Group Rationality Diary, March 16-31

Are you sure you're rewarding the right thing? What if quality suffers in favor of speed?

I've had success by reframing these decisions from "crap, this is too hard (probably because I'm bad), I should give up" to "interesting, this isn't working, what's the best way for this to not work."

I've heard this called "constructive procrastination".

Nicely put.

I used to wonder why other transhumanists seemed to neglect their bodies so much. All this talk about becoming perfect, immortal machines, yet aside from nootropics and the occasional trendy diet, hardly a one put any effort into optimizing what they had; even the really simple stuff, like maintaining decent hygiene and occasionally wearing things other than T-shirts with clever references on them, often fell by the wayside.

The answer, of course, was that the transhumanist identity for most of these people grew out of their geek identity, and that physical and social fitness were seen as threatening or at least alien for male, American geeks of that era: they coded as the domain of jocks or scenesters or boring preppies. I hadn't fallen into the same trap because I'd been disillusioned with the culture for a while by then, but perhaps another solution would have been to change the precedence of those identities.

Alternately you could try looking into the Quantified Self scene; I expect that might make the instrumental nature of e.g. weightlifting more salient.

I've had similar objections in the past. What helped me overcome that was to think about it like I was "going undercover" and "behind enemy lines" to steal their secrets and techniques to use against them. I was going to get strong, yes -- but I was going to do awesome stuff with my strength, not lame stuff.

As Nornagest put, I totally had the geek mentality of "Physicality is for jocks/oppressors!!" Eventually I realized that they were winning on a lot of important levels, and I was avoiding successful methodologies because they were being used by The Enemy. This was needlessly sabotaging my own success.

Even now, the weight lifting communities tend to be extremely irrational, misogynistic, homophobic, and otherwise problematic, and for that reason I'm not totally OK with identifying as a weightlifter, since that's how most people associate it. However, there are groups of non-problematic weightlifters, and I find that identifying with that crowd is pretty cool.

When I read a foreign language, I prefer to read aloud. This helps me to understand some phrases I don't get from reading alone. This may work better for languages closely related to the native one, but it also helps getting the pronunciation right. (For languages I'm more fluent in, I read in different accents. This keeps me from getting bored)

For languages I don't know well, reading comics helps me most, because I can pick up many words from context and I don't have to look up words. Switching to comic books was perhaps the best change of learning habits I have done so far. It finally makes reading practice fun.

Generally, I first try to get the pronunciation right before trying to read texts. I listen to pronunciation samples and to radio until I can at least pronounce texts without compound words. Just from passive listening to radio you can pick up the general rhythm. Also, it works well with akrasia.

What could you do to make reading alone more pleasant, without a trade-off in productivity?

Perhaps you can buy food that requires several hours of advance preparation. Wake up, dump some beans in the slow cooker, and you won't have easily edible food until lunchtime.

I've been using a slight modification of this "autofocus" system for a bit over two months now. It's not my first try with it - I used it for a few weeks a couple of years ago but I think at the time the type of tasks / priority structure I was trying to deal with worked less well with it. Two months in, I could definitely still be in the period where any change of system works really well for a bit before ceasing to work. I do think its effectiveness has declined a little bit since the first couple of weeks. However, subjectively it seems to have stabilised; I'm certain I abandoned it earlier last time; and I don't envisage giving up on it in the near future.

It feels like my motivation to keep using it is affected substantially by my choice of a very slim notebook with blocks of different-coloured pages. "I only have to fill in four more pages of tasks and I'll be into the green section!" Pretty soon I'll be more than halfway through the notebook and motivation to fill it completely is quite strong!

I've toyed with various higher-tech methods over the years, but for to-do lists I always keep drifting back towards good old paper, for the simple reason that I find it really motivating to browse back through long-crossed-off stuff and go "Hey, look at all this that I accomplished!" I've been through couple of digital approaches that sort-of worked for this, but none of them quite did it. (One of them did last ~18 months though, which is definitely my record for use of any organisational/motivational system. Let's see if the current iteration can beat it!)