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Request for advice:
Like many people on lesswrong, I probably lie towards the smart end of the bell curve in terms of intelligence, but I'm starting to suspect that I lie somewhere below the mean in terms of ability to focus, concentrate, and direct my attention.
I only recently became concerned about this because it wasn't much of a problem when I was in school. There, I was able to do acceptably well overall by doing well in the subjects that came easily to me without working hard (science, maths... you know the score) and mediocrely in those that didn't. Ditto my undergrad/bachelor's degree.
But I'm currently struggling rather with the thesis project for my master's degree in computer science. The specifics of the thesis itself don't matter, other than that it's a piece of empirical/numerical research involving a lot of coding and a prose write-up. None of the technical aspects of it are beyond me, and yet I feel like in some way it's the first very difficult thing I've ever tried, really tried, at. The hard part is sustaining interest over the whole length of the thing, planning and organizing the overarching, erm, arc of the project as a whole, and forming a 'narrative' out of all the hard-won bits and pieces of data. (I suppose the fact that I feel fairly sure that the project is likely to find a negative result (i.e. that the method under inspection doesn't offer any gains over simpler methods) also doesn't help my motivation.) Luckily, I did well enough in the taught part of my course that I only need to get a mediocre mark in this part in order to get a 'merit' overall.
But I'm also concerned about how this bodes for my future career. I'd like to do well in work, but I'm beginning to wonder whether I'm deficient in a skill which would allow me to do much better.
To convey what I'm talking about: often when I'm trying to work at home I flit between coding for work, reading, coding for fun, listening to music, etc., etc., etc., and consequent don't engage with any of them very deeply, or get much done. Also, I have almost always taken a very long time to get to sleep, often an hour or more, because I find it hard to 'switch off' my brain when I'm in bed and have decided it's time to go to sleep. (I've recently been making the paradoxical attempt to try very hard to switch my brain off and stop thinking in bed, with, surprisingly, some limited success.)
I feel like I lack the five-second level skill to suppress (or at least, to decline to pursue) any old interesting thought which appears while I'm doing something else.
Things I've attempted:
Things I've considered but haven't attempted:
Any experience with any of the above, speculation on which of them might bear fruit, or suggestions of completely different ideas welcome.
Is this the sort of thing that can be 'trained' through willpower? It seems like a fairly 'deep', even a fundamental, aspect of brain function, so I wonder how plastic such a thing is. Any thoughts on this welcome also.
Finally, am I just worrying too much about this? I was recently heartened to come across this Nassim Nicholas Taleb quote:
If you get easily bored, it means that your BS detector is functioning properly; if you forget (some) things, it means that your mind knows how to filter; and if you feel sadness, it means that you are human.
Perhaps I just have a very stringent bullshit detector. Evidence in favour of this proposal: I think I am able to focus extremely well on personal projects (typically things that I code for fun and find intrinsically rewarding). In fact, when I stop those, it's less often from boredom and more by guiltily tearing myself away in order to get back to my "real" work. (On the other hand, perhaps there's such a thing as a too-stringent bullshit detector - one so stringent as to give false positives.)
Summary: I'm concerned that my focus/concentration skills are significantly worse than average, and that this could be detrimental to my outcomes in life. How can I improve them?
I just want to say that this is extremely similar to my struggles with a Master's degree. Mine is in geology, so your username continues the parallels amusingly. I'm a bit further along, with some marginal successes in efficiency. Here are some of the tactics that I have tried:
*Excercise. My diet is pretty terrible, but regular exercise to offset that has been invaluable. I used weight lifting (if I have a high-calorie diet, then I might as well put the energy to use)- the 5x5 schedule is a good way to gamify things a bit without introducing more complexity than its mindshare allows. This is probably the most useful habit that I have been able to maintain.
*Nootropics. Cautiously. 500mg Choline and about 1600mg Piracetam per day. These are cheap and extremely safe, with moderate-to-questionable benefits. Under this regimen, I have seen quantifiable improvements, including competitive game performance and concentration length. The placebo effect is a strong contender, but rationality means winning, so why not? Previously, I relied on caffeine as my performance enhancer, but the addictive downsides became distracting at the volumes I was using. I don't know much about Modafinil, however.
*Pens. This one may be very specific to me and my response to tactile stimuli, but the consequences are good enough to be worth a shot. For the prose sections of your thesis, write in pen on paper. The paper doesn't matter, but make sure to use a very comfortable pen (the Pilot G2 is my brand). This has three benefits- one, it adds a physicality to the process of writing, which helps to fight distraction with a range of physical inputs that a computer doesn't provide. (Roughly similar to the process of reading or writing in a public place with white noise and background activity, I think.) Two, it is very hard to delete everything you just wrote and start over. This increases the volume of writing your produce in any given time interval, although it will need considerable editing after the fact. Three, it means that you can write in a room without computer or internet access. Leave your phone elsewhere, and you've taken away a large majority of potential distractions. If your brain is missing a detail, it is often possible to just bracket the [thing you don't remember] and keep writing, rather than stopping to look it up and risking an infinite Wikipedia loop.
*Meditation. I tried this also, with some success- that is, I can achieve the mental state usually described as the desired goal. Detachment, hyper-awareness, etc. Philosophically, it has been extremely interesting to see the consequences of this achievement, but it didn't improve productivity any. In fact, the results may have been negative (see 'detachment'). Piercing the veil of the self is not a particularly efficient way to accumulate utils, but it does lower stress.
*Natural light patterns. Try to find a workspace with large windows and plenty of sunlight. Then, avoid turning on room lights except during 'daylight' hours. If you live in high latitudes, you may prefer to artificially extend your light periods to a full twelve hours during the winter. After the sun/'sun' goes down, dim your monitor significantly. This will regulate your sleeping schedule (and thus help build other habits). It will also keep you connected to other humans a bit better, which can stave off loneliness and increase happiness in subtle ways. And of course, this is also a good way to keep up your vitamins and so on.
*Accountability. I am much more productive when I am making regular status updates, with explicit expectations, to the people around me. My proposal was rapidly completed as soon as I began weekly meetings with my advisor, for example. But interested friends can be just as useful, as long as they're reasonably competent to understand what you have achieved, and willing to spend a few minutes at regular intervals discussing your accomplishments. This is up there with my lifting routines in terms of importance, but your mileage may vary depending on your relationship with social power structures.
To emphasize, none of these were a magic bullet that changed my overall lifestyle. There's still a very obvious pattern of procrastination, distraction, and last-minute binge work, and like you, I'm getting really nervous about how this will manifest itself in my career.
It's also the case that a master's degree is really, really hard to get, and the ability to summon an entire thesis from the ether is a part of that difficulty. Most people probably could not achieve such a degree at all; framing your struggles in terms of a deficiency relative to some loosely-defined average is unrealistic and unhelpful. This is true for your colleagues as well- each is an outlier, and the motivating factors that got them to this point are not likely to be directly comparable to your own. You are awesome enough that the bell-curve is not a useful self-assessment, so focus on tactics and not on placing yourself along a continuum.
Thanks for the thoughtful response.
Exercise: I recently started a regime of 2 x 1 hour bodyweight sessions / week with a friend of mine, but we haven't had a session in a while because he recently took an injury boxing. I think I'll start running on my own so I'm not so tied to that one activity (and in accordance with the advice in Optimal Exercise).
Pens: I actually like this advice. On the other hand, I use vim, a programmer's editor, to write everything (including my prose), and I love love love it. (I'm even writing this reply in it.) The 'feel' (not only tactile) of being able to shunt text around so effortlessly (at the paragraph, sentence, clause, word level) is so pleasant that it's hard to give up. On the other hand, there is some sense to what you say about working without a computer.
Natural light patterns: Good thinking. I work in a room with great sunlight during the day; so far so good. But a while ago my monitor broke, and I was able to fix it only by jettisoning its buttons. (Long story.) End result: my monitor is stuck on full brightness all the time. I just checked, though, and I found a linux program (Redshift) capable of adjusting the monitor brightness and colour temperature based on the time of day. I installed it and it seems to work; perhaps it will help. The lamp I use for reading at night also has a slightly harsh, blue-ish hue to it, though it isn't excessively bright. I'll see if I can do something about that, too.
Accountability: Hmmm. I'll think about this. It's certainly the case that periods of poor work correlate with seeing my tutor less. The causation isn't just one-way, though: I'm also less likely to want to see him when things are going slowly. (Perhaps there's something of a nasty positive feedback loop going on here.)
It's also the case that a master's degree is really, really hard to get, and the ability to summon an entire thesis from the ether is a part of that difficulty. Most people probably could not achieve such a degree at all; framing your struggles in terms of a deficiency relative to some loosely-defined average is unrealistic and unhelpful. This is true for your colleagues as well- each is an outlier, and the motivating factors that got them to this point are not likely to be directly comparable to your own. You are awesome enough that the bell-curve is not a useful self-assessment, so focus on tactics and not on placing yourself along a continuum.
Thanks. This actually did help.
But I'm also concerned about how this bodes for my future career.
Then get a job where you will have a boss who keeps you on track by monitoring your short-term progress. For many people college is the only time when they have neither a parent nor boss who pushes them to succeed.
Some things I tried:
Compassion meditation. It doesn't seem as cool as attention-focusing meditation, but it associates pleasant feelings with meditating. Such associations can be useful when you later need to calm yourself down while doing the attention-focusing meditation.
My problem with work is often that I try to avoid even thinking about the work. When I should be doing the work, it is difficult to focus, but when I don't have to work, I completely avoid it in my mind. The problem is, with the things I am successful at, this doesn't happen. It's the other way round: even when I'm not doing them, I keep thinking about them. And I suspect that this thinking is a critical component. So now I sometimes try to think about the work when not working. It's emotionally easier, because it is without the pressure of having to do it right now. And sometimes I have a good idea, which I can use later. Maybe a good strategy would be to go away from the work physically, for a few minutes, but stay with the work mentally. Not typing on the keyboard isn't the problem; not thinking about the project is.
Also, organizing my thoughts is easier when I keep notes on paper. It is easier to split a big problem to smaller parts, when I write them down. Especially when my mind tries to not think about the topic. I mean, if in my mind I realize this problem has a subproblem, and the subproblem has a subsubproblem... that feels like the right moment to run away from everything. However, if I write the subproblem and the subsubproblem on the paper, then I can decide to just focus on the subsubproblem, and temporarily ignore the rest. The algorithm is: "Either it's easy, and I solve it immediately, or it is difficult, and then I write down why specifically it is difficult, what needs to be solved first... and then I resursively focus on the subproblems. At some moment the subproblem is so easy there is just no excuse not to do it. (And if you have an excuse not to do the task, you don't have an excuse not to write down why specifically the task is so difficult.)"
The usual disclaimer: what works for me doesn't have to work for other people.
Did you try lukepros Algorithm for Beating Procrastination?
From your description I take it that the expectancy of the task is moderate (you reliably gain a degree), but its value is partly low: Personally you gain a degree but the thesis itself provides little value on which you could build and which might be intrinsically important for you.
The main problems seem to be delay as is often the case with thesis work. I'd think that your experience with pomodoros should help here: You could break down the thesis into parts, espl. the prose parts.
I'm not clear about your impulsiveness. It appears that you never had to work hard and were able to follow your interests. I can relate to that as it was the same for me. It is kind of a flaw of our society to make some things too easy (not that I'd cry about it). It can hurt us in the long run though. I got out easy: I found a motivation to work hard: Family, esp. my children.
You have to make your mind up on this. I'm not even entirely clear whther procrastination is a bad thing: It's our sobconscious way of telling us that the work has no or may not have long-term potential.
The life hygiene issues of exercise, sunshine, good sleep, social support are all helpful in getting stuff done.
Beyond that, don't rely exclusively on your working memory for keeping track of all of the things you need to do. You are already taxing that with learning, and offloading everything you can to external aids is helpful (todo lists, experimental journals, daily 3 page mind-dump journaling). A regular review cycle of what you have written can give you a sense of accomplishment, which can be lacking in multi-year projects with few intermediate wins. Count volume of output as a goal, and use beeminder or something similar to remind you to track it, and show you what you have accomplished (pages written, commits made, hours worked...).
Not a medical professional and so on.
Difficulty focusing and difficulty to sleep can be symptoms of underlying emotional issues like depression. In countries with universal health care a consultation with a psychologist is usually free for a number of sessions to rule out something like this. Though the symptoms are quite similar to "being tired and having a headache" w.r.t. somatical issues as they appear with nearly every syndrome.
First of course check if you do the bare minimum: Eating healthy and exercising at least two times a week. Then you should worry about underlying issues.
Be careful what you argue for.
For the longest time I was opposing nationalism and the concept of citizenship. I researched the issue, read and crafted arguments in favour of my position and convinced myself that this is a rational opinion to have. Then some things happened that made me feel more connected to the soil I was born on. Still I feel that my identity is not determined by my passport but my previous arguments seem a whole lot less convincing and the arguments I dismissed as unreasonable seem more convincing.
The quest to be more rational is one of the more humbling things I ever did with the hardest lesson to learn being that I am wrong very often and my beliefs are largely not rational.
Maybe the risk is in trying to argue for our positions more strongly than we actually feel them. More extreme positions feel higher-status... but then comes the moment when one realizes "oops, I actually don't feel this", and the pendulum swings to the opposite direction.
Sometimes we are pushed to an extreme position by people who argue for the opposite extreme position. They keep giving arguments for one side... and to argue with them, we focus on the arguments for the other side.
Of course we shouldn't underestimate the impact of peer pressure. But that's a bad reason to change opinions. On the other hand, realizing that one's position isn't truly as extreme as it seemed originally, and updating towards the true position, that is a good reason.
The term "nationalism" is used in at least two very different ways. The particularist use is more accurately termed "national chauvinism", usually but not always ethnically-based, is the idea that one's own nation is in some way better than all the others, and the interests of its people should be accorded disproportionate weight. Note that this kind of nationalist doesn't necessarily care about political organization outside of his own country; he has an ideology about his nation, not necessarily about nations in general.
I would agree that used in this sense, "nationalism" is basically indefensible.
There is a different, generalist use of the term "nationalism," however, which traces academically to people like Ernest Gellner, and philosophically, arguably back to people like Friedrich List. Nationalism in this sense, is merely the proposition, "National boundaries should coincide with state boundaries." Importantly, it doesn't require ethnically-defined nations, merely people who self-identify as being part of a common national community, whether that be based on blood, culture, or something else. A natural corollary of this view of nations and nationalism is that, at least in the world as it actually exists now, everyone is either a nationalist or an imperialist (one could carve out a small exception for anarchists).
In this generalist sense of "nationalism," which makes claims not about "my nation" but about "all nations," I think there are tradeoffs on both sides. I identify as an somewhat ambivalent nationalist. But unlike the the first sense, I don't think you can argue that the nationalist position is prima facie inferior from a consequentialist standpoint.
The particularist use is more accurately termed "national chauvinism", usually but not always ethnically-based, is the idea that one's own nation is in some way better than all the others, and the interests of its people should be accorded disproportionate weight.
The "in some way better than all others" bit isn't a very charitable reading of that position; if a Frenchman wants the french government to further the interests of France and Frenchmen (even at the expense of other countries), then it's a form of nationalism but doesn't include a belief that "France is better than the rest"; it's only that he cares more about France than about the rest.
Having diminishing "circles of empathy" for others depending on whether they're in your family, your city, your country, your religion or race etc. is pretty normal, but there's variance about what levels are considered as more important; (pretty much) everybody cares more about their family, but some may see religion or political affiliation or their city as a "more important" identity than one's country (this is assuming country = nation, which as you say is usually the case in the West now); "national chauvinists" would be the ones who put their country above other identities.
Neither arguments nor evidence. That is the exact point of my post.
But to answer a more lenient reading of your request: After making an effort to be less hostile to group celebrations, people in general and local cultures and traditions I could relax enough to take part in those and/or enjoy them. As a result I both feel more belonging to the country I live in and also I appreciate other cultures and cultural traditions more.
Does that answer your question?
I think your thought process is indicative of our modern age. It is hard to concept of nations in the online environment that, at least for the time being, remains borderless. Nationalism has produced 2 world wars and several smaller conflicts and given its impetus in 1648 as a way of allowing kingdoms and countries to decide their religion without outside influence I think the 21st century will see fewer borders rather than more borders. That being said a quick read of any news site would make that statement hard to believe as nations get more nationalistic. However, advances in communication, transportation, and the movement of good, services, capital, and people will make borders less and less meaningless. What is a nation? What is geographical area? What is a political border? Our economy and our way of working is reducing that meaning. 30 years ago your country was the sum total of your upbringing, language, culture, shared values, and chances in life. Movement was long and hard and fraught with difficulty. That is becoming far less in our modern age. I think we all will feel tied to where we were born and grew up because its comfortable, its homey, we know the back routes, we know the cultural rules and being tribal as humans are we generally fit into that tribe. Those are all important things. Your personal identity is never, nor has it ever been tied to a passport. It is just a little book that tells other countries where you are coming from and some information about you. It is not you, it a part of you that is on paper for movement purposes. The lesson in life that you are more often than not wrong is nothing to be afraid of or anything to cause you distress but rather you are finding the juicy part of the human existence.
That being said a quick read of any news site would make that statement hard to believe as nations get more nationalistic.
News sites don't provide much evidence of increase of nationalist sentiment, unless you take into account the usual spin anytime something bad is reported: "This bad thing happened! Things are getting worse!"
Yes, however the desire for Colorado to split into two states for California to split into 6 and for the ukraine to split into 2 I think shows that there is a identity/policy crisis going on that is compelling political entities to split. Although one does have to dig past the hype these news sites have their use.
Scott Aaronson has a post on the computational power of digicomps. While the post itself is interesting, it is also worth noting here because it is part of a new experiment he is doing. He writes:
Right now, I have a painfully-large stack of unwritten research papers. Many of these are “paperlets”: cool things I noticed that I want to tell people about, but that would require a lot more development before they became competitive for any major theoretical computer science conference. And what with the baby, I simply don’t have time anymore for the kind of obsessive, single-minded, all-nighter-filled effort needed to bulk my paperlets up. So starting today, I’m going to try turning some of my paperlets into blog posts. I don’t mean advertisements or sneak previews for papers, but replacements for papers: blog posts that constitute the entirety of what I have to say for now about some research topic. “Peer reviewing” (whether signed or anonymous) can take place in the comments section, and “citation” can be done by URL. The hope is that, much like with 17th-century scientists who communicated results by letter, this will make it easier to get my paperlets done: after all, I’m not writing Official Papers, just blogging for colleagues and friends.
Richard Bornat, one of the authors of The camel has two humps (about a supposed bimodal distribution of programming ability) recently wrote:
I did a number of very silly things whilst on the SSRI and some more in the immediate aftermath, amongst them writing "The camel has two humps". I'm fairly sure that I believed, at the time, that there were people who couldn't learn to program and that Dehnadi had proved it. Perhaps I wanted to believe it because it would explain why I'd so often failed to teach them.
Read the rest: Camels and humps: a retraction.
Title and excerpt aside, this isn't really a retraction of the actual test, just of the author's overly-aggressive interpretation thereof. Basically he says that the test does have some predictive power but not enough to prove anything about who can or can't pass a programming class.
There were some purely virtual meetups, but there are technical problems when connecting too many people. Like, ten or more.
You could just go ahead and announce your own virtual meetup. Create a public google document where participants can write their names, and set a limit to, say, maximum seven participants per meetup. (If someone realizes they will not be able to come, they should remove their name from the list, to allow other people to join.)
If you want, you could make it a recurring event, e.g. once in a week.
Bob Nelson, of the failed Cryonics Society of California, has written a book. Anyone read the book yet?
I'm an EA and interested in signing up for cryonics. After cryocrastinating for a few years (ok I guess I don't get to say "after" until I actually sign up), I've realized that I should definitely sign up for life insurance, because of the ability to change the beneficiary. I place a low probability on cryonics working right now, but I can claim a charity or a Donor Advised Fund as the beneficiary until I place a sufficient probability on suspension technology working. In the future, I can change it back if I change my mind, etc.
Any issues that might come into this? If no one sees any flaws, I'm committing to sign up for life insurance with this plan in mind by or during the next open thread, and making a more prominent post about this strategy for any EA+Cryonics people.
Three weeks ago I came up with a simple productivity technique that I've been using with great results, and thought I should share it here in case it is of help to others. I could write a couple of paragraphs describing how it works, but I think that by taking a look at this spreadsheet you can very quickly understand the idea. In short, I list everything I want to do each day (using a rather fine-grained criterion of act individuation) and motivate myself to do those things by a combination of points and streaks. (Many of my dailies relate to nutrition or health, but this is just contingent on my own goals and interests.) The system grew out of my dissatisfaction with some of the best existing tools I had tried, like Beeminder and HabitRPG, and I find it works better than those.
I'm happy to answer questions or incorporate suggestions.
(Note that the spreadsheet I link here is a copy of the one I actually use; it is not updated and does not, therefore, reflect my current progress.)
My sense is that the LW wiki has the potential to be a good alternative for someone who wants to learn the ideas of rationality but does not have the time / patience to read through the Sequences. However, the Sequences have the major advantage that they have an order to them (actually several alternative orders - my favorite being Benito's) where someone can start at the beginning and work their way through in an organized way. To my knowledge there is nothing comparable for the wiki.
Anyone out there willing to put together an organized guide to the wiki aimed at a newcomer who wants to quickly learn through the material?
Politics is not about policy: "Differences in negativity bias underlie variations in political ideology", Hibbing et al 2014 (excerpts; media coverage); abstract:
Disputes between those holding differing political views are ubiquitous and deep-seated, and they often follow common, recognizable lines. The supporters of tradition and stability, sometimes referred to as conservatives, do battle with the supporters of innovation and reform, sometimes referred to as liberals. Understanding the correlates of those distinct political orientations is probably a prerequisite for managing political disputes, which are a source of social conflict that can lead to frustration and even bloodshed. A rapidly growing body of empirical evidence documents a multitude of ways in which liberals and conservatives differ from each other in purviews of life with little direct connection to politics, from tastes in art to desire for closure and from disgust sensitivity to the tendency to pursue new information, but the central theme of the differences is a matter of debate. In this article, we argue that one organizing element of the many differences between liberals and conservatives is the nature of their physiological and psychological responses to features of the environment that are negative. Compared with liberals, conservatives tend to register greater physiological responses to such stimuli and also to devote more psychological resources to them. Operating from this point of departure, we suggest approaches for refining understanding of the broad relationship between political views and response to the negative. We conclude with a discussion of normative implications, stressing that identifying differences across ideological groups is not tantamount to declaring one ideology superior to another.
This is juicy and oh-so-obvious. The people arguing for stability and for things generally staying the same (in the US mostly for their collective benefit) are going to perceive any change as bad unless it directly benefits them. This is rational acting at work: does it or does it not benefit me? Lets remember humans care at a fundamental level three things: reproduction, eating, and life-survival (Can I make with it? Can I eat it? Will it kill me?). Therefore, if something in the environment changes that threatens those fundamental things then it can be perceived as negative. Those on the reform side have a different send of answers to those survival questions and look at those stimuli differently while also having stimuli they view as negative. Ultimately, within this dichotomy the good of "the people" is at debate. Sadly, political systems only work when all parties have at least a partial agreed upon premise. Here in the US the agreed upon premise has gone away and gridlock is the new rule. In Europe things are different post austerity and a new set of shared presumptions is being formed (How involved should countries be in the EU?) It is not often in these charged days that people are willing to stand up and make the hard and often unpopular decisions to do what is expedient for the greatest number of people rather than being beholden to interest groups. Such is politics and you are right, politics has little to do with policy and more to do with reptile mind survival of systems that benefit the people involved rather than what moves society forward or backward to a certain agreed upon ideal.