"Applied Rationality Training Regime" #25: Recursive Self-Improvement

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January 25, the final frontier (indeed, it's High Frontier Day,  Lagrange's birthday): we close with Training Regime Day 25: Recursive Self-Improvement wherein we plan to improve our rationality/improvement techniques, and apply our rationality/improvement techniques to the plans, on object and meta-levels (well, it's meta- to begin with, I guess.) So I think I should go back, a bit: where am I anyway? 

1. It's all about "winning", about being the pattern you want to be.

2. It's good to have a list of the things that bug you.

3. (tips): Boggle at reality, (semi)commit to working at it, build "form" with trivial problems, push your comfort zone, "seat-adjust" all the tips always, including this one sometimes; focus on your feelings, take no sides on trivia, paradoxes should be paradoctored, win!

(I think I'm thinking of 1--3 as introductory material here. The Real Stuff begins..)

4. Murphyjitsu: plan around failure, or through it.

5. TAPs: build up your reflexes by (spaced) repetition; this includes know-what, the standard memory stuff supported by flashcards, but it also includes how-to, e.g. sewing.

6 Seeking the Sense in other people's points of view

(I'm thinking of 4--6 as basic tools for internal and external plan formation...)

7: Factor goals into actions and vice-versa, Notice your reflexes, seek the Double-Crux for agreement, Systematize yourself into Huxley's clock, Talk to the Socratic Duck. Practice Focusing, cycle your resolve, dump your brain occasionally, expand your comfort zone. Ask yourself the Important Questions, ...

Is this as random as it seems? Maybe so, and that's not necessarily bad, but I'm going to start over at this point, and go back to What is This Self That "I" Am Trying to Improve? I've spent parts of the day going over this, and I think I'll have to give myself a little more time. Well, I was originally assuming that this was a 30-day plan, anyway, and now I think I'll be continuing it for quite a while after January ends. I will be doing resolve cycles, but my seat-adjustment for them is that I'm not forming my expectations of what I can do in five minutes (or whatever) by self-deception; I'll form them by repetition, trying to work as intensely as I did last time  (or sometimes a little better). Just like physical exercises. I will be naming and consulting more specific story-spiders; I'm not sure that Spider-Duck needs a name, but he has certainly been developing a personality. And I seem to be going back to the physical index cards that used to be a central part of my approach to almost everything. Learning how to learn how to learn... changing how to change how to change.... I'm definitely not done with this sequence, but there are no more numbered days of the Xu sequence, so I'll have to go on a bit without them. Robert Boyle apparently said that "God would not have made the universe as it is, unless he intended us to understand it" and it's his birthday too.