I've been on a years long quest to shore up a decent morning & evening routine that's not tightly coupled with the routine of the rest of my life. IE that can survive me getting sick or going oncall. This post hit me at a time when I was trying and failing to maintain a lot of simple but high value routines (Easy stuff like journaling ~ every night, remembering to take out the trash before it became a problem, etc). On it's advice I setup some relevant forfeits ... and found that it did not work for me at all, about the same level of motivation as any other task management... (read more)
You mention how yumminess positively biases for novel things. I think it also negatively biases for habitual things in ways that make not being an idiot harder.
IE, a new relationship feels a lot yummier than the same relationship with the same person 10 years later - even though that relationship is much more valuable to me personally after those 10 years than at the beginning.
There's a dynamic where we don't feel yumminess for things we have and are confident that we will continue having, even when those things are very valuable to us.
Two thoughts.
There’s also something like “always be looking for and open to improvements” - be willing to spend the time tinkering.
The way I take notes started as “everything I read gets a file” and has slowly evolved into something much more powerful simply by me noticing when I’m experiencing friction and tinkering with stuff to try and reduce that friction.
Maybe I am just really not the target audience of this post - but I did not find this very helpful.
I (and again I might normal minding here) am not surprised that Confusion, or Anger, or Fear make sense and are useful. When I have wanted to discard emotions this was not what I meant.
Rather, what doesn't make sense is the biological feedback mechanisms of some specific emotions.
Anxiety is a good intuition pump. It makes me nervous and sweaty and kinda panicked. I forget things I'd otherwise remember, I stutter and look at the floor. You're totally right that Anxiety fires when we care about things - but I know that I... (read more)
I've noticed that the principles of Evolution / Natural Selection apply to a lot of things besides the context they were initially developed for (Biology).
Examples are things like ideas / culture (memetics), technological progress, and machine learning (sort of).
Reasoning about things like history, politics, companies, etc in terms of natural selection has helped me understand the world much better than I did when I thought that natural selection applied only to Biology.
So, I'm asking here for any other ideas that are generally applicable in a similar way.
(Sorry if this has been asked before. I tried searching for it and didn't find anything, but it's possible that my phrasing was off and I missed it).
I really like the ladder metaphor and think it can generalize out to many contexts where something has to go from point A to point B.
Examples.
1. Development economics will sometimes look at what the victorians did on their path to modern wealth for advice on what development countries should do. A lot of this advice doesn't quite work as the developing world has to contend with all the ways the existence of the very wealthy west changes the landscape (cheap imports, brain drain, etc).
2. Asking my parents for life advice they'll mention the importance of getting into a cheap mortgage on a single family house ...