User:Chriswaterguy

Me in brief. I...

• Run Self-Improvement for Nerds (active on Facebook and events also announced on Meetup)
• Am a life coach, and my focus is on anti-procrastination, ADHD and gaining focus. This comes out of my own struggles, being diagnosed with ADHD as an adult and (at that point) not having developed good strategies for getting things done. One of the main approaches I use is based on MEVID (the Procrastination Fquation).
• Help to organise Less Wrong Melbourne.
• Have worked in sustainability knowledge-sharing.
• Know about wikis, and help run Appropedia, the sustainability wiki.

Sequences: Being generally awesome

Work in progress. Suggestions appreciated. Boldly edit the page, or leave a message on my talk page.

Productivity/effectiveness

(Under development)

By author (incomplete)

lukeprog:

• The Science of Winning at Life - sequence, plus other posts. The individual posts have been included below, organised by topic.

Nate Soares (So8res):

• The mechanics of my recent productivity
• Habitual Productivity
• Deregulating Distraction, Moving Towards the Goal, and Level Hopping
• Dark Arts of Rationality

(+ Look up more of Eliezer's posts on productivity, effectiveness and akrasia.)

Luminosity, a framework by Alicorn:

• Living Luminously

By topic

Science and self-help:

• Scientific Self-Help: The State of Our Knowledge – lukeprog
• A Crash Course in the Neuroscience of Human Motivation – lukeprog

Mood:

• How to Be Happy – lukeprog
• Happiness & depression, e.g. Methods for treating depression
• Note the value of (Againstness, noticing)

Habits and training:

• Cached Thoughts – Eliezer
  • Related: wiki article has interesting links.
  • Cached Procrastination – jimrandomh (Procrastination is at least two problems: cached thought, and analysis paralysis.)
• The Power of Reinforcement – lukeprog
• http://lesswrong.com/lw/58m/build_small_skills_in_the_right_order/ Build Small Skills in the Right Order] – lukeprog

Goals and strategies:

• Hold Off on Proposing Solutions – Eliezer

Practical thinking skills (these posts are likely to be covered in other sequences, but have applications in "winning at life":

• How An Algorithm Feels From Inside – Eliezer
• Knowing About Biases Can Hurt People – Eliezer
• Making Beliefs Pay Rent – Eliezer
• Hindsight Devalues Science – Eliezer (& other posts about wanting true beliefs?)
• Probability is in the Mind – Eliezer
• Guessing the Teacher's Password – Eliezer

Thinking skills relevant to communication:

• Taboo Your Words – Eliezer
• Mind Projection Fallacy – Eliezer
• Applause Lights – Eliezer
• Dissolving the Question – Eliezer

Akrasia/procrastination:

• Working hurts less than procrastinating, we fear the twinge of starting – Eliezer
• How to Beat Procrastination – lukeprog
• My Algorithm for Beating Procrastination – lukeprog
• Improving The Akrasia Hypothesis - PJ Eby
• Anti-Akrasia Technique: Structured Procrastination – patrissimo
• 10-Step Anti-Procrastination Checklist – JesseGalef
• More?: Posts about akrasia
• Strategies and hacks (posts and threads):
  • Willpower Hax #487: Execute by Default – Eliezer
  • Akrasia Tactics Review
  • Akrasia Tactics Review 2: The Akrasia Strikes Back
  • Share Your Anti-Akrasia Tricks

Posts linked from the Akrasia (to be sorted):

• Self-deception: Hypocrisy or Akrasia?
• Chaotic Inversion
• Akrasia and Shangri-La
• Akrasia, hyperbolic discounting, and picoeconomics by ciphergoth
• Applied Picoeconomics by Yvain
• When Willpower Attacks by jimrandomh - How overly strong willpower can get you in trouble.
• Compartmentalization in epistemic and instrumental rationality by Anna Salamon
• Anti-akrasia tool: like stickK.com for data nerds by dreeves

Evolutionary psychology:

• Adaptation-Executers, not Fitness-Maximizers – Eliezer

Self-talk:

• Productivity through self-loyalty – by Nate Soares but off-LW.

Willpower:

• Posts tagged "willpower"

Relationships:

• Rational Romantic Relationships, Part 1: Relationship Styles and Attraction Basics

Other (unordered):

• The Good News of Situationist Psychology – lukeprog
• (How we do the Jedi mind trick on ourselves) - comment by pjeby
• Tags (note that display is in chronological order, and many or all of the above posts are included in these tags): productivity, procrastination

Achieving awesomeness by learning better

(To be developed)

• A brief summary of effective study methods – Arran_Stirton
• On learning difficult things - Nate Soares

Other resources:

• Learning How to Learn: Powerful mental tools to help you master tough subjects Coursera online course, very popular
• A Mind for Numbers: How to Excel at Math and Science (Even If You Flunked Algebra by Barbara Oakley. Highly rated book by one of the instructors of the above course, apparently relevant to other subjects as well as mathematics.

World-changing

• Purchase Fuzzies and Utilons Separately - Eliezer
• On Saving the World
• On caring - Nate Soares, a discussion of how to care intensely about big problems in the world, even when the internal feeling of caring is weak.

Building community

• The Craft and the Community, sequence by Eliezer
• Our Phyg Is Not Exclusive Enough

A communication sequence

Social aspects of communication (or is that a tautology?):

• Levels of communication
• Reasoning isn't about logic (it's about arguing)
• Correspondence Bias (also known as the fundamental attribution error) in brief on the wiki)
• Ask and Guess
• Tell Culture
• The Power of Reinforcement

Emotion, making sense, and anticipating reactions:

• Politics is the Mind-Killer – Avoiding emotional & tribal identity triggers. "Politics is an important domain to which we should individually apply our rationality—but it's a terrible domain in which to learn rationality, or discuss rationality, unless all the discussants are already rational." & "it doesn't matter whether (you think) the [specific political party] really is at fault. It's just better for the spiritual growth of the community to discuss the issue without invoking color politics."
• Policy Debates Should Not Appear One-Sided – "there is no reason for complex actions with many consequences to exhibit this onesidedness property." "Two primary drivers of policy-one-sidedness are the affect heuristic and the just-world fallacy." Avoid using arguments as soldiers.
• Philosophical Landmines – "If something you say makes people go off on a spiral of bad philosophy, don't get annoyed with them, just fix what you say. This is just being a communications consequentialist."
  • Responding to a landmine explosion: It may be best to "abort the conversation." Alternatively, a commenter suggests, "stop taking sides and talk about the plus and minuses of each side."
• [http://lesswrong.com/lw/3h/why_our_kind_cant_cooperate/ Why Our Kind Can't Cooperate, Eliezer Yudkowsky
• Defecting by Accident - A Flaw Common to Analytical Defecting by Accident - A Flaw Common to Analytical People - "try to make everything 10% more gracious, and watch how much your effectiveness increases."
• (Something more about emotional triggers?)

Understanding and being understood:

• Off-LW: Be a Communications Consequentialist, Jesse Galef.
• Inferential distance:
  • "a gap between the background knowledge and epistemology of a person trying to explain an idea, and the background knowledge and epistemology of the person trying to understand it." Inferential distance (LW wiki).
  • Explainers Shoot High. Aim Low! – "we tend to enormously underestimate the effort required to properly explain things."
  • Expecting Short Inferential Distances – explaining in evolutionary terms why this is such a problem today.

Biases, heuristics and fallacies that affect communication:

• Illusion of Transparency: Why No One Understands You (in brief on the wiki)
• Generalizing From One Example (the Typical mind fallacy)
• The Halo Effect – "You should be suspicious if the people you know seem to separate too cleanly into devils and angels."

Disagreeing:

• Better Disagreement.
  • Related: Steel man (in brief on the wiki). Principle of charity (Wikipedia). Unpopular ideas attract poor advocates: Be charitable. Dangers of steelmanning / principle of charity.
  • Ideological Turing Test (Wikipedia). First described(?) at http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2011/06/the_ideological.html by Bryan Caplan. (As Mill states, "He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that.") Also see: Noahpinion: Against the Ideological Turing Test. Related: Imitation is the Sincerest Form of Argument
• The noncentral fallacy - the worst argument in the world? (e.g. "Martin Luther King was a criminal!")

Online communication (for further exploration):

• Text-based communication
• Dealing with trolls

Meetups: "Winning at Life"

This was an experiment that seemed promising, but wasn't continued due to lack of time & energy. Maybe early spring 2016, e.g. September or October, depending on weather for outdoor meetings.

These are the collections of articles used for LW/EA meetups in Melbourne 2015.

Session 1:

• Scientific Self-Help: The State of Our Knowledge – lukeprog
• Working hurts less than procrastinating, we fear the twinge of starting – Eliezer
• Willpower Hax #487: Execute by Default – Eliezer

Possible lists for future meetups:

B:

• A Crash Course in the Neuroscience of Human Motivation – lukeprog (20 pages - enough on its own!)
• Anti-Akrasia Technique: Structured Procrastination – patrissimo