Group Rationality Diary, November 16-30

I've had a longstanding desire to start a video blog. One major cause of my procrastination around doing so has been a tendency to scrap work that wasn't good enough even when I did get around to making an attempt to create a first video, as well as a spiral around "the first video" where I spent more time thinking about it the longer I didn't make one, and the more I thought about it the more it had to match an ideal picture of what a good first vlog/intro vlog for me should look like.

Noticing that, I intentionally made and uploaded a very flawed video consisting of just two sentences describing what I'm doing.

I'm looking into signing up for cryonics, as well as trying to reconcile my expressed beliefs and my actual, more nuanced beliefs about future disability prevalence. It's clear to me that I've been misrepresenting my opinions for political reasons, but I want to advocate for my actual position without losing my membership in a group that I need to be in to make my arguments heard. Realizing that this was what was going on is thanks (in part) to this site.

I had an idea for a new Holiday cached behavior for my roommate and I: the good nut pin.

The good nut pin is to be Christmas-themed and as tacky as possible. The object of the game is to give away the pin as soon as possible. It can only be given away in recognition of someone else being a 'good nut'; that is, as positive reinforcement for some good or worthwhile behavior we notice the other person doing. It is one of several ideas I came up with as I pondered the Meaning Of Christmas; Being Good starts to die out after the Naughty List proves fake, and Doing Good has potential for EA and positive externality-generating habits but is mostly about throwing money at feel-good charities.

I made the mistake of awarding the temporary placeholder pin to a friend we had over. I explained the rules of the game, but the pin never circulated back. I carried her bag and hinted at it in a horridly passive-aggressive way. I loudly pointed out my roommate's excellent contributions to the conversation. I flat out told her we were gonna need it back tonight or we wouldn't see it again until the next time she saw us.

It still left out the door with her. I insist this tradition is still better than elf-on-a-shelf, but it's obviously got its failure modes.

I went back to scheduling my life using my phone. It's basic stuff like workout or clean on this day at this time. This has been an utter failure so far. The reason I originally stopped using the schedule is because, after some initial success, I wasn't following it then either. I need to get into a habit of following it, but breaking the schedule when I've only barely started is a really bad sign.

This week in Hamland:

• switched task systems again, from gtasks to ticktick. Better integration with web, and it includes an inbox.
• explicitly made effort to be open about my insecurities with my roommate/friendboy. I took advantage of my usual weekly freewrite to write an email, and followed it up with an in-person talk.
• took small steps to talk to customers and coworkers, CoZE-style. That is, I'm counting my own discomfort as a reason to push forward, and paying attention to whether the real consequences match up to my perception of them. I wrote notes and set goals after each shift, and started improving just in time to quit and move further south. I felt undertrained to help customers, as I was just holiday setup help, tended towards hyperfocusing on tasks, and got too self-conscious about the speed/quality/accuracy of my work to reach out.

After having heard much about how great a gratitude journal is for one's life, I overcame my sense of impending hokeyness long enough to set up a Google form to journal in and an IFTTT recipe to remind me to do it.

In the interest of full disclosure, it comes to my attention that I did little if any work to figure out where the impression of hokeyness came from and whether it ought to be believed. :/

My third update on curcumin (previous: one, two): I haven't been taking it very regularly lately. This is not unusual for me; as my focus on self-improvement waxes and wanes, so does my likelihood of continuing a practice that either is productive in itself or causes me to be more productive.

Mostly, I've been too depressed to take my pills. My antidepressant pills.

The thing is, the antidepressant effect is not so powerful as to leave one into a basically neutral mood absolutely regardless of what's happening. It can help you withstand minor stress without being emotionally affected; and if you're the kind of person who slips into a bad mood suddenly and without any exterior cause, it will probably help. But if sufficiently unfortunate events happen to you -- say, your mother is in hospital with cancer, your father commits suicide, the love of your life rejects you and then kisses someone else right in front of you, all of your friends turn out to be fake, you have to survive on two dollars for the following week, and you find yourself having to drop out of college -- all at the same time -- then I'm sorry to say that curcumin ain't gonna do shit for you.

I'll be saving my current supply for a time when things go better for me and I can actually focus on the goals for which I chose to take curcumin pills in the first place. Or maybe I'll just take them on days when I don't expect much to be happening, to improve baseline mood.

--

In a similar vein, I started experimenting with melatonin. I never had any problem sleeping when tired, and only very recently I experienced a couple of episodes of insomnia, but after reading gwern's sterling recommendation of it I thought I should give it a shot.

I took it thrice so far. The first two times -- 2 pills of 1 mg melatonin each; I was surprised to see they actually worsened my problem. I got stuck into the unpleasant state of being extremely tired (from the melatonin) and still unable to sleep. I am not sure whether this was because of melatonin or in spite of it. The third time I only took 1 mg, and slept very well for a very long time -- but then again I had amassed a very large sleep debt in the previous few days, and probably would have slept well no matter what. Needless to say, the data I've gathered so far is inconclusive. I have enough pills for the following two months or so; I'll continue taking it and see whether my response improves.