Group Rationality Diary, June 1-30

This Facebook thread on Scalia, which I retracted here. Remarks:

When I stated my condition of sufficient evidence to retract here:

Show me a similar lone dissent by Scalia on the recording of a factual background of no great religious or political valence, and I will withdraw my objection with apologies to Scalia and his great epistemic caution.

... I looked over what I'd written, carefully visualized being presented with that evidence in order to check that it was my True Rejection, and decided that yes, this would be sufficient and that I would in fact react in that case by changing my mind. I didn't anticipate such a piece of evidence to be offered (or I would've already had beliefs consistent with it) but I knew that it would greatly disappoint any skilled minds reading my Facebook feed if I stated such a condition and then went back on it or tried to add extra caveats.

After being presented by the evidence I'd requested here by Dan Haecker:

Often, because he thinks the court is straying from it's role and attempting to divine things like "what the law could be," Scalia joins "all but.." or parts of different opinions. For examples all last week, see http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/12pdf/11-1221_7l48.pdf http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/12pdf/12-167_d1oe.pdf http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/12pdf/12-62_5g68.pdf

...which met my stated condition, I also knew that my community would congratulate me on making a public opinion-change and had a fair degree of, "Yay, I so rarely get to impress my friends and show off my rationality skillz by publicly changing my opinion like this!" The next immediate comment after this is my retraction so you can see that the proper motion was executed without hesitating after I checked the provided evidence.

My friends, especially including Luke and Carl who I knew would both go for it, did in fact 'Like' the retraction (there or in a later status update for greater visibility) so my expectation was confirmed.

Generalizations: Visualize in advance whether the evidence you demand would actually change your mind; expecting your friends to be disappointed in you if you add any further demands will help you visualize this. Expected reliable community support matters a lot in terms of making you feel happier about getting a chance to change your mind.

In an effort to live more luminously, I've been trying to keep tabs on circumstances surrounding unpleasant mental states. I've been doing this for a while with some success, but I have despondent, lethargic periods two or three times a month that I've been unable to account for. They tend to mess with my enthusiasm and usually herald a productivity crash.

Anyway, I think I've managed to account for them: they seem to happen when I feel like I've done hard work across multiple domains and subsequently don't feel rewarded.

This is kind of bad news, because a lot of my work and study goals should pay off really well in a few years time, but this is of no use to my short-termist brain, which wants a figurative cookie right now. Is reward fungible? If, for example, I receive gratifying compliments that show my fitness efforts are paying off, will that satisfy my reward needs in general, or is it somehow kept on a separate tally from all my other efforts?

For deontological reasons, I've been vegetarian for about a year and a half. I recently decided to make up inaccurate numbers to see if the decision makes sense on utilitarian grounds. The sources I trust seem to agree that eating meat will improve my health, so on one side of the equation I had [extra lifespan] [expected earnings per time] [fraction of earnings I currently donate] [lives saved per dollar donated]. On the other side of the equation, [expected years of life] * [amount of meat an average American eats per year] / [usable meat per animal].

Conclusion: I don't care about animals that much, compared to humans. The result was two orders of magnitude away from even being a difficult decision, so even my horrible made-up numbers were persuasive. I've been eating meat for a couple of weeks, now.

I was publicly vegetarian for a while, so I was afraid of telling people; it felt like admitting I'd been wrong. Nothing embarrassing happened. I'll remember this next time I fear looking foolish for changing my mind.

Found out intimate relationships are a part of my life in which I feel I could do better. Found out it is overlooked in x-rationality groups. Bought The textbook on it. Am learning it.

I have quite a lot of "life infrastructure", (calendars, routines, to-do lists, etc.), but I've found there's a lot it doesn't capture. I've started using Workflowy as an all-purpose receptacle for recording things I don't have a sensible tool for. For example, I have a page for logging my study habits, and while it's not the ideal tool for it, it's better than nothing in the absence of that ideal.

I mentioned a few months ago that I was going to record what I accomplish each day for 100 days. I managed to turn it into a habit (big deal for me- I find habit forming difficult) and started my second spreadsheet (I changed the way I "grade" my achievements, and made various upgrades to the system) and am about halfway into it! :D That combined with journaling every night gives me an estimation of why I get into depressive spirals where I don't do any work, and helped me figure out what gets me out of them (where I end up completing a lot of work.)

It's also gratifying to see a high score after doing several hours of work.

I've been using HabitRPG for around a month now to increase the amount of exercise I do and decrease the amount of chocolate I consume. It's caused successful habit formation—I've reduced the motivation needed to do unpleasant strength exercises and 3+ mile runs, even on days where I get no points for completing them. I have little success with decreasing my chocolate consumption, partly because I eat first and pay for it with the game-gold later. I'll keep using this system.

HabitRPG may work for me because I have freakishly great self-motivation and this helps me channel it. It's also my to-do list, though the site crashes with annoying frequency.

So I spent today getting work done. The majority of 11 hours, at least. As a rough estimate, it's probably closer to 8, once you take out the breaks and the eating and such.

I had no idea why, and my models of how to fight Akrasia feel a bit weaker...

But I realized something peculiar about the day before that I hadn't really considered potentially positive: I had done a little more than I had been lately (I threw together a song and recorded a few others with better instruments), but most of my progress for the day was halted when I decided to look at a forum that I'd been avoiding for several months--since October 2012, in fact. I wouldn't call it an incredible mood-lift, or anything; I wound up trying to speed through a 75-page thread (20 posts per page); I only got 26 or so pages in before I bailed and watched a 30 minute video on Youtube.

What I didn't realize until halfway through writing this is that my productivity took a nosedive after October 2012, and it's been very difficult to get it back up to something vaguely resembling passable--I had a random burst of enthusiasm for a spontaneous project one week in February, and managed maybe a month of modest output after I read the Motivation Hacker, but it feels considerably weaker compared to the same time period in previous years.

The observation "Spends a lot of time and mental energy on forum on day X" -> "Spends most of day X+1 working" does not intuitively seem to imply a causal relationship. My observations about my mental state by the end of yesterday did not make me feel all that confident that today would turn out productive. Yet, I'm now wondering what the graph of time spent on this forum vs work done looks like. (Well, how the two graphs would compare, rather.) I don't know how possible it is to actually gather said data (I could check the frequency of my posts and search for references from IM conversations to said forum, for what it's worth?).

The perplexing part is more that, if it turns out that there is a strong enough correlation between time spent foruming and work done, then I'll need to seriously rethink my model of how I'm motivated; avoiding it felt more like removing a source of mental energy drain/procrastination/distraction opportunity, without any significant happiness or idea cost. I have taken that same forum into consideration when trying to figure out how to combat Akrasia in the past, but mostly I came up with "I do better when happier, and occasionally something pleasant enough comes of this that it helps". But I'm starting to question the happiness part.