Group Rationality Diary, May 1-15

Good habits:
+Not only maintained but improved upon my exercise routine. Body weight focus twice a week, cardio focus twice a week, mixed exercises at least once a week, yoga and stretching daily, stretching every half hour at work. I was already slim so no real visual rewards yet, but I certainly feel good.
+Returned to reading the sequences after a break in which my lack of formal math training made it seem pointless. Almost through the Quantum Physics and the rewards have been quite good. The concepts have reached a point where they feel intuitive, maybe not on a gut level but at least on a reflex level. I'm glad for this because it also makes them easier to change/reject/assimilate when I learn more and understand better. The concepts of Many-World and Timelessness feel less like a fire and more like wood to burn for a more lovely fire. As do all concepts that I understand on a gut level.
+Begun to meditate.
-But have not optimized my meditation habit. Still need to improve upon it. -Dropped attempting to learn piano or Spanish as well as attempting to utilize more open source software such as Linux. The reasons were many but the results are still a negative.

Bad habits:
-Still involved in a habit that is a time sink but which I have a great emotional attachment too. Am currently determining my best course and cost and benefits of trying to optimize it or cutting it.

New evidence:
This one was hard on me. I've recently had some kerfluffles regarding job opportunities. When an opportunity suddenly opened for a job in my very very isolated, very poor hometown, I did not want to take it. My family pressured me to do so. However, I realize that my decision not to take the job was ignorant. It is an opportunity for money and work that I can terminate when something better comes along. While I know that the reasons my family wants me working at the job (nearness to home, isolation from my peers) are things I want to avoid, this is no reason I cannot utilize the job to maximize my own position.

New beliefs:
I'm currently updating my beliefs about the LW community and the related sister communities. I still have the sensation of an outsider looking in, but I find myself relating to or agreeing with more of the socially strange beliefs of the community. Not because they come from the community but because, as I read about these beliefs, I find they make sense. And as long as they make sense, I have no real choice but to accept that they seem to make sense until I find reasons that show them not to make sense.

FOLLOW UP EDIT:
I imagined which world I would most need my time sink habit in. After all, my time sink habit isn't something like smoking or video gaming addiction. It isn't directly unhealthy nor does it demolish my social life. It is merely and inefficient use of time and unsatisfying in the long term. However, it does provide some, short-term emotional satisfaction, and I can imagine a world where that small benefit outweighs the price. Some circumstances demand a short-term emotional reward to accomplish long-term goals.
So, I tried to picture the world I would have to live in to justify spending time for the small emotional benefit of the habit. The world that match is the one I am now in; that is, the situations I am now living through, where the habit already seems inefficient and unsatisfying in the long-term, are BEST suited for keeping the habit. They provide the most payoff for the least price.
If this is the best world for using that particular past-time, then clearly the past-time is not worth using, as part of this world is my desire to rid myself of it. So, I did. Any change in my world now will lead either to the habit being less desired or less needed. This was the only place it could have been worth having and there is no room for it here. So there is no room for it at all.

I've been trying to study math. The problem was that I usually need the outside force of a deadline to get me to complete my studies on time instead of procrastinating indefinitely. For a while I didn't have a good solution to this problem, but recently zedzed very nicely offered to provide an artificial deadline for me. The way we're working it is as follows:

• We agreed on a textbook I would us, currently Art of Problem Solving Introduction to Algebra (I discovered that I needed to back up all the way to algebra!).
• We agreed on a tentative pace. That pace is still being refined, but currently stands at one chapter per week with 2 free late days per month. If I'm late and have no more free late days, my grade for that chapter is penalized by 20% for every 24 hours late.
• We agreed on a grading system. The system we're using is slightly convoluted, since a lot of the problems are very challenging and I didn't want to hold it against myself if I didn't manage to answer all the hardest problems. End result is that I can technically get a grade of 120+ on many chapters, though my goal is mainly to score around 100.
• I write up all my answers in LaTeX, turn it into a pdf, and email it to zedzed.
• I report my grades to the LW community by posting them on the Rationality Diary thread, and zedzed confirms them.

We only started this recently. So far my grades are as follows:

• I felt I already knew the first several chapters well, so I skimmed through them and only did the very hardest problems. I did not use the regular grading system for these chapters but rather just used a simple percentage of (correct answers / total number of questions attempted) * 100. Grade for Chapters 1-5: 94
• Chapter 6: 100 out of 109 possible
• Chapter 7: 91 out of 123 possible

Started an exercise program that I feel I'll be able to keep up. It's really simple, no more than 15 minutes a day, and you don't need anything except enough floor space to lie down in. I've been doing it for almost a month now, only missed 2 days so far.

Habits:

• Going for streaks of getting ALL my daily habits done. These streaks were broken during my trip to California, which I stubbornly refused to put attempting productivity on hold for.

VOI

• Hung around Berkeley and Bay Area to get some idea if I'd like it there. My sense from this trip was that I really, really hate cities. They're expensive and noisy. I did like the diversity, you don't really get that in Utah. Salt Lake is as diverse as it gets here, and there it's mostly homogeneous with small pockets of prideful "This subculture exists!". But I wouldn't necessarily live in the middle of the city, so that doesn't tell me anything too useful. This was last-minute and not terribly well-planned, I failed to visit the rationality grouphouses I'd most likely attempt to move in/near to. I had fun, but didn't accomplish much for my primary goal.

• Stopped following the mathematical philosophy class on coursera. I will look into the later videos of the course which seem to pertain to bayesian reasoning and epistemology for curiosity's sake, but I'm not seeing a lot of personal value in learning philosophy. I was mostly interested in it for self-signaling that I'm smart and cultured, but I really want to be usefully informed more than I want to impress academics.

Optimization/Meta:

• Planning to do some offline training of my morning routine. Right now I look at my to-do list and spend some time waffling about which morning activity to do first. Some items take more time or mental energy than others, so I subtly put off starting them.

• Put a picture of a valkyrie on the head of my info board as a reminder to find and protect the "life force" (goals, happiness, well-being) of my closest people. Tsuyoku Naritai -- I actually want it done, not just to satisfy my impulse to feel like a caring person.

Emotional responses

• Also just generally trying to train my visceral imaginings to what is likely to happen instead of what happens to be cognitively available. For example, when thinking about how to keep family safe I realized I ought to be picturing heart issues, diabetic neuropathy, worsening asthma, UTIs, and drowsy driving reaction times more frequently than dramatic spinal cancer, or getting hit off the road by a drunk driver, or stabbed to death by a random stranger. Next action is to look up actuarial tables.

Interesting data I am still digesting: I ran across this story, which summarizes the results of a study someone did to see if doctors were able to correctly interpret test results. original source. The important thing to note here is that these people are generally trained on this notion that tests have false positives and negatives and how to deal with that. The poor success of doctors to do this kind of analysis, despite being trained on it, and potentially using that skill every day, and caring about the outcome, and being in the presence of the outcome fairly often - this has raised my perception of the difficulty required to train people to learn and apply even small amounts of probability theory. Specifically, I think this provides some hint that moral or utility arguments are not going to convert the masses. I've been wondering if there's a way to trick people into developing and applying skills.

Fun project: I started working on a dinner game. I'm not entirely sure what the end form of this game will look like, but right now, it involves sticking an object in a closed box, passing the box around, and having people try to determine what is in the box without looking inside it. I tried this out with my family last night; they seemed to enjoy the idea of trying to experimentally determine properties of an unseen object and then trying to figure out what it might be. They were able to pretty precisely determine the shape of the object and two were able to guess the object correctly (though one changed position upon hearing an observation from another player). Several identified unreal properties of the object, but didn't fixate on them. Based on the success of that run, I am going to try more exotic shapes and materials in future games to see how that changes things. Ultimately, I'd like people to weigh in on propositions like, "The object is red" despite being uncertain what the object is.

I've started taking an online course on naturalism, and have been quite surprised by the quality of the discussion questions, which have illustrated to me that my thinking is not particularly precise about various unlikely metaphysical propositions. And speaking of metaphysical propositions and imprecise thinking, I am still looking for a good argument somewhere about how to set sensible priors for metaphysical propositions.