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If UBI were being offered across the US, I would expect them to rise by the amount of UBI.
For subsidies per purchase, maybe.
But not for subsidies per human.
Imagine some prefab tiny house off the grid somewhere in a food desert. I don't think its rent will go up by the UBI amount.
Also, there are houses that house two people (or more!). If there's limited supply in comparison to the demand, I'd expect that the costs of those might go up by more than UBI (because there's two people's worth of UBI as extra budget available).
So I find it interesting that God, in the story above, rejected this throne. Unlike us, he had the option of full control, and a perfectly aligned world. But he chose something different. He left pure self behind, and chose instead to create Otherness—and with it, the possibility (and reality) of evil, sin, rebellion, and all the rest.
I see reasoning or rationalizing from fictional evidence here. You're looking at a story created by some human to serve some purpose (my guess: some vague gesturing at religion & answering the question of why-can-there-be-evil-in-this-world-if-god-is-perfectly-good), and you're surprised that something in that story happens the way it does.
The story doesn't work for the purpose that I think it's made for if that choice wasn't made. You can't say "and that perfect world, is the one we're living in" because then you'll be met with so many counter points (why war, why disease, why death...) that you'll drown in them.
There are examples you can use, but this is not one of them. This one is fake. Manufactured by humans. For instance, this "these ancient forests could hold the secret to the next vaccine" argument? Yeah, it doesn't fit here, but it has the right idea, maybe? The idea that, if you don't exert control over something and leave it to its own devices, then it might produce something that you yourself wouldn't think of / that you couldn't make yourself? Or the part where you just give an artist a patronage and no direction, because you think they'll do better without your input.
Maybe my suggestion is too blue. But I do think that using the "god allowed freedom and as such we got humans and that's an example of why you might not want to control everything" is assigning too much agency to this god character.
That's fair, and I have a workaround now with nitter.
For now, URL rewriting seems to do the trick: replacing twitter.com with nitter.net allows me to view. It's slow, though, and I have no idea whether nitter is safe or whether it will be able to handle the traffic.
Twitter no longer allows accessing tweets without logging in. If it's not too much effort, can you include the text of a tweet (like you've already done for some)? Twitter links are now effectively dead for me.
Duplicate IDs are hard to come by. However, you might be able to have multiple different forms of ID (such as an ID card and a passport).
Shoes might be the one item that you can't do this for, but maybe I'm wrong.
Pre-covid, I bought a pair of shoes. But I am averse to throwing items away before they are properly "dead" (or until they really require effort), so shoes that still have some soles on them (and fit comfortably rather than the tight fit of new shoes) would still be used.
Because there were lockdowns and the like, I wore my shoes a lot less. I went out a lot less. My grocery store is rather close to my house. The new shoes spent two years in their shoe box.
Lockdowns were lifted and I started spending more time outdoors again. Within a month, my old shoes were deemed "properly dead", and I switched to the new shoes. But within two weeks, the leather on them started flaking off.
Maybe I bought poor quality shoes. Or maybe I didn't store my new shoes well. But I've got the feeling that shoes don't keep as well as most other clothing does, and that you won't get the full lifetime out of an old-new pair.
So the fact that Alice can't be viewed as having any coherent relative value for apples and oranges, corresponds to her ending up with qualitatively less of some category of fruit (without any corresponding gains elsewhere).
It's possible that the fruit has negative value, and that the behavior aims to reduce the total negative value.
The situations:
8a1o, 0a3o, 2a2o, 5a1o.
If apples are minus two and oranges are minus seven then all trades are rational. 8a1o is valued at -23, 0a3o is valued at -21, 2a2o is valued at -18, 5a1o is valued at -17.
Japanese has formality as verb conjugations - http://www.japaneseverbconjugator.com/VerbDetails.asp?txtVerb=%E8%A1%8C%E3%81%8F - iku 行く as "will go (plain)" and ikimasu 行きます as "will go (polite)". Translators try to preserve this, but I personally find translating that to be kinda hard. "I'll go" and "I will go" is the best I can do off the top of my head (watashi wa iku/watashi wa ikimasu - and as a more realistic example, kaisha ni iku/kaisha ni ikimasu - I'll go to the office/I will go to the office - "watashi/I" being left out because Japanese is contextual).
Ethereum is working on proof of stake, which boils down to "I believe that this future is what really happened, and to guarantee so, here's $1000 that you may destroy if it's not true."
https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/Proof-of-Stake-FAQ
Key quote for me:
"in PoW, we are working directly with the laws of physics. In PoS, we are able to design the protocol in such a way that it has the precise properties that we want - in short, we can optimize the laws of physics in our favor. The "hidden trapdoor" that gives us (3) is the change in the security model, specifically the introduction of weak subjectivity."
Hmm, true.
I'm not sure you understood my other point, though - using the statistics for the ssc survey might contain a bias because see reasons above.
One piece of obvious advice I've heard a lot is that you should exercise more.
I have a lot of ... probably weak ... counterarguments to this. They seem to be rationalizations; e.g. "I don't want to do this because ...".
For example, I'll list a few.
- Why should I exercise if I'm already at a good weight?
- Why should I exercise if my daily life (programming) does not require significant physical skill?
- Why should I exercise if I already go on a short (15 min) daily walk - is more really needed?
- I don't want to feel tired, so exercising doesn't feel rewarding to me at all
- Exercising takes up time, I'd rather not spend this time exercising
- If you live a longer life because of exercising, how do you know you're not running a red queen's race (you have to stay fit lest you get a heart attack 6 months later because it's old and you die anyway)
Rather than looking for cutting edge ideas to be more productive, I'm rather looking for a cutting edge idea as to why obvious advice would work / be given.
Possibly I should make a reddit account and post on changemyview or something. I just don't see why I should exercise at the moment given that I have the weight I want and the fitness to do what I need to do and don't have any health issues related to fitness (dental issues, but that's a separate point and due to a filling that seems have been placed improperly).
Then again, I sometimes feel as if I'm one-eyed, saying "I understand how having two eyes would be better, but is it really necessary? Operating is hard, it costs money, it takes time, I'd have to go to the hospital, it'd be a huge thing, and I can already see right now, so I don't see why you'd want two eyes. Yeah, okay, the redundancy would be nice, that you're not blinded if your one eye gets dirty or develops issues, but is all the hassle really worth a second eye?" And I'd feel that the answer that would convince me is actually seeing out of two eyes and realizing that hey, you can sort of see in 3D now and estimate distance and you get depth perception and a wider field of vision and it's easier to read or skim text and blah blah blah blah - but you wouldn't know that, because you only have one eye.
What's the two-eyed benefit of exercising?
I stopped commenting on slatestarcodex because they disabled anonymous accounts and I didn't feel like signing up because the comments weren't that important for me anyway, plus there's enough comments down there already that there's too much noise to communicate anything.
And the second options feels like: "omg, we can't take any criticism; we have become a cult just like some people have always accused us!".
You mean "the second option is disabled". which would leave upvote or ignore.
Does it "not happen" or does it "unhappen" or does it "get fixed"?
Maybe your utility system works, but I don't feel like it matches our world.
Plus, what does the "negation" of an event even mean? If someone that I care about dies, I feel sad. If they then come back, I don't feel not-sad, rather I'd be pretty disturbed (and of course happy) because what the hell just happened.
That is to say, if you stab me, but then use a magic wand to make it go away, I don't go back to normal, I become really scared of you instead.
You could say that "negating" an event turns it into "it never happened". But then I don't know what it means or how you could steer actions with it. You can't "negate" events that already happened, so, best you can do with the model is "yeah, I guess we shouldn't have done that"?
How about no, because I prefer my stability and I don't want to track random bets on stuff I don't care about?
Apply marginal utility and a 50/50 coin with the opportunity to bet a dollar, and you've got 50% chance to, say, gain 9.9998 points and 50% chance to lose 10 points. Why bother playing?
The only reasons to play are is if an option is discounted (4x payout for heads and 1.5x payout on tails on a fair coin), if you don't care about the winnings but about playing the game itself, or if there's a threshold to reach (e.g. if I had 200 dollars then I could do payoff something else which would avoid the deferred interest from coming into play, saving me 1000 dollars, so I would take a 60% chance to lose 100 dollars because those extra 100 dollars are worth not 100 but 1000 to me).
Plus there's always epsilon - "the coin falls on its side" or other variations.
I don't know if I'm neutral (no, because I have an account here for a while now), but I wouldn't have the same confidence to swing that bet out of there like you do. The post in and of itself is not convincing enough for me to say that your idea won't work, but it certainly makes me go "hmm, well, he might have a point there".
Specifically:
- "Normal" people don't need to explicitly write out all the rules for their housing with regards to social rules.
- But here there's a large list of rules and activitities and all that with the goal of getting group housing to work properly.
- Also, here's some examples of the group of people that you want to source your participants from having low social skills.
- By the way, if you set up a ton of rules then it usually won't work.
- Thus, there's a pretty big chance that the rules will not work out and that the social skills of the participants will be too low to have the group housing work.
I am not convinced that this is the truth.
However, if I read in a year from now that this is what happened, I would not be surprised.
Basically what I'm saying is I can see 1 or 2 people leaving due to drama despite the rules if you try this, with a chance greater than, I dunno, 10%?
I take methylphenidate but that's because I have ADD.
Can you un-metaphor this for me? I don't get what you're talking about.
I'm inclined to believe this because it fits with pretty much all the scenarios I have seen it used.
I am not sure I see or understand the issue that playing with your food is dangerous or anything. Maybe if you start catapulting it or juggling it, but sorting or stacking or making shapes doesn't seem dangerous to me.
I'm also not convinced that people will spit in my food if I play with it -
Hang on, if I write it down like that it just doesn't make any sense at all; First I receive my food and then I play with it, how are they gonna spit in it? Do they watch me and then spit in my desert? Or do they just start spitting in everyone's food (why?! It's not payback if you do it to everyone) pre-emptively?
I can see another version of your first point: Playing with food is for people who are preparing food only, so if you want to play with your food, come help with preparation next time.
Except if I started to make shapes and sorting the alphabet soup spagetti I'd be ladled out of the kitchen for sure.
This seems to make sense.
What's Chesterton's Fence for "Don't play with your food"?
I did some thinking and googling and found that...
- The food might get cold
- The food might go places it shouldn't go, making things dirty (or you might get dirty hands by playing with your food and then things get dirty that way)
- It's disrespectful to the chef (table manners)
- It's annoying to the other people who are eating so please just stop
- Touching the food might not be very hygienic
What reasons am I missing? If you're eating food that doesn't go cold on your own, is playing with your food bad?
Paper.... cups?
The important parts, for me:
Research subjects who believe in ego depletion (that willpower is a limited resource) show diminishing self-control over the course of an experiment, while people who don’t believe in ego depletion are steady throughout. What’s more, when subjects are manipulated into believing in ego depletion through subtly biased questionnaires at the outset of a study, their performance suffers as well.
Seeing willpower as a muscle-like force does seem to match up with some limited examples, such as resisting cravings, and the analogy is reinforced by social expectations stretching back to Victorian moralizing. But these ideas also have a pernicious effect, distracting us from more accurate ways of understanding human psychology and even detracting from our efforts toward meaningful self-control. The best way forward may be to let go of “willpower” altogether.
--
Okay so I'm halfway through the article, right, and I get the feeling that this author has a point. Maybe "Willpower" as a term is too broad.
But then I think about Akrasia and how adjusting your situation so that you do not need to expend willpower to take actions which help advance long term goals is helpful for discussing things. And these are... seemlingly in conflict, but both true.
... So is this community using the same definition of willpower as the author?
The author describes his version of willpower as "finite and exhaustible", as something books say you can increase, and the modern definition of willpower, "the capacity for immediate self-control".
I think that adjusting a situation so that you don't need to restrain yourself on a daily basis is a good strategy. One of the reasons for that is that restraining yourself uses resources. The author seems to say that there is no such resource to consume, there is no willpower. Or, more specifically, if you believe that there is such a resource, then there is, and if you don't believe that there is such a resource, then there isn't.
... Then the author concludes that since willpower can only hold you back, humanity as a species should let go of the whole idea. Sure, we'll lose a term to describe this ... "thing", but the advantages will be all the greater.
I'm left confused, though.
Say you erase the idea of willpower from the general population. People still lapse in self-control, but muuuuch less than they do right now. How would you go about explaining your friend (who is having more trouble with self-control than others) that, you know, maybe if he did his groceries shopping earlier in the day, he wouldn't be so hungry during the groceries shopping and thus would be making less impulse buys? Without the concept of willpower, lest you unleash that demon on civilization.
(That's a poor argument though, because I'm saying "but wait, even if everyone is better off, what about this one guy")
Maybe a stronger version; how do you explain to people that forcing everything is bad? That you shouldn't put yourself through life in a way where you have to fight yourself every step of the way?
I think my POV on this is "if what you're saying is true, then yes, we should scrap it. Before we do that, though, I have this one thing I'm worried about..."
Are we talking about getting friends to help you for pizza or about a professional moving service? $20 seems cheap for movers but seems to be about the price for a couple pizzas.
You can use the water and soap you used to clean the plate for flushing out the first layer of crap out of the pan. Put the pan into the sink, then wash your plate. The water will end up in the pan. Your plate will most likely not be all that greasy compared to the pan.
And their reply was....?
... I dunno. Plates are easy to wash. There's a push to get rid of plastic plates and all that because it's a waste that's not necessary if you just used regular stoneware plates...
Plus I don't know what kind of disposable dinnerware you're looking at but here in the Netherlands we mostly have these shitty flimsy plastic plates, if you were to put a hot meatball on that it just might burn a hole through the plate. If you're living on your own, how hard is it to wash a plate?
To what question are you responding? If we go by the title, you are surprised by people who pay for vetting cats?
How does a rational actor resolve the emperor's clothes?
Story link: http://www.andersen.sdu.dk/vaerk/hersholt/TheEmperorsNewClothes_e.html
Specifically, insert ourselves into every step of the process.
1) You're the emperor. Two tailors come to you saying they can make you a suit that cannot be seen by those that are stupid and/or unfit for their current position.
Answer to this, I think, is: You don't believe this magical stuff, see it for the scam that it is and tell them to bugger off.
2) You as the emperor, somehow agree to this. They take your measurements and start weaving, then start demanding all sorts of resources (cloth and silks).
Answer to this is probably: You give them this, because as the story goes, you really want fancy clothes. ... Besides, if you say no, they'll say they can't make clothes without cloth. Now what? It's not an unreasonable request. Maybe you can complain about the quantities, ask for an itemized invoice, but, eh.
3) You've sent your minister, which you trust dearly, has been at your side for years, real standup guy, and he says they're making the most beautiful clothing. You've sent another official, and he says it's absolutely magnificent. You go and visit in person, and they point at empty looms, whilst saying "see, aren't these the most beautiful clothes ever?" Your guards stay silent.
So here's one of the places where I'm interested in the answer, because this is the point of personal doubt as the emperor. You can either, as in the story, say "Oh yes, such wonderful clothes!" and internally go "oh crap am I unfit", or I think you could go "What clothes are you talking about, those are empty looms!" But the evidence you have is, there's 2 people who you don't know that are saying "the clothes exist and they have a property that if you cannot see them you are dumb and/or unfit", and there's 2 people who you really really trust that are saying "look at these fine fine clothes, they really do exist".
My answer in this case would be to station the guards in the room, leave the room with the ministers, and ask them individually "Okay, now let's be honest. Did you really see those clothes?" If any of them say no, I'd have the "tailors" executed. But if they both say yes and start expressing worry for me and all that then I don't know what to believe.
4) You're a citizen of the country. The emperor is having a parade to showcase his new clothes! They're supposedly magical clothes, which cannot be seen by those who are unfit and/or dumb. It's a bit chilly. Everyone's talking about the fancy clothes, and when the emperor comes around the corner, you can see him: He's naked, but otherwise fine. Behind him are several noblemen, pretending to hold the drape of the clothes. Your friend looks at you and says, "Look, aren't those the most fancy clothes?"
This case too, is hard for me. I mean, it depends on your standing in society for how much you stand to lose, but in a medieval society, if you're a farmhand? I'd say "but he's naked!". Farmhands aren't particularily clever (I might be misguided), but they haven't got a whole lot to lose. But if you're a craftsman, somehow who has a shop? Yeah, that'd be a big reputation hit, if the whole town thought you were unfit to make the things you make.
My question, for each case - what's the rational belief to hold? The main beliefs you can hold that I can see are "The clothes do not exist, but everyone is faking it, and it should stop", "The clothes do not exist, but everyone is faking it, and I should fake it too" and "I am unfit and/or dumb and I better fake seeing those clothes lest I lose my station".
My other question - As the emperor, you could go all science on the clothes. "I can see the clothes just fine, but why do they not cast shadows?" "These clothes are very light", in fact, when weighed, they don't weigh anything, they don't create shadows, they let heat through, they don't hold water (it seeps straight through as if the clothes weren't there)... That'd be one way to quickly gather evidence. I'd also express worry - if someone can't see the clothes, won't they see me naked?
Anyway, my other question - how would you gather extra evidence as a citizen?
Disclaimer: I have autism. I sometimes worry that despite functioning pretty well in society, some day, people will say "hey, these people have problems integrating with society sometimes! We should cure all the autisms!" and I'll be forcibly "cured" and have my personality (autism is a way of thinking, sometimes, so I think that this counts as part of someone's personality) altered against my will.
Compare with the deaf people, which is BOTH a culture and a disability. Same thing goes on here. I believe that a way should be found to prevent people from being born deaf/with autism (preferrably via curing in the womb, not via abortion, but if people want to abort because their unborn child is deaf/has autism I think they should be allowed to do that because it places a higher burden on the parents). I don't believe you should forcibly (or via social pressure) intervene in people who, for their entire lives, have been deaf/have autism in order to cure them. You should make the means available to them, but it's their decision.
So, on one hand, I agree that it would be better if people were smarter on average.
On the other hand, you're using a lot of scary labels. ... Actually, after reflecting a bit, "Stupidity is a mental illness" is the only scary label. But it is a REALLY SCARY label. As in, my overton window is probably shifted, I dunno, 2 or 3 or 4 standard deviations in your direction, compared to the average person. I know about nootropics (at the very least, that they exist). And I'm sort of familiar with this community. And I still got scared reading this.
One of the issues is is that it takes something which has previously enjoyed somewhat protected status (intelligence), and puts it on a same level of importance as ... ... I don't have an example. Weird.
I know a lot of people who are stupid in one way or another. I would hate to see "treatment" forced onto them because they're not as smart as we'd like. I get the feeling that not speaking up now means being next on the list - "when they came for X I didn't speak up because I wasn't X, when they came for Y I didn't speak up because I wasn't Y, and when they came for me there was no-one else to speak up for me".
I don't know what constitutes "stupid" for you. Is it people with, say, an IQ of 70, where their intelligence impairs them on a daily basis? Or is it people who are capable of holding down a job, but live paycheck to paycheck and vote in elections based on very questionable grounds (I don't have proper examples for you)?
I think that because there is no definition of "stupid people" provided, this becomes scary. You're targeting a population group, which was previously okay, but now they're no longer okay, and this feels like you're trying to invoke "look at these people, they need to be fixed", and maybe I'm shaping some of that feeling myself, but I don't see the underlying tone of doing good. This isn't helping others, this is helping yourself. Maybe everyone benefits. But this essay reads as something that helps just you.
In short.
Promoting research into intelligence boosting drugs: Yay
Destigmatizing stupidity into favoring intelligence: Yay
Classifying stupidity as a mental illness, forcing things like the American health system onto people who are already missing one of the success factors in life: Nay.
...
And I don't think mental illness is seen as something positive either. People with mental illnesses are dangerous, not fit for society, scary, should be kept someplace safe... I think that's the sentiment you'll get if you ask the average person (maybe they're stupid too? I don't know). Now, I don't mean to say these traits apply to people who are stupid, I mean to say that people on average think these traits apply to people with a mental illness, and that as a result, you don't want to be mentally ill, and reclassifying people who are stupid as mentally ill won't go over well. Even only because people won't actually say they can't see the emperor's clothes, lest they lose their job.
Honestly, I think if you want to go this way, you'd be better off trying to develop things that people can use for their kids. They'll buy organic foods "because it's more healthy", so they might also buy intelligence boosters for their kids so they can go to a prestige university and do great in life.
And you don't want to classify stupidity as a mental illness. You want it to be seen as a physical injury. You go to the hospital, they fix you, you're better. No shrink visits, no endless talks, no getting locked up in an internment facility.
Interesting part of the article, for me:
“Partisans with weak math skills were 25 percentage points likelier to get the answer right when it fit their ideology,” Ezra Klein explained in a profile of Kahan’s work. “Partisans with strong math skills were 45 percentage points likelier to get the answer right when it fit their ideology. The smarter the person is, the dumber politics can make them.”
Personally, I encountered this in the wild. My brother asked me "do you know what the series 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + 5 + and so on sums up to?" "Well," I said, "That sums up to infinity."
"No, it's -1/12!", he exclaims. I exclaimed that this was bullshit - there are only positive numbers in the series, there are only additions in the series, and since adding positive numbers together produces a positive number, the "negative a twelfth" result is just plain wrong.
We had a bit of an argument after that, after which he said "yes, you're right, but when you sum them up ALL AT ONCE then you get negative a twelfth". And I accepted that, because, well, summing them up all at once is a different operation than repeated addition, so then you might get some different result. I didn't study complicated maths, I don't know what happens when you wrap things with complicated functions, and I'm willing to concede that there exists some fancy way of wrapping repeated addition in a mathematical construct so that you can get a negative result.
So this post comes along, and yes. You take a fancy mathematical function and apply it over the repeated addition, just as expected.
I get the feeling that if you told Jenny all this they'd get angry at you at some point of your explanation. It feels kinda manipulative. I don't get this "manipulative" feeling from the example. The end result seems good, though.
Stackexchange (or Q&A sites in general) is also a popular hit for me, but that might just be google profiling me.
I did not read the link.
But I also think that drugging myself like that for this is not OK.
Yes, and I can probably include that in the automation. I already have a list of my own records, but updating it is a pain and as a result I tend to just head over to storage. Reducing the workload to keep the list updated should resolve some of those troubles as well.
But Jacob had not touched a child. He had contacted whom he thought was a 10-year-old girl in a chat room and made plans to meet up with her. When he arrived, he discovered he had been corresponding with an undercover police officer, and was arrested for luring a minor.
The title of the article contradicts the content. Therefore, this is crap journalism.
The task itself is annoying because everything takes too long. Because it's a game, you have to walk over to storage and you have to walk over to auction and basically when you see something for cheap in the auction, answering the question "how much of that do I have already" takes 30 seconds. Then to get back to the auction and the listing you were looking at takes probably another 15 seconds. This makes the whole process feel like bleh because, well, it's...
It's like using a slow and unresponsive website.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UtbYPITWiMg
Here's a link to a youtube video which explains how to use the auction - I don't know of its quality, but point of interest is the gold/black list of stuff and the blue grid on the right. The gold/black list is the auction interface, the blue grid is your inventory. There's another box somewhere else in that room he's standing in, that's your storage. It contains another blue-grid style inventory.
The sizes of items in the grid layout can change with updates (sometimes intended, sometimes unintended). The icons for items in the grid can change with updates (most of them unintended and thus undocumented). And lastly, I'm not sure bots are allowed. I know external information tools are allowed, like things that read game chat and filter it for you or read the game's message log to display a map of waypoints, but I don't think the actual input is allowed to be done by botting.
Because automating the clicking is pretty hard and subject to needing maintenance every time the game updates (which is about every 2 months or so)... and automating the "what do I need" part is easy and can probably be done in 2-3 hours.
Yes, I could convert it into a daily 5 minute task, or a weekly 30 minute task. This leads to some overhead, though. Most of the work is identifying how much I need of what - making 2 stacks instead of 8 just means I have to click a bit less.
... So I had an idea just now, there's the ability to get a html table of all my items - I could probably parse this with some tool, which could help me with doing the work. I'd still have to do all the clicking, but some of the stock taking could be automated like that, and this could help me with structuring and organizing the task as such that it's less uncertain.
I have this but different!
It's not dirty - it's static electricity for me. Worked at a place that had carpet, and I had to work with poorly grounded cameras. Got zapped EVERY SINGLE DARN TIME.
Now I tend to pull my sleeve over my hand before touching something.
... You could try wearing gloves (there's fingerless gloves, if you get some thin ones, they can be for comfy winter use).
You could try chaining various events - e.g. "when do your hands need to be clean?" and then everything that is "eh" dirty is okay to handle for that time. So, grab the pen, do the journaling, make some tea, do this, do that, etc etc etc, then wash your hands, then start making dinner.
You don't actually need clean hands until you start preparing food, so to say.
I am NOT going to drug myself into forming a habit. This is a ~25 euro/hour, 1 hour per week side hobby, which I could miss without any problems. ... Maybe that's the wrong counterargument but I feel it's too dangerous for the rewards involved. (I wouldn't try smoking if you gave me money because I hear from people that it's hard to quit.)
The public commitment thing is something I use myself from time to time, and I can make use of it - I will make use of it a bit more (I even used this post as a sort of public commitment) but the whole idea of a "real money game" is already pretty weird to my co-workers (They're more comfortable with the explanation "It's a casino styled like an mmo and I make money via arbitrage over the chips") so it's kind of hard to weave into the conversation. But I can talk about it with family or someone - not like I have to discuss it in detail with them, more like a casual mention. Worth trying, at least.
I think I could try this. I had thought of this solution myself, but ... I don't know why I dismissed it. Maybe because I hadn't done the proper thinking in regards to how much time there is being having to restock, so there was no period to schedule it for (so the objection was "It's unschedulable" which is no longer true).
I have tried this. I find that neither task (the watching of the series AND the work) gets done properly. I miss half the jokes or only get them half and end up half-smiling rather than laughing... and I'm constantly busy with switching contexts. Listening to music on the other hand works fine, which is what I'm doing now. The music turns the boring task into something okay-ish (I'd rather be doing a full-time fun activity like playing some game, though once I started I don't mind because I'm enjoying the music).
How do you prevent or stop the creation of an "ugh field"?
Context
There's a game I play which uses real money - Entropia Universe. In this game, I am a trader - though most of my activity is reselling resources (stackable items). I buy large stacks of various resources, and then split these up into smaller stacks which are more affordable for the regular buyer. I then list these smaller stacks on the in-game auction.
There is an app for this game. Using this app, I can see which stacks have sold and how much I have left of each item. The app also also me to place bids on auction items (such as large stacks with which I resupply my stock), and the app allows me to list stacks on auction.
The only thing I can't do in the app is split a larger stack into smaller stacks. Thus, I have to login to the game on my PC, go to my inventory, and perform the menial task of looking at what items I have and which items I need to split up. I have to do this about once every 20 days, give or take 5. I could put some effort into increasing my stockpile, increasing the time that goes between moments at which I have to login, but this is hard, since if there is a shortage, I can't stockpile all resources equally high and I have to make a tradeoff between restocking as soon I'm out of 1 resource or restocking once I'm out of multiple resources (decreasing my earnings in between due to selling less). So 20 days plusminus 5 is about the best I can do there.
I find that logging into the app is a bit of a bother, since it is boring work, but it pays reasonably well (5 minutes a day of time which I can plop down in any segment - such as during lunch break or when waiting for something). And if I don't do it, well, I can do it the next day.
But logging into the game on my PC is turning into a hassle for me. I keep postponing it, since there is no actual need to login and split stacks until I am running out of stacks to sell of a certain resource. When I do login, there is naturally lots of work to do - it can take up to 45 minutes to do all the things I have to do (take stock of inventory, make a list of stuff I need to buy, announce buy offer in trade chat, split stacks off the stuff I already have, make trades with the people who are willing to sell me the stuff I need, buy stacks off auction if nobody is willing to sell to me, make stacks out of the stuff people sold me, check if I did everything properly - then, log out of the game on the PC, login on the mobile app, and clear the notification list there so I don't double list something).
And I'm starting to notice that I find the IDEA of having to do this work more annoying than the actual work itself. The actual work itself is quite simple, there's no heavy lifting involved, just some clicking. I put on some music during that work, and it's quite pleasant. But the idea of "ugh, I have to remember to login tonight because I'm almost running out of X" frustrates me. It also doesn't help that I sometimes forget and have to make the choice to do it now (where now means stop watching the series you're watching right now, log in, do the work, log out, go to bed because it's bedtime) or postpone it until tomorrow.
TL;DR
I spend 5 minutes a day making money via a phone app. After about 2 to 4 weeks, I have to do a task which takes 45 minutes on my PC at home to enable the ability to make money via the phone app. The phone app task feels easy, but the idea of having to do the 45-minute task at home is a burden. The actual work in the 45 minute task is pretty light.
Question
How do I prevent a task which I have to do on a irregular basis in my leisure time from becoming an ugh field?
I'd like to keep doing the actual tasks - I earn about 2 to 3 euro in those 5 minutes a day. The 45 minute task itself doesn't earn me anything directly, but good performance (such as paying attention to the trade chat and spotting a deal) does improve how much I can get with the 5 minute daily work on my phone. Suggesting I drop the whole thing together IS an idea, but I feel I'm making an adequate trade of time for money with these tasks.
I also can't automate the task, mostly because modding the game is not allowed and because there's quite a bit of thinking involved which makes the whole thing non-trivial. Plus the game has to communicate with the servers before it will let you make another change (such as creating a new stack of x units and reducing another stack by x units), so even if the clicking was automated I'd still have to sit there.