Imagining myself as a human,
For some reason I found this very funny.
sediment
Karma: 486
I recently made a dissenting comment on a biggish, well-known-ish social-justice-y blog. The comment was on a post about a bracelet which one could wear and which would zap you with a painful (though presumably safe) electric shock at the end of a day if you hadn’t done enough exercise that day. The post was decrying this as an example of society’s rampant body-shaming and fat-shaming, which had reached such an insane pitch that people are now willing to torture themselves in order to be content with their body image.
I explained as best I could in a couple of shortish paragraphs some ideas about akrasia and precommitment in light of which this device made some sense. I also mentioned in passing that there were good reasons to want to exercise that had nothing to do with an unhealthy body image, such as that it’s good for you and improves your mood. For reasons I don’t fully understand, these latter turned out to be surprisingly controversial points. (For example, surreally enough, someone asked to see my trainer’s certificate and/or medical degree before they would let me get away with the outlandish claim that exercise makes you live longer. Someone else brought up the weird edge case that it’s possible to exercise too much, and that if you’re in such a position then more exercise will shorten, not lengthen, your life.)
Further to that, I was accused of mansplaining twice. and then was asked to leave by the blog owner on grounds of being “tedious as fuck”. (Granted, but it’s hard not to end up tedious as fuck when you’re picked up on and hence have to justify claims like “exercise is good for you”.)
This is admittedly minor, so why am I posting about it here? Just because it made me realize a few things:
It was an interesting case study in memeplex collision. I felt like not only did I hold a different position to the rest of those present, but we had entirely different background assumptions about how one makes a case for said position. There was a near-Kuhnian incommensurability between us.
I felt my otherwise-mostly-dormant tribal status-seeking circuits fire up—nay, go into overdrive. I had lost face and been publicly humiliated, and the only way to regain the lost status was to come up with the ultimate putdown and “win” the argument. (A losing battle if ever there was one.) It kept coming to the front of my mind when I was trying to get other things done and, at a time when I have plenty of more important things to worry about, I wasted a lot of cycles on running over and over the arguments and formulating optimal comebacks and responses. I had to actively choose to disengage (in spite of the temptation to keep posting) because I could see I had more invested in it and it was taking up a greater cognitive load than I’d ever intended. This seems like a good reason to avoid arguing on the internet in general: it will fire up all the wrong parts of your brain, and you’ll find it harder to disengage than you anticipated.
It made me realize that I am more deeply connected to lesswrong (or the LW-osphere) than I’d previously realized. Up ’til now, I’d thought of myself as an outsider, more or less on the periphery of this community. But evidently I’ve absorbed enough of its memeplex to be several steps of inference away from an intelligent non-rationalist-identifying community. It also made me more grateful for certain norms which exist here and which I had otherwise gotten to take for granted: curiosity and a genuine interest in learning the truth, and (usually) courtesy to those with dissenting views.
I was pessimistic that this thread would yield anything worthwhile, but am gratified to be proven wrong.
Thanks. Do you feel like it’s had much impact on your mental state when not meditating?
Thanks for the thoughtful response.
Exercise: I recently started a regime of 2 x 1 hour bodyweight sessions / week with a friend of mine, but we haven’t had a session in a while because he recently took an injury boxing. I think I’ll start running on my own so I’m not so tied to that one activity (and in accordance with the advice in Optimal Exercise).
Pens: I actually like this advice. On the other hand, I use vim, a programmer’s editor, to write everything (including my prose), and I love love love it. (I’m even writing this reply in it.) The ‘feel’ (not only tactile) of being able to shunt text around so effortlessly (at the paragraph, sentence, clause, word level) is so pleasant that it’s hard to give up. On the other hand, there is some sense to what you say about working without a computer.
Natural light patterns: Good thinking. I work in a room with great sunlight during the day; so far so good. But a while ago my monitor broke, and I was able to fix it only by jettisoning its buttons. (Long story.) End result: my monitor is stuck on full brightness all the time. I just checked, though, and I found a linux program (Redshift) capable of adjusting the monitor brightness and colour temperature based on the time of day. I installed it and it seems to work; perhaps it will help. The lamp I use for reading at night also has a slightly harsh, blue-ish hue to it, though it isn’t excessively bright. I’ll see if I can do something about that, too.
Accountability: Hmmm. I’ll think about this. It’s certainly the case that periods of poor work correlate with seeing my tutor less. The causation isn’t just one-way, though: I’m also less likely to want to see him when things are going slowly. (Perhaps there’s something of a nasty positive feedback loop going on here.)
It’s also the case that a master’s degree is really, really hard to get, and the ability to summon an entire thesis from the ether is a part of that difficulty. Most people probably could not achieve such a degree at all; framing your struggles in terms of a deficiency relative to some loosely-defined average is unrealistic and unhelpful. This is true for your colleagues as well- each is an outlier, and the motivating factors that got them to this point are not likely to be directly comparable to your own. You are awesome enough that the bell-curve is not a useful self-assessment, so focus on tactics and not on placing yourself along a continuum.
Thanks. This actually did help.
Thanks. I had actually already wondered about whether I was depressed. I don’t think I am, though this was not at all obvious to me, and I had to consider the possibility for some time before rejecting it. I perhaps have a slightly flat affect compared to some, but I think I enjoy life and have a basically happy disposition.
I recently starting a bodyweight exercise regime with a friend (2 x 1 hour sessions / week), but we haven’t had a session in a while because he recently took an injury boxing. I think I’ll start running on my own so I’m not so tied to that one activity (and in accordance with the advice in Optimal Exercise).
I think my diet is decent.
This makes sense.
Actually, I’m finding this weirdly coincidental: I was listening to DAF for the first time this week and it really made me want to do a project with electronics by me and shouty German vocals by a female friend of mine who happens to be fluent in shouty German. It even crossed my mind to do some heavy/weirded out versions of Kraftwerk songs.
Request for advice:
Like many people on lesswrong, I probably lie towards the smart end of the bell curve in terms of intelligence, but I’m starting to suspect that I lie somewhere below the mean in terms of ability to focus, concentrate, and direct my attention.
I only recently became concerned about this because it wasn’t much of a problem when I was in school. There, I was able to do acceptably well overall by doing well in the subjects that came easily to me without working hard (science, maths… you know the score) and mediocrely in those that didn’t. Ditto my undergrad/bachelor’s degree.
But I’m currently struggling rather with the thesis project for my master’s degree in computer science. The specifics of the thesis itself don’t matter, other than that it’s a piece of empirical/numerical research involving a lot of coding and a prose write-up. None of the technical aspects of it are beyond me, and yet I feel like in some way it’s the first very difficult thing I’ve ever tried, really tried, at. The hard part is sustaining interest over the whole length of the thing, planning and organizing the overarching, erm, arc of the project as a whole, and forming a ‘narrative’ out of all the hard-won bits and pieces of data. (I suppose the fact that I feel fairly sure that the project is likely to find a negative result (i.e. that the method under inspection doesn’t offer any gains over simpler methods) also doesn’t help my motivation.) Luckily, I did well enough in the taught part of my course that I only need to get a mediocre mark in this part in order to get a ‘merit’ overall.
But I’m also concerned about how this bodes for my future career. I’d like to do well in work, but I’m beginning to wonder whether I’m deficient in a skill which would allow me to do much better.
To convey what I’m talking about: often when I’m trying to work at home I flit between coding for work, reading, coding for fun, listening to music, etc., etc., etc., and consequent don’t engage with any of them very deeply, or get much done. Also, I have almost always taken a very long time to get to sleep, often an hour or more, because I find it hard to ‘switch off’ my brain when I’m in bed and have decided it’s time to go to sleep. (I’ve recently been making the paradoxical attempt to try very hard to switch my brain off and stop thinking in bed, with, surprisingly, some limited success.)
I feel like I lack the five-second level skill to suppress (or at least, to decline to pursue) any old interesting thought which appears while I’m doing something else.
Things I’ve attempted:
Meditation. It seems plausible that meditating could help to ‘train’ deliberate attention direction in other aspects of life. Does anyone have any experience with this? I tried checking the literature, and found only one weak-ish study supporting such a hypothesis, but I’d be open to anecdotal evidence. I’ve tried to meditate a few times (less than ten), for about half an hour each time. The first couple of times I became weirdly aggravated and agitated at how bad at it I was: I was frustrated by the realization that something as simple as focusing on one thing and avoiding other thoughts was beyond me. After the first couple of times, I no longer find it aggravating, but I have yet to find it rewarding, either. I haven’t yet managed to obtain the focused, quiet state which I understand is the aim, at least for more than a handful of seconds a couple of times. (Is this normal beginner-level performance?)
Pomodoros. I’ve had some success with doing pomodoros of work, including beeminding them, but I find that they’re best suited to well-defined, discrete tasks. Tasks which are more nebulous seem less suited to it. Also, I find it hard to do pomodoros unless I’m feeling high-willpower, but perhaps this is fixable with, erm, the application of more willpower.
Things I’ve considered but haven’t attempted:
Medication, self-. Is this the sort of thing which would be amenable to a course of Modafinil, or some other nootropic? I could be open to trying this, if it were likely to work.
Medication, other. I could try seeing a doctor to see if what I’m talking about warrants a diagnosis of ADD, and a prescription of Ritalin or a similar drug. I have no idea whether what I’m describing would be considered drastic enough to warrant either of those, though.
Any experience with any of the above, speculation on which of them might bear fruit, or suggestions of completely different ideas welcome.
Is this the sort of thing that can be ‘trained’ through willpower? It seems like a fairly ‘deep’, even a fundamental, aspect of brain function, so I wonder how plastic such a thing is. Any thoughts on this welcome also.
Finally, am I just worrying too much about this? I was recently heartened to come across this Nassim Nicholas Taleb quote:
If you get easily bored, it means that your BS detector is functioning properly; if you forget (some) things, it means that your mind knows how to filter; and if you feel sadness, it means that you are human.
Perhaps I just have a very stringent bullshit detector. Evidence in favour of this proposal: I think I am able to focus extremely well on personal projects (typically things that I code for fun and find intrinsically rewarding). In fact, when I stop those, it’s less often from boredom and more by guiltily tearing myself away in order to get back to my “real” work. (On the other hand, perhaps there’s such a thing as a too-stringent bullshit detector—one so stringent as to give false positives.)
Summary: I’m concerned that my focus/concentration skills are significantly worse than average, and that this could be detrimental to my outcomes in life. How can I improve them?
A position with great pedigree: Borges, Larkin.… Just hope you don’t go blind.
The shouty German version of “Planet Rock” should be an absolute corker.
Agreed. Great idea. Hope it works out.
I’m not sure whether you intended this, but I suppose “70 years from now” does mean “70 years ago”, in an extremely literal, unidiomatic sense of “from”.
In that situation I would have gone with a straight “yes”, nor would I feel myself to have lied. I’d consider it a case of choosing to speak figuratively rather than literally.
I don’t think that what you did say was misleading or that the child would have, in essence, misunderstood it. In fact, under the circumstances I think it was a very well-expressed, even a beautiful, answer.
Whether the extra knowledge allows her to enjoy the book, or whether the extra knowledge makes it clearer to her why she will not enjoy the book, given what I know about reading books or seeing movies 50 or 100 years after they are produced, that learning the context will be revealing and valuable in many ways.
Agreed. My only point of disagreement is that this is a sufficient substitute for reading the thing itself, as opposed to a supplement to it. (In my own reply to the OP I suggested looking at a study guide.)
I guess we have different interpretations of charlemango’s motivation here. I assumed they (“they” because I don’t know his/her gender) were seeking to get some aesthetic enjoyment from the book but were struggling to do so. On the other hand, you state that they are probably reading it to determine why it’s famous. This seems strange to me: I don’t think someone would try reading a book for only this reason. I agree that if that is were indeed someone’s motivation for reading a book, they’d be as well reading the reviews.
Edited to add: there’s some insight in your claim that modernist literature is, in some sense, aimed at an audience of specialists.
Does that make the pair autological, in some sense?
tl;dr: can we raise the sanity waterline with clever use of social media?
Like “perpetual motion machine”, the conjunction of “raise sanity waterline” and “use of social media” in the same sentence is immediately activating my red flags for “oxymoron; doomed to failure”.
If you can find a decent study guide (online, or, if there’s a physical edition, then secondhand copies of it will doubtless cheaply available on Amazon from students who are done with them), then reading that along with the book isn’t cheating. Reading notes for something which is fiction and therefore ostensibly ‘leisure’ reading may seem a bit absurd, but I think it can perhaps be justified. Aside from anything else, it can supply useful context not otherwise easily available to those not living in early twentieth century America and/or part of the high modern literati.
Whether or not you want to invest that kind of effort over and above what you’re already doing is your call, though.
It is a hard book. I read it when I was a rather high-minded teenager, surely understanding very little of it, but it’s actually a little hard for me to conceive of myself reading something so difficult now.
I’m not sure, but my recollection is that the other parts aren’t as hard as Benjy’s bit. It’s been a few years, though.
Sightings:
Arguments that aren’t actually arguments: argument by tribal affiliation was certainly in full force, as well as a certain general condescension bordering on insult.
Statistical illiteracy: in an only minor variant of your hypothetical exchange, I said that very few people are doing too much exercise (tacitly, relative to the number of people who are doing too little), to which someone replied that they had once overtrained to their detriment, as if this disproved my point.
I was also struck by how weird it was that people were nitpicking totally incidental parts of my post, which, even if granted, didn’t actually deduct from the essence of what I was saying. This seemed like a sort of “argument by attrition”, or even just a way of saying “go away; we can tell you’re not one of us.”
A general pattern I’ve noticed: when processing an argument to which they are hostile, people often parse generalizations as unsympathetically as they can. General statements which would ordinarily pass without a second thought are taken as absolutes and then “disproved” by citations of noncentral examples and weird edge cases. I think this is pretty bad faith, and it seems common enough. Do we have a name for it? (I have to stop myself doing it sometimes.)
Your symbolic arguments made me laugh.