I stopped procrastinating as much and kept more organized. I also spent more overall time on productive activities.
The wearing off was just a slow gradient of falling back into my usual level of productivity. I didn't notice it immediately as it was happening, only upon reflection.
Fortunately it just barely managed to get archived:
http://web.archive.org/web/20070901222628/http://felicifia.com/showDiary.do?diaryId=89
That's a good idea. It seems to work but the thought takes a little while to convincingly construct.
It switches from current to future in 10-30 minutes. Future to far-future is not a hard limit. I just meant that I want my future self's work to eventually pay off.
First, realize, that you're inherently time-locked: the current self is the only one on which you have some amount of control
Actually, I have managed to cause short-term changes in productivity to my future self but they tend to slowly wear off. This makes me optimistic that there are self-sustaining solutions.
I don't like doing much work. I would however, like my future self to do work so that my far future self will have better opportunities.
To clarify, I want these things for each specified self:
The problem is, I expect that my future self will feel the same way and also want immediate gratification. What can I do now to achieve all 3 of those goals? How can I manipulate my future self into doing more work without having to do much work right now?
In HTML, URLs must begin with the protocol or they will be assumed to be relative paths.
Change your code to felicifia.org.
I'm suspicious that the solution is so simple. If academic recursive self-improvement were as straightforward as you imply, wouldn't somebody somewhere be making a killing off of it?
which to make matters depressing, I'm not even sure we have any more [w.r.t "societies [sic] truth seeking mechanism"]
If society no longer had a mechanism for finding truth would you still expect there to be regular technological and scientific discoveries like there are today?
I will attempt to do so but I have no way of knowing whether this is accurate or it is just the best rationalization my brain came up with. In addition, I know very little of psychology and my attempt at introspection is probably inadequate to give much useful information.
If I introspect while making a decision I can notice a succession of feelings in response to each other. I tried reflecting upon the experience of making a poor decision and explicitly noticing the affective factors that influenced my decision. I constructed a new feeling which I thought would promote productivity. I attempted to suppress thoughts supporting the poor decision while promoting my constructed feeling whenever I was making a decision related to productivity.