Group rationality diary, 7/9/12

Last month I was looking for remote hospitality work in Australia. I was just about to settle for a fruit picking job, but then I found work at a remote petrol station/convenience store.

I have to the say, the job is everything Louie said it would be. I'm getting the $15.79/hr, with only $6/day living expenses. I get a bedroom to myself and I only have the share the bathroom, kitchen and living room with one other person. Internet is reliable and available all day, as long as I save the high-bandwidth stuff for night. I also have access to satellite TV, an Xbox 360, and a couple hundred dvds.

The job itself is easier than when I was working on petrol station in America. There's no odd hours; I just work 9:30 to 5:30, five days a week. My coworkers are more mature and the customers are more patient than when I was in America. Really the only hard part is trying to talk to some of the aboriginals who don't speak English.

Last week I engaged the Odysseus Protocol and lashed myself to the metaphorical mast. I deleted every videogame on my computer and blocked the IP of every website I go to for pleasure except LessWrong and Youtube. Predictably, my LessWrong time has ballooned, but even at inflated usage my overall internet use is a fraction of what it was before. I'm currently contemplating blocking LessWrong too. My productive time on the computer has quadrupled and I'm vastly more diligent with my Programming, Rosetta Stone, Creative Writing, and Anki. I'm also spending more time off the computer, it takes significantly less willpower for me to do free time activities like go to the gym or clean the house when I know that videogames/internet are not an option. Overall, great success.

Something surprising to me is how ingrained videogames and time wasting websites are to my habits and routine. I'll open up the browser to look up something on google and I'll still immediately click on my bookmarks that have been giving nothing but 404 errors for a week now. In retrospect, there was absolutely no way I could have "willpowered through it," and I can see how all those previous attempts were silly and doomed from the start.

There's a universal principle for realizing potential: things will flourish spontaneously when the conditions are right. Instead of relying on willpower, create those conditions in advance.

Please, please use “July 9” rather than “7/9”: the latter usually means ‘7 September’ on this side of the Atlantic. (While you're there, “July 9-15” would be even better.)

I'm in the military and have strict standards of appearance with regards to hair, uniform, etc. I've spent most of my life believing that spending any time at all on your appearance is a waste of time, as it has no effect on your ability to get stuff done. I've played along with Army regs because that's the rules, but I half-assed it a lot, because I really didn't see the point.

Then I realized (after thinking about it for 2,000 miles of driving) that "society expects it" is actually a really good reason for doing something. A lot of social norms seem stupid and contrived, and I still kind of resent doing stupid things just because everyone else does it, but there are benefits to not being an arrogant prick who's always fighting the standard.

Now I'm going to go spend 10 minutes preparing my uniform, and I don't feel bitter about it at all.

Also, I got tired of packing everything up and then not being able to find anything for a couple weeks. So I wrote down where I packed everything. Why did it take me an entire year to think of that?

In September 2011, I moved away from where I had been living for about eight years. I had been working on various writing projects with a close friend for almost that entire span of time. We both wanted to continue our friendship by some means, and we were mutually dissatisfied with the volume of actual writing we had produced in eight years.

We started a blog with the following rules:

• I had to post an entry Tuesdays and Thursdays. My friend had to post Mondays and Wednesdays.

• An "entry" is a piece of short fiction in practically any form.

• Nobody else is allowed to see any entry of the blog without explicit permission from both of us.

• At the start, we had a firm rule that no "negative criticism" would be allowed.

• Fail to post on your day and you accumulate a 1000 word "penalty" to be written in the future, on top of your normal writing duties.

I believe that the story of this project has been an important demonstration of instrumental rationality concepts.

I'll briefly describe our results. The highest number of entries posted in a month was 18, which was actually more than the required number of posts in that month. The lowest number of posts in a complete month (before May 2012) was 6, and then the post count for May, June and July of 2012 has been 5, 3, and 0, respectively. All told, our average was 11.1 posts per month, with a total of 111 pieces of short fiction of various forms written in this 10 month period, between the two of us.

Many of these entries were good. Some few of them qualify as the best things either of us had yet written, by some metric. For example, I completed a short story over the course of five consecutive entries - this was the longest piece of fiction I have ever completed. Some single standalone entries were themselves surprisingly powerful. Some entries were "chapters" in a book that we were writing together, and these were generally some of the most fun.

Many of the 111 entries were "churning," or, just getting something down on the page, getting some sticky idea out of our heads to a place where we could play with it, and discover whether it was worth saying anything more about. A few of the entries were baldly "fake" attempts to avoid the 1000 word punishment, and we usually had the good grace to make up for these atrocities on our own recognizance.

We agreed to the "no negative criticism" rule because we were more concerned with being motivated and establishing frequent writing as a habit, than insisting that all our writing be "good" from the start. Furthermore, when you squeeze out a piece of writing in two hours before bed for the purpose of entertaining your friend, you already know it's not very good along some dimensions, you don't need to be told what its flaws are. It's actually much more interesting to discuss what did work, what was interesting about the piece despite its flaws.

Now, I'm not ready to say that we've failed, but we are definitely in a slump, and I'll tell you why. My friend moved away from our former residence recently, and this severely disrupted his habits. He has no Internet access where he is now, for one thing. And when he stopped updating regularly, I stopped updating regularly. I did not decide to do this. I did not rationalize it, there simply "stopped being enough time" for me to fit in writing. Somehow, even on days where I surfed the internet for two hours, there wasn't enough time to write something for the blog.

I think the reason this blog worked so well as a motivational tool are reflected in the reasons why it stopped working. I needed to be able to rely on my friend reading my works, and then giving me positive feedback about the work. And I needed to know that my friend would be disappointed if I didn't post an entry on my assigned day. And I knew that I would feel guilty if my friend was keeping up his end of the project and I was dropping the ball. And I wanted to keep reading his highly entertaining stories, so I was motivated to motivate him with my own stories. And there was probably an element of friendly competition as well. When my friend stopped being able to read and post stories, I stopped wanting to post them!

This blog was a very important part of my life for almost a year. My wife could tell you how dedicated I was to the project for most of its run. It is fascinating to me how my motivation and passion disappeared almost the moment I knew that my partner wasn't going to be able to participate fully.

I have discovered a lower bound of cost and inconvenience that will cause me to shoplift. As part of a larger purchase I was trying to buy four boxes of assorted painkillers at a self-service checkout. There are limits on the number of analgesics you can purchase in a single transaction, and I went over it. I was advised to ring the last box through as a separate transaction. Rather than make a second debit card payment for a 19p box of paracetamol, I put it in my bag and walked out.

I am largely a law-abiding citizen, and have never been motivated to shoplift before. This has got me thinking about the circumstances under which I'll transgress other societal norms I'm otherwise in agreement with.

I tried adderall. It was terrible. My reaction to it was the complete opposite of what it should have been. It put me in a negative emotional state. I felt depressed and stressed, like there was something constricting my chest and throat. I felt on the verge of crying/screaming for large portions of the evening.

It made it harder to concentrate on a single task. I was trying to do reading, and I had to also be singing along with music as well (I normally work with headphones on, but singing along is NOT a norm.) or I would get antsy. I was reading something that I would normally find really interesting, but on adderall it couldn't hold my attention at all. It (and everything else) seemed boring and like an undesirable task. My motivation to do things like "take the dog outside," or "do ANYTHING" also plummeted. (Don't worry about my pup. Of course I DID take him outside. It just took more effort.)

My reaction was weird enough that I double-checked that the pill wasn't a placebo, and that my dosage was strong enough that it shouldn't be explainable by "I just happened to have a really bad day that day."

So, adderall....never again.

I recently began flossing every other day. I've also been managing to maintain my exercise program, a very un-ambitious schedule of running 2 miles twice a week; I had a long break during the spring when I was much troubled with allergies.

Last Time I wrote about completing 1 rationality checklist item a day. That... has not panned out. Some of the habits are reactionary and can't be sought out very readily, and I've also just been forgetting to do it while I'm at work and school.

Fashion update: many people have complimented me on how good I'm looking!

This last couple of weeks I've started using RememberTheMilk to manage my tasks a bit better. It's coming along. I'm probably not using it to its full potential yet but I'm actually GTD so that's a start.

I've also experimented with Pomodoro to increase productivity; the couple of times I used it it seems to work. More data required.

I recently tried and failed at maintaining the habit of flossing my teeth. Prompted by suggestions in that thread, I purchased 2 rolls of dental floss instead of 1, so that next time I finish a roll of floss, my habit doesn't get broken while I procrastinate on buying a new one. I think I'm about 3 days in flossing twice a day.

I've realized I have a conflict between my political beliefs and my hierarchy of ethics; I've long held that law, morality, and etiquette were distinct (but potentially overlapping) sets, but have just realized that my political views are "conveniently" identical to my ethical views. Which means I either need to reformulate the hierarchy or reformulate my political beliefs.

Which is messy, because that hierarchy figures into my metapolitical beliefs about what law should and should not be.

I was fed up with my insomnia, so I started taking melatonin (5mg pills about an hour before going to bed). It doesn't seem to work for me.

I started the habit of taking a walk every day after work, because I suspected that not getting any exercise was a drain on my happiness. I also started rewarding myself for noticing my posture and straightening up (and put a reminder in my cube to do so), and it seems to be working so far.

I also started doing GTD-style weekly reviews again. Only done it once so far. I've previously failed at this because other commitments came up and it became impossible for me to do it at the same time every week, as I was trying to do. So this time, I decided to treat it like an appointment with another person: somewhat negotiable in the exact timing, but still high-priority. I'm very reliable with those, so hopefully the remapping will make me more likely to do it.

Per orthonormal's suggestion I started recording every time I noticed any sort of lack of productivity-conducive activity at work. We'll see how it goes. Yesterday I made 17 notes. Also I looked up how to insert the date/time in Evernote. It's CTRL + ;. Also I did note this instance of interneting already.

I finally took my bike out for a ride.

I'm using ActiveInbox per lukeprog's suggestion. I like it a lot. I'm not sure how far back in my 15,000 emails I want to go before bulk archiving all the remaining emails, but going back over the past month I found about a dozen dangling threads I wanted to follow up on with an email or task.

Yesterday I tried to drive my remaining GMail tasks down to 0. I instead went from 13 to 10. Then up to 13 again.

Doing the ST101 stats course. I'm not sure if I like the style, but I'm learning a lot, and think it would be valuable for all lesswrongians not already familiar with stats.

We did Bayes Rule last week, including doing a python implementation.

I went and saw my dentist about something that's been bothering me for a while, but I was irrationally delaying treatment for.

I used to have lots of tabs open in my web browser. Sometimes more than a thousand. I've installed the Tab Utilities plugin for Firefox and enabled "multi-row tab bar", so that all the tabs are all visible, which covers up the browsing window if their are too many. After installing it I quickly reduced my tab count and have since been fluctuating around 100 +/- 20 tabs. I previously tried "Tree Style" tabs, which didn't fit my workflow and had some bugs (which probably just manifest for hundreds of tabs).

I'm still looking for a way to reduce and limit the volume of my document directories.