Open thread, 14-20 July 2014

I just want to say that this is extremely similar to my struggles with a Master's degree. Mine is in geology, so your username continues the parallels amusingly. I'm a bit further along, with some marginal successes in efficiency. Here are some of the tactics that I have tried:

*Excercise. My diet is pretty terrible, but regular exercise to offset that has been invaluable. I used weight lifting (if I have a high-calorie diet, then I might as well put the energy to use)- the 5x5 schedule is a good way to gamify things a bit without introducing more complexity than its mindshare allows. This is probably the most useful habit that I have been able to maintain.

*Nootropics. Cautiously. 500mg Choline and about 1600mg Piracetam per day. These are cheap and extremely safe, with moderate-to-questionable benefits. Under this regimen, I have seen quantifiable improvements, including competitive game performance and concentration length. The placebo effect is a strong contender, but rationality means winning, so why not? Previously, I relied on caffeine as my performance enhancer, but the addictive downsides became distracting at the volumes I was using. I don't know much about Modafinil, however.

*Pens. This one may be very specific to me and my response to tactile stimuli, but the consequences are good enough to be worth a shot. For the prose sections of your thesis, write in pen on paper. The paper doesn't matter, but make sure to use a very comfortable pen (the Pilot G2 is my brand). This has three benefits- one, it adds a physicality to the process of writing, which helps to fight distraction with a range of physical inputs that a computer doesn't provide. (Roughly similar to the process of reading or writing in a public place with white noise and background activity, I think.) Two, it is very hard to delete everything you just wrote and start over. This increases the volume of writing your produce in any given time interval, although it will need considerable editing after the fact. Three, it means that you can write in a room without computer or internet access. Leave your phone elsewhere, and you've taken away a large majority of potential distractions. If your brain is missing a detail, it is often possible to just bracket the [thing you don't remember] and keep writing, rather than stopping to look it up and risking an infinite Wikipedia loop.

*Meditation. I tried this also, with some success- that is, I can achieve the mental state usually described as the desired goal. Detachment, hyper-awareness, etc. Philosophically, it has been extremely interesting to see the consequences of this achievement, but it didn't improve productivity any. In fact, the results may have been negative (see 'detachment'). Piercing the veil of the self is not a particularly efficient way to accumulate utils, but it does lower stress.

*Natural light patterns. Try to find a workspace with large windows and plenty of sunlight. Then, avoid turning on room lights except during 'daylight' hours. If you live in high latitudes, you may prefer to artificially extend your light periods to a full twelve hours during the winter. After the sun/'sun' goes down, dim your monitor significantly. This will regulate your sleeping schedule (and thus help build other habits). It will also keep you connected to other humans a bit better, which can stave off loneliness and increase happiness in subtle ways. And of course, this is also a good way to keep up your vitamins and so on.

*Accountability. I am much more productive when I am making regular status updates, with explicit expectations, to the people around me. My proposal was rapidly completed as soon as I began weekly meetings with my advisor, for example. But interested friends can be just as useful, as long as they're reasonably competent to understand what you have achieved, and willing to spend a few minutes at regular intervals discussing your accomplishments. This is up there with my lifting routines in terms of importance, but your mileage may vary depending on your relationship with social power structures.

To emphasize, none of these were a magic bullet that changed my overall lifestyle. There's still a very obvious pattern of procrastination, distraction, and last-minute binge work, and like you, I'm getting really nervous about how this will manifest itself in my career.

It's also the case that a master's degree is really, really hard to get, and the ability to summon an entire thesis from the ether is a part of that difficulty. Most people probably could not achieve such a degree at all; framing your struggles in terms of a deficiency relative to some loosely-defined average is unrealistic and unhelpful. This is true for your colleagues as well- each is an outlier, and the motivating factors that got them to this point are not likely to be directly comparable to your own. You are awesome enough that the bell-curve is not a useful self-assessment, so focus on tactics and not on placing yourself along a continuum.

But I'm also concerned about how this bodes for my future career.

Then get a job where you will have a boss who keeps you on track by monitoring your short-term progress. For many people college is the only time when they have neither a parent nor boss who pushes them to succeed.

Did you try lukepros Algorithm for Beating Procrastination?

From your description I take it that the expectancy of the task is moderate (you reliably gain a degree), but its value is partly low: Personally you gain a degree but the thesis itself provides little value on which you could build and which might be intrinsically important for you.

The main problems seem to be delay as is often the case with thesis work. I'd think that your experience with pomodoros should help here: You could break down the thesis into parts, espl. the prose parts.

I'm not clear about your impulsiveness. It appears that you never had to work hard and were able to follow your interests. I can relate to that as it was the same for me. It is kind of a flaw of our society to make some things too easy (not that I'd cry about it). It can hurt us in the long run though. I got out easy: I found a motivation to work hard: Family, esp. my children.

You have to make your mind up on this. I'm not even entirely clear whther procrastination is a bad thing: It's our sobconscious way of telling us that the work has no or may not have long-term potential.

Some things I tried:

Compassion meditation. It doesn't seem as cool as attention-focusing meditation, but it associates pleasant feelings with meditating. Such associations can be useful when you later need to calm yourself down while doing the attention-focusing meditation.

My problem with work is often that I try to avoid even thinking about the work. When I should be doing the work, it is difficult to focus, but when I don't have to work, I completely avoid it in my mind. The problem is, with the things I am successful at, this doesn't happen. It's the other way round: even when I'm not doing them, I keep thinking about them. And I suspect that this thinking is a critical component. So now I sometimes try to think about the work when not working. It's emotionally easier, because it is without the pressure of having to do it right now. And sometimes I have a good idea, which I can use later. Maybe a good strategy would be to go away from the work physically, for a few minutes, but stay with the work mentally. Not typing on the keyboard isn't the problem; not thinking about the project is.

Also, organizing my thoughts is easier when I keep notes on paper. It is easier to split a big problem to smaller parts, when I write them down. Especially when my mind tries to not think about the topic. I mean, if in my mind I realize this problem has a subproblem, and the subproblem has a subsubproblem... that feels like the right moment to run away from everything. However, if I write the subproblem and the subsubproblem on the paper, then I can decide to just focus on the subsubproblem, and temporarily ignore the rest. The algorithm is: "Either it's easy, and I solve it immediately, or it is difficult, and then I write down why specifically it is difficult, what needs to be solved first... and then I resursively focus on the subproblems. At some moment the subproblem is so easy there is just no excuse not to do it. (And if you have an excuse not to do the task, you don't have an excuse not to write down why specifically the task is so difficult.)"

The usual disclaimer: what works for me doesn't have to work for other people.

Huh -- I've found that pomodoros help me stay on task tremendously. I generally keep a timer tab open, and my brain seems to think "Oh, I can avoid facebook for another five minutes... let's keep working!"

Not a medical professional and so on.

Difficulty focusing and difficulty to sleep can be symptoms of underlying emotional issues like depression. In countries with universal health care a consultation with a psychologist is usually free for a number of sessions to rule out something like this. Though the symptoms are quite similar to "being tired and having a headache" w.r.t. somatical issues as they appear with nearly every syndrome.

First of course check if you do the bare minimum: Eating healthy and exercising at least two times a week. Then you should worry about underlying issues.

The life hygiene issues of exercise, sunshine, good sleep, social support are all helpful in getting stuff done.

Beyond that, don't rely exclusively on your working memory for keeping track of all of the things you need to do. You are already taxing that with learning, and offloading everything you can to external aids is helpful (todo lists, experimental journals, daily 3 page mind-dump journaling). A regular review cycle of what you have written can give you a sense of accomplishment, which can be lacking in multi-year projects with few intermediate wins. Count volume of output as a goal, and use beeminder or something similar to remind you to track it, and show you what you have accomplished (pages written, commits made, hours worked...).

Regarding the mediation, I had a professor of Eastern Philosophy speak at one of my clubs, and he led us in a meditation. When I asked him how long it took before he saw results from his meditation practice, he said about six months, so it's not maximally effective immediately. Anecdotally, I can say that I I have noticed my ability to focus during the meditation to have improved, though I haven't maintained it for six months yet.

Maybe the risk is in trying to argue for our positions more strongly than we actually feel them. More extreme positions feel higher-status... but then comes the moment when one realizes "oops, I actually don't feel this", and the pendulum swings to the opposite direction.

Sometimes we are pushed to an extreme position by people who argue for the opposite extreme position. They keep giving arguments for one side... and to argue with them, we focus on the arguments for the other side.

Of course we shouldn't underestimate the impact of peer pressure. But that's a bad reason to change opinions. On the other hand, realizing that one's position isn't truly as extreme as it seemed originally, and updating towards the true position, that is a good reason.

As a fervent anti-nationalist, I'm very curious as to what arguments and/or evidence made you change your mind.

I think your thought process is indicative of our modern age. It is hard to concept of nations in the online environment that, at least for the time being, remains borderless. Nationalism has produced 2 world wars and several smaller conflicts and given its impetus in 1648 as a way of allowing kingdoms and countries to decide their religion without outside influence I think the 21st century will see fewer borders rather than more borders. That being said a quick read of any news site would make that statement hard to believe as nations get more nationalistic. However, advances in communication, transportation, and the movement of good, services, capital, and people will make borders less and less meaningless. What is a nation? What is geographical area? What is a political border? Our economy and our way of working is reducing that meaning. 30 years ago your country was the sum total of your upbringing, language, culture, shared values, and chances in life. Movement was long and hard and fraught with difficulty. That is becoming far less in our modern age. I think we all will feel tied to where we were born and grew up because its comfortable, its homey, we know the back routes, we know the cultural rules and being tribal as humans are we generally fit into that tribe. Those are all important things. Your personal identity is never, nor has it ever been tied to a passport. It is just a little book that tells other countries where you are coming from and some information about you. It is not you, it a part of you that is on paper for movement purposes. The lesson in life that you are more often than not wrong is nothing to be afraid of or anything to cause you distress but rather you are finding the juicy part of the human existence.

Haidt calls this pushing your "hive-switch" (humans are "90% chimp, 10% bee").You can reliably increase your groupishness by simulating your in-group being under attack or by taking certain kinds of drugs.

Title and excerpt aside, this isn't really a retraction of the actual test, just of the author's overly-aggressive interpretation thereof. Basically he says that the test does have some predictive power but not enough to prove anything about who can or can't pass a programming class.

Did someone actually use an ad-hominem argument against themselves to destroy the credibility of their own paper?

Fascinating.

Will this start a new wave of "sorry, I was high when writing the paper, please don't take it seriously" retractions?

:D

There were some purely virtual meetups, but there are technical problems when connecting too many people. Like, ten or more.

You could just go ahead and announce your own virtual meetup. Create a public google document where participants can write their names, and set a limit to, say, maximum seven participants per meetup. (If someone realizes they will not be able to come, they should remove their name from the list, to allow other people to join.)

If you want, you could make it a recurring event, e.g. once in a week.

We've done this a couple of times in Melbourne. It works as a way to say hi, but not so much as a way to participate more generally.

A couple of questions about your individual situation -- just curious:

1.) What are your morning and night routines like?

2.) Do you think it's valuable to break your don't eat up by food, or just have one junk food category?

3.) Why not sleep during the day? I had previously been in a habit of napping and found it useful, and it's generally regarded as healthy. The only reason I don't nap now is because I have a standard 9-to-5 (well, more like 10-to-7) job.

4.) Why so much caffeine in the coffee and tea? It seems like this would just promote tolerance, which seems bad.

5.) What are the benefits of eating dark chocolate? Olive oil?

Looks like in a month or so, your easy-to-keep items will outstrip all others. Maybe the value should grow logarithmically over time, not linearly?

Looks like a cool system. Curious what you count as being a slip-up in your "sugar" category, since you have a day that's red for cake but green for sugar. Presumably the cake contains sugar (and probably your 10g of dark chocolate does too?) - do you just mean sugar by itself?

Seems a similar concept to HabitRPG

Are you on a gluten-free and/or starch-free diet?

I don't understand. Can you explain that more?

Idea: The concept of a great filter is a collective failure of imagination on the part of humanity, amplified by a severe lack of data.

The main flaw I can think of is that insurance is a money-loser on average - otherwise the people selling it wouldn't make any money, so they wouldn't offer it at that price. I can't immediately find average ratios for life insurance, but typical payouts for medical insurance are 80% of premiums while the figure for property insurance is more like 50%.

In other words, the expected net cost of taking out the insurance policy, if you never decide to redirect it to cryonics or loved ones, is going to be somewhere between 20% and 50% of the premiums. Is that worth it for the extra flexibility it gives you? That's something only you can decide.

I sell life insurance as a big part of my day job, and you should be aware that buying a big life insurance policy for charity is the sort of thing life insurance underwriters tend to be a touch suspicious of. It can be done, but they'll ask for things like your donation history to that charity and why you suddenly feel the need to shower hundreds of thousands of dollars upon them. Insurance applications can be turned down for financial reasons too, not just medical.

It might be worth looking into which life insurance companies are friendly to cryonics.

Presumably, it would be more efficient to donate the cost of life insurance directly to the beneficiary. People often fund cryonics with insurance because they can't afford it otherwise, but if you could pay upfront without significantly damaging your quality of life, I'd expect that to be a good idea too.

Well it still costs money, so it will be a constant drain on resources as long as you have life insurance. Which I suppose is fine if the payoff to the charity is worth it as a terminal goal, but I personally feel very weird betting on my own death. (At least in the absence of children or other dependents).

This is juicy and oh-so-obvious. The people arguing for stability and for things generally staying the same (in the US mostly for their collective benefit) are going to perceive any change as bad unless it directly benefits them. This is rational acting at work: does it or does it not benefit me? Lets remember humans care at a fundamental level three things: reproduction, eating, and life-survival (Can I make with it? Can I eat it? Will it kill me?). Therefore, if something in the environment changes that threatens those fundamental things then it can be perceived as negative. Those on the reform side have a different send of answers to those survival questions and look at those stimuli differently while also having stimuli they view as negative. Ultimately, within this dichotomy the good of "the people" is at debate. Sadly, political systems only work when all parties have at least a partial agreed upon premise. Here in the US the agreed upon premise has gone away and gridlock is the new rule. In Europe things are different post austerity and a new set of shared presumptions is being formed (How involved should countries be in the EU?) It is not often in these charged days that people are willing to stand up and make the hard and often unpopular decisions to do what is expedient for the greatest number of people rather than being beholden to interest groups. Such is politics and you are right, politics has little to do with policy and more to do with reptile mind survival of systems that benefit the people involved rather than what moves society forward or backward to a certain agreed upon ideal.

[sorry; posted on wrong comment]

The Charisma Myth by Olivia Fox Cabane is a evidence-based book that summarizes advice about dealing with social situations. I'm not sure whether it helps in the reading department but it provides practical tips that improve social ability and multiple people on LW recommended the book in the past.

When it comes to reading people in my own experience reading other people has a lot to do with being able to read yourself. Developing my own bodily awareness helped me a lot with reading other people. It gave me awareness of things like when a partner of a conversation tenses up when I say something.

Paul Ekman sells an online course for detecting microexpression to detect emotional states of other people. Paul Ekman is a serious academic psychologist but it's not 100% clear whether all his claims are true in the strong form in which he makes them. If you have money to spend doing his course seem like a good investment.

Creating an Anki deck for Ekman style detection of emotions also seems like a good project from my own perspective. I think a lot of people on LW and in general would appreciate such a deck.

All that said, don't think that you will improve social skills by sitting in front of a book. Improvement comes from actually practicing and doing exercises.

US-only so far.

SDr is involved with http://lipreading.org/ which may be of interest.

"Tower of Babylon" by Ted Chiang. It's a novelette that's part of his compilation "Stories of Your Life and Others". To quote Wikipedia, "the story follows a young miner from the town of Elam who ascends the tower of Babylon to help break through the vault of heaven. Along the way he sees many wonderous sights, uncovers mysteries of heaven and earth, and in the end finds them as inscrutable as ever."

Also the books of Karl Schroeder (Sun of Suns series, other standalones)

Rendez-vous with Rama?

The Culture series by Iain M. Banks has a lot of different examples of mega-structures, and they tend to feature somewhat prominently in his stories. The books themselves are on the hard-SF side of things, but a few of them delve closer to fantasy when they pull a Star Trek, and have an encounter with a less-developed race.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titan_(John_Varley) seems perfect

The Fountains of Paradise, by Arthur C. Clarke. (space elevator)

Entoverse, by James P. Hogan. (planet-sized computer)

The Ringworld saga, by Larry Niven. (über-massive artificial planet)

Singularity Sky, by Charles Stross. (god-like AI controlling us from the future)

Ra by Sam Hughes (http://qntm.org), kinda, though the mega-structures involved are very much in the background for much of the story: Warning: work in progress, completion date unknown; posting roughly one chapter per month.

A bit late here, but Golden Age by John C. Wright.

"This one speaks as the Power That Helps. [...] Look upon my Helping."

It's gone for me too, but I don't think it'll last. This has happened before, and I think we're looking at either an intermittent glitch on the server side or some kind of resource issue.

Personally, though, I'd be just as happy to see it stay gone. It's ugly; it takes up real estate it doesn't need to; and most importantly it's not all that useful for its apparent niche as a guide to newcomers, adding little that the header bar doesn't already have. The article lists aren't too hot either; the stuff they link to is usually years old and the aggregation function seems to be doing some kind of dumb association that usually clusters around some uninteresting keyword. I liked it better when the front page just mirrored Main, although aggregating Main and Discussion might be a better move these days.

The change is intentional. See the wiki edit (by Jackk from Trike).

We probably won't build a space elevator anyhow - though check out some other options.

It is just the current state of technology that only one usable material exists (no fact checking has been done), Given time a wide variety of eligible materials will be developed with appropriate properties. This is nothing special, just the endless advance of science in materials engineering.

Boron Nitride nanotubes are strong enough, and enough stickier that they'd probably be better than carbon nanotubes.

Maybe this is part of the great filter? No planets that have lower gravitational force are hospitable to intelligent life and all planets that are hospitable to intelligent life have higher gravitational force. We are just incredibly lucky to lie just one the boundary.

I am not suggesting that gravity causes intelligent life to evolve but that the overall characteristic of such planets is such that etc.

Warning: worthless evidence-free armchair evopsych speculation coming up:

The benefits of technology and techniques don't spread right across the whole population immediately - the primary benefit goes to the inventor and those near to them.

So, in the ancestral environment, if inventing a new kind of pointy rock to better kill dinosaurs gives you +1 fitness points, and lying around watching stone-age TV until your neighbour makes a pointy rock then stealing it gives you +2, then genes for inventing will spread until everyone has a 1/2 chance of having an inventor for a neighbour, at which point equilibrium is reached and both gene types will do equally well.

(I think what we call Bio in German is called "organic" in English.)

A couple of starting points to improve your investigation.

First, rigorous inductive reasoning, i.e. bayesian probability, includes as a special case deductive reasoning, at least in the case where deductive reasoning is conflated with "classical logic". AFAIK there have been only sparse and timid research into widening probability to fit other kinds of logic.

Second, the example you use to illustrate generalization is a case of what in logic is known as elementary embedding, and it's a pure application of deductive reasoning. Although the process that led the first mathematician to the invention of rational numbers might have very well been one of inductive reasoning.

Third, do not be tempted to think that abstraction is generally linear. It may very well be the case that the model C is generalized by model B, which is generalized by model A which is found to be a special example of C. This kind of "strange loops" (I credit Hofstadter for the invention of this term) happens all the time in category theory.
The very same four different foundations for mathematics (set theory, type theory, category theory, univalence theory) are all instances of one another (see for example the paper "From Sets to Types to Categories to Sets" by Awodey, which however was compiled before univalence was formalized).