Group rationality diary, 10/29/12

post by cata · 2012-10-30T18:01:56.568Z · LW · GW · Legacy · 6 comments

Contents

6 comments

This is the public group instrumental rationality diary for the week of October 29th. It's a place to record and chat about it if you have done, or are actively doing, things like:

  • Established a useful new habit
  • Obtained new evidence that made you change your mind about some belief
  • Decided to behave in a different way in some set of situations
  • Optimized some part of a common routine or cached behavior
  • Consciously changed your emotions or affect with respect to something
  • Consciously pursued new valuable information about something that could make a big difference in your life
  • Learned something new about your beliefs, behavior, or life that surprised you
  • Tried doing any of the above and failed

Or anything else interesting which you want to share, so that other people can think about it, and perhaps be inspired to take action themselves.  Try to include enough details so that everyone can use each other's experiences to learn about what tends to work out, and what doesn't tend to work out.

Thanks to everyone who contributes!

Previous diary; archive of prior diaries.

6 comments

Comments sorted by top scores.

comment by MileyCyrus · 2012-10-31T14:26:14.602Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Saved a couple hundred dollars by not protecting myself from identity theft. Initially, I was going to go the safe route, but then I looked up identity theft risks. Turns out I only had .35% chance of having my identity stolen, and the costs would likely be under $1000.

comment by zntneo · 2012-11-05T16:08:55.990Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

So I recently found out I have ADHD inattentive type. I think that is a cause of my current unemployment. I have been trying to say about ways to compensate that are science-based but having a hard time finding good information (I am on a medication now). Any suggestions would help.

comment by Jabberslythe · 2012-11-02T19:40:13.714Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

I've started drinking a large amount of aspartame pop. From the research I have done it seems like it has doesn't any (negative) health effects. I don't normally drink enough liquid and it encourages me to do that and I normally eat and drink too many sweet things and now I tend to just do this instead. I also encourages me to take my medication and it's really cheap and fun.

Replies from: None
↑ comment by [deleted] · 2012-11-02T20:13:04.985Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

No desire to dispute the health claims, but regarding

really cheap

as far as I can tell, in most of the world diet soda is still much more expensive than water, tea, or coffee.

Replies from: Jabberslythe
↑ comment by Jabberslythe · 2012-11-02T20:40:44.799Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Yep, those are all essentially free. It's 1$ per 2 litres, so it probably works out to 20$ a month, which is a lot more, but still not much at all.

comment by Jayson_Virissimo · 2012-11-02T10:47:36.102Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
  • Optimized some part of a common routine or cached behavior

When introducing myself to a new field of study I would typically read Wikipedia and work through The Complete Idiot's Guide or listen to the lectures by The Teaching Company.

Lately, I have been purchasing those laminated study sheets (usually only 4-6 pages) from the bookstore (such as the ones made by Kaplan or SparkNotes) and transforming them into flash cards to enter into my SRS (in sentence sized chunks with close-delete of key words). Subjectively, they seem to give me about the same (or only slightly less) quality introduction to the topic as the aforementioned methods, but only cost about $4.