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Similar to other people's shortform feeds, short stuff that people on LW might be interested in, but which doesn't feel like it's worth a separate post. (Will probably be mostly cross-posted from my Facebook wall.)
I was thinking of a friend and recalled some pleasant memories with them, and it occurred to me that I have quite a few good memories about them, but I don't really recall them very systematically. I just sometimes remember them at random. So I thought, what if I wrote down all the pleasant memories of my friend that I could recall?
Not only could I then occasionally re-read that list to get a nice set of pleasant memories, that would also reinforce associations between them, making it more likely that recalling one - or just being reminded of my friend in general - would also bring to mind all the others.
(This was in part inspired by Steve Andreas's notion of building a self-concept. There you build self-esteem by taking memories of yourself where you exhibited some positive quality, and intentionally associate them together under some heading such as "lovable" or "intelligent", so that they become interconnected exemplars of a quality that you have rather than being isolated instances.)
So I did, and that usual thing happened where I started out with just three or so particularly salient memories, but then in the process of writing them down my mind generated a few more, until I had quite a long list. It felt really good; now I want to write similar lists about all my close friends.
Interestingly I noticed that the majority of the memories on my list were ones where I'd helped my friend and they'd been happy as a result, rather than the other way around. This does say something about me finding it easier to help people than to ask for help, but might also be related to the finding that I've heard quoted, that giving a gift makes people happier than receiving one.
I also had somewhat the inclination to do this, when I first read about Anki on Michael Nielsen's -Aumenting Cognition, he speaks about using Anki to store memories and friends' characteristics such as food preferences (he talks about this on the section: "The challenges of using Anki to store facts about friends and family").
I did not do this because I did not want to meddle with Anki and personal stuff but I found another similar solution which is MONICA a "Personal Relationship Manager", the good thing ... (read more)
Similar to other people's shortform feeds, short stuff that people on LW might be interested in, but which doesn't feel like it's worth a separate post. (Will probably be mostly cross-posted from my Facebook wall.)