"Applied Rationality Training Regime" Overall

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 January 31, the end of this subproject. (Click the "^" link above for the subproject index page, on which this page will be the last entry.) I've spent at least a little time (and one blog post) for each day of January, on the idea of "applied rationality" -- specifically on what Mark Xu describes as his take on CFAR's (the Center For Applied Rationality) take on ways to get your thinking and your actions to be a little more in line with your goals, a little less counter-productive; how to improve a little in almost whatever direction you wanted to improve in. In the end, how to improve your methods of self-improvement.

And has it helped? Yes, I think so. Some. I think doing this has 

  (a) pushed me into forming somewhat better models of what I'm doing when I try to form habits (although they're very awkward to phrase, which probably means I don't really understand them);

  (b) made it easier to form some new simple-but-useful habits;

  (c) made it easier to stop doing/saying annoying things that I wanted to stop;

  (d) made it easier to approach some problems more systematically.

  As outcomes go, that's not bad.  TAP, Noticing, Murphyjitsu+Socratic Duck; in fact I'm now starting each morning with a brief meeting inside my head, a meeting with the characters I invented as labels (at least as labels) for what I need to do for each of those. The habits I'm trying to reinforce get assigned to Checklist Charlie, my TAP-dancing Laputan flapper-spider. Warnings about what I'm about to say or do come from Marian, the Noticer. For working through problems and anticipating troubles, I talk with Spider-Duck as well as Sarah Som and Jim Pright who form my Murphyjitsu team. I'm trying to use sketches more, simply because I'm better at symbols...I might end up trying to create a spider who draws.

  Each of these is really, I think, serving as a low-bandwidth messenger (or at least message-locus, a label for a mail-drop) between my "conscious self", my central story as continually updated, and the other systems that don't communicate very well with it. You can describe it as communication between System 2 and varying parts of System 1 if you wish, but I don't frame it that way.  I'm starting from the same point as Arnold Geulincx, the 17th-century follower of Descartes who noted that his identity was his consciousness so what he wasn't conscious of, such as muscle management, wasn't, couldn't be, part of his identity. "Since, then, the movements of my body take place without my knowing how ..." it followed that "I do not cause my own bodily actions" and in the end, "I am therefore a mere spectator of this machine." I do think that's going too far: the label "I" within my story applies not only to having viewed, but to having shared some of the decisions. As Mark Xu  puts it in his followup post of TAPs for Tutoring, I may not be deciding how my central pattern generator walks, but I will remember having asked it to "do the walking thing." (Okay, he didn't really put it that way, but that's what I got out of his use of that phrase.) Of course it might be less direct than that. I know that I'm asking some part of me to "do the walking thing", and I know that a central pattern generator is involved, and I think I can claim that our understanding of CPGs is sufficient for me to say that my attempt to "walk consciously" will interfere with it, making me more clumsy rather than less. But I strongly suspect that there is at least one additional layer between my consciousness and the CPG: "I" don't talk to it directly. 

  And why am I talking this clumsy way? Well, partly because it's Geulincx' birthday, but mostly because this really is my current view of what I'm working with when I deal with the not-so-conscious parts of me. Of us. Whatever. I would like to develop a good vocabulary for this, and I'm going to try, and in the process I'll be trying to extend my messengers in what I think of as Bayesian directions. But I'm also going to try to learn some specific stuff that simply interests me; I'm going to go on with trivial form-building and try to watch myself learning IPA. (As a programmer I've worked with IPA as adapted for some endangered languages, but I didn't understand the IPA layers any more than I understood the Russian or Japanese translation layers. So I'm curious, and I didn't like being unable to pronounce "Geulincx" by Wikipedia's IPA: https://itinerarium.github.io/phoneme-synthesis/

didn't accept it, although I was able to work it out with

https://www.internationalphoneticalphabet.org/ipa-sounds/ipa-chart-with-sounds/ .) It's a small thing to learn, and worth learning. We'll see. Happy Birthday, Arnold.