Group Rationality Diary, May 16-31

I asked for advice regarding App Academy here and Less Wrong really came through for me. Thanks for all your help!

I will be attending the August cohort in San Francisco. If anyone else from LW will be there, please get in contact with me via PM.

I am troubleshooting my method for writing papers in an attempt to make the process go faster or at least more efficiently. So far, I have asked a couple of my colleagues about their methods, and intend to try to collect a representative sample before I try to extract any important general bits

I have started using HabitRPG to reinforce reading on a daily basis, Anki usage and exercise, as well as doing some programming, though that last is less well established. I had the program on my phone for a while but kept on forgetting it so I just set two daily reminders in Google calendar. Problem solved. I uninstalled remember the milk as HabitRPG's todk functionality is good enough.

I am now spending a lot of time that was previously unproductive internet time reading textbooks on my phone's Kindle app. Almost certainly inferior to paper books but my phone had pretty much killed that habit already. I amn't able to read and process highly technical or mathematical texts but for psychology textbooks and the like it works fine.

I've been going to the gym two or three times a week, ttavel excepted for three months now. I'm still above my ideal weight but more of said weight is muscle. I feel like I should do some kind of minimal daily exercise routine in addition to lifting at the gym but am unsure what I should be doing.

"Established a useful new habit" (Background: I have a tendency to experience peak excitement about a new idea early on and then drop it entirely once the excitement wanes.) I have surprised myself by continuing to use HabitRPG for over a month now. I am very happy with the software; it really seems like it works for me.

"Established a useful new habit" I have been thinking for a while that I wish I was reading more philosophy, but I never quite got around to doing it. I finally decided that I would commit to just reading something -- I created a daily task in HabitRPG that would be satisfied by even a single paragraph. That task is now my longest running streak, and I usually read much more than a single paragraph.

"Obtained new evidence that made you change your mind about some belief" For a long time I approached the notion that minds are material things with mild scorn -- "what sort of misguided a priori commitments would motivate someone to believe that?" At any rate, it was not an issue that I thought about with any frequency. This past month, I found myself encountering some of the brain damage/stimulation research again, and this time my reaction was, "this seems terribly more probable in a world where minds are what brains do." I then went through a whole series of questions in this way (viz., "on which approach is aspect X of thinking more likely?") and came up with the same answer each time. I also realized that the idea of a non-material mind feels kind of goofy to me, and I asked myself, "why would I need to posit that? what do I lose without that?", coming up empty-handed. I have no dramatic level of confidence in my new belief, because I haven't done the real research, but I am perfectly happy with the level of confidence I have. So it is not really a matter of having found new evidence, but of approaching the issue in a new way. Honestly, I think the biggest factor is all the time I have spent over the past few months working through the sequences: I just think about things differently on some basic levels.

Sorry for the wordiness; it was an interesting and pleasant experience to watch myself work through that process.

sat and thought for a few minutes about what I was attempting to do with my journal. Realized that I had several different objectives that were kind of mutually exclusive, such as wanting to have all my hardcopy data organized CHRONOLOGICALLY and by TYPE at the same time. My phone will now ping me at random intervals to get a better distribution of my day. I have a page dedicated to listing which wellbeing indicators I'm collecting at any given time, such specific indicators (as opposed to random thoughts and a general description of my day) are written in the left page margin. Emotion/Belief processing is to go on a separate sheet of paper--or, even better, done digitally so thoughts don't have time to mutate as I transcribe them--with only the premises and end conclusions referenced in the journal proper.

Stopped using anki and duolingo as my default action when bored. This was not intentional. Anki because it keeps crashing on my phone, duolingo because I've discovered the web app is so much better. I've also been generally mentally exhausted, it was only this week that I've succeeded in doing perfect day streaks on HabitRPG again. I have so many little to-do's that need doing... It hurts just to look at the list.

Change the dates to May 16-31?