This is a special post for quick takes by Alice Blair. Only they can create top-level comments. Comments here also appear on the Quick Takes page and All Posts page.
People often say "exercising makes you feel really good and gives you energy." I looked at this claim, figured it made sense based on my experience, and then completely failed to implement it for a very long time. So here I am again saying that no really, exercising is good, and maybe this angle will do something that the previous explanations didn't. Starting a daily running habit 4 days ago has already started being a noticeable multiplier on my energy, mindfulness, and focus. Key moments to concentrate force in, in my experience:
Having a friend to exercise with is surprisingly positive. Having a workout tracker app is surprisingly positive, because then I get to see a trendline and so suddenly my desire is to make it go up and stay unbroken.
Many rationalists bucket themselves with the nerds, as opposed to the jocks. The people with brains, as opposed to the people with muscles. But we're here to win, to get utility, so let's pick up the cognitive multiplier that exercise provides.
My model of ideation: Ideas are constantly bubbling up from the subconscious to the conscious, and they get passed through some sort of filter that selects for the good parts of the noise. This is reminiscent of diffusion models, or of the model underlying Tuning your Cognitive Strategies.
When I (and many others I've talked to) get sleepy, the strength of this filter tends to go down, and more ideas come through. This is usually bad for highly directed thought, but good for coming up with lots of novel ideas, Hold Off On Proposing Solutions-esque.
New habit I'm trying to get into: Be creative before bed, write down a lot of ideas, so that the future-me who is more directed and agentic can have a bunch of interesting ideas to pore over and act on.
Interesting class of miscommunication that I'm starting to notice:
A: I'm considering a job in industries 1 and 2
B: Oh I work in 2, [jumps into explanation of things that will be relevant if A goes into industry 2].
A: Oh maybe you didn't hear me, I'm also interested in industry 1.
B: I... did hear you?
More generally, B gave the only relevant information they could from their domain knowledge, but A mistook that for anchoring on only one of the options. It took until I was on both sides of this interaction for me to be like "huh, maybe I should debug this." I suspect this is one of those issues where just being aware of it makes you less likely to fall into it.
(I might write a post on this at some point.)
There's a meditation technique that I have used to improve my typing speed, but that seems pretty generalizable: Open up a typing test[1] and try to predict my mistakes in advance of them happening. This could look like my finger slipping, or running into a faulty muscle memory for a certain word, or just having a cache miss and stumbling for a second. Then, I use this awareness to not make those mistakes, ideally stopping them before they happen even once.
I've learned to type from scratch several times, going from hunt and peck to touch typing with qwerty, to touch typing colemak, to learning to use the Kinesis Advantage 2, to learning the CharaChorder 2 and its custom layout, which is now my daily driver. I only started doing this meditation about half way through learning colemak, and it noticeably boosted my accuracy in a relatively lasting way. However, it's relatively straining to meditate while also trying to type as fast as you can, especially on the CharaChorder because it has an entirely new type of cognitive load that I'm learning.
I would probably generalize this if I was trying to get really good at another DEX-reliant skill, but for now I'm not. It feels related to the part of me that more generally notices when I'm Predictably Wrong, but in practice it felt like a meaningfully different thing to train.