Group Rationality Diary, May 1-15

I've made a moderately bold decision that I haven't started to regret yet: I'm going to read an undergrad textbook on every subject I claim to be interested in. My main hope for this is mapping out my own ignorance. It's extremely annoying when armchair-experts talk erroneously about subjects from a position of imaginary authority, and I don't wish to be one of those people. It should produce a useful line of demarcation: if I haven't read an undergrad textbook in a subject, I'm definitely unqualified to say what that subject does and does not contain.

If nothing else, it will at least teach me what I'm genuinely interested in, and what I only claim to be interested in.

(Also, yes, I've seen Luke's best-textbooks-on-every-subject post from two years ago.)

I was accepted to CFAR's May workshop, which means I'm flying to California soon. I mentioned that I probably wasn't going to get to see much of the area, and someone asked why I wasn't staying around for a few days afterwards. I said something like, I'd rather visit with friends.

Later I realised that that's not at all the reason. As far as I can tell, the reason is that when I was buying plane tickets, I was having a tired and stressful week, the idea of finding accomodation didn't appeal, and I just didn't want to think about the issue.

I've now payed £120 to change my booking so that I do get a few days before flying back.

I recently considered leaving graduate school to get a job. I talked to a number of friends who had jobs, revamped my CV into a resume, created a linkedin profile, and learned a lot about what the job market is like in my area, and about the interview process, and about what sorts of jobs I was interested in. I also talked to people in my department about it for the first time, though it had been on my mind for a while.

I decided that the remaining time that I have (probably two years) is a worthy investment for a number of reasons; including the experience itself, the value of having a PhD, and contingent circumstances about my social life.

After that I've been incredibly productive in my program, scheduling my qualifying exam and constructing a committee and preparing material much faster and more easily than I'd been working before, and I feel a lot less self-doubt about doing school work.

After reading The Motivation Hacker, I decided I desperately needed some success spirals to build upon. I picked out four things that sounded simple enough, and planned on doing them within 48 hours of completing the book (the two hours following that period were precommitted to preparing for my interview for App Academy).

I failed miserably at all but one of those 4 tasks, and was feeling absolutely awful by the morning of the last day. I felt like I wanted to get to the point where I could truthfully say whether or not the techniques in the book work for me (and, well, I really want to stop failing at everything), so I gathered what will I had left and started planning out that day, based on the time of the interview.

By some rationalist voodoo, I rebounded so spectacularly that I'm still riding the ensuing success spiral almost a full week later. I started monitoring my happiness levels with an hourly prompt; I disconnected the internet and started coding for an hour and a half, then made a call to Radioshack (I still didn't have enough information to determine if they had the battery I needed, but this was still pretty significant for me). The interview itself fell apart on a professional level--my screen reader and computer really did not like the tools the interviewer preferred for the coding challenge, and verbal backspacing while talking through code does not make one sound all that great, but I did fine on the challenges themselves.

I'll also add that I've been applying every antiakrasia technique I could think of during the past week--this includes working outside with a braille display, monitoring diet and moving around and thinking aloud whenever there are no social costs, playing music while working. (The braille display is pretty much necessary to program with music playing!).

The weather has not been cooperative on every day, and the day that I felt the worst was the one when I was unable to work with music and braille, yet I've still kept up that coding block in the morning, and have been adding new blocks in the past couple days.

Something I noticed on the first day, thanks to a combination of The Motivation Hacker and comments I read on LW, was the point where I hit mental resistance in coding. In the past, it was typical that I could start a project and hammer out the class structure, variables, and some of the simpler methods, but when things got slightly more complicated, I hit a lot of mental resistance and could not willpower my way through it. This particular incident was a different sort of more complicated (in this case, it was basically copy-editing my notes into code, after I'd been defining lots and lots of variables), so I took the advice of mentally rewarding the fact that I noticed this happening, and realized that my brain was functioning in "super easy" mode, and I needed to get up to "kinda easy" mode (I've been using a gear-shift analogy). Explicitly pausing, noticing, and deciding to shift into a higher gear helped tremendously.

Also, I cannot stress enough how insanely little music I was listening to compared to the average productive person, simply due to the inconvenience of setting up and using a braille display with a laptop. Productivity and happiness both improve dramatically with music.

The greatest source of suffering in my life in recent times has been the anxiety of waiting. Pretty objectively stressful things have happened to me over the last ~2 years but what causes far more suffering than anything else is the anxiety of anticipating the outcome of some uncertain event, where one of the possible outcomes is negative.

Earlier this year, I was job hunting. This involved at least the following periods of anxious waiting:

• after receiving interest from a company I really liked, waiting to see if I would get an interview

• after taking the interview, waiting for the hiring decision

• after receiving the news that I would be hired, waiting for the right time to tell my current boss I'm quitting

The whole process has been a highly unpleasant roller coaster. To reiterate: the week leading up to telling my boss I'm quitting (which I just did an hour ago) was subjectively worse for me than the week my daughter barely survived an emergency c-section to be born two months premature.

I wonder if I am atypical in this regard. I do not think that I am, necessarily. The unpleasantness of an unpleasant event which is not anticipated is experienced, and then it is over. Anticipating a potentially unpleasant event, or unpleasant news, drags on and on, amplifying itself over time, draining one's mental stamina, dominating one's thoughts, depressing one's mood, and making it very difficult to concentrate on day-to-day matters.

I believe these remarks to be apropos of a rationality discussion because I've made really irrational decisions lately as a consequence of this anxiety. Specific examples:

• dragged my feet looking for a job because I didn't want to be rejected

• once I secured an interview, stopped looking for any other opportunities in order to shield myself from further anxiety about further interviews

• told nearly all my co-workers that I would be leaving before telling my boss

Besides these major ones, I'm certain there were many more minor instances of doing the stupid thing because the intelligent thing was connected to the anxiety-inducing issue. This is basically an Ugh Field, but the concept of an Ugh Field is very general - I'm specifically concerned with Ugh Fields generated by uncertain future events.

( On a related note, I noticed a peculiar human tendency. Whenever I informed someone that I would be leaving my job but hadn't yet informed my boss, they took it as an opportunity to dispense detailed advice on how to break it to him, often down to describing a rough script for me to follow. This was true whether or not the individual with whom I was sharing this information even knew my boss. My hand-waving evo psych explanation is that in the ancestral environment, when you know that two tribe members are going to have a critical conversation which affects the future of both parties, it is automatically an issue for the whole tribe. Hearing "Bob is going break some bad news to Bill" very quickly activates and brings to bear all available social circuitry, because everybody wants to make sure that you break the news correctly, presumably so that Bill doesn't take some rash tribe-dooming action in response to the news.

At a certain point in this process I started reminding my friends and acquaintances that the content of my message, i.e. "I am quitting," remains the same regardless of how I deliver it, and it is the content itself which is life-altering, so spending energy polishing the delivery of the message doesn't really accomplish much. People would agree with me completely, and then continue giving advice on what I should say as if I hadn't spoken. )

My question to LessWrong is, does anyone have generalized mental tools for dealing with the anxiety of anticipating uncertain future events? Techniques like Cog B comes to mind, but I don't see how to implement such techniques in a generalized fashion.

Also, does anyone else share this problem, or am I actually odd?

I'm trying to celebrate Rationalist Lent continuously by periodically denying myself things I think are ultimately bad or at least that are unnecessary. So far I've given up porn, shampoo, and Tumblr.

I've come to realize that I am very bad at noticing I am confused and am not sure what to do about this.

In January, I mentioned that I had decided to try to keep a journal every night. As a commitment mechanism, I offered my girlfriend $5 for each night that she reminded me to keep a journal but I failed to do so.

Results are as follows:

She has not reminded me once, resulting in $0 lost Out of 117 days since I started, I kept a journal 102 days, consciously chose not to write anything 2 days and forgot 13 days I have read very little of what I have written; while I did not explicitly mention that as a goal, I think keeping a journal would be a lot more useful to me if I did I don't feel like I've made any particular insights while writing in my journal

Overall I would say I met my stated aim but not the real goal behind it. I think my next steps are: Read through everything I've written so far; take notes Schedule a regular time to read through recent entries and see if I learn anything useful that way

Any other suggestions?

Using fungibility, in real life:

When I go to lunch from work, there are two places. One of them is closer to the work, the waiters are fast, and the cost of lunch is € 3,50. The other one is a bit further, the waiters are slow, and the cost of lunch is € 3,30. The quality of food is the same.

I prefer the former one, but some of my colleagues reminded me that I should not ignore the small difference in costs, because it accumulates during the year. Or, as a LW reader would say, when I am making a timeless decision, my costs are not just costs of one lunch, but of all lunches that I will choose by that decision.

The only problem with this argument is that not only the costs of lunch accumulate by the timeless decision. The wasted time accumulates too. Actually, deciding it from the timeless point of view, it seems to me even more important that I should choose the former restaurant.

Some numbers: Lunch in the former restaurant takes 20-30 minutes in total (walking from work to restaurant, waiting for the meal, eating, paying, walking from restaurant to work). Lunch in the latter restaurant takes 40-50 minutes (walking is longer, but mostly it is longer waiting for the meal and for paying). So we are talking about 20 minutes of time in exchange for € 0,20. Or about € 0,60 for an hour of my time spent waiting in the restaurant, which means that I come home from the work later.

Multiply it by 20 working days in a month, that means 6 hours 40 minutes in exchange for € 4. In 24 working days, the difference would be 8 hours (one full day) for € 4,80.

Seriously, would any of my colleagues accept an offer to work more than 8 hours overtime (to be fair, let's assume that the overtime is not work, they just have to sit there) in exchange for € 4,80 (let's make it cca €8 pre-tax)? Or, to fight the status quo, wouldn't any of them accept an offer to take a day off when there is nothing to do, in exchange for € 4,80 (€ 8 pre-tax) deduction from their salary? To me the answer is obvious. My colleagues seem happy to trade their time for less than 1/10 of what they make at work.

Completed the final round of coding challenges for App Academy roughly an hour ago. I noticed that, on two separate problems, my first plan was way more complicated than it needed to be, and I only caught myself just before the point when it would have required a great deal of backspacing. I can't help but wonder if this tendency goes uncaught elsewhere in my decision-making.