"Applied Rationality Training Regime" #24: Resolve Cycles 2

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January 24th, getting  quite near the end of our not-quite-30-days, is
Training Regime Day 24: Resolve Cycles 2 and this I find to be even more odd and awkward than the original Day #13: Resolve Cycles. The idea is to push yourself really hard to solve a problem really fast, and in particular you're supposed to "to figure out a way to reliably generate expectation for yourself.... Tell your friend [a likely falsehood, or...] Pretend..." And he cautions that "A caveat with this technique is that if you can't solve the problem after you've expected yourself to be able to solve it, then it hurts..." 

   My problem is not the expectation of hurt but the loss of internal credibility; if my internal selves are lying to each other, then nothing much makes sense to me. So, I describe this issue to Spider-Duck: he points out that seat-adjustment has been needed for just about everything else, so why not this? And I ask my murphyjitsu team if they can tell how this kind of resolution problem-solving could have gone right for me, instead of how it will have gone wrong, and we get distracted with thirty-year-old memories of problems solved by resolution in theorem-proving, but it seems that Sarah Som has a probable sister. Serena wanders in possible worlds, so that if there's a chance that things go right then Serena might be able to sense it, and I might be able to do what would have worked in that world, and my selves might even be able to work as hard as the selves in that world, too. Maybe the consideration of possible selves is a way to generate expectations, as Mark (and presumably CFAR) recommend. Mostly I prefer to generate expectations based on prior experience and on taking the external view, mostly I'm more interested in guarding against expectations that are too high, not in pushing them higher than the evidence suggests, but I guess I can expect my selves to push as if they expected everything to go right. After all, some of them do.

   Hmmm....this doesn't make a whole lot of sense, but I think I can try it. But I also think that I'm deviating more and more from the "proper" (?) approach. I'm actually wondering if trying too hard isn't a serious issue here. Maybe because of Smullyan's sage, back towards the beginning, but maybe because today is Edith Wharton's 159th birthday, and "If only we'd stop trying to be happy, we'd have a pretty good time" seems like an excellent application of rationality to me. But yes, I'll try to try to do better -- specifically with study methods. I think I can solve the problem of getting myself to study and remember, using what I already knew plus what I've been doing for these 24 days past.