From what I remember, Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids contains only a very short mention of how to inspire good behavior in children - essentially the advice to punish consistently, especially including funny or endearing offenses. The more I think about this, the more it seems to me that discipline itself is the practice of training the same response to an increasing range of stimuli.
Progress in Vipassana, and in meditation in general, comes from engaging with fewer and fewer distractions. Progress in habits comes from decreasing the number of times that you allow some override or excuse to change your plans. Progress in security comes from shrinking the number of people you make exceptions for, maybe because you don't want to be mean to them or there are extenuating circumstances. Progress in being a fair parent comes from providing the same consequences for the same actions, even if one of your children's actions gets a warmer reaction from you.
This isn't to say that discipline is the only virtue, or that you ought to seek discipline for its own sake; some excuses do rise above the threshold of acceptability. But the point of training discipline is, in a nutshell, to have consistent reactions to stimuli that invite inconsistent ones.
I've been writing things in one form or another for about 13 years, and I've passed the first "million bad words" every writer's said to have. I've also released around 200 rap songs under different names, which tends to come off lower-status but is no less dear to me. (I would consider 500-1000 songs to be the equivalent "bad" cutoff, though.) Since these are the things I've spent the longest time learning and practicing, I want to see if I can apply anything in them to learning and practicing in general. Here are my thoughts so far:
Failure to apply a lesson is usually failure to register its relevance to your life. Don't look for the moments where you try and retry but your effort doesn't bear fruit, look for gaps between what you learn/know and your world-model.
This is one reason to make beliefs pay rent in expectations, and to ensure that all the nodes in your model of the world are hooked up to something. The go-to example of this being Feynman's story of students who understood the math of refraction indices but not that water was a refraction index, leaving them unable to use what they'd learned. I read that example years back and then fell into the exact same trap, because it's a story about science education and not general thought.
In my own experience, the most powerful moment of this so far was realizing my trans-ness, which is also my greatest "oops" moment. I'd found some internet content centered around trans people, including lists of potential signs that a person is trans and hasn't realized yet. I knew these signs applied to some people, but I also thought the net they cast was far, far too broad because, after all, half of them even applied to me! (Looking back, I sometimes laugh at the utter lack of self-awareness present in that thought.)
I already knew people could be trans, and I don't think more information on that front would have helped anything. The realization that changed the course of my life really was just that I counted as people too.
I think the logic behind this is that we handle many many concepts and not all of them will apply in our lives, so the onus tends to be set pretty high for a piece of information to become relevant to us. There's a default sense of immunity or exclusion to new concepts, even when we take them on knowing they surely must apply to something.
To handle catastrophizing, you have to first grasp that the thing you're doing that seems to have traits in common with it probably isn't a special edge case or a false alarm - and that the reason it hasn't jumped out at you sooner as an example of catastrophizing is that you weren't focusing on it. And if you read a guide to something like negotiation, the techniques involved will avail you nothing until you find reason to believe that you're engaging in negotiations. Application rests on these kinds of understanding.
Related to half-assing things with all you've got, I've noticed that there's often a limit to how much you can succeed at a given task. If you write a paper for a class worth an A+ it's certainly still possible to improve the paper, just not in the context of the course.
The Buddhist teacher Chogyam Trungpa once put this as "You will never be decorated by your guru." In the presence of a master, your development of your art will never blow their mind and leave them deeply impressed - and if it did, it would only be a signal that you're in need of a different master. It cannot be another way.
Thus, we should recognize success by the context we expect it to appear in, or the person who will be measuring it, and calibrate accordingly.
I have yet to meet the opinion in the wild that the humanities are better or more worthy of study than STEM, and I'm skeptical that a degree in, say, entomology has anything like the market of a science like physics. (That said, from some cursory checks I'm surprised at the level to which a non-applied math degree seems to affect one's career, although I'm suspicious that the STEM label lets it get lumped in during analyses with potentially higher earners like statistics, physics and engineering.) And my courses were largely on subjects like web design, running radio stations and using AV equipment, which I wouldn't put under the same heading as studying history or literature in any case.
More to the point, though, would this line of thinking have saved me my present headache? I knew at the time that STEM was more marketable, of course, but I still underestimated how little my own degree would do for me - I assumed that I would do something in an office setting and be a writer at night. I can't even chock it up to the degree itself being terrible or just a big counter-signal for the eccentric elite, because plenty of my classmates went on to at least have decent desk-jobs.
Despite all of that, though, if I'd really believed that mathematics or engineering was the only path and that my stalling at precalculus level would simply have to be overcome - that it was this or nothing, in a nutshell - then I think I would've chosen a better direction.
I've done scientific research not at all, but I've been cooking for friends and roommates for about six years. Last night I had a lot of bagels I wasn't going to eat, so I tore them into small pieces, soaked them in an egg mixture and baked them into a French toast casserole. It's not a recipe I've ever made before, but I did know for instance that the amount of milk in the egg mixture wasn't actually very important. I think part of this is that I've made French toast many times; the simpler the recipe, the more it can be iterated.
In contrast, one roommate of mine is learning to cook, and she'll do things like carefully working out every bubble of a box-mix cake batter. In my experience this is far more care than necessary, and I think this is because experience highlights the steps in the process that are more crucial.
The recipe innovations I see most often are those that try to rebuild a recipe or a taste without one or more ingredients or steps, like gluten-free pasta or no-bake cookies. Some recipes we understand very well, like bread, and people have reinvented some version of it for almost any shortage in ingredients. Perhaps this could lead to a better development of scientific taste - how would you achieve a similar study if the p-value were lowered substantially, or you had a different sample size?
I'm skeptical that reading LessWrong helps; I had the Sequences and HPMOR under my belt well before I graduated. I also received the advice that I should take something like a business degree, though maybe not often or forcefully enough to sink in. If someone had taken me to one side, shook me by the shoulders and told me in no uncertain terms the difficulties I'd have, I want to think I'd have chosen differently.
I think cynicism often assumes an unreasonable level of hindsight, though. If we were in another branch of the multiverse where I'm an assistant librarian or working HR somewhere, it would be wrong of me to say that I'd overvalued my degree. And of course I may wind up doing one of those things, in which case it was good for me to have a degree after all, but if I had perfect foresight on graduation day I'd have done something else in the few years between getting the degree and getting the position.
Thinking more about it, I think one of the major factors in these traps is that avoiding them codes them as final actions. There's a gun on the mantle you never touch, and when you finally pull it down in an act of desperation it winds up being jammed from so many years of disuse. Or there's money in your mattress you never even look at for a decade, and then when you need it the most half of it's vanished. In real life last resorts don't really exist - a problem that no available solution will work on can at least be broken into smaller problems on which further solutions can be attempted.
Thus it was written, "The repeated failures didn't matter, they only led into the next action in the chain - but he still needed a next action -"
Consider these two cases:
I've had experiences like these, even today. And I think the root of much learned helplessness in my life stems from situations like these where things are measurably worse than I'd thought possible. I would call this insufficient cynicism, but I think it's a combination of both overvaluing the likelihood and value of certain options combined with flinching away from thinking about them too closely.
Some options don't work out, and some options are painful to consider, but options that are both can be generators of helplessness and bitterness. I graduated early with a degree in Communications, and my experiences since have made my wish dearly that I'd made different choices; looking back, what would need to be different for me to predict that this achievement would make no actual difference to my career?
Thanks for listening to them! I have mixed feelings about most of what I make, but I think those songs are alright. My approach to making music does tend to strike a lot of different chords in a small space, but it's more that I just feel like writing in one or two tones doesn't really fit the ideas I have - most of my songs start as a list of concepts, and I rarely have an album's worth of concepts that all fit together in the way other albums do.
A lot of those effects are just baked into the beats, which I had to use because I was scouring the Free Music Archive for CC-licensed material. I like the ticking in Zeitnot, too, which was the big influence in what the song ultimately became, but I agree sometimes the tracks would be better without them.
I also want to say that a couple days ago I relistened to AFAD, my Doxy album, and was pleasantly surprised at how well it holds up for me after six months of not thinking much about it.