Group rationality diary, 9/17/12

I realized I didn't know enough about other people's points of view on elitism and decided to investigate them after my elitism thread crashed and burned.

I tamed my elitism mind kill reaction.

A couple of things recently have got me thinking about socialisation and empathy.

The first is the recent set of posts on Yvain's Blog about gender relations. Many of the posts and comments express a level of frustration with the complications of male/female social interactions which I used to share, but don't any more. It doesn't seem that complicated to me any more, but I can very clearly remember a time when it did.

The second is a semi-formal debate I recently attended, where I was one of the speakers for a motion supporting the unconditional right of pregnant women to terminate at any time up until birth. My actual beliefs on this subject are informed by elaborate arguments on personhood, the conflictive nature of moral intuitions and a smattering of politically-oriented game theory (which LWers would probably be in a better position than most to appreciate), while my fellow speaker for the motion came at it from a more nihilistic angle.

We both realised our own personal arguments for the motion would be highly unpopular with the audience, and so we had to construct a more generally appealing set of arguments. There was a time in the past where this would not have occurred to me, and I would have spent ten minutes holding forth on arcane subject matter, trying to deliver a resistant audience to a repugnant but incontrovertible conclusion.

In both cases, a previous version of myself did not understand the social ramifications of certain types of behaviour. I'm trying to decide whether this is more the result of slowly accreting many different pieces of information over time, or of a general increase in my ability to empathise with/simulate the reactions of other people.

If it's mostly the latter, I don't really need to do anything special to improve this capacity. If it's mostly the former, I'm not sure how to go about directing a search for more of them.

Recently, I wanted to spend some time with a certain lady in a bedroom... but the only available bedroom, her primary's, had doors with large glass windows in them; she remarked that she and her primary were considering trying to put up curtains across the door.

At some point thereafter, two large moving boxes were stacked up in front of the door, a blanket had been spread over them, a sitting pillow had gone on top of them, and a bed pillow had been stacked on top of that. It wasn't perfect privacy but it at least meant somebody would need an effort to see in, which in the generally libertine environment was as much as we cared about.

I realized afterward that I'd just turned into Harry in Chapter 16 of HPMOR, except that instead of asking how I could use every object in the room to kill someone, I was glancing at every single object in the room around me and reinterpreting it in terms of how I could use it to achieve my current objective of "block visibility into the room". And that apparently other people don't automatically Munchkin when confronted with real-life problems, and CFAR needs to come up with some sort of training method.

I set up Beeminder recently and it's been helping me make progress on a few things:

• Going rockclimbing once a week. I'm using this to track how much I climb every week, but me doing this can mostly be attributed to Roger and I committing to do it together on a specific day every week.
• Doing homework / studying for about 8 hours per week. I'm hoping this will eventually cause me to spend slightly more time on schoolwork than is absolutely necessary to do my homework; I'm still calibrating how much time I should aim for per week.
• Doing a weekly review every week. Doing this made me feel WAY better this week. I've set up a GTD system with an Incompletes note in Evernote (so I can update it whenever I have my phone on me), and knowing that I have a safe place to collect all of the nagging tasks I have to deal with and a way to know when I really need to deal with them has made me feel a lot more in control of things.

I've also set a habit of, when I'm deferring tasks, to just give myself one or two Big Action Items per day; this makes it a lot easier for me to focus on things. The combination of this, plus tracking my homework time and doing a weekly review, should hopefully allow me to get enough sleep every night; I've been doing quite well at this so far, with 9 hours almost every night. (It doesn't hurt that I have a particularly late schedule this semester, though, so hard to tell exactly what's causing this.)

I also tried out Fitocracy. I still generally update it whenever I do something active, but the amount of that has lessened since the school year started, and I don't really have enough free time to think impulsively, "I want some Fitocracy points, I'm going to go exercise." (I get TONS of points for rockclimbing every week, though.)

I am resuming my use of Anki; among other things, I suspect it will be a better use of my away-from-home downtime than Triple Town.

Unfortunately, the reason I stopped using Anki before was because I learned things faster than I added them- and so very quickly it would be weeks between reviews, and I would get out of the habit of reviewing, and then I would remember about it a year later.

The deck I have now (which I need to stick to for classes) is one of Laplace transforms, but I'd like more suggestions. Another one that's coming to mind is that I'm reading a lot of scientific literature now for my new research project, and it may be helpful to attach faces to all the names. There aren't enough of those to take me longer than a week, though. I also started memorizing the Periodic Table years ago, and could resume that, but that one always seemed a bit artificial / it was hard to keep caring through the Lanthanides.