Almost never when learning a new skill etc. Commands, sometimes, but the setup cost is way too high.
Often. Especially for things like plans etc.
I keep a journal whenever I remember to do so. Planning or things I need to do when working towards certain goals are worked out on a whiteboard for the outline, and then filled in with more and more details.
I used a bullet journal for a year or so, and a physical journal for a year. Keep for a while in the past, then OrgMode, and now I’m using Obsidian.
To not forget my ideas. I have too many. Most still end up forgotten because I didn’t bother to write them down, but still.
masasin
Karma: 113
[Question] Who was the person who escaped the Nazis a day before they cracked down?
Why not both? Refer to the new paper in the errata.
Which is still a huge probability. That being said, the precautions to prevent murdering others are exactly the same precautions that would reduce my probability of getting sick in the first place.
Until I get symptoms, the highest probability was that I hadn’t gotten COVID yet. On the other hand, even if there was a 1% chance that I was infectious (able to spread COVID to others) on any given day, it’s not high enough to warrant a test, which is uncomfortable, and expensive unless it was positive or I had a confirmed exposure. At the same time, it was high enough that e.g. my neighbours (80+ years old) or the person at the supermarket might get sick from it, and be hospitalized, not to mention the secondary effects, so I made sure to breathe slowly around people, and wear masks and keep my distance. Most of my communication ended up being gestures (and even then it was mostly “thank you!”) instead of words.
In other words, 99% chance that I’m vulnerable, take precautions to avoid getting infected if I’m not infected already. 1% risk of preventably murdering someone else, take precautions to avoid that consequence just in case I am infected already.
Assume you’re both infectious and vulnerable to infection.
I disagree with their #3. I’ve had a prior that I had an asymptomatic infection at less than the background rate of asymptomatic infections in the population in general. So, no symptoms would definitely not cause me to think I have been infected, unless I had more information (e.g., a test result). I certainly wouldn’t act as if I was immune. At the same time, the probability that I had been infected without symptoms was high enough that I always treated myself as infectious, just in case.
Even being conservative, I think 5% would be a big overestimate. When I was living on my own, it was less than 1%. When I moved in with my sister (who only interacts with people who keep their distance and take the same precautions she does), it went up a bit, and then went down a bit when she got vaccinated, because even if she would have increased her risk-taking, she’d be less likely to get infected, and less likely to be infectious, and, if she was infectious, it would be unlikely that my symptoms would be severe because of virus load.
(In the end, she tested negative, so...)
As for their #4, my symptoms (i.e., the cough) are already gone, and I didn’t notice a decrease in e.g. breath holding ability, energy levels, or anything like that. I think the no long covid for me is 80+%.
Didn’t really have much of a choice about #2. I was living alone, and didn’t want to househunt in the middle of a pandemic. Ended up living rent-free.
Sometimes, it can take a while to notice confusion
Inbox was awesome and I used it from day 0 to day day −1. Adding a note to the reminder when you snooze was the most useful part.
Did you cultivate the fear of cars on purpose? Why? Did you use to be able to drive before?
I got my license in 2010, but didn’t really drive until Feb last year. It took me a month to start the car up. It took me another 3 months to get on a highway, and 4 months after that until I was comfortable going on longer trips. Obviously COVID, so I had to teach myself for the most part. And I’m still relying on certain automations (e.g., sensors to make sure I don’t destroy things while backing up, adaptive cruise control to control my speed and distance, etc.) I’m not sure I would be able to drive something while controlling the speed with my foot.
Two tools I found extremely useful were my dashcam (front and rear) and Google Street View. At the start, I’d spend about 3 hours for each planned hour of trip reviewing the route on Street View, finding the different signs at each point and how the intersections were arranged, seeing what they look like from above, etc. And then after the trip I rewatched the entire thing to see my mistakes (and there were plenty of mistakes) and get advice (COVID, so I sent clips to friends and family who I think drive well).
Nowadays (or rather, until I left it in my previous country of residence), I do most of my planning with the Google Maps routing tool. I take a look at it with the satellite view, and use street view where I think it might be easy to get confused (e.g., multiple tight turns after each other, where the GPS might be delayed.) That takes me about 10 minutes per hour of driving (less for highway-heavy trips). For the highway, I review the exit names I should look out for whenever there’s a split or a merge or I need to take a certain lane. After the trip, I do a review for longer trips, but I batch the shorter ones (e.g., groceries) and do that once a month or so.
Back in Feb, I couldn’t even stay in lane. I’m still not quite satisfied with my spatial awareness of the size of my car, but I can offload it to the car, so that’s okay. That being said, I’m a much safer driver compared to before, I’m much better at anticipating things that would happen 5 to 10 seconds before they happen. I’ve had many highway trips where I don’t need to touch the accelerator or the brakes at all.
Another tip is to get things that increase your safety, such as blind spot mirrors if you don’t have them, hydrophilic coating for the mirrors, and hydrophobic coating for the windshield (for when it’s raining). And finally, use checklists! Things that you might forget, or things that would be dangerous not to have already done in case an emergency happens. It shouldn’t take more than two minutes (most days it’s about 40 seconds) to start the car, but I know that I have e.g. the sunglasses on my head for driving towards the sun (and I know which sections those are during those times because preplanning), I know that I didn’t forget a passenger, and all my items are stowed safely in case of a crash.
As for the dreams, most of them I don’t remember. The ones I do don’t tend to have (m)any other people, but I have had the “I forgot the mask (despite the checklist) == immediate isolation/return home (never happened btw)”, and the “there are so many evil (maskless) people around and no safe route!” before. I’m hoping for some things to catch on (e.g., I used to wear a mask when I was sick pre-pandemic and people would minimize it). I’ve never liked crowds in the first place, so smaller event sizes make me happier.
I was living on my own, but I locked down on 9 March. From when my SO had to leave the country on 21 March, to when I was kicked out of the country in Jan, the only person I had physical contact with was one hug on 20 September. The friend was on day 14 of her own quarantine. And when I finished the quarantine in the old/new country in Feb, that was the first time someone had seen my face in person since my SO.
I got my first ever car in Jan 2020 because I didn’t want to risk public transport. I bought lots of food and masks etc. I convinced my workplace to let everyone work from home if they wanted to (me!) a couple of weeks before the government lockdown. The last restaurant I went to was March 8 2020.
The major factors in my opinion were:
I don’t want to kill anyone by mistake, and most of the old people weren’t wearing masks properly. (And my literal next door neighbours were a very old couple who also didn’t wear their masks properly).
I don’t want long covid. If I get sick, I’m on my own. I lived alone, and I had zero family in the country. There would be nobody who would be able to help me if something happened. And my building had no elevator, so I’d need to climb up four flights of stairs while being out of breath for however long it took to convalesce.
Most people around me weren’t taking adequate precautions. I know many people who got COVID, but nobody who died from it.
Some differences from mingyuan:
I was okay with outdoors (in a forest) meetings with one (or possibly two) other people. That being said, that only happened a total of three times.
I was okay with going to further places (I finally had a car!), so long as I was away from people. I did a few same-day solo road trips (packed my own lunch and ate in the car), and lots of exploration (and virtual dates with my SO).
I did interact with others (e.g., groceries and some necessities.)
Some similarities:
When things started to open up (e.g., in the summer), people threw caution to the wind. Government allowed e.g. up to 10 people to meet in restaurants etc, so these were definitely out. People wouldn’t wear masks when outdoors even in large groups.
I did end up expanding my network of Rats (online) and learning a lot of things, though.
Right now, I’m staying with my younger sister, and she’s vaccinated because of her work, so yay. There’s a visa application in progress to see if I can return to the previous country, but when I go will depend on how accessible vaccinations are here vs there.
For now, I’m satisfied with what I did, and I think it was reasonable all things considered. One concern I have in the long term is that seeing crowds and unmasked people gets a visceral reaction, including e.g. in old movies. I’ll need to retrain myself, because I don’t want to end up with agoraphobia.
Quick explanation of the weeks. It’s not the first time you mention that.
The rest of the world uses this method of counting weeks: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_week_date.
Week 1 is the first week (starting on Monday) with the majority of its days in January. This year started on a Friday, so we only had 3 days in Jan in the week containing New Year. As a result, we ended up with 2020 having 53 weeks.
So, on the graph, Week 53 is Dec 28 to Jan 3, while Week 1 is Jan 4 to Jan 10. We’re currently in Week 10.
Looking at the list:
Blaming others: Maybe 2? When I see how badly COVID was handled. I started preparing in January last year, the governments didn’t do much for months, and then didn’t learn and didn’t learn and kept reopening. When I see people who still haven’t learned how to wear a mask properly, who can’t keep their distance or who do things because they’re the exception for some reason? I have seen a total of three people in person since March, and none of them were unmasked or inside or at a close distance. I know I’m not contributing to the spread. This thing should have been over last summer.
Difficulty making decisions at 3 or 4, mainly because I plan a lot and have plans for when my plans fail, going multiple levels deep. e.g., my visa application got rejected last week and I knew what to do. I’m also making plans for how to meet my SO whom I haven’t seen in March if I end up in one of several countries that I might end up in by the time it’s safe for her to come. For some reason, Murphy’s law happens a lot with me, so even when I lose my job etc, it’s just an “okay, we use this plan now” thing. No shock or surprise or sadness, just a fact of life.
Spending less time with family or friends: Physically, sure (COVID), but everyone being online made them easier to access, so I spend more time overall with them.
For the Activities and Personal relationships one, it’s more lack then loss for the most part. Work is to make money, money is to be comfortable, and being comfortable allows me to do things that I like to do. Sure, work was interesting (I wouldn’t have applied otherwise), but I make it a rule not to do overtime (for the most part; sometimes I get carried away and realize the next morning that it’s the next morning). For me, wanting to learn new things is a huge motivation, and trying to figure out how to be reunited with my SO. But I don’t really have much interest in working in particular. Also, things that are supposed to be pleasurable (or adrenaline rushy, like jumping out of an airplane or going on a roller coaster) are just a “huh, so that’s how it feels like” rather than a “woohoo” that I was expecting. I attributed that to the ADHD because my reward centre is basically broken. I’m still happy all the time, never angry, sad happened only once. Satisfaction is high no matter what happens, but I always want to try and change things so that they move in a direction that would make me even happier.
Difficulty sleeping at 3 or 4, feeling tired at 2 or 3. I always want to do more things and it’s more like turning off suddenly than falling asleep. And I keep waking up to look up something or another. My fiancée is 8 time zones away, and next week it will become 14 hours, with work 6 hours away, so dealing with multiple time zones 100% of the time.
Also never really had an appetite, so not a loss. I try to eat on time, but I don’t really get hungry, and I keep an emergency jar of peanut butter for when my hands start to shake. I eat the peanut butter straight, wait for 15 minutes, and start making food. Both that and the sleep are also common with ASD and ADHD for similar reasons.
Worrying about my health: COVID. Living in a building with no stairs (4th floor in 1-indexed countries, 3rd floor in 0-indexed countries), with no family on the continent and obviously can’t come and help. I’m my own backup and support. And I don’t want to risk the long term complications because I like moving around.
Suicidal anything: Absolutely not. I want to be (functionally) immortal and non-aging.
According to the table, it’s anywhere between mild to severe. What do you think?
Being able to have routines and habits in the first place.
At least in my case, I don’t think I have depression. I’m pretty much always happy (according to my counselor, who can read my facial expressions). The happy isn’t that high, but it’s not sad either. It’s more like a stable emotion on the positive side, pretty much no matter what happened. Which isn’t that nice when things that are supposed to give you an adrenaline rush (e.g., roller coasters and jumping off planes) or feel nice (e.g., exercise or delicious food etc) still have me at the exact same regular happy. (I’m bad at emotion words because alexithymia.)
I had the book I want to read on my bedside table for months. Didn’t end up reading it. The website blocker works great though (when I remember to do it). Shoes are always by the door, but putting on the socks and then the shoes and then going down the stairs etc is a big barrier.
I really like the microsteps! I don’t have a name for them, but it’s literally the next action, then the next action, then the next action. Except it’s easy to get distracted, especially when moving from room to room or noticing something or having a question I need answered. Right now, for example, I have the rice ready but was going to start cooking, but wanted to find out the reason why something is done in cooking, which took me down the rabbit hole, which got me distracted to a bunch of different things, then I saw your message and I wrote this reply and I’m going to cook now.
I was trying to find something that helps me form something that doesn’t need any deliberative attention, though. Can you give an example of where it might be useful?
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I’ve tried introducing routines around that, but (at least with me) it works really badly.
Most of the time, it’s less going to bed and more like suddenly waking up a few minutes/hours after. If I was wearing regular clothes, that’s what I’ll wake up in. When I get up it’s usually because of a message notification, so that tends to be the first thing I look at. I do have routines set up on my Google Home for going to sleep (turns off the lights and starts background noise) and waking up (turns on the light and reads the news), but they go unused more often than not. I also made it tell me to prepare to sleep (close curtains, brush teeth, drink water etc) at 23:30, and tell me to stretch and/or meditate at 23:40 before turning the lights off at 24:00, but that also fails much more often than not.
(The 23:40 one can sometime spur me to close the curtains but the bathroom is like 15 m away with two rooms in between, so the teeth get forgotten), so I tried adding another one at 23:50 for the stretching, but it didn’t work either.)
Also! Sometimes I manage to do some low effort things right before sleeping (e.g., sending a good night message to my SO). Sometimes I have full conversations with her while sleeping and then I wake up and reread it and it’s coherent. But even then it’s a toss-up if I actually end up sleeping. Sometimes I’ve stayed up until the sun came up, or I’ve gone to sleep and then start looking up answers to things, or start doing things. I fail badly if I try and sleep on my own, even without lights or devices. (Also no coffee etc, because caffeine doesn’t work on me.)
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For the placing things part, I’d probably look for it around me on my bed or on the floor. That’s where most of the things I actually use are. I’m pretty good at finding things in the last-used order. I’ll try the otsukare trick for objects if I remember.
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Except I do have to think all that much. There’s almost no automatic/instinctive component. It’s not just remembering/starting to do the thing in the first place, but it’s the right order of things. Without the checklist, I often forget to put toothpaste on my toothbrush, or forget to rinse it at the end. So I can do enough to survive/live okay, but there still aren’t any automatic routines or habits, which is why I made this post.
That being said, I do plan a lot. What happens if this fails or that fails, or different things got delayed etc. I’m waiting for a visa for my fourth job in 2.5 years, and I was financially ready for my first job loss within six months, and have been ready ever since. I’m now on month four of what should have taken a month or two, and I’ll have been un(der)paid for 5 or 6 months before my first full paycheque.
Or what happens if a pandemic happens? Bought my first ever car with cash (and then took out a retroactive loan because I like having the buffer) and masks etc and started stockpiling food in Jan and Feb last year because COVID was coming and it was going to be bad and everyone was ignoring it. I wrote up a huge report on 4 Feb on whether it’d be safe for me to go get her, and for her to come etc. She was considering postponing a couple of months, but I told her that we’d almost certainly not be able to see each other this year if she delayed to April.
I also had plans of what to do in case my SO decided to go back because she didn’t like the country etc. One thing I didn’t plan for/expect was for things to close down, so we didn’t even have the time to get her application going. If we had, she’d be able to properly immigrate whenever. At least I managed to reuse part of the “what if she doesn’t like the country” prep.
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It’s a huge accomplishment! I’m happy about it, especially when it works. The second onboarding is usually much faster than the first (it takes about a week), but the third and fourth etc take about as long and I haven’t seen any reduction. It also lasts longer. Though if I ever miss it, there goes a month or three of not having any system until something inspires me to find something else. The problem with these kinds of things is that the novelty wears off very quickly, and there is no motivation without the novelty. I’d love to make something like that automatic.
The point of systems and habits is to make it intrinsic, because strong habits are inelastic with respect to intention. Most people “have to” brush their teeth before going to bed, “have to” eat at a set time (or when they get hungry), and “have to” grab for the seatbelt as soon as they sit down in the car. Many “have to” make their bed in the morning, or write in their journal, etc.
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For digital stuff I do make conversion scripts between formats from time to time. But a lot of it is on my whiteboard, or on physical paper which gets thrown out etc. 2019 was the first time I had a physical journal which I used mainly as a set of lists of stuff that were more temporary. I got another one for 2020 but almost nothing happened so it’s still mostly empty.
I don’t have a centralized repo of all my “important things” list, because these go into whatever tool I was using at the time. I don’t like that at some level, but at the same time they change so often that even if I tried converting everything every time, and was perfectly productive, I don’t expect I’d be done before the tool needs to change again. So for the most part, I kind of expect everything I do to be ephemeral. I think I’ll pay for Google Photos in a few years once I’m over my storage limit, though, because I take lots of pictures, and they’re often a nice chronicle (along with the Google Maps timeline; did I go somewhere yesterday/last week?).
If I ever become important enough to warrant someone digging around in my history, they’ll have plenty of information about me in so many different places (including this post—hi!) that I don’t know where they all are, and that’s fine.
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I have a counselor for ASD. I’m happy pretty much all the time, and he’s not sure how to help me with the social side anyway (especially with COVID; first session was in December or Jan last year, even though I’d applied in June of 2018; huge waiting list) so most of the practical side of what we work on is ADHD related. He’s the one who suggested using two systems simultaneously while the first one is dying, and quite a few of the apps. I managed to make a successful transition three times this year (which gave me about 3 weeks rather than two each time).
We do talk about things like emotions etc quite often because, well, I’m happy all the time and he finds it strange. One thing he pointed out was in August when the government unilaterally cancelled my work visa because of an error on their side. I had a session with him a few hours after I got the news, and I told him about that, and he said it was my usual ukiuki. The only time he’s seen me not happy (but not even sad) was when I told him that my SO had to leave.
(Bonus fact, I have hundreds more words for emotions in Japanese compared to English, where I basically group things into happy and sad.)
It’s a government funded program, so it’s less than 6€ per hour (and sometimes we do half an hour and that gives us another half hour at another date). Ends up being around 20-ish euro every few months. I still have another year or so of that before I no longer get access to it.
Unfortunately, I haven’t found anyone who specialist in ADHD, which I feel causes the most problems day-to-day. But the last time I checked was pre-pandemic, so hopefully there might be some with expanded areas of operation. I listen to podcasts a lot, though, so I get some ideas from there.
For ASD, things like fashion or body language or music or facial expressions or tone of voice etc are all lost to me and they’re skills I want to try and learn. For some things, I can learn the heuristics (e.g., colour wheel), but it’s basically knowing the teacher’s answers rather than understanding them. Does this outfit look good or bad? The book says that it’s bad and it should be fixed by doing XYZ, but it looks fine to me. The minor chord is supposed to be sad. Except everything feels happy to me. Turns out people get it from context (e.g., watching sad scenes in movies) but I don’t realize someone is sad unless they say it out loud, and don’t realize a situation is sad or creepy or dramatic or whatever either, so “yay, movie == fun/happy!” I’m taking courses (e.g., on the University of Bayes), but the explanations usually don’t make sense either.
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So what would the procedure be for e.g., brushing teeth? I’ve done it thousands of times already. It’s still a conscious decision whenever I realize that I haven’t brushed my teeth in a while. Repeat a few times because e.g., I see something on the way to the bathroom so I go do something else, so brushing my teeth is delayed by another few hours/days.
I’m using a complete blocker for those things, but then I get distracted by others. I don’t think the gummy vitamins would work for me because I’d just end up eating them all with or without brushing my teeth. (I forget to eat until my hands start shaking, and I have emergency peanut butter set aside for that, but if there’s something else that’s easy to eat it might become the new target.)
I try to offload as much as I can to checklists, but I can’t get started with the task (and there’s no guarantee I’d finish it even when using the checklist; even going to a different room resets everything). I also made e.g. something that reads my calendar events out loud because the notifications don’t do anything.
There is pretty much zero automaticity in anything I do, though. If I did react consistently to the environment, I think I might have been able to figure something out by now.
I started preparing in January. Bought my first ever car to avoid public transit, and bought emergency food and masks etc too. By the time China closed down Wuhan, I thought it was high double digits that a pandemic was inevitable. By the time the Diamond Princess happened and so many people on the ship got infected, it seemed likely that it was airborne (and the fact that SARS spread that way was an extra data point). I encouraged my SO to fly over because I didn’t think we’d be able to meet that year otherwise. (She ended up coming, but we were about a week too late for cohabitation, and she had to return.)
That being said, it’s still too early to stop wearing masks in most of the world. In most of the US, too, if that’s your metric. Even if prevalence is low where you are right now, depending on how many people are no longer (as) susceptible, you can still get huge numbers again. More than half of your states have less than 50% of the population vaccinated. Not to mention the variants that are much better at spreading compared to the baseline (which was relatively high to start with), which have an even higher herd immunity threshold.
As for me, I’m in Belgium, and I am still double masking. We’re starting to see another increase. Both the first and second derivatives are positive. But the government says it’s okay to do basically everything again so people are essentially acting as if COVID doesn’t exist. I haven’t even eaten in a restaurant since March last year.