Group Rationality Diary, April 5-14

"Humans are not automatically strategic."

Today I realized I had a meme in my head which said the opposite of this. It was like: "If you really want something, then you will do it (without any strategy). And if you didn't do it, that means it wasn't really so important for you." In other words, relax, turn off all your strategic thinking, and believe that everything will be 100% okay. -- In reality this approach often fails. In which case you are supposed to rationalize that you actually didn't want that thing too much. Of course sometimes you are lucky and succeed despite the lack of strategy; and then you are supposed to take this as an evidence that the strategy really is not necessary.

I already professed the belief that humans are not automatically strategic, but I didn't realize I had a meme deeper in my head which said the opposite, and that in real life I probably followed that meme most of the time.

(I find it horrifying how easy it is to spread irrational memes, without any... consequences. I mean, if someone distributed poison to people, they would get arrested. But distribute poisonous memes and the only consequence is that the people who refuse to drink are sometimes called closed-minded and intolerant.)

• I actually thought about something for the first time in years
• While thinking about it, I jotted down "Find an article to back this up." I quickly noticed my error and replaced it with "See what science has to say on the subject."
• I recognized that there is a problem with how I think about social interactions.

I read up on a bunch of theory about Alexander Technique. It's something that feels a lot like physical rationality - that is to say, how you do the things you do involves choices, and you may not be making the choice you want to make out of force of habit. Some highlights:

• I noticed that I spend a lot of my time walking around with my head down. I've been spending time re-focusing my attention on the horizon. Still notice myself looking down by force of habit, but it's not a permanent state.

• My monitor needs to get raised by about six inches

• I've had lots of issues with neck/back tension and tension headaches. I'm trying to let myself relax those muscles more.

• Nobody had ever told me that, functionally speaking, the shoulder blade and collarbone are part of doing arm motions. My first instinct is to do everything past the shoulder. I've been retraining myself, and I've been sore around my shoulder blade. Similarly, you really want to use muscles above the buttocks as a "leg muscle".

• How you act and how you feel has some "backwards" causality. I've noticed myself feeling more confident while walking around with my head up (as opposed to pointed towards ground).

I was talking with someone about how I ran out of normal food and decided it was easier to bake and eat brownie mix than go to the grocery store, and they suggested paleo to me.

I responded with "I've had paleo recommended many times, but the convenience costs are too high compared to bread and pasta," when I realized that I had recently learned a cooking method that took only slightly more effort and time than boiling pasta. So I followed it up with "Or, I suppose I could just steam chicken every day." They responded with "yeah, also consider pressure cookers- I eat a tasty stew every other day."

Looking backwards, I'm glad that I actively checked the thing I said, noticed that my cache was out of date, and updated accordingly. Looking forward, I'm going to only buy meat and vegetables on my next two grocery trips, and then reevaluate.

I'll kick it off:

I've begun to seriously consider the anti-natalist views of philosophers like David Benatar. My two sisters recently each had their first child and while I've given thought to the idea of having my own children in the past, closely seeing the process play out from beginning to end has somehow updated my thoughts on the topic. I haven't read much yet (I'm about a quarter through Better To Have Never Been and would relish some suggestions from LWers on the matter.

Currently my thinking is that as much as I would like the experience of raising a child who shares my own DNA, I am becoming more and more convinced that I can't feel like I am making a morally-correct decision by bringing a new human into existence. If I had never been born I necessarily wouldn't have been harmed in any way by not existing - and now that I am here I can enjoy life as much as possible (which is a lot, don't get me wrong), but I still must endure some measure of suffering and I also must face mortality.

I was never interested in the idea of adopting children before, but in light of my updated viewpoint on conception I can see the benefit of adopting an already-born person.

Another part of it I think about: As far as utility to society goes, I already know that I have certain inclinations or aspirations towards rationality and a general motivation to attempt to better society in some small way if I can. There's no guarantee that a new person I create will match or exceed the possible positive impacts on society that I make. That uncertainty-for-positive-change along with the fact that a new person will necessarily impose some negatives on society also makes me wonder how I could justify the decision to make a new person.

As I'm sure it is clear, I'm in the early stages of considering these topics and haven't done much research at all into writings and analysis of the issues I'm raising. I am open to any and all suggestions of avenues of research.

Last month I started using HabitRPG, and Boomeranged myself to post about it again in a month's time. So here are my experiences so far:

The positive: At 2nd or 3rd level you get to form a party with other people, so now my best friend and I can see each other's health, XP and gear. Being in a party doesn't do anything else, but it does add a little extra accountability/competitiveness/gear envy. The gear you can buy with your rewards looks pretty cool. The system gently encourages you via the XP mechanic to break stuff up into subtasks so you can get more xp and regularly review habits that you're not getting done (since not doing them makes you lose health).

The negative: A few showstopping bugs: when I have it open it regularly disconnects from the server until I reload the page, which often results in me losing task completions/new tasks that I'd added. On my (Android) tablet browser, trying to complete a task causes the browser to crash, every time. Leaving the tab open in the browser often slows my netbook down due to some kind of memory leak. Also, customising tasks so that they only trigger on certain days or give more or less xp or whatever is kind of fiddly and not really worth doing most of the time IMO.

Overall: The fact that I can't use my tablet to complete tasks anymore is kind of a dealbreaker for me. I'm still using it at the moment but unless the tablet issue gets fixed I'll probably try to find some other method of tracking and forming habits. It's a pity because the main part of the app is very effective.

I went out of my way to read something insane (and mindkilling, so I won't link it), and noticed that it felt progressively less insane the longer I kept at it.

I think I'm a little more wary of what I feed my information-processor now. I was aware that the brain provisionally accepts ideas by default, but hadn't really internalized that fact.

I learned some scary stuff about sugar recently (see e.g. Lustig's Sugar: The Bitter Truth and this Mother Jones piece). I got the same feeling as when I read about the history of de Beers: like something that felt like just a background fact about reality (sugar is okay for you, diamonds are how you show someone you love them) was actually carefully constructed by a corporation to make money. Seems like I should trust everything else that feels like a background fact about reality slightly less in response.

I've established the habit of using a checklist for the things I would like to turn into habits. I have had medium to good success so far.

I'm two weeks in to a polyphasic sleep adaptation. I wrote a fairly lengthy blog post about it, but some details that might interest LWers:

1) I'm using a Zeo which is proving to be extremely valuable even just for my own sanity, because adaptation is hard enough without objective data that it's working. I've started informally trying to guess what my chart will look like after each nap (e.g. Wake, REM, REM, Wake (the bars represent 5 minutes)) and I plan to start doing so formally tomorrow. I expect to get to the stage where these predictions are quite accurate. Then again, I also expect that as I adapt, my naps will become more consistent.

2) I've been running myself through a battery of tests on Quantified Mind. No conclusions yet.

Unfortunately, with both the Zeo and QM, I didn't do much/any data-gathering before adaptation, because I only acquired / started using the technologies in the week prior to adaptation, and for logistical reasons I didn't feel like I could delay my adaptation for the month it would have required to get enough Zeo data and eliminate all of the practice effects on QM.

It's possible that at some point I'll be forced to return to monophasic. At this stage, the data I'm gathering may become more valuable, especially if I later return to polyphasic.

3) Moments of extreme tiredness have been an interesting exercise in Systems 1 and 2 fighting each other. My body / limbic system wants nothing more than sleep, but my neocortex is driven to succeed. I can watch them battle if I pay close enough attention.

If anyone has experiments etc. they'd like me to attempt, I'm open to suggestion, although they may not be feasible.

14:56:31 < X> how are you doing today?
14:57:28 <@gwern> X: feeling a bit put out that I sort want to go for a walk but I sort don't
                     and I no longer have the dog which would have pushed me over 
                     the edge in favor of taking a walk
14:57:44 <@gwern> 'those barbarians were a solution, of sorts'

I just launched the alpha of forget.io, a service for developing habits and recording data in self-experimentation. It texts you on your phone; you text it back. My stereotypical question (and the one I invented it for) is "How happy are you on a scale of 1-10?" Free to minicamp participants; costs a small fee for everyone else (although only enough to pay for the text messages).

I've gotten a lot better at managing my emotional response to things, possibly because of a certain online game that generates endless rivers of burning rage in many of its players. From the outside view, however, I can't recommend this as a way to increase your emotional awareness, because most people don't get this ending.

An entirely possible alternate explanation is just that I've gotten better at this self-awareness stuff at the same rate as normal, but only noticed it because of the game.