Raj Thimmiah
I think you can separate out responses to ‘school is not good’ to:
-school is inherently useful
-school is hard to replace and serves a function (even if not perfect) in current equilibriumI strongly recommend reading:
-The Case Against Education (I liked this summary by Zvi)
-Free to Learn by Peter Gray (unfortunately I don’t know a good summary but shouldn’t be hard to find one)Case against education basically demolishes idea that we go to school for inherent value rather than signaling.
Free to learn demolishes idea that there aren’t good alternatives (you can naggle about specifics of implementation but I think it makes a decent enough case for 80% of things)
Didn’t realize you were the author of that post, read it a few days ago!
So what do all 5 of these oscillation patterns have in common? A lack of congruency. The tendency to ignore some needs in order to focus on others. A sense of inner conflict, instead of alignment.
In each and every case, the solution involves welcoming and acknowledging all parts of yourself, before plotting a way forward. Transitioning from forcing yourself to choosing what you want to do.
Honestly, I could do another 100 tweets on what this looks like in each case. The delicate dance of beliefs, emotions, strategies, behaviors, and tools that can be combined to internalize a new way of being.
But the start is just self acknowledgement. Letting all your feelings, values, desires in, and going from there.
This seems accurate and like my current equilibrium is great because I got lucky enough to have done a few things that ended up aligning things that previously were not aligned without me realizing it.
Do you have a way that you manually worked out your incongruencies and made them congruent? I think it might be useful if you added a hammertime style exercise for practical implementation since idea seems solid but it still seems hard to practice directly.
In general, I like to use the stages of change model when trying to make a change. The research basically says that if people try to change when they’re ready to change, they’ll do it the first time, but if they try to change before they’re ready, it will take multiple attempts.
Oh MAN this makes too much sense. The stuff that’s working now, I’ve tried for like a year plus with incomplete success but now it’s just working, without having to apply extra effort. Could you give a source for this?
Learning to forgive yourself is HUGE here. Research says that people who forgive themselves for procrastinating are less likely to procrastinate in the future, and I’m pretty sure this generalizes. Expect adjustments and forgive yourself for needing to make them.
Any chance I could bother you for source on this? I’d like to read more on it, also seems cool as hell.
I’ve vaguely moved towards this with issue of forgiveness/not forgiveness moving more towards: oh no, have I screwed myself into a downward spiral?? Which is mainly just because I’m not confident yet in my ability to recover from disruptions (not that I have strong evidence of it being a big problem this year but more based on outside view and past data).
MurphyJitsu is a great tool to use here. There’s a bunch of good exanations on LW, but the basic tool is to imagine you failed, ask yourself why, then patch your approach until it’s very surprising that you failed.
Thanks, forgot about this. Will try out the plan-bot
I agree that generally a single miss is alright as long as I get back on track. I’m mainly just worried though about exactly that: how do I make sure I actually start again? Or at least reflect and iterate on whatever system failed?
Right now, I’m generally okay, I’m alright with a miss or two (did nothing over weekend because of Unsong but have been fine today) but I’m thinking more about long-term future me
[Question] How do you build resilient personal systems?
In general, when I first started using SRS I had this issue too. Over time, I got a fair bit better of it with 1 or 2 rules:
-I should be able to make at least 1 connection from the idea to something else (filter out only shallowly understood things)
-I should be able to either connect it to a situation of real life applicability or a goal
I didn’t make it only: I need to be able to figure out applicability when making card, because a lot of useful knowledge might not that have it as obvious. But at the least, I should be learning it in a real context. E.g. some of my main goals now are:
-learn UX design
-understand how SRS/IR can be used to create genius
-get better at teaching
-become more resillient to disruption (emotionally)
Those are specific-ish and learning in context of those instead of I can use this sometime in the next decade is a useful filter
The creator of spaced repetition has talked about how usage in children of SRS is not a great idea here
Roughly idea is that self-direct learn drive based learning is needed for coherent, well connected models.
It’s sort of like how I learned trig in high school and I can’t apply it to a real world problem to save my life. If I’d learned trig for myself, when I thought it’d be useful, it’d be way more applicable and not be so siloed to ‘this is how you use trig to solve math problems on a test’
Anyone have recommendations on good non-swiveling chairs? Unfortunately I end up fidgeting and moving around way too much with them (maybe some of my ADHD?). I’m using a normal chair now but I wonder if there’s something better for my back
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xRb7_ffl2D0
is a ted talk from Sugata Mitra about it
Basically, Mitra installed a computer in a wall with free, unrestrained access to local children.
Fairly quickly they got acclimated to it. I know I read a good description of it somewhere but can’t remember where for the life of me
I’m not saying it makes it impossible for people to learn for themselves. I’m saying that your argument that bottom 20% couldn’t learn for themselves is flawed because for the majority of people in coerced learning environments it’s not obvious that they could learn by themselves.
I think the assumption that people can’t learn for themselves is sort of a catch 22. If you put people in a place where they’re taught to learn from being taught, how can you expect them to be able to learn for themselves?
In terms of suggestions, me and author of this post have started on a project related to that and should hopefully have something in not too far future.
How do you effectively represent knowledge in learning?
how do you effectively apply recognition primed decision making rather than lesswrong biases?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n5OO9L67jL4
Is breadth of knowledge, depth of knowledge or applicability of knowledge more important? Whatever the answer is, how do you more dakka the hell out of it?
Raj Thimmiah’s Shortform
This is exactly the kind of sensationalism that would have convinced me to embrace school.
It seems strange to dislike a rhetoric so much that because of the rhetoric alone you embrace a different position. Is there a reason you think the sensationalism pushes you so much?
In fact, if the author *really* wanted to make me think, they shouldn’t even portray the enemy as shiny like Ra (https://srconstantin.wordpress.com/2016/10/20/ra/). They would portray the enemy as normal. Relatable, in fact; someone you could be best friends with. It is of the greatest importance to this person not to be annoying; not to “cause problems for the sake of causing problems” (i.e. to invite debate about why things are the way they are). This is extremely persuasive to most people; they don’t want to be That Guy, whose badness is just to be taken for granted. Anyone with common sense understands. Be Skeet and not Jimmy.
I am having significant trouble parsing this. Could you try to say the same thing in different words?
Were you able to find a lead?
I like this, will try it myself. Would be interested in an extended post on the idea.
It seems to fit into a class of things I want to try myself: iterated experiments. Too easy to assume many things are net good without actually measuring it and trying to optimize them over time.
leechblock also has the power to delay sites apparently
I think gumroad allows you to offer more than 1 format for download
I actually have been wondering about the safety mechanism stuff, if anyone wants to give examples of actually produced things in AI alignment I’d be interested in hearing about them.
Huh. I forgot this. Over time, I internalized the opposite: if I keep failing to keep up habits, it’ll be harder to get the habit going the next time. But my habits are lasting much longer than they used to and instead of downward spiral, I’m going on an upward one.
I used to think this: I had clear time I was productive and I could envision getting back to it. Current system might not be perfect but it is definitely much clearer that I can get back to current state, enjoyably.
One thing you alluded to is that breaks are good. I’ve generally found this confusing because I generally enjoy what I’m doing and aside from tasklists, everything else I’d be happy doing every day. But I checked out some of the posts you linked and they were interesting. I’m gonna go through this meaningful rest post with a friend .
Thanks for the comment