Group Rationality Diary, October 1-15

It seems appropriate to report a rationality failure from this week.

It was 8:00 AM and I was sitting in the window seat of a Boeing 737, toward the back of the plane. The aircraft is preparing to back away from the gate. I hear the engines power up and almost immediately the view out my window is obscured by a thick cloud of smoke or vapor.

I hear a few other voices in the cabin comment on this with varying levels of alarm, but nobody actually does anything beyond make a remark to their neighbor. A few seconds later, I detect a strong acrid smell - the man sitting beside me comments that he smells it as well. I have never experienced anything like this is dozens of flights on jets.

At this point, nobody, including me, seems to have any plans to do anything - except my wife, who is sitting behind me, who almost immediately starts to stand up and wave for the attention of a flight attendant.

Interestingly, several people around her, including me, start trying to reassure her that nothing serious is wrong. I hear a voice say, "Somebody on the ground would have noticed and said something." I myself say, "I think it's just water vapor," which is stupid because I can smell fumes of some kind.

My wife succeeds in informing the flight attendant, and she goes to report this to the pilot. A few moments later the pilot comes over the intercom and explains that the thick plume of smoke is totally normal in cold weather, and the flight proceeds without incident.

So, nothing bad happened, but I consider this to be a huge rationality failure on my part, because I not only fell prey to the Bystander Effect, but I tried to dissuade my wife from shaking free of the Bystander Effect in a situation where I really had no privileged information. I later thanked her and she explicitly acknowledged that she didn't care if she looked like a fool, she wasn't going to let herself become a victim of the Bystander Effect.

To encourage my writing habit, I've made a wager with a group of friends:

Each person involved in the wager chooses a charity (the charities must be something that none of the others have chosen nor can any of the others find the charity immoral). Each person agrees to start work on a large project (in this case, novels). When one of us completes their project, they donate a set amount of money to the charity of their choice. If anyone gives up or goes a set amount of time (in this case, a month) without progress on the project, they instead donate to the other charities.

I fashioned the wager this way to encourage dedication to the project without emphasizing speed or competition. We're working on novels, so encouraging people to rush would only make their writing sloppy and destroy the joy of the work. The month time limit is, I feel, longer than needed, but will serve the purpose of keeping us checking on each other and encouraging each other. The charities were chosen so that money would not become a sticking point. No one gains personally, but there is no feeling of being cheated out of cash. A donation will be made no matter what, and since the charities must be such that no player feels them to be immoral, those donations will have some level of good feelings attached. Meaning no one walks away sour.

• I got into the habit of doing a quick web search for just about anything for purposes such as finding out more about something (to keep myself from letting an inaccurate idea/cached thought inform my view on the matter), checking internet consensus on the best ways to go about solving common problems, checking whether I'm right or wrong on a factual belief, and many others. It may not sound like much of an improvement in rationality, but I learned loads during the last few days half spent googling random things. (By the way, I probably wouldn't have done this out of the inconvenience of turning on my desktop PC until now; I recently got myself a tablet.)

• As a result, I learned pretty much all I needed, within reason, in order to fix my diet and workout program. I stopped eating crap entirely, cold turkey; filled my fridge only with the most nutritious foods I know of; began to restrict my calorie count to resting metabolic rate level to ensure I never have to deal with unwanted weight gain again (although I'm not sure yet whether this provides the life extension benefits of calorie restriction); optimized my workouts for maximum fat burning along with an increase in lean body mass and am currently trying to figure out a way around joint pain caused by running a lot. The results are... pretty shocking for someone who hasn't seen me in a long time. ;)

• Finally did something about my suspected dopamine deficit. For years I've been trying out all sorts of methods for increasing my motivation and productivity, with no avail, because I simply could never muster enough will to get stuff done, my natural inclination being to just laze around all day long. Then I found out about MAO-Is and how they work, and started popping the only over-the-counter supplements that contained MAO-Is that I had around. (I doubt I could have gotten a prescription for anything else; the doctor I've spoken to regarding my dopamine levels recommended me no medication whatsoever.)

I wasn't looking for the non-selective kind, only MAO-B inhibitors interested me, since I couldn't say I was feeling particularly low on serotonin. They unexpectedly came in handy. I recently had something happen to me that would have left me a total wreck otherwise (indeed, similar events in the past did leave me a total wreck); the antidepressant effect was the only reason why I kept feeling basically normal on an affective level. (On a behavioral level, though, I couldn't help acting like a depressed person. That's the only problem I've been noticing so far; your emotions get out of sync with your behavior, and you can't predict yourself anymore.)

Memory has improved; I kept having episodes of random recall. No more brain fog as well; I'm more alert and aware of my surroundings. As for the intended effect... I definitely have a lower "activation energy" now; at last I notice myself starting to study spontaneously, without a lot of inner conflict, anguish and reluctance about the matter. However, it may take a higher dosage for me to have the crazy levels of motivation that my study schedule would require; last night, for instance, after taking my usual MAO-I dosage, I went out with some people and smoked a little (yes, yes, I know...). Now, cigarettes also contain MAO-Is along with nicotine, and apparently that's what makes them so addictive; there are certain warnings when combining two MAO-Is. When I got back home, I began feeling a little over-stimulated. I was energetic as hell and very responsive to any idea that came to me. It would occur to me to do things that I'm normally unenthusiastic about, and my mind would go all "Why, that's a great idea, let's do it!". If the effect lasted a little longer, I might have gotten much more done.

The bottom line, they helped, and they helped a great deal. To everybody who's been trying for a long time to improve motivation and tried everything from Pomodoros to precommitment to psychotherapy: please please please consider dopaminergics. It may have been your core issue all along. There's no substitute for naturally feeling like doing a lot of stuff, and no software (psychological hacks) that can get shoddy hardware (neurochemistry) to run like a supercomputer. Once you do, you may regret not having done it earlier.

• On an unrelated note: ever since I completed CFAR's sunk cost fallacy exercise book, I don't think I've fallen prey to that bias (that I know of). I now recognize it very easily and tried to give some friends the intuition behind why it is irrational.

No I don't think he is insane, he is however like most singulatarians a fucking dumb ass.

I've been using a personal wiki to develop my rationality skills, and I've recently written about it, here:

http://meditationstuff.wordpress.com/2014/09/29/what-rationality-actually-looks-like-from-the-inside-4500-words/

Now that running regularly, for fitness and to keep my weight down, is a well established habit, I've signed up to run a half-marathon next March. (Not without a twinge of sadness, thinking of Hal Finney.)

Instead of just going out for a run on sundays and the occasional weekday, I'm now "following a training plan", that is, running workouts with specific targets, using a heart rate monitor, and so on. It makes some interesting differences and I've learned a few things.

One aspect of keeping fit that I'm still somewhat failing at, despite much self-monitoring and various attempts at behavior change, is getting more sleep. I'm still sleep-deprived (less than 5h) two or three nights a week.

I have started steering my daydreaming in constructive directions. I look for ways that whatever I am working on could be used to solve problems in whatever fiction is currently on my mind. I can then use the motivation from the fictional daydream to power the concentration on the work. This isn't working very well, yet, since it is very hard to find a good bridge between real-life research and interesting science fiction that doesn't immediately get sidetracked to focus on the science fiction parts. However, in the instances in which it worked, this helped me come up with a couple of ideas that may actually be helpful in my work.

Given how much of my day I spend daydreaming (going to and from work, going shopping, showering, etc), I think that this could be an enormously useful source of time if I can make myself use it more constructively.

Do you have experience with this? I could imagine that this may not be entirely healthy for one's mind. Do you know of any research or arguments about this?

Tried adapting to polyphasic sleep, am off it for now. My critical weakness was waking up after core sleep periods - naps were east and effective though, and I found lots of great uses for the extra time (okay, math textbooks and videogames). I'm going to try playing around with what times in the 3-4 hour range it's easiest for me to wake up, get an alarm clock that produces light, and try again in a week and a half.