How much serendipity is too much?

Twice now, within the month-to-date, I've started seriously looking into an idea and, within a week or two, a directly related post finds its way to the HackerNews front page. As far as I know, HN doesn't have a personalization engine that could've tracked me across the internet to show these to me specifically.

I don't mean to imply anything crazy is going on here -- it's entirely possible that some decent subsection of the HN cohort was primed in some way, and I'm perfectly aware of the frequency bias (and more vulnerable to it right now, for unrelated reasons). It just got me thinking; at what point is it appropriate to assume phenomena like this isn't random? I have no idea what my prior odds for this would be, especially given the rise to front page specifically.

You offer a really interesting point. I don't think I feel as sharply bad about having to context switch as you do, but it very well could be that I still register a similar bad feeling, and simply react to it by doing nothing as opposed to being productive and then having to go through a context switch.

I hadn't really thought about it as a response to stimulus like that, but I guess that's because I have a more subtly bad feeling when switching contexts, so there wasn't as obvious of a thing to associate my behavior with.

Anecdotally, I remember seeing analyses of Stockfish v. Alpha Zero (I think) where AlphaZero would fairly consistently trade absurd amounts of materiel for position. While there is obviously still a tipping point at which a materiel advantage will massively swing the odds I feel that the thrust of this essay kind-of understates the value of a lot-a lot of intelligence in light of those matches.

With that said, I haven't seen any odds-games with AlphaZero, so perhaps my point is entirely moot and it does need that initial materiel as badly as Stockfish.

Ah. I had no idea that this was symptomatic of ADHD. I happen to have an appointment with a psychiatrist coming up for reasons unrelated, so I suppose it might be worth bringing up. Thank you for the insight, and sorry the post was so trite.

Something that I struggle badly with is valuing (and meaningfully using) small chunks of free time. I feel that I am more inclined to waste a forty-five minute block of free time between classes than I am to waste, say, the entire end of a day.

What I feel is that I cannot meaningfully engage with an activity if I suspect that I might be forced to stop before I'd like to, and I'm not sure that that is an entirely incorrect intuition. After all, there is certainly a loss incurred by context-switching, and perhaps leaving business unfinished in one task while being whisked away to another will make my performance on that other task worse. Anecdotally, I recently started programming for personal projects again, and on the occasions where I decided to start programming even an hour before class, I wouldn't really be able to put my work down -- I'd instead continue to program through my lectures. So, perhaps this intuition is actually my System 2 trying to save me from hurting myself academically?

So, maybe the moral I need to take from this is that I should both be less averse to starting things during small windows of time, and that I should find a way to make myself more inclined to actually put a task down (maybe by making it easier to resume?)

I'd be delighted to hear from anyone who has or had a similar problem, and how they went about solving it.

Last night, I had a dream that scared me awake. I suspect that this was some sort of response to a low heart rate, because when I woke, I noticed that my lips were rather cold, and my heart was now beating rather quickly. I've often heard of dreams of falling being a way for the mind to correct for this kind of danger, but I've failed to find any evidence for that with some quick searches.

If true, though. this would be interesting because it would suggest that some part of my brain has a model of "things I put myself through that I would fear enough to cause an elevated heartrate." I typically consider things like that to be exclusively (stimulus -> response) events in the brain, so some part of me that could work backwards from a visceral response without my conscious faculties would change that perception considerably.

Granted, I can't say for sure that anything like what I describe happened here, because I don't actually know that my heartrate was low to begin with, and I think an experiment designed to show that (low heartrate -> scary dream to elevate heartrate) in some or most cases is probably beyond my means.

That said, if anyone has a recommendation for a device to track sleep, and more specifically heartrate during sleep, please let me know. It could be worth keeping a journal to see (anecdotally) the relation between the two things.

I may, at some point, and for other reasons. Lets say, if I were to start drinking some rather foul-tasting protein or something -- it would be nice to potentially taste less of that. But, in general, deliberately and severely impairing my ability to taste the things I like for about two weeks, only to be able to taste in that way for a meal or two post-recovery is probably not the sort of tradeoff that I'd find myself making regularly.

Recently, I had a strange reaction to Sensodyne Whitening and Gum Sensitivity toothpaste. As luck would have it, I happen to fall into the subset of the population that lose much of their ability to taste certain flavors after using the toothpaste for a couple of days.

I happened to catch on pretty quickly and ended up switching toothpastes within the week, but it still resulted in about two weeks where I could not taste salt, and could hardly taste anything sour, sweet, or whatever makes buffalo sauce taste like buffalo sauce. It felt like I was coating my mouth with flavorless lard, in case anyone was curious.

What I found most fascinating about this experience came after my tongue recovered. Despite only having lacked those tastes for about two weeks, my perception of them became a lot stronger -- apple juice, which I previously would not have called sour, suddenly seemed to have a bit of a twang to it (which is to say nothing for how sweet it was). The taste of salt, surprisingly, did not become overwhelming without amounts that I'd regularly consider to be a lot.

I suppose that this shouldn't be particularly surprising -- this happens with vision. For example, staring at the color yellow, and then looking at a black background will show you a stygian blue, which is impossible to perceive normally. Still, I find this interaction fascinating, and have to wonder what might happen if I were to blind myself for a couple of days, or deprive myself of sound or smell. I must also note that it's incredibly disappointing that I will likely never taste apple juice in that way again, it was probably one of the best drinks I've ever had.

That's a very interesting outlook -- I haven't really considered action being a sum of motivations up until now. So, I guess my question then would be, what does encouraging/discouraging sources of intrinsic motivation look like for you?

This is a very interesting approach, and one that I haven't really considered. I fear that the temptation to start from scratch might be quite strong, but then I suppose that having very good documentation serves to blunt that problem in the first place.