Group Rationality Diary, January 1-15

therufs

Happy new year to those who are celebrating! This is the public group rationality diary for January 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.

Next diary: January 16-31

Previous diary: December 16-31

Rationality diaries archive

Happy new year to those who are celebrating! This is the public group rationality diary for January 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.

Next diary: January 16-31

Previous diary: December 16-31

Rationality diaries archive

Meh. For the record, I didn't even downvote you, though I can see why others did. Not that we're here to judge you - but then we can't be judging the "soccer moms" of the world either. All we can do is take their attitudes at a given for the moment, and perhaps start working on the hard problem of altering these, as part of our overall goal of making the world saner.

Again, it's all well and good that you want to "give the finger to social standards". So brave, much confidence. But you can only do that properly if you understand how the standards work in the first place, and why they're what they are - otherwise, you'll simply come across as your average foolish, angsty teen, who wants to reject the world's hypocracy and set on his own path, but doesn't get that this always involves paying a high price, and more often than not fails anyway due to his inexperience and poor understanding. Most people who naïvely set out to "achieve greatness" fail due to overconfidence. It's the people that just have something to protect who can end up doing impressive things in the process, if only occasionally and almost by accident.