laakeus

Its seems its very easy for OP to be productive, because he's very intelligent.

I think intelligence and productiveness are inversely correlated.

Well, I didn't exactly state any particular experiments in the above post, but I did get some results.

First, the system of measuring my time worked just fine. RescueTime and similar software products do this as well and I encourage anyone considering doing experiments on yourself to get one or arrange a system like I did and then just start measuring. You'll get a nice baseline to compare to. It's surprisingly difficult to notice a significant difference and if you don't have a quantitative approach and historical data, it might be impossible to say if som... (read more)

I updated by beliefs based on the criticisms of the studies and I now feel confident in my expectations about parental influence.

I'm curious as to what your updated beliefs are on parental influence. Can you summarize in couple of paragraphs?

(I think the original description matches how I view the issue, but I feel the topic doesn't have enough importance for me to spend a lot of time trying to update my beliefs.)

A related note is that the neurophysiological effect of the epiphany wears out really quickly. I haven't studied which neurotransmitters exactly produce the original good feeling, but I remember reading (apologies for not having a source here) that the effect is pretty strong for the first time, but fails to produce pretty much any neurological effect after just few repeats. By repeats, I mean thinking about the concept or idea and perhaps writing about it.

In another words, say you get a strong epiphany and subsequent strong feeling that some technique, f... (read more)

I would argue based on my own experience, that it is very difficult to maintain this type of attention when practicing any type of complex skill. I think the typical pattern of rapid learning at the beginner stage and then stopping improving completely is the result of mind resisting continuous, persistent attention. The beginner's state of mind is not a pleasant one to be in and we want to start feeling comfortable quickly. Easiest way to do this is to stop paying so close attention. I don't think this is an explicit decision. It's just our tendency to no... (read more)

I think any article proposing a solution to procrastion would do well to relate to pjeby's Improving The Akrasia Hypothesis. I'm not saying that the hypothesis there is necessarily the right one, but what seems to be lacking in these types of systems is exactly what pjeby's article is describing. Namely, how the system is going to help to resolve particular conflicts. I don't think this algorithm proposes any novel approaches to conflict resolutions. (Note that I'm not saying that the article itself isn't useful.)

Of course, you could claim that the hypothesis is not useful. But if so, it might be worth mentioning explicitly.

I do accept that the equation is a pretty accurate description of akrasia and has been proven empirically, but personally I've found that the type of strategy OP proposes is not effective for me.

First, the crucial steps of the algorithm require the exact same mental resources that are missing when I have the worst bouts of procrastination. When it's clear that I'm procrastinating because I haven't divided the task into smaller subtasks, the idea of doing this division is as difficult as it is to try to start the task itself.

Second, the attacking part of ... (read more)

For what it's worth, the book has been published and should answer anyone's questions on the subject. I have it, but I've only just began to read it. The book might be somewhat disappointing to some people in the sense that not everything falls in place once you hear the theory. The theory is rather blunt, but sounds convincing so far.

They have a summary of the theory in the introduction:

"Our brains are engaged full time in real-time (risky) heuristic search, generating presumptions about what will be experienced next in every domain. This time-press... (read more)

You may want to warn people that "a large amount of hands" means in the order of hundred thousand hands and more.

And to be more exact, variance only goes down relative to the expected winnings. The standard deviation of a sample increases as a square root to the number of hands. Whereas the expected winnings increases linearly. In Limit Hold'em, a 1,5BB/100 hands expected winrate just barely covers two standard deviations from the mean over 100,000 hands. Experienced player can perhaps play 4-6 tables simultaneously, which means that he can accu... (read more)

One thing I always forget to mention: when you start sleeping more, you will probably notice that you feel drowsier during daytime for a while. If you consistently sleep more, the drowsiness will wear off. But this is why many people complain about "sleeping too much" or not becoming alert after sleeping exceptionally long. It's your brain's way of saying you should sleep more.

I haven't seen any good explanations for this effect, but I think it's simply to get yourself more "hungry" of sleep when you do have time for it.

1. I fall asleep during the day. I've tried getting more hours of sleep at night and it doesn't solve the problem. When I'm bored or confused, my body says "Naptime!" It can be quite embarrassing.

There are two primary things that determine your alertness (or drowsiness) during day-time: sleep debt and circadian phase. The more sleep debt you have, the more tired you feel during the day. If you have significant amounts of sleep debt it might take weeks to decrease the sleep debt to normal levels.

Then you have circadian alerting, which makes... (read more)

Use Self Control to block all my entertainment internet sites during "working hours" (I'll leave early mornings and/or late nights free.)

I find that the best indication of being productive is that I don't need any external blocking mechanisms.

On the other hand, when I'm in slumber, no amount of self-restriction makes any difference. It only makes my overall feeling worse.

There are different types of conflicts some of which can be treated with this type of thinking. If procrastinating doesn't feel worse than working, then your mental conflict is of different type. (I personally can relate to what EY is talking about.)

The bigger problem is that, depending on the type of conflict that causes the procrastination, the brain is very resistant against these types of insights. The insight works for a short while and sooner than you realize (or to be more exact, don't realize), your brain finds a way to side-step this trick.

I'm particularly perplexed by the claim that war would be solved by higher intelligence. Many wars are due to ideological priorities. I don't see how you can expect necessarily (or even with high probability) that ideologues will be less inclined to go to war if they are smarter.

Violence has been declining on (pretty much) every timescale: Steven Pinker: Myth of Violence. I think one could argue that this is because of greater collective intelligence of human race.

I like this way of putting it.

It maybe more useful in practice too, but like Rodolfo Llinás hypothesizes: all we can do, as humans, is to activate motor neurons. So thinking is fundamentally just internalized movement.

A book about the subject is coming out early next year, called Inside Jokes.

There's also a video from Dennett's talk, but that too ends too short. Nevertheless, Dennett manages to get into the subject matter. You can get the gist of it looking these videos and the book excerpt, but still not quite enough.