Seize the Maximal Probability Moment

Huh, I wonder why this post currently has negative karma. I've been conditioned as much as anyone to be critical of anything diegocaleiro writes, because it tends to be long-winded, unclear and poorly formatted, but this post is a welcome departure from this pattern, being clear, concise and to the point:

• it starts with a short exercise,

• uses it to identify a cognitive bias (seems like a new one to me, something along the lines of "missing the hump"),

• suggests a course of action to mitigate it,

• gives an example of applying the action,

• analyzes other relevant examples,

• has an inspirational conclusion.

That's the type of articles I would like to see in Main.

I read this and thought that the best time to comment would be right now so I st

Very strongly seconding this.

as a less long-term changing corollary or adjunct to this: If you're worried about someone's end of any joint endeavor, get in contact as soon as possible. This is true for projects, for trips, but even just for going out for a night. The amount of time it costs you and them for you to give them a phone call to figure out whether they'll be at the restaurant at 8 is very minor, on the order of 30 seconds to a minute. The amount time you can save yourself waiting around can easily be half an hour or an hour. In general, if the answer to a question can drastically change your plans, make sure to ask that question as soon as possible.

Great post!

One potential problem is having too many maximal probability moments at once, depending one the nature of the hacks you're trying to implement. It's an embarassment of riches, honestly.

For example, I had a maximal probability moment for about 7 or 8 life-hacks after I came back from minicamp and there was no way I could implement all of them at once because each one would require some amount of concerted effort, so I was better off focusing on a couple at first. When this comes up, often there is a best hack or two to focus on, but the trivial inconvenience of figuring out which ones to focus on may just prevent you from implementing any. I know it's happened to me. When in this situation, just pick something. Anything. It doesn't matter, really. Implementing something is much better than wanting to implement the best something but actually implementing nothing at all and the marginal gain from implementing the best thing probably isn't worth the risk of implementing nothing.

For the record, I tried the "use very bright light to help concentrate" trick for a couple of months at one point, and after some time I successfully conditioned myself to be able to fall asleep even in very bright light. It was probably helpful for a little while, though.

More on topic, ~"if you don't require further information to decide on something, decide on it now and act on the decision immediately" is good advice.

You could also call this “sieze the Schelling point”. You’re setting a Schelling fence for making the change between “the maximal probability moment” and “right after that” – if you slide past the Schelling fence, you can expect you will fail to make the change, and that encourages you to make the change now.

I won't implement big changes in my life just because someone told me about a potential life hack while I was half-listening. it sounds like if you adopt the change immediately when you hear about it might be beneficial for the adoption rate of the change but by implementing new hacks into your life immediately without having researched them will lead you to also adopt non-beneficial changes.