Group rationality diary, 1/9/13

My current life plan, which revolved around graduating college, failed miserably, so I ditched it. I'm going to bike about a 1000 miles, then reassess why what happened happened, and what I'm going to do next.

My current thoughts are as follows; It was a mistake to go to school when I did. I went because I was scared, and didn't really know what to do with my life. I thought college was a good idea because it would buy me time to figure myself out a bit more. Sadly, this only works out if school doesn't make you depressed and apathetic about life. While I'm convinced I picked a good major, possibly even the best one I could have taken, the mistake was thinking that after a lifetime of schooling, my best move was more school. I'm still not sure what I want to do with my life, but I'm no longer concerned about failing. Been there, done that. I wish I could have learned the lesson some faster, cheaper way though.

While in college, I thought I could fix my grades by being more disciplined, by having a schedual, by cutting bad influences out of my life, and by having fun hobbies that engaged and interested me. This didn't work. What happens is I have to do something I dislike, which I do, and ends with me being depressed and apathetic about doing anything other than mindlessly browsing the internet and playing video games. As a result, I don't socialize or do an interesting hobby, and so when I do that difficult, annoying task again, I come away just a little bit more apathetic and depressed. This continues until the apathy builds up enough that instead of doing the unpleasant task, I procrastinate instead. So the task doesn't get done, I'm just as apathetic about life since procrastinating doesn't make me happy, plus I'm not happy with myself as a person. The end result is a slow, downward spiral that ends with me endlessly browsing the internet and not talking to anyone.

I thought I was depressed, and if I could just find the right drug (coffee, mild anti-depressents, modafinil, that sort of thing) I would become motivated to do things I dislike. This also failed. Chemicals may help, but cannot be the main source of happyness/motivation. In retrospect, this seems obvious.

As for the future, the way I see it my options are:

1: Getting a job, like hotel night clerk, that doesn't require much effort on my part, so I can explore my interests on the side without getting stuck in that cycle of depression, lack of motivation, procrastination, and frustration with myself. This is the most likely outcome.

2: Be paid to do what other people want me to do, and hope I learn/am able to enjoy the work. This was my original life plan. I am currently avoiding this route, at least in the short term.

3: Create my own job by doing fulfilling work and finding people willing to pay for it. This remains a distant dream. That said, I am now much more willing to make the sort of sacrifices required for this to happen.

4: Go back to college. NO. But maybe in 5 years.

My goal for this bike ride is to do what I should have done before going to college; be totally free and financially independent. Carry everything I want and need in my life on my bike. Want to spend a day biking from nowhere to nowhere? Go for it. Want to spend the day in the library? Sure. Sleep anywhere? Of course; cars and houses are for chumps caught in the rat race. No deadlines (at least till the money runs low), no expectations, no goals other than the arbitrary one of reaching a certain physical location on my bike at some date in the distant future.

I should also make some friends, as my standard reaction to stress is to isolate myself. This is often a bad idea.

I'll re-evaluate all this 1000 miles or so from now.

A new version of spaced-repetition software Anki came out a bit ago, and the Android version updated as well. It's fixed my largest complaint about the original. (I had different decks for different subjects but when I went to study, I wanted to study all of them intermingled. The new version allows hierarchical decking which lets me do just this.) It's also got a bunch of new improvements and the interface (in particular the Android app) looks much nicer. It's also got a nice way to separate information and review cards that is much more approachable than in the previous version. LaTeX and other media is also now easier to get working with the Android version (or in any situation where you have multiple clients). This is a good excuse to try it out if you haven't already. (See Gwern's introduction for an excellent overview if you haven't already.)

As such, I've started using it again after having success this past summer studying for the GRE with it but then stopping after my driving goal was met. I hope to keep this up during classes this coming semester.

So, after reading the Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, I decided that I would try out his method of developing virtues. Art of Manliness has an extended list of the virtues, but if you want to read Franklin's description, search the text for "It was about this time I conceiv'd the bold and arduous project". Basically, he kept a spreadsheet where he would tally the number of times he failed to live up to each virtue that day. In order to make the project doable and gradually scale up, he'd only focus on reducing one particular virtue each week, just noticing failings along other axis without seeking to correct them immediately.

Here's a template; here's my record, which will start tomorrow.

I considered abbreviating some of the periods for the virtues- I'm already the most temperate person I personally know, and so spending a week focusing on that seemed silly. I decided to go with it a general resistance to exceptions, and I expect that it'll still be useful as training the habit of actually recording this every day.

There is still some improvement to be made- I think I'll record the duration of my feed period and see if I can bring that down- and perhaps the primary benefit I will get from this project is not the recording of my actions, so much as the deliberate focus on "what does it mean for me to be X?"

I have a client!! Not just a one time thing that a mentor referred me, but a result of my own marketing efforts (and thus evidence that the business is sustainable).

Makes me happy because it is some evidence that I'm being rational in opening the law firm - which is very reassuring. Still, more marketing / networking is necessary. And getting good marketing habits has been a struggle.

I've started applying some LW-flavoured lessons to my long-time recreational pursuit of swing dancing.

I suspect the goal of most people in the swing dance community is simply "get better". This makes sense in context, as a large component of social status in this community is one's talent as a dancer. However, as a nebulous and ill-defined goal, and with semi-pro and professionals in the scene who will always have more time, effort and commitment towards improving, it's a recipe for perpetual status anxiety.

As a result, this year I've begun setting achievable projects and goals in my dancing, and started thinking about how I might optimise it hedonically. I may be conflating it with general new year enthusiasm, but this does seem to have given me a lot more enthusiasm for the whole thing.

Several of my old friends and I have started a YouTube channel where we document, in whatever fashion we choose, our achievement of our 2013 New Years goals. My goals are

• Win a programming contest
• Learn to cook 8 impressive vegetarian dishes
• Be able to complete 100 consecutive push ups
• Sign up for Cryonics
• Learn 5 songs on the drums
• Write a first draft of a novel
• Learn a simple magic trick
• "Figure out the stock market"
• Finish the goddamn PhD

The goals vary considerably in scope and difficulty, and this is intentional. It will be nice to be able to "knock out" some of the smaller ones to build up momentum.

The YouTube channel has been a really fun way of focusing my mind on the goals. I admit that we are only 10 days into the year and might not last. On top of this, I'm going to be writing up a Stikk-esque commitment contract for most of these goals. I became sort of ... depressed ... when I read another LWer's New Years goals paired with their own probability assessment that they would actually acheive them. I realized that if I took a similar Outside View assessment of my goals, I probably won't achieve any of them. So I resolved to not give myself a choice. I figure something like $1000 hostage to the Church of Scientology should force me to behave more strategically.

I've started using intermittent positive reinforcement to increase my motivation. In the morning I do my Anki reviews in chunks of 100. After 100 reviews, the program will stop me and display a screen. I flip a coin. If it is heads, I get a reward, if it is tails, I get nothing. My current rewards are a cup of coffee or a piece of dark chocolate (I get to choose). Do another 100 reviews, get another flip. It seems to be helping me to study more, particularly Mandarin, which I fell off of.

I'm experimenting with nicotine lozenges as a concentration aid. Will update here with my progress. I've never noticed any effect from cigarettes, but after seeing articles on Gwern and examine I thought I'd give it a try. Somewhat verrous about risks of addiction or health effects, more from a cultural negative association with cigarettes than from the reported health risks f nicotine itself.

Any advice from others who have tried this is appreciated.

I noticed that I cache a bunch of negative self-image thoughts related to things I think I'm supposed to be good at. For example, I've gotten pretty good at a sport but I don't practice a lot while I'm in school. So during the time that I didn't train, I internalized that I've gotten much worse that I used to be which made me less inclined to start training again. But then I went to practice during the holiday break, I noticed only a very manageable rustiness that was nowhere near the horrible failure I was projecting in my brain. So I'm going to try and not trust my negative self-estimates too much when they stop me from doing productive things.

I made a spreadsheet. I want to do certain things every day, or at least monitor how often and for how long I do them. A lot of times, I get these ideas and I think "oh! I ought to learn this!" but then I forget what the "this" is after a few weeks, since I'll either get distracted or find something else more interesting. The spreadsheet will track what I want to learn, and if I keep it updated, I'll never forget exactly what it is that I want to learn. So far, its been helping.

I'm trying to learn at least 1 new recipe a month so that by this time next year I will be able to create 12 passable meals. I am now on number 3.

I bought a pocket pencil and notebook in order to record things that occur to me as I don't like the workflow of taking notes on my phone. But I am not yet in the habit of pulling it out of my pocket because the fact that I have it doesn't occur to me. Going to try setting alarms and writing down random stuff when the beeper goes off until I ingrain the habit.

I've been reading, stretching, and practicing 3 times a week for 16 months and today I finally did a barbell squat with perfect form.

I am continuing to fail at figuring out optimal cardio. I obviously need a new incentive pattern.

I am trying a new commitment mechanism, vaguely modeled after the Beeminder concept. I want to keep a journal every night, but the last few times I have tried this I have failed to maintain the habit. In order to maintain it, I am offering my girlfriend $5 for any night that she reminds me to write in my journal but I don't. I think this approach offers the following advantages:

• Like Beeminder, it makes the cost of failure more salient by including a financial penalty,
• It incentivizes someone to give reminders, both through the financial incentive and by signaling that I care about maintaining the habit,
• It may create social pressure to maintain it.

I will post again when I have some results to report.

Last night I decided that since my current schedule of classes goes from noon until 10pm, I should treat all times as though they are 4 hours earlier and use this as my intuition for when to go to bed, which will allow me to do things like actually eat dinner at a reasonable time.

Then I got up this morning and realized that I have something at 10am today, and I stayed up far too late to be okay with that.

Minus one rationality point for adopting a change without thinking about it for five minutes.

I've been looking into beeminder and procrastinating about using it. The irony of this has not escaped me.

There is a class of things I don't want to do so much as have done, such as exercise; this is the sort of thing I'd like to use beeminder for. The internal fear leading to the procrastination seems to be "oh, crap, if I take step X that is likely to override my defenses against doing Y, I might actually do Y."

My brain goes to remarkable lengths to undermine me.

So what happened to this?

I posted my current conundrum on the mentoring thread (http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/929/less_wrong_mentoring_thread/89c2), but since that's a pretty old thread, I figured I'd post a shortened version here, if you don't mind...

Here's my preliminary conclusion: I've been pursuing a profession that has (from what I've been able to tell) about a 1% chance of making a living at it. These are horrible odds, but since there's nothing I'd really rather do, it's like choosing between $5 and a 1% chance of getting $500, except that even if I don't get the $500, I still get the $5 ($5 representing, in my case, a job I'm not really interested in).

Does this sound rational? :\

EDIT: In a way, it's like the "just lose hope already" thing, but hopefully I'm avoiding that pitfall since I'm going to be adjusting my goals and strategy.