Group Rationality Diary, December 16-31

I'm highly risk-averse, and took a rather big step out of my comfort zone recently and got laser eye surgery on the thirteenth of December.

It's turned out very well so far. The post-care management and discomfort is rather manageable (eyedrops 12 times a day, face shield at night, ban on touching eyes), discomfort is minimal and mostly just light sensitivity).

I had irregularly shaped eyes (astigmatism and perhaps more) before surgery, and correcting that has been amazing. Combined with getting more and better peripheral vision, and it's a huge cognitive load off. Multiple people have remarked that I've seemed much happier after getting lasik done. I've had to re-train my hand-eye coordination to not compensate for the wacky geometry I was compensating for, and it's a very unique feeling. Very hard to describe.

It's also gotten much easier for me to keep track of my surroundings, notice and comprehend more things and more details, line things up and use more accurate lengths, and find objects. As far as I'm aware, uncorrected astigmatism is a big contributing factor to clumsiness in general, and I had a big tendency to figure out how to carry large objects through hallways and staircases by braille. Too soon to tell how much that all is fixed, but I fully expect it to get much better.

I've vaguely wanted to go through with it for just over a year, and I'm a little sad that I didn't earlier. But it's fixed now, and I'm already moving towards being less overcautious, so there's really no point in beating myself up over it.

I started using beeminder more actively, and successfully trained myself to execute a daily goal that's very important to me. The price was paying beeminder $10, $30 and finally $90 for defaulting on the goal. That last payment seemed to trigger some sort of WTF reaction in my mind that has pushed me to strict compliance and kept me far away from default ever since. I value the successful execution of the goal far above the money I paid.

After reading Dennett's Intuition Pumps, in which he invites you to pay more attention to certain words in arguments by suffixing them with "(ding!)" whenever they appear, I've installed a regex browser plugin for the purpose of training myself to "ding" whenever I come across certain words in text.

Keep paying attention to rephrasing statements as relative, rather than absolute, where appropriate, before expressing them. Such as "I like this song" instead of "This song is great". In EY-speak, replace implicit 2-place functions disguised as 1-place with explicit 2-place.

After reading the latest willpower research from Kurzban, I tried to figure out a way to make use of the model it proposes to decrease impulsivity and increase the time I spend on productive tasks.

I've developed a habit that makes use of mindfulness skills (that I get from nightly mindfulness meditation) where I notice when I am feeling an aversive state in response to deciding what to do or evaluating what I'm doing and use that feeling as a reminder to be mindful of just the task I am working on (which has the effect of diminishing the aversive feeling). I've experienced success in that I end up not being influenced as much by the aversive states (due to inhibiting them using mindfulness), which leads to me feeling much more able to work on productive but not instantly gratifying things. I feel overall less "decision fatigue" or "mental exhaustion", which makes my day more pleasant without the cost of wasting time on immediately gratifying tasks (and I find that immediately gratifying tasks don't really "recharge" me anyway, which is consistent with Kurzban's model).

I'm taking a Data Analysis course via Coursera because I believe the skill of analyzing data will be generally useful. I'm also teaching myself cell biology via a textbook as part of an effort to learn neuroscience, because I hope to get involved with computational neuroscience at some point (and I think knowledge about how the world works can be generally useful). In both of these, I've been using Anki to create cards as I learn (and review them during my commute), and I've noticed that it's greatly improved my ability to recall what I've learned, which has made it easier for me to more quickly process new concepts as I learn.

I've been keeping on regularly using Anki and HabitRPG, both of which I recommend. I still exercise daily, have much more regular sleeping habits, study all my flashcards every day, etc.

I am learning to use stenographic typing, and I have made enough progress to type up this post. Slowly. You have no clue how long this is taking. But I can write, slowly, and that is enough to make it easier to learn more and to practice more.

I hope to get much, much faster at this. It is a simple matter of practice, though. I am doing a lot of stopping and looking stuff up, and that is where most of my time is spent.

150 WPM is my long term goal. At that point it is better than anything I could get from a qwerty layout, even with infinite practice.

Links:

http://plover.stenoknight.com/

https://sites.google.com/site/ploverdoc/

http://qwertysteno.com/Home/

https://github.com/caru/StenoTutor

I'm trying to cut down on soda intake. I've gone down from 1 bottle of coke per day down to maybe 3 cans per week. However, I do work night shifts at a bar so there's the temptation to sneak a glass or two from the taps for the caffeine boost, to get me through the night.

After dealing with the effects of bad procrastination over fall semester, I started working on anti-akrasia techniques last week. So far, it seems to be working.

I've started a diet in VLCD fashion with a goal of losing at least 5 kg of mainly fat in a month. I'll mostly use a micronutrient-dense powder I bought in a pharmacy, and will complement it with additional protein and occasional normal food. VLCD is mostly recommended for the morbidly obese, and I'm just having trouble with the waistline and not overweight, so this should be interesting. It's three days in with about 1000 kcal intake, and I haven't experienced great difficulty yet. I've also had energy to exercise a bit.

I'm a doctor (yes, not a nutritionist), so I probably know most of the arguments and words of caution against this idea already, and know when to quit, so please don't bombard me with expressions of concern. I wouldn't recommend this to anyone else without reservations.

If anyone's interested, I'll post an update after a few weeks.

I've had trouble keeping up with certain prescribed medications due to side effects and a sense that I may be comparing them to an atypical baseline (non-medicated) baseline.

Today, I finally got around to implementing a new schedule for medications & for handling the side effects. Since I procrastinated so long, I also now have a much better baseline helped by the acquisition of an Android application designed explicitly for people with my condition that makes it easy to log symptoms even without Internet access. I also started using a 2 button timer so that I am reminded to go back and log how I'm doing after the initial onset of symptoms.

I still have to do number crunching and see what this new (almost certainly more accurate) baseline says.

Briefly, I am going to take advantage of the following ideas:

• Cutting out all the obstacles I can think of
• Feeding your inner pigeon
• Habit RPG (and everything that entails)

After reading Scott Adams' article about goals versus systems, I decided to create a system for losing weight (I am 20 pounds heavier than I think is optimal for my health). The first part of the system is simply counting calories. No restrictions, just being aware. I plan on doing this for two weeks, then start changing my diet.

11 days ago, I started tracking my food using LoseIt and have found it extremely useful. The holidays have been intense (several days of eating 2x my daily "requirement").

The biggest thing I have found that meals of 250-600 calories leave me feeling sated but not tired.