Group Rationality Diary, May 1-15

therufs

This is the public group instrumental rationality diary for May 1-15.

It's a place to record and chat about it if you have done, or are actively doing, things like:

Established a useful new habit

Obtained new evidence that made you change your mind about some belief

Decided to behave in a different way in some set of situations

Optimized some part of a common routine or cached behavior

Consciously changed your emotions or affect with respect to something

Consciously pursued new valuable information about something that could make a big difference in your life

Learned something new about your beliefs, behavior, or life that surprised you

Tried doing any of the above and failed

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

Thanks to cata for starting the Group Rationality Diary posts, and to commenters for participating.

Previous diary: April 16-30

Next diary: May 16-31

Rationality diaries archive

This is the public group instrumental rationality diary for May 1-15.

It's a place to record and chat about it if you have done, or are actively doing, things like:

Established a useful new habit

Obtained new evidence that made you change your mind about some belief

Decided to behave in a different way in some set of situations

Optimized some part of a common routine or cached behavior

Consciously changed your emotions or affect with respect to something

Consciously pursued new valuable information about something that could make a big difference in your life

Learned something new about your beliefs, behavior, or life that surprised you

Tried doing any of the above and failed

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

Thanks to cata for starting the Group Rationality Diary posts, and to commenters for participating.

Previous diary: April 16-30

Next diary: May 16-31

Rationality diaries archive

I've been trying to study math. The problem was that I usually need the outside force of a deadline to get me to complete my studies on time instead of procrastinating indefinitely. For a while I didn't have a good solution to this problem, but recently zedzed very nicely offered to provide an artificial deadline for me. The way we're working it is as follows:

We agreed on a textbook I would us, currently Art of Problem Solving Introduction to Algebra (I discovered that I needed to back up all the way to algebra!).
We agreed on a tentative pace. That pace is still being refined, but currently stands at one chapter per week with 2 free late days per month. If I'm late and have no more free late days, my grade for that chapter is penalized by 20% for every 24 hours late.
We agreed on a grading system. The system we're using is slightly convoluted, since a lot of the problems are very challenging and I didn't want to hold it against myself if I didn't manage to answer all the hardest problems. End result is that I can technically get a grade of 120+ on many chapters, though my goal is mainly to score around 100.
I write up all my answers in LaTeX, turn it into a pdf, and email it to zedzed.
I report my grades to the LW community by posting them on the Rationality Diary thread, and zedzed confirms them.

We only started this recently. So far my grades are as follows:

I felt I already knew the first several chapters well, so I skimmed through them and only did the very hardest problems. I did not use the regular grading system for these chapters but rather just used a simple percentage of (correct answers / total number of questions attempted) * 100. Grade for Chapters 1-5: 94
Chapter 6: 100 out of 109 possible
Chapter 7: 91 out of 123 possible