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incoherentham · 7 years

Text

Strategic Review: August & September

Every month or so I do a review of how my life is going. I’m posting these here now

Positives:

Went to the CFAR Alumni reunion. Had INSIGHTS!!! Met Rohit.

I broke my phone just before going, and so could not use internet as a crutch for the whole weekend. My vague sense of malaise around unreflective tech adoption coalesced into a "Holy crap" realization that we have startlingly few protections against bad transformative innovations. INSIGHT!!

Val and Anna some talks that provided a shared context to better talk about ontologies. I had fun, and probably induced some hypomania, turning the umbral lense in on itself to spot wizardry and the seeds of godhood. (h/t Olivia Schaefer for playing out crazy ideas with me, and lending me a tarot deck.)

Joined an every-2-weeks circling group with Lauren H. I find it difficult to connect with at times, but the facilitator (Matt Porcelli) welcomed my feedback and personal theorizing on neurodivergence-aware circling variants.

Rediscovered kava for general anti-anxiety, rather than a social lubricant. Had several productive mornings/evenings from using it.

Got to talk more freely, comfortably about some of my deep fears with partners.

Cuddles with Rohit.

Had lovely campfire & friends nights at Codornices.

Starry-eyed at opening of Less Wrong 2.0. Any complaints I could (and do) make pale next to the sweet victory of having an active, funded revival team. <3 <3 <3

Bought a bike. (h/t Kava insights and a talk with Raymond.) Used it to more easily visit Rohit.

Made it to 2 Lyon Martin appointments, acquired testosterone.

Got my California DL again, and successfuly signed up for CalFresh and Medi-Cal.

For some reason I assumed the government 'knows' that I'm a super smart privileged person who 'should have no trouble getting a skilled job but is just lazy', and would only ever do anything under the pretence of raising kids or going to college.

Lauren interviewed with a bunch of places through Triplebyte, and we will have more options to exchange money for goods and services.

Discovered Text-To-Speech to read long-winded blog posts or gutenburg project books in the background.

Negatives:

Missed some social events in early August and felt really awful about it

I don't know if testosterone. Furthermore, I need to haul my butt all the way to SanFran to get it injected on a regular basis or take 3 classes for the privilege of anxiously stabbing myself.

Wanted to write a lesswrong post, thoughts kept scattering. Then I see LW posts making a point on the same topic more thoroughly and eloquently than I ever hoped to write. Very frustrating.

I do not feel able to acquire or keep a job at the moment, and this idea twists in my head to suffocating cruelty and shame and dread.

Metamours acting awkwardly around each other, and I don't have a private space.

Went to several parties. Felt alone at them.

The story

(Larger context)

I've felt lost since high school. I latched onto the local LW meetup for friendship and hope. I pushed myself to attend CFAR and the reunions. I moved to the bay. I still feel like I'm playing a losing game, always 10 steps behind where I need to be. I have not had a full time job until recently, when I moved back to Utah on promise of one. I struggled to stay at work and on task. They restructured, I went into full breakdown and quit. Came back home, and hated myself a bit for not knowing whether any of it was looking out for my wellbeing or shooting myself in the foot by giving up.

(Previously, up to the beginning of August)

I'd been trying to pull myself together with some new regularizing structure to my goals. I tried hard not to stress too much about things I wasn't getting done, but I still cared about empiricism and precision so I relegated all my worries into making bets with myself with the Jane Street protocol. I set desperate, reaching explicit goals to learn and deal with trauma and maintain an edge. I had fun with 36 questions, I got pissed at Hufflepuffs, I studied derivatives and parallel programming. But I felt keenly unprepared: I stressed out dealing with insurance, I saw anki cards I couldn't answer anymore and felt powerful loss. Looking forward, I hoped I could move my organizational structure out of high-maintainance systems and into my head, that I could develop a sense of time passing and master the skill of spontaneous plan generation. I worried I would get stuck on fidgety details instead of core progress on my higher goals.

(August)

I pared down my Anki decks hard, trying to establish independent thinking. It didn't seem to work, and instead I lost time. I couldn't remember my focus. I broke my phone before the CFAR reunion, and I had to go without my crutch at all. In light of Val's mythic mode series, I came to the realization the modern world stole my humanity in more ways and long before I'd yielded my judgment to an Anki exobrain.

(September)

I pushed myself to leave the house more. I visited houses, got high on stories with Olivia. Rohit kept pushing to see me, and offered me his space to fall apart safely in. I unwound my own twists a bit, and tried to recreate a bit of that space in other relationships as I realized how desperately I'd needed it. Lauren and I started to create a common vocabulary to talk about interactions. Circling pushed more things to the surface as well. Lauren got their own emotional stabilizers, and I tried kava to help capitalize on their new openness. I realized kava was useful enough as an anti-anxiety agent to help me make progress on things, like getting a bike or cleaning or catching up on strategic reviews. I've been unwinding and cuddling and delighting in LW 2.0.

Who am I now?

I am the Fool. I leave behind all other worldly possessions, for they are next to nothing on my journey. I am armed with only simple tools, each of which has weight beyond its appearance, and must face the world. My pen and notebook, my earplugs, a bike, a headband, a mealsquare in my pocket.

I am the Wandering Bard. I am torn between two homes, and somewhat misplaced in either. I am taking risks with brain chemistry and can't find it in myself to care. I know only a few small tricks and beg that it be enough to pay my lodgings. I see too many stories and not enough endings.

I am the Moon. Grasping for any solid truth, clinging with knuckles white to whatever data and tools I possess.

Where am I going?

Regularly Scheduled

LW Meetup Fridays

Circling Every Other Wednesday

Optional weight lifting MWF

Snuggles, chats, and visits whenever with partners

Planned

Lauren Interviews

Community Town Hall Sun 8

Injection Class

Show up for Jury duty

Community Town Hall Sun 22

TBD

Voice practice

Breaks from Kava

Relationship talks

Plotting, Writing

Household chores

Comment & Vote on LW

#Strategic Review

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incoherentham · 7 years

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Updates - Sep 2017

I have a deck of flashcards where I put all of the factoids or bits of advice I’ve changed my mind about. Every so often, I go through the deck and write a summary of what I've changed my mind about. This is that summary.

Nonviolent Communication (NVC)

"Rude", "Waste", "Deserving", "Responsibility", and "Goodness" are best categorized as Evaluation/Judgements.

"Stress", "Calm", "Confusion", "Hurt", and "Want" are best categorized as Emotions

I don't really endorse NVC in the same way I used to. How to Talk so Kids Will Listen and Listen so Kids Will Talk gives a more succinct and accurate summation of the kind of insights that NVC should give you. (I have also heard good things about Crucial Conversations.) These cards in particular exemplify my worst takeaway from NVC: Evaluating how meticulously my monologue separates information from implication instead of opening up and keeping up a dialogue.

Power struggles, hurt feelings, and wasted time are signs that you need to do better

Vague prompt with a vague passive-aggressive answer. In truth, not everything is about you.

Replace "I have to" with "I choose to"

Abusers can use this easily by creating false dichotomies. It's genuinely useful in a narrow window of circumstance, when the speaker is self-actualizing enough to create their own options but has rigid thinking around them that they aren't communicating clearly.

Red Flag: you might have trouble making your argument specific or concrete because judgments and evaluations just don't gloss to observations

Holding this belief in my head left me feeling guilty about everything, because when I get stressed I just want bad things to stop happening and don't have the spare mental space to carefully pull this impulse into its constituent pieces. A commitment to using NVC favors those who can consider their wording at leisure over those experiencing an active harm they need stopped. I consider this a major failing of the framework.

Negatively phrased requests offer no understanding of the right thing to do, and form ironic processes instead.

I feel very confused about what I need, I mostly request an ongoing conversation to figure it out because I don't have an active recommendation to give. Aiming to create a coherent plea before asking for help makes it so much harder; I call reserving the right to say "don't, at least for now" having a safe word.

If you find yourself approaching with the objective to change people and their behavior, pause. Go back to your needs, and ask for empathy and ideas to satisfy them.

There's some value in using this as a framework to draw out why others are trying to change me or my behavior. Trying to analyze myself in this way mostly made me avoid thinking about other people's behaviors as changeable.

A flat statement after feelings have been expressed leaves it unclear to others what we want them to do. Ask after underlying needs.

Sometimes making a flat statement is the only way I can get words out. It requires almost tricking myself into believing that what I say just reads into an obscure log file that no one ever looks at. Log files don't have opinions on what the admin should do, they only report what they detected. Expecting that any particular statement will invite a diaogue about root causes can throw me into enough panic that my mouth refuses to produce anything.

(I'm gonna stop adding NVC things now, even though that's not all of them. Suffice to say it was an excellent tool to beat myself up with.)

Other communication frames

Priming is the phenomenon in which exposure to one concept makes related concepts more easily accessible

Priming studies didn't replicate

When you expose people to info that changes their attitudes in a way they don't approve of, they may consciously cancel out the unwanted influence in the moment and shift beliefs later when their guard is down. (Sleeper effect)

I am more suspicious of this claim since the backfire effect failed to replicate. I think it points to a real pattern that exists, where people will stick to their rhetorical position while an argument is going and reexamine their beliefs based on evidence presented later; I doubt that it is basic or pervasive enough to be called out as a human bias.

Embodied cognition: increase persuasion with hand gestures, happiness with a smile, empathy by mimicry

I am slightly more suspicious of these kind of claims since the power poses failed to replicate. They check out intuitively - I use smiles as positive reification in meditation, hand gestures are very communicative, and incorporating emotion mirroring has had THE BIGGEST EFFECT SIZE on my casual social interaction by far - but on their own these ideas do not quite prescribe action.

A memorized Hook, Line, Sinker sequence to leave interesting first impressions on people

didn't drop into an introduction naturally, lacked confidence to force it out

Persuasive levers: Comfort, Acceptance, Greed, Ego, Drama

After careful consideration, I realized that coming at social skills from the angle of persuasian would backfire horrendously. People notice when you make decisions on more complicated considerations than "what would a good person do".

Spaced Repetition Technique

If I can give a partially right answer to a card, split it up into multiple cards.

My inability to tag consistently makes it hard to make connected groups of cards. It takes too much overhead to keep track of multiple cards for shaky concepts (i.e. ones I may want to change or correct later). Given that the majority of my cards are now secretly Implementation Intentions I find it more useful to change a card to be concrete & specific than to split it up.

Note: Upon reflection, I moved this card into my 'advice' deck. It's still a useful suggestion for people using spaced repetition like traditional flash cards.

If I think I made a bunch of cards with the same style before, pause and look them up.

It's useful to keep question phrasing consistent. If similar questions are phrased differently, you can start guessing the answer based on quirks of phrasing which are irrelevant to the question itself. But as I said above, it's too much overhead to track card by card. Instead, use card templates.

When designing the card answer, I need to understand what I need to understand what I need to know for this card.

So vague I have to explain the explanation, so it's useless for its original purpose. For my current SRS use case, it's flat out wrong — I have a couple decks that are designed to be a process involving spaced re-exposure, over which I expect my understanding to grow and change.

Elm and Elixir syntax

Programming syntax cards were useful to make: I had slow down and think about each piece of information. However, most of them were not very useful to review.

I should have cleared them out sooner. As long as I kept them, though, I could imagine myself as a Virtuous DoGooder who offered free basic syntax decks to any aspiring programmer who needed them.

That was way off. The correct thing to do as a beginner is not to solicit a premade deck, but to read the freaking docs and make your own reference cards. I won't send anyone my small hodge-podge of "stuff I don't want to look up on stackoverflow again" until they've done that first.

Habits

Habit knowledge is encoded in procedural memory

What is procedural memory exactly? The kind of memory that habit knowledge is encoded in, I guess. This is an isolated fact. I can say the words but I don't know anything significant about the world.

According to Wood and Neal's Habit Change manuscript, health interventions based on knowledge/intentions do not work to change long-term behavior. They don't consider how to supplant habits.

The framing of it rubs me the wrong way.

1) Aiming to change behavior: your body operates by a mostly-self-correcting system that shouldn't be trivially override-able every time you are convinced of a brilliant scheme to muck with it. If all it takes is a persuasive argument for you to overturn your lifestyle, then I have a church membership to sell to you.

2) I think there do exist people who will reliably change their long-term behavior based on knowledge/intentions (and who are not gullible yuppies). At least if you know what interventions work, you can maybe intervene on yourself. I think there's a deeper skill involved, though, based on combining your abstract reasoning and other systems cleanly into a greater system. The pieces are all there, but they're often just a little too broken to work. You need a trustworthy filter for good ideas, reliable translation from abstract to instinctual terms, a functional reinforcement system at all, a way to reason well about blackbox algorithms, explicit data collection AND lots of up-close exposure to the real world. we need more of it.

People with high self-control traits attain goals by forming habits that allow them to achieve goals without experiencing unwanted temptations (Wendy Wood's Psychology of Habit)

This is a very incomplete model. You cannot engineer your environment to do all your agency for you, though I certainly tried. It will not work for people who are just missing, or maybe misapplying, a certain kind of forward drive.

This is a fundamental issue I have with CFAR. It really helps some people to be told that their brain has internal mechanics that can be altered in such and such ways if they're giving you problems. Being told how to tinker does not teach me how to build a working system from spare, half-functioning parts. They're assuming a crucial centerpiece of the system without teaching it, so it's confusing when all the pieces check out but the engine still doesn't run.

Stimulus reinforcement a good way to control our behavior because automatic systems run effortlessly (unlike willpower, which breaks down)

Man I don't even remember what specific thing 'stimulus reinforcement' means here. As for my best guess, I think any attempt at naive reinforcement on yourself will have either be too narrow or have lots of weird side effects. This is because most people are way smarter than their model of themselves. You will hit goodhart's law sooner than you think.

Trainees put on a continuous reinforcement schedule for along time are likely to quit upon their first failure, so training trials should contain many successes mixed with occasional failures.

This is probably a good first approximation of what works to tell someone, such that if they try to implement it they will probably get much closer to the ideal than they otherwise would have. I don't think it's strictly true though... You get the most out of training at the edge of the learner's ability, and one of the things you expect to see at the correct level is that the learner neither succeeds effortlessly nor fails all the time. I suspect there's a thing about the kinds of distributions of reward in the real world that makes quitting at the first failure in a long range of successes a fairly rational tactic. You may actually not want to train people out of this tendency if you could.

Training trials should contain many successes mixed with occasional failures to increase resistance to extinction. (trainees on continuous reinforcement schedules are likely to quit upon the first failure.)

I think intentionally mixing in failures is wrong in principle, but "occasional failures" as typically measured is a proxy for something that matters. It's important to train variations, multiple contexts; if you are setting thing up precisely enough to prevent all failures then you may be training something much narrower than you think you are, and it will not continue outside of the narrow context. You stay more motivated as well when you train at the edge of your ability, which appears from the outside as having many successes mixed with occasional failures.

You halt a positive feedback loop by matching its most common/powerful triggers to actions that cut off its source material. You halt a negative feedback loop by matching the most common/powerful triggers to actions with neutral or positive feedback.

A masterfully crafted technically correct answer. All the confusing concrete details have been abstracted away, and as such I have no idea how to apply it to real world situations. How do I recognize what kind of loop some phenomena is? How I determine its common or powerful triggers? How do I identify its source material, and what kind of feedback a certain action gives? lol i dunno

Yearly/Weekly task list to check off

Weeks don't map to anything in my brain, so actions never become habitual. I find it hard not to find weekly lists arbitrary and resent the imposition from my past self. Some tasks sincerely need my attention at regular intervals to accomplish, and I'm trying to find other ways to create consistency on those. Yearly only listed prescriptive measures while not actually having a comprehensive enough spread to plan my year around.

Personal Habits

Habit: When I am bursting with irritation, locate the nearest person to complain at them.

It seemed an important to do something to acknowledge that screaming silently hurts me and prove to myself that I am worth defending. I hoped that triggering this action with the initial frustration instead of the later despair would catch problems before they snowballed. However, trust in others needs to be built incrementally. By the time I'm irritated enough to have a rant I know I'm angry enough to do real damage in suddenly letting it out at someone.

Frames that have worked better for me lately include complaining into a list (so I can deal with one piece at a time) and seeking reassurance.

You can cement appropriate response protocols in people's heads by having them come up with scenarios individually, solve the scenarios in pairs, and talk about the solutions as a group.

I decided this entirely on the apparent success of it being used on a group of EA Global 2016 volunteers. That's not nearly enough data, I know. I think this strategy approximates correct training technique better than a lecture does, but is probably not ideal. It certainly depends too much on the appropriate thing to do being transparently recognizable as such.

Morning routine: get dressed, take pills, eat cereal

My actual routine tends to be more adaptable than the cards I make about it.

Also right now I'm doing a thing where I don't do routines, I do what I want.

"every time i've gone for a walk in the sun on a quiet street, i've felt a little better, even when i was depressed, and i would bet money on that happening again if i did it now despite System 1's insistence otherwise."

Many things have slight improvements on mood while depressed, but I get sick very quickly of trying to fill the grand canyon one penny at a time.

if my empathy is failing me take 5-htp

need a more well-rounded theory of drugs, as I don't trust throwing contextless TAPs at problems to form effective solutions when there's interactions and tolerance in the picture.

Use one or more hard trigger for positive thinking: context switch, access to food, make more tools in-reach, be heard out by people, exercise, sleep, sunlight

Need to want to feel better or I will avoid these things anyways. Conflicts with several other cards attempting to enumerate exactly the same things.

Track in phone when I use happy songs, loving-kindness meditation, 5-htp, or naps to deal with feeling awful

Writing down in phone marks these as deliberate interventions, which requires me to, before doing things that might help, a) notice that I'm feeling awful, b) admit to myself that I'm feeling awful, c) admit I don't want to be feeling awful, and d) believe it (I'm?) worth the effort to try.

Keep count of movement and happies vs. flinches to break helpless spirals

tends to make me think too short-term to solve systemic problems

Keep count of noticing detail vs. shutting down, or positive bids vs. disengagement while socializing

I kind of need my attention spare when socializing. Also too short-term to help me solve underlying causes.

Keep count of sensory details vs. noticed confusions vs. hypotheses while debugging or PCK-seeking

Definitely had to write them down when considering people's complex problems and worried it made me look distracted or judgmental.

Keep count of intuitions vs. outcomes when finding The Most Important Thing

Continually trying to figure out the Most Important Thing to do tired me out quickly.

Computers

Your data type design is not done until it has a function template giving the core structure needed to interact with it.

I have not created an ordering to how I do data type design, meaning there's not really anywhere in the process I can stick an "after this, write a function template". I'm sorry, but you really can't make effective 'before' trigger action plans. At best you can do 'when I think about starting , run through this list of prerequisites', and the pain of extra overhead often causes me to avoid thinking about .

Cmd [ or ] to move between tabs

Doesn't work in any Mac program I've tried.

Good Machine Learning Scaling: Get every feature in approximately a -1 to 1 range

For what kind of machine learning is an important question, before I'm pretty sure some kinds actually require 0 to 1 scaling. This is also the most vanilla(1) kind of standardization I can think of; it's got nothing on batch norm. -(1) actually no, vanilla is a fine, upstanding flavor. this is more like, sparkling water flavored soda or cream-flavored ice cream.

Why did I bother, seriously why?

Thucydides said 'It is a habit of mankind to use sovereign reason to thrust aside what they do not fancy'

Why did I think I would ever need to know this quote. Even if it sounds nice to put in a paper or article, I should probably stick to quotes I know the context of.

Starbucks customer service method is to Listen, Acknowledge the complaint, Take action to solve it, Thank them, and Explain why it occured (LATTE)

This is a cute acronym for customer service protocol. There are TONS of cutesy acronyms for customer service protocols; this does not seem particularly notable.

cryptomnesia: when a memory returns and it appears to be a new thought

Obscure vocabulary for something I rarely observe. I guess it is kinda cool to know it's a thing in case it ever happens and someone's like "is this normal"? Except I don't actually know if it's common or a symptom of anything.

Memory encoding is linking new info to info structures already memory

which this card utterly failed to do

E.T. Jaynes says randomness is not a property of the world

Another out of context quote! I really do not know enough about Jayne's general philosophy that I should be confident quoting him as an authority.

For a CRDT to be safe, updates must be Commutative, Associative, and Idempotent.

Isolated factoid. I need a better idea of what a CRDT is, what it's used for, and/or when it would come up. Would also like a better grip on how to determine that updates satisfy the three properties. (I bet it's easy as pie to verify in Haskell.)

Grueling Level Grinding Attempts I Quickly Became Averse To

tensorflow and cuda everything

reading the code for my partner's startup

haskell everything

Kotlin

Other

The first step to rooting a phone is to install TWRP

Useless without the other steps, such that I'm not even sure I don't need to look up stuff first.

Is (X) safe for dogs?

I started this because I keep winding up in houses with dogs, and it seemed prudent to know some common food rules offhand. It wasn't very efficient to memorize foods when the dog was too well trained to steal food, I was too apathetic to feed it scraps, and the list was always too adhoc to generalize. I'll just google it if I'm concerned in the future.

Do Core Transformation technique all the time

For some reason I really resist diving into the depths of my deepest insecurities on a regular basis.

Maybe I should try core transformation on that resistance... Oh that's right, personal growth is useless work in that it doesn't give the tribe a reason to not kick me out.

Everyday math is a crucial skill, a la Eliezer's post "The Simple Math of Everything"

Trying to force math concepts and fast computation tricks into my head in the hopes that I caught something that happened to be applicable was a recipe for exhaustion. The very basics are critical for later learning efficacy, but how you get eager learners is by creating opportunities to see what math is useful and why, and what prerequisite concepts you need to grasp in order to use the math to its full extent. How you get mastery is use, and with only the flimsiest of toy examples to suggest where to apply skills of course I'm not going to use them.

Using the rote practice in a limited context way as the Default Way to learn math skills is ridiculous--you do targeted practice to address deficiencies that are holding you back. Maaybe you do multiple, varied step-throughs of the process in order to assess your ability. Ugh.

According to Haidt, we might be blind to our own selfishness because this helps us project a positive self-image

This is not a straight forward fact about humans. This is one of those corrections that gets taken most seriously by exactly the people who don't need it or need the exact opposite correction. It needs to include a concrete way to estimate its applicability.

When I notice I'm missing important information, that is NOT the time to push to extract feedback. My current mechanisms won't often find what they missed just by looking harder.

I've this unfortunate habit of panicking at the messenger, whenever I notice big holes in my understanding. This was an attempt to prevent making things worse in that way. Now, instead of supressing the instinct to "interrogate everyone"/"solve everything now", I've moved to integrating an understanding that the quick solution IS making a small update to longer term strategies.

Identify your Signature Strengths and take steps to use them more often

My self-image contradicts itself in ways I don't know how to resolve. I feel scared and confused when I try to sort out which beliefs reflect my real abilities, which ideas manifested out of depression or internalized verbal abuse, and which characterized myself in specific circumstances that don't apply to me anymore (or rarely).

Keep major decisions in LADR format

Not lightweight enough for me to use consistently, need a way of classifying which decisions merit recording this way. I might reconsider using them in my strategic reviews.

Lines of a general 101 introduction speech to memorize

I imagined I would give a lot of 101 talks which this might have been helpful to have pinned down. I have little reason to expect it works, having never tested it. It feels silly to fiddle around optimizing a hook when poor vocal projection and scattered thinking put much tighter bottlenecks on how good I get at giving talks.

Software development: For the next time I have a problem, I try to think of a few words that will quickly focus my thinking.

Vague

Someone operating on a delicate live system must know if there are any "points of no return" in the procedure, and stop to re-check the system.

Many things are delicate live systems, having this in my head encouraged me to obsess over decisions until deadlines even more.

As evidenced by people predicting music competition winners better with no sound, only visuals, style is more important than content.

Could it be that being voted a pop-star is better predicted by style than content? No reason to expect this generalizes to every part of life.

The difference between sensitivity and accuracy: sensitivity is % correct of positive examples, accuracy is % correct of all predictions.

The difference between sensitivity and precision: sensitivity is out of all real positives, precision is out of predicted positives

terms used too loosely or interchangeable in every day examples to be worth attaching precise data wrangling definitions

Anki checklist:

☐ I know why I want to make tis card. ☐ I understand what I need to know for this card ☐ I know how to recognize when/where I need this ☐ There are no almost or partially right answers to this card ☐ There are no technically correct answers which comically miss the point ☐ There is no way to cheat to the right answer ☐ I cannot get marked wrong for being smarter than the question writer

How I'm using anki cards changes often, and have subtler common qualities than this checklist

#update #anki

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incoherentham · 7 years

Text

Strategic Review - Late July 2017

Every month or so I do a review of how my life is going. I’m posting these here now

Positives:

Discovered I like pink moscato

Modified my review system with robustness and decomplecting in mind

Made a bunch of prediction-bets with myself, won a few against Lauren

Cleared out my old anki decks

Studied derivatives and parallel programming

Redeveloped some appreciation for the beauty of math

Housemates came back from their trip and started being awesome and making delicious food all the time

Made homemade sushi and soup

People came over to hang out with me and be social experiment test guinea pigs

Found some new avenues to work on mental health stuff

Negatives:

Confused about effects of supplements

Realized I'd forgotten a whole lot of stuff about R and data science

Worried about maximizing fun and The Culture(tm) at the upcoming CFAR alumni reunion

Pissed off at self-proclaimed Hufflepuffs

Wisdom teeth removal held up in insurance snafu

What’s on my Hot Loop:

Supervised Goals

General

make predictions

strategic reviews

generate + benchmark plans

Testosterone

daily Inboxes

roll to check daily

catchup periods

Community

pulse prn

Clothes

weekly redraw

CPTSD

track episodes

blocks for EMDR

Reunion

track bunnies

dedicated rfis blocks

dedicated blocks for TF

paper catchup

Fathom

dedicted blocks to notate

do visualizer

Benchmarks

Meta

Decomplect - Who, what, when, where why, how

Basics of reasoning - Do the most important thing first, Feedback Loops / Go play outside, Trust your instincts

Track Hours usage

Weekly Predictions roundup every friday

Group tuning

Circling - stay present, authentic

Track speaking time, interrupts

Inboxes

Gmail inbox

Feedly Newest

Anki new/due

Calendar

Social

Speak slow, simply, loud

Curiosity mindset

Testosterone

CPTSD

EMDR

Writing Code

udacity course

programming guide

runtime api docs

Low-Level Programming cards

ML papers cards

Tensorflow cards

Laurenationship

I approve of the algorithm that is you

Level Grinding

TensorFlow

ML papers list

Sort probationary clothes

Listen to Stanford human behavioral biology lecture series on youtube

Parallel programming book, grokking 8086 architecture

Minutiae to absorb

Cooking chemistry facts/vocab from Kitchen Mysteries book

httpd how-to

types of cache associativity

derivative rules

bash shortcuts

info about dropout

what different bid/at betting spreads mean

ML datasets

deep Learning companies/groups

ML algorithms

parallel programming

eye-Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing therapy

intuitive explanation of sines and e

the *music plays* song

set & predicate logic notation

look at the first sharp to figure out the key on sheet music

where things go in my anki decks

file transfer over netcat

how to spell bureaucracy

estimated impact of repealing ACA

translate between orders of magnitude difference in terms of time

Misc scraps

weekly timeboxing summaries

a generator of short intimacy-building exercise (they wound up taking like an hour tho)

I am still looking for people who want to try these out

notes on intentionally building positive self-concept (h/t Kaj Sotala)

a list of awesome public datasets

a list of genetic modifications to consider, from kanzure on hackernews

notes from cryptocurrency talk

R anki cards I want

ideas for a general programming-language cheatsheet anki card template

complecting analysis of my meta/review system

things I want to have 1 or 2-syllable codewords for with my partner

misc sociological studies

meetups to maybe go to

interesting machine learning papers

news feeds I want to keep an eye on

math-heavy papers to attempt reading

website to let you draw a symbol and find out its latex code

how to make cake mix cakes awesome

how symptoms of personality disorders show up (link)

quick breakdown of supplements

#Strategic Review

2 notes · View notes

incoherentham · 7 years

Text

Strategic Review: July 2017

Every month or so I do a review of how my life is going. I’m posting these here now

Positives:

Got a new whiteboard

Lovely tea kettle introduced to the kitchen, I have silicon spatulas now and misc. good food to good.

[redacted] moved out, we have a nook and more kitchen space again

Had a positive fight with partner!

Got my work travel expenses reimbursed

Been reading machine learning papers, and am starting to comprehend the code I look at.

Made adjustments to my hip bag like a pro fixer-er of stuff

Negatives:

Lost my gold fidget spinner

Boxes boxes everywhere

Keep dropping social engagements

Anxiety feedback loops between partner and I. We've improved, but not solved this problem.

I really really want to set up a merchant stand but don't see how to

Fucking deleted last review by accident

What’s on my Hot Loop:

No soft edges. Demand personal space first.

Track hours usage

Daily

Testosterone

Meditate Breakfast

Evening Tea

Stick to the basics of reasoning

Do the most important thing first

Build Feedback Loops / play in the dirt

Trust your instincts

Clothes decimation

Sample new clothes from piles every Sunday, save what I actively like. (Autosave socks and underwear, because judging those is hard.)

Detailed Inventory

earplug necklace

eye mask

toothbrush, razor

suitcase

weighted scarf

glasses

wallet

supplements

phone, microusb chargers, portable charger

laptop, mac charger

makeup bag, backpack, hip bag

fidget spinners

laptop

clothes

current

suspended

Level Grinding

Assertiveness CoZE

Annotate code

Keep up with ML news

TensorFlow

ML papers list

Sort probationary clothes

Send refund cash to bank

[redacted] docs

Inbox zero: feedly x3, gmail, alumni forum

Study cuda programming

Listen to Stanford human behavioral biology lecture series on youtube

Learn low-level and hardware programming

Speak out loud along with misc. tech conference talks subtitles

Cultivate loving-kindness mindset

Write a CBT chatbot

Endorsed Heuristics

The goal of a postmortem is to expose faults and apply engineering to fix these faults, rather than to avoid or minimize them

Carry a dry erase whiteboard for notes

Use wet wipes periodically

Most critical piece of meditation is rewarding yourself when you notice distraction and return

Taste the supplements you take

80% confidence intervals = 10-90% = 1:4 bet

Government should default to inaction

Use "what situations would make this go away?" to consider confusing impulses

Loving-Kindness meditation

Look out for self-aggression when working on self-improvement, it’s counter-productive.

Python naming best practices

subset of 20 rules of formulating knowledge

PCK seeking

Write down my steps as I solve important or complex but infrequent tasks

Speak simply, slowly

Self-denial is unhelpful

Personal rules for alcohol use:

no more than 3 drinks in 2 hours

have a glass of water every other drink

no drinking when I am already upset

Know the source of a trivia fact for context and a way to verify

Narrow down what type of errors a classifier makes by looking at the confusion matrix

Enforcing optimism is cruel to people in objectively bad situations.

Quantify consequences: how often, how long, how intense.

Freezing or spacing out responses to stress often don't get recognized as stress at all

Buy experiences rather than objects

Scientific theories tend to be not so much wrong as incomplete

Communication

Self anti-silencing policy: Share "I disagree but don't expect to the thoughts to be welcomed, so I am not doing so."

Add "Like this comment to express skepticism or disagreement" to FB posts

Check my comments are at least two of (true, necessary, kind)

Instead of offering sympathy, offer money, effort, or time spent coordinating sympathetic people's money and effort.

Offer sympathy and support when friends are in the grip of distorted thoughts, not "reality checks"

Tips to engage cooperation from How to Listen.. parenting book

Ask for feedback with "what did you notice that might be worth looking at together" (h/t Malcolm Ocean)

Start off any rationalist meetup with a game of object-boggle

CFAR mailing list norms

Replace "Middle Class" with "Working Class" in conversation

Establish the shape of an idea to someone before teaching them

Iterated Critique

Push-Pull-Action Critique

Replace "sorry for taking time" with "thank you for giving me your time"

Replace "do not shout" with "talk in a quieter voice"

Replace "refuse" with "said would not" or "did not"

If you aren't describing events, you're probably evaluating them.

Dev

Master and Develop branches should be kept constantly shippable

Black-box monitering alerts preserve good signal-to-noise ratio

R tidbits

Seriously limit the amount of on-call and manual work time by a Site Reliability Engineering team members to ~50%.

little bit of Haskell type theory

Try turning it off and back on again

Prefer to prepend vs. append to lists

Python naming best practices

Check the base case in recursive types/functions

Check closed boundaries and midpoints in intervals

Make a function template for complex data definitions

A function returning a Boolean needs at least a true and false test case

Define your data type when directly manipulating similar values

Stub functions so you can test code with unfinished/broken dependencies

Syntax errors accumulate quickly, compile-check often

Write a failing test so you don't forget to finish a stubbed function

You need to write a docstring

Biases to notice

People want to benefit from dishonesty but also consider themselves good people (video)

Regression to the mean

Choice-supportive bias

Scope insensitivity

Gambler's fallacy

The procrastination equation

Anki

Memorize individual derivation steps to always follow the fastest path while solving a problem

Don't memorize whole books or articles unless you're about to have an important exam

I must have a specific reasong for wanting to make this anki card

Redudant information in the question of a card will slow down your learning process

When an experienced user starts forgetting cards, it's likely from similar cards with different answers.

Don't try to memorize unordered sets of more than 5 members

Flashcard questions should be short

Minutiae to absorb

1 thousand to 1 million order of magnitude difference = 15 mins vs 12 days

1 million or 1 billion order of magnitude difference = 12 days or 30 years

Cache associativity

MESI protocol

derivative rules

bash shortcuts

reader-writer locks

what is a store buffer

recognizing chump bets in the jane street protocol

Misc scraps

notes from Modern Operating Systems 4th edition

proposed rationalist life timeline

weekly timeboxing summaries

stuff Jake says

mathemetically modeling the usefulness of holding onto stuff

ml papers notes

location of Onward house

ADEPT explanations

formatted nvim text wrapping

relationship meta <3

daily timeboxes

prefix sums, reduction trees

sci-hub.cc lets you get ahold papers, apparently

notes from [redacted] docs

android app for getting around the mobile hotspot limitations

shipnames for rl couples

postmodern jukebox does modern songs in vintage style

Applied Information Economics (h/t Ian Moss)

math concept cheatsheets

how to transfer files between local computers with netcat

Activity cards I'd like to make

why is calibration so hard to practice?

some changes

add dry erase whiteboard carrying

refine going through clothes/posessions plan, changed current clothes in hotloop

chance tasc task

add ml papers

removed day plan

got more specific in my "endorsed" stuff here

add Annotate code, tenserflow learning to tasks

remove Learning C stuff

#strategic review

0 notes

incoherentham · 7 years

Text

Strategic Review: Late June 2017

Every month or so I do a review of how my life is going. I’m posting these here now

Positives:

Gonna see lahwran and other lovely people soon

Had some fantastic movie-and-cuddles nights

Wisdom teeth taken care of

Reading about modern operating systems

Negatives:

Panic attacks, irregular sleep

Quit job because people I trusted there left and because of general stress.

Had to deal with probable infection in dental surgery site

Frequently got sniped into spending a lot of time writing facebook comments which I then didn't post.

What’s on my Hot Loop:

The Plan

Track hours usage, message for help when stuck

Time exposed to machine learning state-of-the-art

Time doing shared focus

Use checklist when shutting down:

Are partners okay without me for next bit / what specific care needed

Are there any critical time-critical problems that need solving

Stand up

Take pills/have snack/drink water

Take shower

Get dressed

Eat food

Plan for a social call

Hours Spread

10hr sleep: 7.5 night + nap

14 hr left

2hr meta/anki

1hr partner care

3hr knowledge seeking

7hrs self-care focus

1hr unallocated

Stick to the basics of reasoning

Do the most important thing first

Build Feedback Loops / play in the dirt

Trust your instincts

Level Grinding

Speak out loud along with misc. tech conference talks subtitles

ShaderToy

Write an IRC bot in Haskell

Use triggers for positive thinking

Learn low-level and hardware programming

Plan approach to job search

Cultivate loving-kindness mindset

Reach out to another person, remind them they can reach out to me

Write a CBT chatbot

Endorsed Heuristics

Git: Master and Develop branches should be kept constantly shippable

Include "Like this comment to express skepticism or disagreement" with facebook posts

Check my comments are at least two of (true, necessary, kind)

Offer sympathy and support when friends are in the grip of distorted thoughts

Black-box monitering alerts preserve good signal-to-noise ratio

The goal of a postmortem is to expose faults and apply engineering to fix these faults, rather than to avoid or minimize them

Taste the supplements you take

Seriously limit the amount of on-call and manual work time by a Site Reliability Engineering team members to ~50%.

Ask for feedback with "what did you notice that might be worth looking at together" (h/t Malcolm Ocean)

How to engage cooperation when talking with people

80% confidence intervals = 10-90% = 1:4 bet

Start off any rationalist meetup with a game of object-boggle

CFAR mailing list norms

Tips to engage cooperation from How to Listen.. parenting book

Government should default to inaction

Loving-Kindness meditation

Look out for self-aggression when working on self-improvement, it’s counter-productive.

Python naming best practices

Test-driven coding

little bit of Haskell type theory

subset of 20 rules of formulating knowledge

Miscellaneous bias literature

The procrastination equation

Self-denial is unhelpful

Personal rules for alcohol use

Effect sizes

PCK seeking

Iterated Critique

Push-Pull-Action Critique

Speak simply, slowly

Write down my steps as I solve important or complex but infrequent tasks

Have you tried turning it off and back on again?

Minutiae to absorb

Haskell list operators, ghci use

Concrete things to offer people instead of prayers and sympathy

C types and operators (from Modern C)

8086 pointer types

& to run in background in shell

notes from Modern Operating Systems 4th edition

format string syntax

Automoderation of group conversations

Misc scraps

notes from Modern Operating Systems 4th edition

Prediction on Dragon Army Barracks

Modern C index summary

Learn You a Haskell index summary

What I want when I write a book

Stanford intro to human behavioral biology series on youtube

Dath Ilan

Better phrasings for checking in with how friends are doing (h/t argumate

"Like this comment to express skepticism or disagreement."

CIFAR-10 stuff 1,2,3

How to change tabwidth in Vim

Things I wish I knew in C

Distortions listed in Ozy's DBT sequence

Outline of a talk I want to give on reinforcement learning in the workplace

Wide Residual Networks paper

People's names I can never remember

New Introductions

Anki's algorithm

Kinds of things computer registers

timebox of Jun 16

lullabies

types of mean

arithmetic

geometric

harmonic

generalized

two perspectives: 80/20 vs. thoroughput

some changes

made 'The Plan'

made a basic day schedule

changed the people in my loving-kindness focus

removed Attention counts and various level-grinding distractions

watched Simple Made Easy

added to endorsed heuristics

#strategic review

0 notes

incoherentham · 7 years

Text

Strategic Review: June 2017

Every month or so I do a review of how my life is going. I’m posting these here now

Positives:

Gonna see lahwran and other lovely people soon

Had some fantastic movie-and-cuddles nights

Wisdom teeth taken care of

Reading about modern operating systems

Negatives:

Panic attacks, irregular sleep

Quit job because people I trusted there left and because of general stress.

Had to deal with probable infection in dental surgery site

Frequently got sniped into spending a lot of time writing facebook comments which I then didn't post.

What’s on my Hot Loop:

The Plan

Track hours usage, message for help when stuck

Time exposed to machine learning state-of-the-art

Time doing shared focus

Use checklist when shutting down:

Are partners okay without me for next bit / what specific care needed

Are there any critical time-critical problems that need solving

Stand up

Take pills/have snack/drink water

Take shower

Get dressed

Eat food

Plan for a social call

Hours Spread

10hr sleep: 7.5 night + nap

14 hr left

2hr meta/anki

1hr partner care

3hr knowledge seeking

7hrs self-care focus

1hr unallocated

Stick to the basics of reasoning

Do the most important thing first

Build Feedback Loops / play in the dirt

Trust your instincts

Level Grinding

Speak out loud along with misc. tech conference talks subtitles

ShaderToy

Write an IRC bot in Haskell

Use triggers for positive thinking

Learn low-level and hardware programming

Plan approach to job search

Cultivate loving-kindness mindset

Reach out to another person, remind them they can reach out to me

Write a CBT chatbot

Endorsed Heuristics

Git: Master and Develop branches should be kept constantly shippable

Include "Like this comment to express skepticism or disagreement" with facebook posts

Check my comments are at least two of (true, necessary, kind)

Offer sympathy and support when friends are in the grip of distorted thoughts

Black-box monitering alerts preserve good signal-to-noise ratio

The goal of a postmortem is to expose faults and apply engineering to fix these faults, rather than to avoid or minimize them

Taste the supplements you take

Seriously limit the amount of on-call and manual work time by a Site Reliability Engineering team members to ~50%.

Ask for feedback with "what did you notice that might be worth looking at together" (h/t Malcolm Ocean)

How to engage cooperation when talking with people

80% confidence intervals = 10-90% = 1:4 bet

Start off any rationalist meetup with a game of object-boggle

CFAR mailing list norms

Tips to engage cooperation from How to Listen.. parenting book

Government should default to inaction

Loving-Kindness meditation

Look out for self-aggression when working on self-improvement, it’s counter-productive.

Python naming best practices

Test-driven coding

little bit of Haskell type theory

subset of 20 rules of formulating knowledge

Miscellaneous bias literature

The procrastination equation

Self-denial is unhelpful

Personal rules for alcohol use

Effect sizes

PCK seeking

Iterated Critique

Push-Pull-Action Critique

Speak simply, slowly

Write down my steps as I solve important or complex but infrequent tasks

Have you tried turning it off and back on again?

Minutiae to absorb

Haskell list operators, ghci use

Concrete things to offer people instead of prayers and sympathy

C types and operators (from Modern C)

8086 pointer types

& to run in background in shell

notes from Modern Operating Systems 4th edition

format string syntax

Automoderation of group conversations

Misc scraps

notes from Modern Operating Systems 4th edition

Prediction on Dragon Army Barracks

Modern C index summary

Learn You a Haskell index summary

What I want when I write a book

Stanford intro to human behavioral biology series on youtube

Dath Ilan

Better phrasings for checking in with how friends are doing (h/t argumate

"Like this comment to express skepticism or disagreement."

CIFAR-10 stuff 1,2,3

How to change tabwidth in Vim

Things I wish I knew in C

Distortions listed in Ozy's DBT sequence

Outline of a talk I want to give on reinforcement learning in the workplace

Wide Residual Networks paper

People's names I can never remember

New Introductions

Anki's algorithm

Kinds of things computer registers

timebox of Jun 16

lullabies

types of mean

arithmetic

geometric

harmonic

generalized

two perspectives: 80/20 vs. thoroughput

some changes

made 'The Plan'

made a basic day schedule

changed the people in my loving-kindness focus

removed Attention counts and various level-grinding distractions

watched Simple Made Easy

added to endorsed heuristics

#Strategic Review

1 note · View note

incoherentham · 7 years

Text

Strategic Review: May 2017

Every month or so I do a review of how my life is going. I’m posting these here now

Positives:

Hufflepuff Unconference

Wearing earplugs when I need to (public transit, group conversations)

Slowly converging on an idea of the fashion style I want

Meds seem to work

Food delivery is the bomb

I feel okay spending money on things I want in order to improve my life

Habitified a good method for creating traction on hard problems.

Negatives:

Arguments about Hufflepuff Virtue and the General Worth of People

Having a hard time translating my thoughts from niche jargons into English.

Miss my partner

DRAGON ARMY BARRACKS is everything I’ve ever dreamed of trying in a rationalist house and I’m out here in Utah with a stable job and sh*t.

What’s on my Hot Loop:

Stick to the basics of reasoning

Do the most important thing first

Build Feedback Loops / play in the dirt

Trust your instincts

Level Grinding

Read "Site Reliability Engineering"

Speak out loud along with misc. tech conference talks subtitles

Find ways to apply my signature strengths

Learn Kotlin programming language

Learn low-level and hardware programming

Plan approach to job search

Cultivate loving-kindness mindset

Reach out to another person, remind them they can reach out to me

Write a debugging chatbot

Practice giving 101 speech opening

Build Feedback Loops

Use triggers for positive thinking

Use work resources to solve problems at work

Speak simply, slowly

Look for the Most Important thing

Seek Debugging PCK (Pedagogical Content Knowledge)

Notice noticing detail vs. shutting down in social situations

Notice opportunities vs. exhaustion when in danger of helplessness spirals

Minutiae to absorb

Elixir for loops

Internet slang

"What situation would make this go away?" prompt (h/t Toon Alfrink)

Stack trace prompt: blurting out any concept unrelated to the ones before. (h/t Toon Alfrink)

Habit building thoughts

8086 architecture & registers

CFAR mailing list norms

How to respond to a friends' delusions

The role of CFAR's 'boggle, honor self, give material a chance' in building feedback loops

"Assume overnight some miracle happens and solved the issue - how would you tell, what would be the first sign that it had happened?" to make goals clearer, notice progress

Automoderation of group conversations

desires vs. cesires

dev tools & libraries I want to know about

binary numbers

my hook, line, and sinker phrases

Site Reliability Engineering

Misc scraps

recommendations by random developer blogs

set notation

stuff my partner is up to

tech talk ideas / intros

Algorithms to Live By: task scheduling and laplace's law

aborted facebook comments

economist names

ruby bloom's self-assessment questions

contemplating types of motivation

random dev tools & libraries mentioned to me

prediction-related sites: aforeseeablefuture.com, hypermind

think about sleep in 90min. cycles instead of hours

cool hackathon projects I want to check up on

people I meet at meetups

tips on meditation design

notes from Modern Operating Systems 4th edition

tidbits about coworkers

how to set up a facebook messenger bot, irc bot

what is going on with omega-3 and omega-6

idea to taste pill contents to leverage body's chemical-intake feedback

"Site Reliability Engineering" notes

Endorsed heuristics

Seriously limit the amount of on-call and manual work time by a Site Reliability Engineering team members to ~50%.

Ask "what did you notice that might be worth looking at together" instead of for feedback (h/t Malcolm Ocean)

How to engage cooperation when talking with people

80% confidence intervals = 10-90% = 1:4 bet

Government should default to inaction

Loving-Kindness meditation

Look out for self-aggression when working on self-improvement, it’s counter-productive.

Python naming best practices

Test-driven coding

little bit of Haskell type theory

subset of 20 rules of formulating knowledge

Miscellaneous bias literature

The procrastination equation

Self-denial is unhelpful

Personal rules for alcohol use

Effect sizes

PCK seeking

Iterated Critique

Push-Pull-Action Critique

Write down my steps as I solve important or complex but infrequent tasks

Have you tried turning it off and back on again?

some changes

changed 'habits' section to 'effort'

added feedback loops as major focus areas

removed interaction types

added 80% confidence intervals = 10-90% = 1:4 bet

#Strategic Review

0 notes

incoherentham · 7 years

Text

Strategic Review Apr 2017

Every month or so I do a review of how my life is going. I’m posting these here now

Positives:

Check ins with bosses. I am a valued employee..

Some bits of reproducibly happy mood achieved

Visited partner in Cali

Negatives:

Got sick

Anxiety about making progress on work project

Mood whiplash

Almost never went through my anki decks

What’s on my Hot Loop:

Stick to the basics of reasoning

Do the most important thing first

Feedback Loops / Go play outside

Trust your instincts

Take close notes on medication use

Habits

When I’m feeling vague at work, go exercise or rest in the sun

When I’m interested in my mental processes, record PCK data in code on paper or in stride as I go along.

When I have an insight, record it in Anki or stride.

When someone interrupts me, hold up my finger and say “Just a minute”

When I have something important to say, make it short and say it slow

How to preface a 101 talk

Loving Kindness meditation

Misc learning

How to engage cooperation when talking with kids

Lightweight Architecture Decision Records

Interaction Types (suspended)

core transformation technique (kaj sotala, based on book)

Elixir tidbits

Habit building thoughts

Skills

actually do code reviews

101 speech opening

Misc thought scraps

taking testerone

make a rationalist monastery

the most important thing with children is not to keep them alive, but to keep them able to grow

graphing calculator

Advanced Renderman book notes

reading ml papers with @lahwran

ways to share information well with people in different stages of self-efficacy

Clusters of circumstances that correlate with 'everything is possible' mindset

"Replay" by Ken Grimwood book suggestion

built-in reasoning objects (book "Cognitive Pluralism")

gpu programming basics

ought to make some kind of cbt chatbot

trick to convert km to miles using fibonnaci sequence

Hufflepuff unconference: TAPs for dealing with obstacles, notes abt people I talked to, goals

cynical views on people

response to "Assume overnight some miracle happens and solved the issue - how would you tell, what would be the first sign that it had happened?" prompt

performance trick in react native

productive reality-checking

css grid

puns

want to learn low-level programming

writing rubrics

work meeting notes

Toon Alfrink's focusing alternatives: What would make this situation go away, and 'stack trace' blurting out any concept unrelated to the ones before.

rationalist diaspora articles

WE WILL BE THE AI

guilty reminder to read 80k hours career guide

LSD interactions with menstruation (see gwern for more info?)

SlateStarCodex determines that you should eat bland food if you're fat

"explicit “feedback” as in “I have some feedback for you” is broken", Malcolm Ocean

desires vs. cesires, sideways-view.com

SlateStartCodex seeing like a state is what's wrong with Rationality

Endorsed heuristics

Loving-Kindness meditation

Look out for self-aggression when working on self-improvement, it’s counter-productive.

Python naming best practices

Test-driven coding

little bit of Haskell type theory

subset of 20 rules of formulating knowledge

Miscellaneous bias literature

The procrastination equation

Self-denial is unhelpful

Personal rules for alcohol use

Effect sizes

PCK seeking

Iterated Critique

Push-Pull-Action Critique

Write down my steps as I solve important or complex but infrequent tasks

Have you tried turning it off and back on again?

some changes

cleaned out my 'polaris' cards

removed things to remind people of

forget about Nonviolent Communication

#Strategic Review

1 note · View note

incoherentham · 7 years

Text

Updates

I have a deck of flashcards where I put all of the factoids or bits of advice I’ve changed my mind about. This is my summary of those cards.

Lifehack: use velcro strips to keep common items where you want them

velcro is so tacky, I am never actually going to recommend this to anyone.

Lifehack: If you don't want to forget whether you've done something, like turn off the stove or close the garage door, do something unusual while you're doing it.

giving yourself extra associations indeed helps you remember things, but this issue is better tackled by other means than memory tricks such as checklists or strengthening the habit.

Lifehack: Microwave leftovers evenly by spreading your food in a doughnut shape

I have yet to encounter evidence that this actually helps, and recall it being debunked somewhere. Judging from the cooking patterns of potatoes, I have a hunch that what really matters is the thickness of food, not its location on the plate. If placement ever helps at all I bet it's dependent on the make of the microwave.

State a goal so it's most achievable by stating it in terms of measurable behaviors

My rationality senses are tingling. This feels like technically correct advice, which when followed in practicality will lead to going through motions vaguely related to the goal or listing out the specific things I can flog myself for failing at. It can be a useful push but could be harmful for me or people sufficiently like me.

Vim (on mac): you can't copy a portion of a line to the clipboard.

:'<,'>w !pbcopy acts as if you selected with Visual Line by default, it's quite annoying. My partner Lauren found a workaround that lets you do partial-line selects. I haven't put it into my vimrc, but I am so very happy to know that there's a way.

When I say I want to "persuade" people, I mean "bend the likelihood that someone does a thing, in a way they perceive as their own will"

This was a strict improvement on my previous mental framing around persuasion, which was not the sort of persuasion one wants to employ on people one likes, so I didn't do much changing of minds. This new definition pushed me to pause and explore the interaction between how people perceive my behaviors/actions and what actually causes their own behaviors. It's an alright framework for assessing persuasion tricks or attempts, but it's not the right mindset to actually attempt persuasion in.

Persuasive levers acronym: CAGED: Comfort, Acceptance, Greed, Ego, Drama

Based loosely off 'How to win friends'. Never actually used them. They're too abstract to build a strategy quickly off of, and the acronym is creepy.

Formatting SRS knowledge:

"use simpler models; you can always build on them later on": This is so vague it's useless

"Flashcard answers should be as short as possible?": I think people using SRS for complex or diverse topics stand a real risk of making cards lexically short instead of conceptually basic. Terseness is a good practice proxy for simplicity, but in the long run it's not the same thing.

"You should eliminate interference as soon as you spot it": No. I think you should keep it in there until you actually resolve the question of which is the correct answer

When you have next action, set up a trigger for it

This led to massive proliferation of terrible and often contradictory next actions. There needs to be an evaluation step in there.

If planning time permits, loop on contingency planning

I never progress from tweaking my plans to actually implementing them when I loop on contingency planning, and usually work myself into paranoia/defeatism besides. This needs more specific instructions to avoid the failure mode.

Contingency planning should be rapid and intense.

I disagree that it should be rapid and intense; I think it should be smooth. If you work yourself in a hurry or panic you are doing yourself a great disservice. See above.

You can use the subject's blog or twitter to help track down the context of an interview quote.

I tried this a couple times and couldn't find anything useful. It's potentially more useful for people who read news daily instead of catching up on it months later.

Rule 240: if your flight is cancelled or delayed, the airline has to offer you any available seat on the next flight out on any carrier.

That rule is way out of date. Similarish promises called "conditions of carriage" vary by airline and generally only apply if it's absolutely the airline's fault.

Having a narrow vision of possibilities in a social scene makes acting on opportunities difficult.

I was trying to make enough sense of social anxiety to do something about it. Social anxiety creates stress, which creates tunnel vision and reactive reasoning, which makes me even worse at solving on-the-spot social problems. This idea was not concrete enough to help me recognize and make sense of what was happening in the moment. On the occasions I did remember, it left me nothing to do about my anxiety except feel more anxious because I was probably missing opportunities.

I just said something. I should expect I'll need to repeat myself

I speak quietly. Expecting to need to repeat myself grates at something in me, and I'd rather solve this problem by learning to speak more loudly.

When I feel flicker of uncertainty about social event, insist on my ground rules: Clear plan for how I'll get back, when, what the price range is and who's paying it. Because people breaking your boundaries hurts you more than any potential benefit.

True but not easily implementable. I don't know how to actually get words out in some timely way, and it's too easy for [redacted] and [redacted] to distract me from pressing the point.

Notice subverbal thought, snap fingers

Cool idea for training gestalt thinking, but I never remember it except right after the card comes up. I need to think of a more specific trigger, that would target especially useful times to work in nonverbal concepts.

If there's a choice with many options, write down the top level clusters. Assessment time is less valuable than time spent implementing and pivoting; better to map the option space and pick with random number generator.

I think randomization is a very useful tool to avoid systematic bias, and I think people underutilize it. However, intuition and precedent are also very useful heuristics. Making a good decision about when to leverage which technique requires some technical understanding. That judgment has to be trained, and can't be replaced with a simple habit recommendation.

When work is boring, have fun

I was trying to learn a motto as if it were a habit. Have Fun is not actually an action though.

When I'm confused in conversation, say "Wow, I did not understand that. In particular, X."

When I felt confused or overwhelmed, I would silently shut down and stop contributing or paying attention, which was a problem because some of the really interesting conversations in the Bay Area get very confusing. This habit was meant to give me an opening back into an information-dense conversation. I didn't get a chance to use it before I moved to Utah. My current biggest concern is shutting down in important office meetings, and its phrasing is too brazen to use there.

The most common psychological effect posited to explain the surge of suicides in May and June is the broken promise effect; people think things will get better in the spring, and then they don't

Apparently the May/June suicide phenomenon used to be larger and is now disappearing (acc. to data in switzerland). I got this card secondhand, its source is a NY times article, and it's an isolated factoid I don't have any other context to evaluate in.

To eat a cupcake with class, cut the bottom away from the muffin-top and place it on top of the frosting. You now have a classy cupcake sandwich.

I don't get how you're supposed to bite into the cupcake sandwich without squishing out all the frosting. This seems like only a marginal improvement, not worth memorizing.

If you can say "I think" in place of "I feel", say that instead

This is an attempt to gloss everyday language into a more NVC-friendly format. I thought this would be a strict improvement over claiming your thoughts as an emotional experience, so no one can defend ridiculous claims with "You can't say I'm wrong about my feelings!", but in practice you can still defend a lot of malicious accusations under a thin banner of "that's just my perspective!".

As I notice I'm missing knowledge, I should note to myself that my current mechanisms don't route through an important area

Too vague. The notes about "I don't understand this" just kind of pile up and make me feel stressed without providing a viable pathway to fix my blindspots.

When I'm trying to go to sleep, run through steps: Breathe. Replay my day. Mentally "turn off" body parts. Count backwards.

This is such a long instruction step I never get all the way through. Execution, especially on Replaying my day, is too varied for habit reinforcement to catch on.

When feeling suspicious/paranoid of people, make a small hand wave to draw attention to myself. Admit distrust aloud if possible and an option of how to respond to it. ("I distrust this, AND I will...")

Habitually stancing myself as if other people are out to get me really hinders my working ability and emotional wellbeing. I hoped this would break vicious isolation cycles and help me accumulate evidence for my System 1 that paranoia wasn't warranted. Unfortunately, examples of people responding well did not accumulate faster than my discomfort at forcing myself to do unsafe-feeling things.

When you're in "cold" emotional states, use your self-control to build systems that prevent poor decision-making

To the extent that I think I know how to build a "system that prevents poor decision-making", it constrains my actions too much and I have no room to build feedback cycles.

An example of using problem-solving instead of punishment with kids: "What can we work out so that you can use my tools when you need them, and so that I'll be sure they're there when I need them?"

I expect that this gets implemented a lot as "here, let me tell you an extremely constrained formulation of the problem for which the only logical solution is to do exactly what I want you to do".

Record 'bugs' on paper or in Stride app.

One of the tricks I've discovered when training a skill is to pick a concrete target I can hit on a ratio between 1:4 to 4:1, and just keep track of that ratio while ignoring the impulse to analyze what I'm doing to cause the result. (This has correlaries in neural networks with RPROP and RMSPROP.) This is supposed to operate on a similar principle of "this is just a data point". At some point it turned into a depressing commentary and lists of complaints.

One project a week

It sounds impressive to announce your intentions to do cool stuff on a regular basis. I wasn't very motivated to actually work on the stuff though.

Dan notices that his chain smoker dad has still lived to 90 without lung cancer, and infers that cigarettes aren't that bad for you. His reasoning flaw is misuse of the availability heuristic.

Misusing the availability heuristic, yes. I think the general strategy of copying your long-lived relatives' habits is actually pretty robust.

You can set up a system to self-regulate by making an action for a change that also suppresses the triggers for related actions from firing for a while

A textbook answer that will not in any way guide me to recognize or create such systems in real life.

My blog posts should first and foremost have a story arc. For any information source in a blog post, I should aim to include reproducible methods.

I fail at the stage of make myself write words, aiming for a particular writing style doesn't help much.

Tinkering vs. pure rationality techniques: overlearn the pure styles at the start, then make them your own.

Need to operationalize 'overlearn' more. I don't have good systems in place to keep up deliberate practice.

When soliciting feedback, spread my arms or make a pinching motion to denote the scope of corrective feedback I'm looking for. (Overarching changes for a prototype, or details to fix on a final draft?)

I'm not asking for in-person feedback readily enough to practice this habit. Until I am, this mostly turns into an anxious gesture to ask that people not criticize me about things I'm too fragile to think about right now.

Framework of Technical vs. Adaptive problems

Rationalists tend to favor a narrative where every problem has a technical solution, and ones you think don't are really just poorly framed or under-specified. I think this narrative encourages tilting at windmills. Adaptive-ish problems exists in the sense that there are some things that you are going just keep getting wrong, and maybe never even see from inside whatever framework you are currently using to think about your problems, no matter how many meta levels you go up. I don't think technical/adaptive carves concept-space at its joints; it's obscuring something fundamental to distinguishing kinds-of-problems.

When I'm notice anxious, perfectionist behavior, open my arms wide and say "I trust you" to myself

So hokey. It was a very good stopgap measure, but not enough.

Stretch and intentionally take up space when I enter a personal area

This is me refusing to flinch from the world before it gives me a reason to. (It's what HJPEV would do.) It's another habit where I'm trying to reverse-invoke a brainstate by replicating the outcomes it would have caused. It's not a bad idea — Fake it till you make it is a thing, stepping outside of self-reinforcing cycles is a thing. But such interventions are not powerful enough to counteract whatever common causal factor keeps regenerating these issues.

If a debuggee is giving nothing to work with, say "Some things come to mind. Let me give you four ideas.. Is it <3 examples of what I suspect>.. or something else?"

The "or something else" is a very important part, and with the way my explanations meander I don't often get to it.

My prayer...

The world as my witness I call upon you to know and be known in return The void as my jury I call upon you The damning and beautiful silence My heartbeat as signal The knock knock that matters So long as you can feel at all Nothing must stop me but that which can stop me So mote it be

It's based on a core mindset concept I recently scrapped. I tweaked this prayer too often for it to act as good anchor anyways; better to start from scratch.

#Strategic Review

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