I had a specific reason for giving the book a shot, while simultaneously I had strong evidence that I was wasting my time. I wanted to nudge people who didn’t have a specific reason to read it to consider reading it, anyway. Overkill? Doth protest too much? Maybe!
MarkL
Karma: 242
Learn how to safely fight. Like, really, truly, ugly-ly fight:
You’ll get more out of your relationships and have better relationships. (John Gottman who writes all the pop relationship books (and does peer-reviewed, quantitative research) loves this guy’s stuff.)
Oh yeah, so here’s how I actually log these 2-4 hours: If a) I’m only doing X (e.g. not also eating or listening to music), and b) I truly expect not to be distracted (I’m in an isolated location and email and phone are off), then I log that time. Otherwise, it goes into the “everything else” bucket. From my log, it looks like I average only 15 hours/wk under these criteria.
Just more anecdata, but this jives with me. I keep time logs. I have “maximal mental effort” (MME) and “everything else.” For me it’s about scope and depth: MME is about how much I can integrate and bring to bear on what I’m doing, like my capacity to coherently integrate citations into my writing. So perhaps it’s how large and long you can subconsciously sustain “useful potential inputs” to conscious working memory. Monkey coding I can do, for sure, many hours a day. But coding at my maximum ability is, again, 2-4 hours per day.
Ok. That’s compatible with what I meant, even if it’s not what I said. :)
This reads like a recipe for locking-in into your own randomly generated dogma.
I’m coming back to this years later, but, wait, what? How does one learn, then? How does one separate true stuff from false stuff without engaging with it, without wrestling with it, without trying to disprove it, without applying it?
When you don’t know, you don’t know what you don’t know. How can you know, except by doing something intelligently accidental? Even if it’s just doing the exercises at the end of the chapter?
Something to add: allocating attention in the correct order:
emotions
felt meaning
verbal thoughts
Otherwise you have the failure mode of avoiding painful emotions (even if they’re being triggered erroneously) and then all sorts of bad things happen. So check in with (1) before (2) and (3). And check in with (2) before applying (3), because otherwise you’re using cached thoughts.
Jealousy/envy of people that have money. It’s worth a simmering frustration and, more importantly, short bursts of action, for me.
Some versions of cognitive behavioral therapy ask you to write down the pros and cons of holding a particular belief.
Registered. A very large chunk of my quality of life is due to my facility with searching Amazon and Google and Scopus (and using Google to search Amazon.) Even one little tidbit will be pay off exponentially.
Start with minimal knowledge. Everything you read seems plausible.
Try stuff, keep track of your results. Form hypotheses, and seek new information being slightly more skeptical and discerning than before.
Repeat 2 until 99% of what you read is crap.
Follow the 1% advice, but you already know what you’re doing by that point, anyway. Diminishing returns.
It’s really hard to tell good from bad when you don’t have the domain knowledge. You have to acquire a little bit by luck/accident, and then you start iterating.
This worked for me re: diet, meditation protocol, exercise protocol, time management, goal management, existential suffering, and much more. (Some are pretty steady state, others are still changing, and the steady state stuff may change if it stops working—which means my knowledge is incomplete, and more iteration is required.)
Shinzen Young’s “Do Nothing” Meditation:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZ6cdIaUZCA (Note that he is “neuroscience aware.”)
http://www.shinzen.org/Retreat%20Reading/FiveWays.pdf
http://www.basicmindfulness.org/
(Also the discussion of “Willingness” in http://www.amazon.com/Acceptance-Commitment-Therapy-Second-Edition/dp/1609189620/)
The goal is to raise the baseline of equanimity and mindfulness. You naturally start allowing emotion and inner talk to thunder through you without letting it drive behavior. This is a prerequisite for rational deliberation and choice under increasingly emotional situations. Maybe.
I don’t/didn’t have time to assemble a coherent section on this, but I also want to point people towards Acceptance and Commitment Therapy. Related buzzphrases: Experiential avoidance, rule-governed behavior, environmentally contingent behavior, repertoire narrowing, relational frame theory… (Stephen C Hayes and colleagues) There’s a developmental line or skillset in there that relates to ugh fields, original seeing, cached thoughts, and more, in LessWrong jargon. See also “Compassion Focused Therapy: Distinctive Features” for more references and exercises for influencing “socioemotional” brain systems.