Recovering the 'spark'

If you have the least bit of writing skills, I'd be happy to read what you write and maybe comment on it, provided you actually get to describing some real-life examples rather than going on about updating your source code. It would be best if you present a situation without analyzing it right away. "That one time, in a band camp..." is one way to start.

I would be interested in reading this, but if it's painful for you to share your thoughts, I would recommend writing primarily for your future self's benefit, with the possibility of publishing later if your feelings change.

I have found writing to be an amazingly effective way of rapidly reshaping my mind. I am not sure why that is (I can speculate, but I have no particular reason to think that my speculations reflect reality). Still, I have genuinely changed my mind on a couple of fairly important things, and my mind has stayed changed.

Start your own blog. Summarize here if it ends up being interesting.

Would this process, and the chronicling thereof, be at all useful to other members of this site? Because baring myself to the world is an intensely painful experience, both for myself and for others, and I'd rather only do it if it's going to be useful to people other than me.

If nothing else, it would at least be interesting to read about. If it disturbs you to talk about it online, though, it might not be worth it to publish your results. I'd still recommend writing out the posts anyway even if you keep them to yourself; it should help bring clarity to the process.

I can relate, so it might be beneficial for me. Going from way above average to slightly below in the last years of school, or I at least get that feeling due to mild chronic depression, I think it might help me as well. The goal of this site is (from what I have observed) roughly in line with improving thinking, and destroying negative thought patterns, so I think you're doing something COMPLETELY in line, and at least a few other LWers would benefit from this.

Do you need support of any kind?

You need to evaluate the benefit to you of having a group of people who are willing to listen to you and call your bullshit, against the cost to you of communicating what you are trying to do. I think that LW is one of the best places on the internet to find people who will take you seriously enough and provide fairly constructive advice. I also think that the internet is a bad place to find those people.

My personal advice: Befriend a liberal arts college graduate using any of the rote procedures for doing so, then explain your position above and request that they "Listen to me describe myself and call out the mistakes I am making in observing myself." The reason I suggest lib arts grads is that they are the group I find most likely to want to participate in parent-adult interactions (as defined by Eric Berne in the transactional analysis bible Games People Play). I suggest you read that book if you suspect any moral problems in the deliberate manipulation of people to gain a specific advantage; with the right kind of person, the course of action I describe favors them more than you.

I'm interested in reading that kind of self-analysis. I'm fairly confident it won't be painful for me. I suspect it would be better to set up your own blog for it.

I think it might be useful for me-- I've got my own problems (though less severe) with depression.

Also, I the the problems of mental self-modification have some relevance to computer self-modification. How do you decide what an improvement might be? How do you evaluate the safety of a new method of change? I'm inclined to think these questions are actually somewhat easier for humans, and still very hard.

Would you be willing to describe the early modifications you tried to make, and what you were hoping to get from them?

Have you tried anything on the physical side? This would include psych meds, dietary change, exercise, and various ways (Alexander Technique, Feldenkrais method, yoga, etc.) of improving coordination. That last may sound weird, but I have some experience with the way habitual patterns of muscle tension are part of emotional and mental habits.

I can relate to this a lot, and I'd find it very useful to see how someone else monologues about it. Just to take another step meta here, a framework for doing the sort of thing ('re-calibration'?) you want to do in itself would be a useful akrasia-kick for people who for whatever reason haven't gotten to the stage of automating how to get out of the inefficiency slump.