Monthly Bragging Thread January 2016

His response to your comment: "I don't know why I chose to donate, I just had an urge to." I then asked him why Against Malaria Foundation? "Because it was top rated on Givewell." I then asked him why Givewell. "Because you (James) said it was a good charity site."

Sure!

Basically, they have you fill out an extensive application, where you get to list everything from your interests to your preferred traits in the kid they match you with. They ask for a commitment of one year, meeting a few hours at a time, a few times a month. I preferred a kid older than nine.

They matched me with a thirteen-year-old girl, who had many of the same mental health problems I'd struggled with. We also both enjoyed crafts and anime. I met her, we clicked pretty well, and then we were all interviewed separately about whether we wanted to go through with the match. Me, her parents, and her.

There has been one problem, where her mom treated me more like a babysitter than her kid's friend. I asked BBBS for mediation, because it was making me and my Little Sister uncomfortable. They handled it beautifully and I haven't had problems since.

That was a "let's see if anyone reads this far" joke-listing :-p.

An error of measurement is always a possibility. Unfortunately, I can't travel back in time to measure my weight from before two weeks again.

To add more context, at this moment I am quite overweight (most that I've been at least in the recent ten years), because in recent months I had a lot of stress and almost no opportunity to exercise, plus an access to a lot of great food (I am really bad at resisting temptation: my only strategy for not overeating is "don't buy it"). Generally, my behavior depends a lot on my environment, and most of my self-control and self-improvement is based on strategically modifying my environment; and I had almost zero control over my environment until recently when we moved to a new flat. Now every morning I do sit-ups and five different exercises with a 10-kg dumbbell, most of them until I am too tired to continue. And half of the days my diet consisted of some joylent (about 10-20% of daily intake) and vegetable soup, and maybe a slice of bread.

I attribute this change to the "beginner's luck", which means that if you haven't been doing anything and you suddenly start working hard, you usually get some huge progress at the beginning and then it slows down. I expect that doing exactly the same thing for the next two weeks will have much smaller effects. (Unfortunately, this also makes the "error in measurement" hypothesis unfalsifiable.)

Anyway, I congratulate myself for the willpower to exercise regularly, regardless of whether the outcomes were measured correctly. That was an important hypothesis I needed to test experimentally -- whether my behavior will really change in the new environment, or whether I am just rationalizing my laziness.

Thanks!

I previously explored some of the ideas I write about on LessWrong, and on more than one occasion I was corrected here on dumb mistakes in math and reasoning that I made. I was hoping that the same would be true for Putanumonit, I even promise a small gift to anyone correcting a major mistake I made. That hasn't really happened yet. Either I'm becoming more careful in my writing, or I was spoiled by the high level of the commenters on LW :)