Third experiential pica thing is missing actual content?

Finally coming around to this one, I found that I was a bit disappointed in myself that I wasn't able to generate as many leads as I did last Bug Hunt.

While I'm maybe not perfect at keeping my identity small, when I was visiting the identity, I found that I've already been pushing on the problematic areas, to the extent that I didn't find anything interesting while examining where my identity may be too big. Following the heuristic of Inverting Advice, maybe I could invert this and ask where I might have too small of an identity? Or perhaps it can be worthwhile for me to just try to write out everywhere where I know I have identified too big of an identity in the past.

Regarding Pica, I suspect that there may be something to it, but if there is, most of it is flying under my radar. I was able to identify soda, video games, and walking as activities that may have pica-like motivations; I find that I most crave soda when I haven't been eating enough (I always enjoy soda, but perhaps I've been drinking it more than I normally would lately due to suboptimal food intake), video games I generally have a positive relationship with, but I find myself wondering if some of my motivation lately to play videogames has something to do with me not doing practical things that my mind is built to want to do. I also suspect that walking may have provided some benefits in the ancestral environment that I'm not getting from walks in the modern environment; walking used to be a mode of transport, a way of exploring one's locale, and something that could lead to discovering new resources; of course, none of these happen on my walks (aside from meeting people, but lately even that hasn't been very helpful). Maybe there is some deeper purpose my mind hopes to achieve when it tells me to go for a walk? But then, I'm not sure this is true. Maybe I just go for walks because it's good for the mind and body, when I'd otherwise be inside all day. It's a thread to pull on.

Regarding Ambition, I think that I'm already quite good at pulling things in the direction of setting crazily ambitious goals - to the extent that I've lately grown somewhat jaded at overly ambitious goals, and now I just groan when I consider a goal that doesn't seem realistic; instead of the wild excitement that Xiaoyu's heart felt when he kept doubling the intensity of his ambition, the groaning in my head just grew louder and louder as I raised the stakes. I instead decided to invert this advice, and try to make realistic goals out of the wildly ambitious goals my brain gives me, but halving the stakes until I felt confident in my ability to achieve them. I turned the goal of increasing by 1 kyu in Go every week to the goal of increasing by at least 1 kyu every month. I turned earning $1,000 every month to simply earning at least $10 every month. Another low-ball goal I generated was to just photograph a person; I'll let your imagination figure out what the original goal was.

For the daily challenge, I'll lean right into it. My most subjectively immodest ambition is to govern a city-state on the Moon with at least 250,000 inhabitants, all of whom are people who are selected according to criteria I set. Actually, I can do better than that. If I want to be as subjectively immodest as possible, I want to govern the entire Moon, with a population of at least a billion people. That's plenty immodest, and makes my heart throb with joy.

Here's an Archive.org copy of the broken Method of Rotation/Kierkegaard post

I would like to be the lead author on a patent (and one that actually represents a new development). I work on a team that has produced dozens of patents, but none in the last few years. I want to get my skills to the point where I'm genuinely pushing boundaries, and more selfishly I want to have something public to show for my work. I don't know if that'll be possible on my current team, or if this team/company's time has passed, but it's something I would find really special. 

Reflecting back on the bug list, I actually came up with relatively little more to add based on today's post. Thinking about things in terms of the themes discussed today certainly helped me reframe some of the items that were already on there, but it didn't make me come up with significantly more bugs. The list currently stands at 124 bugs, of which I've solved 26. Many of the solved bugs were simple ones related to my space and physical objects, since these ones could be quickly solved with a purchase. But I've made progress on more complicated bugs too. The highest bug that I consider to be solved is a 5/10 difficulty, failing to shower and brush my teeth on-time in the morning, which I seem to have been able to fix with a TAP. But I've got a 10/10 difficulty bug, not being sure if my current job is a good fit for my long-term happiness, that I'm making serious progress on. That one was actually remarkably easy to get started on, I told my manager that I had some available time and was interested in trying to broaden my skills, and he arranged for me to spend 1/4th of my time for the next three months working with another team in a different area. 

All-in-all, I'm pretty happy with how these first 10 days have gone, and I'm hoping that the next 10 will be similarly positive!

I'd like to win a Grammy one day. It's hard to not qualify that, or hem and haw, or excuse it. But honestly, I'd like to.

Not too many identity-related bugs came up for me, but maybe that's because I can't even see the things past my current identity. I'll be thinking about this more. 

Brainstorming around pica brought out a lot of bugs. I noticed sometimes it's easier to catch the pica than to fill the void that's left. Example: I play (real) guitar at a high level, but Guitar Hero is much more addicting in the short term, probably due to clear iterative improvement and overall lack of ambiguity - there is a clear thing to do; hit all the notes on the highest difficulty level. It's hard for me to figure out how to fulfill this need. Tracking pomodoros is the closest I've gotten to channeling this positively. 

Both the initial bug hunt and this one were by far the Hammertime tasks that took the longest - I have a lot of bugs I can list in lots of areas, so nearly every time the instructions call for a 5-minute timer I take at least twice as long adding bugs in that category. Plus this time I also added some bugs I just forgot to think of on the first try, as well as things from my Workflowy that can also be conceptualized as bugs.

I think this is useful in that it lets me organize and systematize these things and keep them all in once place. Though nearly nothing I think of is actually new. So I'm not sure if this is so much more useful than the other techniques that it justifies spending so much time on it. I guess we'll see to what extent this helps me actually solve bugs going forward!

My greatest ambition is to create a fully trainable art of rationality that’s so good it gets taught to every high schooler in the country and bankrupts multiple industries that prey on irrational behavior in the process. Although it may seem impossible, the success of anti-smoking efforts against an extremely addictive product with a massive advertising industry suggests that it's achievable, and the fact that the Internet exists now and didn't exist then suggests it's even easier than that was.

The most ambitious I could be would be spending twenty-five hours a week getting better at and doing activism for my internship.