Group rationality diary, 5/21/12

Over the last week:

Been practicing being much more open and sympathetic with people (especially wife) about emotions. Has had some big gains.

Wife has been using personal TDT on everything and has become much more effective at excercises, food habits, and sequence reading.

Used the "I am a rationalist, I can do X and nothing bad will happen." thought pattern to motivate myself to try things that I was previously averse to. (mostly gross and/or sexy things)

Been climbing trees at all opportunities (who knew there were so many opportunities for so much fun).

Been practicing being generally excited and high-energy about life. (yeeehaw! high fives all around!)

Dabbled in various day-planning and productivity techniques. Mild gains. Limiting factor seems to be attention span.

Rewarding self for noticing and siezing opportunities to be socially or otherwise courageous.

Being Specific. Holy crap! Once you start noticing this, it is everywhere. Still not super good at automatically being specific, but I'm quite good at noticing unspecific things now.

Had some unfortunate emotional instability over last few days. Was very depressed and useless yesterday. I don't like being depressed. Also some useless rage. Didn't break anything or blow up, but can't do much else when mad. (EDIT: realizing how poor internet text is for conveying emotion. I feel like having a big lesswrong internet hug, but it is hard to communicate this.)

Now if only I can make myself actually work...

I have overcome my crippling social fear/anxiety enough for having precommitted to an intense social experience: a 5-day tree-climbing-camp. I want to use the time to experiment with me feeling comfortable being around strangers, making friends and generally earning lots of positive social reinforcements and as less as possible negative reinforcements.

I just got a new job and my boss is really terrible at Being Specific. At first I wasn't worried because I figured I would just force him to Be Specific by asking precise questions. I felt like my questions were awesome but I still wasn't getting the information I needed out of him and I couldn't figure out why.

I was super excited when I figured it out: he was interrupting me in the middle of my questions and giving an answer to a question he was imagining. I tried talking through him and finishing my question when he interrupted me and it worked. He answered my actual question. So I now have a tactic to elicit the information I need from him. I've only tried it the once so far and I'm curious to see if this will work in the future or if he'll catch on and let me finish my questions.

I have recently been trying to mediate my motivation and emotional states using film and television.

I've been watching hardly any TV at all over the past 18 months. I have other things to do, most of what's available isn't very appealing, and anything that does appeal would involve a significant future investment of my time. I do wonder if I'm missing a trick, though.

Fairly recently I noticed that when I do watch television, it has a significant impact on my motivation to do things. If I watch something filled with fit athletic bodies doing fit athletic things, I feel considerably more motivated to go outside and get some exercise. If I watch something filled with smart people doing smart things, I feel more motivated to sit down and study. At the moment, exercise and study are my two biggest akrasia-blocked activities, so significant gains in this regard would be extremely useful.

There are, unfortunately, no television shows to my knowledge about chronicling one's motivation and leisure activities in a quantifiably tractable manner, so I'm not really motivated to do that. Any assessments I make will be purely anecdotal in nature.

I'm going down the path of gwern and ordered some Modafinil and empty capsules to do blind tests on myself -- those should arrive this week. I'll probably try the same with other popular nootropics afterwards.

Also, this week I'm going to spend 6+ hours learning to draw, working off Raemon's drawing posts and Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain. If it's true that I can become a passable sketch artist in the span of a few dozen hours of practice, I have no excuse not to -- that would be a skill that would be really fun and also somewhat useful to me as a programmer. So I'm working on that during the evenings this week.

Long post--my apologies.

Background:

I have been trying for a while now to follow the paleo (or caveman) diet. I think the argument for the diet seems legitimate enough (or, I should say, I am not smart enough in those areas to disprove their argument). Additionally, there seems to be a lot of anecdotal evidence in favor of the diet, especially from people with auto-immune diseases, which I have. So for those two reasons, I have been trying to make it a permanent lifestyle change; what ends up happening is that I struggle through one week and rebound into massive cheating.

The Problem:

The problem that I have run in to—which I think is fairly common—is the diet is extremely difficult to maintain if you work a lot or don’t want to devote the majority of your free time to cooking. It takes a LOT of time to cook all your food from scratch. The paleo diet is: no grains, no dairy, no legumes, no sugar, nothing artificially made or with artificial ingredients, no potatoes, no peanuts, and very low added salt.

You are mostly supposed to eat meat, fish, poultry, eggs, and vegetables, with occasional nuts, fruits, and starchy vegetables like yams. These foods spoil easily, and require a decent amount of time to prepare, especially when you compare them with the typical American diet. So the problems I have run into are (1) it is a difficult lifestyle to maintain due to the time it takes to cook everything (2) the foods perish easily and I am stuck going to the supermarket 2+ times a week.

My Solution:

Change1: Optimize my cooking regimen by standardizing it. I now eat the exact same thing for breakfast and the exact same thing for lunch and dinner every day. At some point I expect this to get boring, but so far the results have been good.

This has the result of: -Food preparation time is shortened. I am no longer trying out new foods or recipes, which is a time waster.
-I purposely eat the same thing for lunch and dinner, thus I only have to cook one meal instead of two. -I cook said lunch and dinner for the next day while I am eating my dinner. -I purposely selected foods which do not require much attention to make, thus I can eat my dinner while I cook the next days food. I have been eating frozen organic stir fry vegetables and chicken cooked in coconut oil. I supplement it with a salad which takes about 1 minute to make if you buy your veggies cut up.

Change 2: After asking a clerk, I found out that all grocery stores (or at least the ones in Hawaii) get a resupply of foods on Tuesdays. So if you buy your foods on Sunday, like I was doing previously, you are getting vegetables and meat which are 5 days older than if you buy foods on Tuesdays. I have started grocery shopping on Tuesdays, which I expect to limit my grocery shopping trips to one time per week.

Change 3: Since food preparation is a time suck, I wash all the fruits and vegetables immediately upon returning from the store. I have not timed it, but it does appear that washing all the produce in one batch is faster than washing it in 7-21 separate batches. I also started packaging snacks in baggies directly after washing them, so I don’t have to spend time each night making snacks for work.

At this point (day 3 of strict diet) no health changes have occurred. Advocates say the health changes take 2-4 weeks to be noticeable.

A couple of months ago I tried a modafinil tablet when I had to do one of the many assignments I have for my current course (studying to be a high school maths/science/IT teacher). I have developed huge, unbearable ugh fields with the assignments for this course because they require me to write lots and lots of bullshit, which I am quite good at but despise doing.

Anyway, at the advice of another LW member I made a to-do list before I took the modafinil, and I found that I powered through the assignment without even feeling like a break. It took longer than expected (as usual) and I didn't end up accomplishing anything else on the list, but I found I felt really positive and switched-on the whole time. I didn't use modafinil again for a while.

So the other day, after a friend cajoled me for not experimenting again, I tried it out once more for a different context - this time playing a board game (Small World) at a friend's place. I was curious to see if it would have any effects in a social context. Unfortunately this time I didn't really notice any change at all, and afterwards I asked a couple of friends if I'd seemed different in any way and they hadn't noticed anything either.

So I'm now thinking about trying some testing. I've debated buying a capsuling machine and making some placebo capsules but it seems like grinding and capsuling would be a lot of effort; someone suggested I could just just encase the pills in peanut butter or nutella or similar and swallow them that way. I have two housemates who could easily help me set up a double blind test.

Any advice?

I downloaded a strict pomodoro on my computer, and have used it for work. It blocks a list of sites, while it is running for the 25 minute work time. The downside is that it doesn't automatically go back into work mode after the 5 minute break, so I often end up stretching them a bit.

We started using the mini-camp material at our local LW meetups, starting with the class on discovering aversions, and finding ways to combat them. Everyone REALLY enjoyed it, and definitely wants to do more. This was awesome for me, since I really wanted activities to do with the meetup group that wasn't gaming or discussions.

I've got my social pressure work partner starting in a relatively regular schedule, but that can definitely still use work.

I've failed at getting my sleep schedule normalized, and in fact it has been amazingly bad this week. I will now utilize social pressure by stating here that when I write in next week's Rationality Diary that I will have made significant improvement in this area, and will have gone to bed later than 1:30 am only one day in the following week. If I fail to do so, you can downvote me, and send stern and disapproving glares in my general direction. (I will hopefully remember to mention that you should downvote me in my comment, but if not, feel free to bring it up.)

I moved my daily vitamins to somewhere where I cannot fail to notice them in the morning, an embarrassingly simple tweak that has increased my adherence from 50% to 100%.

I've also added vitamin B1 to my daily routine following Kevin's advice, but have no idea whether it's working (the purported benefit is increased mental clarity). A N of 1 trial seems called for.

I've arranged for some modafinil to come my way, and am planning to do a simple experiment on its effectiveness (heeding this comment).

I've been putting off using pomodoro at work, despite being reasonably convinced that it would work (and having some urgent stuff due that affects me directly). I'm not sure why, so I think a thought experiment might be called for.

I've been trying to be more open and appreciative, and several friends have remarked that I've been particularly fun lately.

Continuing from here, I've found the self-modification stuff Critch talked about to be an absolutely amazing tool. I now find myself wanting to take every spare few minutes to work on my dissertation, which is quite novel. It felt just like tedium before. I've also found my applications of CBT to be fantastically more effective because (a) rewarding myself for noticing distorted thoughts makes it a lot easier to notice them later (especially with TDT supplementation) and (b) rewarding small improvements from a rational response had made the rational responses vastly better at causing emotional improvement. I've also been rewarding self-change to make that more automatic, though I have as yet to determine if that's too meta to actually work.

Today wasn't something new, but was an example of a skill I've been working on developing: Use the Try Harder, Luke. I had told myself I would work on research for at least two hours today, and by the first 30 minutes discovered a significant problem with the method I was investigating. Typically I would shunt it to subconscious and do something else for a few hours, but because I was on the clock (using pomodairo to track time and regulate breaks) I took a drink, looked at the problem for a few minutes, and then tried another approach. (That one didn't work either, but figuring out why it didn't work gave me some valuable insight into the problem.) I ended up putting about four and half hours of concentrated work in, which is a lot for a day I had originally allocated as a Diablo III vacation :P

[Edit] On rereading this post, I wonder if this was a missed opportunity to try out some emotional engineering. I don't think I checked whether or not I was seeking, and if I wasn't it might have been worthwhile to try and cultivate that emotion- but that might have been procrastination rather than trying harder. I think I'll make a note to think about that during break periods.

I really tried hard at being friendly and positive, and may have gotten a job out of doing so! (I will know in a week.)

I failed to start teaching myself Italian. I meant to start Sunday, but end up reading junk instead. I also planned on painting, and never got around to doing that, either. I'm mainly posting that here to make me do it when I wake up tomorrow. It's not the actual doing of the work that I dread, it's figuring out where to start.

I'm working to be able to do a full lotus meditation pose. I have some weird stuff with the way my hips work and am generally inflexible, so this is not trivial for me. There is a certain stretch that several sources online say will allow me to do it if I stick to doing it for 5-6 weeks every day. The problem is that holding the pose isn't easy, and I've tried in the past and been unable to reliably stick to it. I've been using personal TDT in order to get myself to do it every day, even when tired and ready to go to sleep. So far this has worked wonderfully. I'm also realizing that keeping a streak has its own very strong motivational value for some reason. I'm not sure whether this is particular to me or not. Additionally, I've been trying to use as much positive reinforcement as possible. I don't think that has been quite as successful though. I'm going to focus on finding ways to remedy this.

Meta: Do we need one of these every week? Even the Open Thread doesn't recur that frequently.

I've been getting up at 7:30 every day and exercising since I got back, which is essentially unheard of for me. It's very exciting.

Unfortunately, there is a lot non-rationality related stuff that needs to be done in the next three weeks, so I've had very little time to synthesize and go through the rest of it. I'm hoping that in a month when things are less crazy I'll be able to commit half an hour a day as was suggested, but am worried that by then momentum will be lost. Any suggestions?

After years of planning to practice our Spanish and barely doing so, my husband and I are in Ecuador for a few weeks taking Spanish lessons. One-on-one conversation is way better than books or group classes, and the fact that we pay for regularly scheduled sessions means we actually spend 4 hours a day at it. Other than the money spent, it's entirely painless (unlike practicing at home, which felt like a chore).

The going to another country part isn't really necessary. I'm sure there are similar services at home, but this way we combine vacation with gaining a useful skill.