Group Rationality Diary, August 1-15

I started a freelance business and have a client already.

Ham Land Week #2

• I made an anonymous feedback form, wee. Check it out here. So far I have one response, someone who deigned to inform me that I am a "poo-poo head". I ain't even mad.
• new habit: Started a new coursera course, Interactive Computer Graphics. Amusingly enough, the course material itself doesn't seem very interactive. It's just throwing vaguely connected factoids out into the world. As I type this up, I begin to wonder if it's high enough EV to keep Calculus in the waiting list. Calculus is so tantalizingly useful in statistics and machine learning, it's driving me nuts that I can't derive any of the formulas I need from scratch. I am prone to making stupid mistakes; not recognizing the underlying math means I have even fewer chances to notice and correct them.
• Added a whole bunch of tiny rewards to habitrpg for various projects. Literally all they are is "Brag about [project]", and they have a pretty small cost. Just a reminder to let myself revel in victories now again, try to capture that upward spiral.
• VOI / Emotional responses: I went and murphy-proofed the Equinox ritual I'm throwing. Its theme is heroic responsibility, or more accurately the virtue of The Void. My aims are to have a strong mental/emotional memory of it 6-9 months later; inspire significant, non-depressive changes in behavior lasting 2+ months; and remain in friendly contact with participants 6 months later.
• Toned down my VOI drawings and neurobio notes to a couple of times a week.

Established a useful new habit

Installed Anki locally and mobile and used it to learn an artificial language: E-minimal (http://www.ebtx.com/lang/eminfrm.htm ).

Started participation in the Good Judgement Project. I did the required test, was invited, did the training and am now waiting for the questions. Note: A summary of the training might make an interesting post but I wonder whether the material can be cited.

Obtained new evidence that made you change your mind about some belief.

Continuing old routines that were successful in the past doesn't neccessarily make them a good idea in the furture after significant changes in context. This obvious fact can be difficult to realize when the routine has become habitual and the original benefit has cemented your feelings toward the routine. Concrete example: Joint family events don't need to continue to be nice and beneficial for all involved after a divorce (or probably comparable life change). Just because one feels that the 'should' be nice doesn't make them so. Reconsider them.

Consciously pursued new valuable information about something that could make a big difference in your life

Bought and started to read Causality ( http://bayes.cs.ucla.edu/BOOK-2K/ ). Whether that makes an impact remains to be seen. Praise is high.

I think pursuing the GJP (see above) also counts.

Tried doing any of the above and failed

I tried to establish a routine for streangth training and mostly failed:

a) I installed a pull-up bar and use it every time I cross it and

b) I tried to do the 7 minute workout daily.

Both failed. I do both only occassionally. It's not that bad because I gamified exercise and award me a point for every 5 minutes of training (different kinds) and average 7 points per day. But it didn't increase as planned.

In Ham Land...

• Have given up on two coursera courses which I started late, and continued to get further behind in as time went on for reasons.
• Just turned my daily 20 min. psychology book reading habit back on. We'll see how that goes.
• Now dedicating 20 min every Tuesday to murphy-proofing common and terrible outcomes I've googled.
• Added a habit to draw some visualizations of VOI/EV calculations, doing that pretty much every weekday. I'm hoping to a.) get in the habit of thinking about these, b.) force myself to tone down perfectionism in art and guestimating, and c.) have these cool visualizations hanging up in my room to reference!
• Also pulling the misc. notes from the neurobio coursera course to make a reference booklet. I doubt I'll ever look at it again after I finish, but it helps me remember. Maybe 60% chance that it'll be nice enough to give to someone else.

Success: Still exercising, have now read three and a half psychology textbooks, still using Anki for learning Chinese, moved from contextless Anki cards to multiple cloze massive context as recommmended by AJATT.com My savings continue to grow, which is great.

Failures: Opening Habit RPG got aversive due to me constantly dying due to missing dailies on programming and diary writing so I stopped. I have just realised I should take them out of dailies and put them in habits. I also really need to start doing to do lists and planning things, considering what I want to do, etc.

In writing my hypothetical apostacy I used to just sort of argue against myself. However, I recently found that it's a lot more effective when I really pretend to be a different person. Like an older and wiser version of myself that is disgusted with my current self's shortcomings. Or a future girlfriend of mine who is a "better" version of me and has different pet peeves.