Long shot:
I’m moving to NYC. Any LW NYCers have a room available for <$1,000 per month that I (a friendly self-employed 23-year-old male) might be able to move into within a week or two? Or leads on a 1br/studio for <$1200? I could also go a bit above those prices if necessary.
PM me if so and I’ll send more details about myself.
I recommend you read The Motivation Hacker for techniques to get yourself to do what you know you should be doing, but can’t bring yourself to do. I especially recommend Beeminder, especially this approach to using it.
If you want to make games, start doing it now. It’s entirely possible for a single person to make great indie games. Working on that would also build skills that are useful for all 4 of the preferred careers you named.
It’s okay if you find CS classes boring; the real test is whether you find working on real projects (such as your own indie games) boring.
Having lots of portfolio pieces will also help with finding a job.
there have also been a few huge disaster-threads recently that really damaged my personal affect regarding this community. When everybody in The Rationality Club (tm) starts acting like children, defect-defecting on each other and statusmongering and basically looking indistinguishable from my Facebook feed
I’m curious, which threads are you referring to?
I think complement can mean both too. E.g. red and green are complementary colors, whereas the sets “red” and “not-red” are complements).
More info: marginal utility
I had brought some books from the LW reading list I had in my collection
Do you have a link to the reading list?
Improve the ergonomics of your computer situation:
Better chair
Better desk
Keyboard without a numpad so that the mouse doesn’t need to be so far out
Bigger monitors/multiple monitors
If your computer is at all slow or annoying-to-use, consider whether better hardware could help that (and thus reduce the stress of using it). E.g. getting an SSD could decrease load times if you find those problematic
PSA: You can download from scribd without paying, you just need to upload a file first (apparently any file—it can be a garbage pdf or even a pdf that’s already on scribd). They say this at the very bottom of their pricing page, but I didn’t notice until just now.
Lukeprog’s How to Beat Procrastination is a good instructional for building any kind of habit. Personally none of it really stuck for me until I read Nick Winter’s The Motivation Hacker though (it has basically the same information as Luke’s post, it just stuck with me more).
Beeminder is also a good way to pre-commit (mentioned in both Luke’s post and The Motivation Hacker) to things in order to combat impulsiveness. I recommend this approach to using beeminder in order to also increase expectancy. Impulsiveness and expectancy are two of the components in the “procrastination equation,” which, as Luke says, “accounts for every major finding on procrastination, and draws upon our best current theories of motivation.”
Precommitment is an interesting aspect of game theory that ties in well with lukeprog’s how to beat procrastination.
Second, you make the things you want to do aversive by telling yourself to do them and then not doing them.
I think this is really important. It also fits into the procrastination equation by decreasing expectancy.
Since you said in another comment your area of interest is medicine, you could study statistics (and work on statistics problem sets during boring lectures—problem sets are just a type of puzzle that also build more useful skills besides keeping your brain busy).
If you send an email to “1year@followupthen.com″ with a reminder for yourself, you’ll get an email reminder in 1 year.
Can you explain this? I always thought of game theory as being like calculus, and not about human values (like this comment says).
It sounds like some of these emotional issues could be helped by working through the exercises in a book like The Feeling Good Handbook, which has been shown to be about as effective as therapy for treating depression. Make sure you actually write out the exercises, don’t just read them or think about them, you have to actually write for them to be effective.
“It takes two to tango)” (not tangle)
The Feeling Good Handbook has good evidence as a treatment for depression and could help you to identify and address your automatic thoughts caused by negative feedback.
Long shot again:
Any LW NYCers have a room available for <$1,000 per month that I (a friendly self-employed 23-year-old male) might be able to move into within a week or two? Or leads on a 1br/studio for <$1400? I could also go a bit above those prices if necessary.
PM me if so and I’ll send more details about myself. I’m also staying with some friends in NYC right now so we could meet up anytime.