"Applied Rationality Training Regime" #10: Systemization

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January 10, Mark Xu's "Training Regime Day 10: Systemization" and we try to become more systematic about the choices we make, in fact to keep them from being choices at all, along the lines of the Alfred North Whitehead quote I started with on day 1:

Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them. Operations of thought ... are strictly limited in number....

And yet this may not be along the lines of Smullyan's Sage and Huxley's clock-self, because it's not clear that choices are being removed altogether. Instead they are being lifted into meta-choices, where we choose spools or skeins of story thread, then let them unwind. It's the choice to live by repeating calendar entries and checklists.  Yes, it's a good idea; yes, I have a negative reaction to parts of it, probably because I've had the experience of trying it but not actually saving time, or saving some time but at the cost of extra willpower because it was hard to do and kept on being hard to do. Maybe that's all there is to it. Very likely, it's the same balkiness that some of my selves feel with commitment, as I said in #3:

I think there are parts of me that tend to confuse commitment with loss of autonomy.

Okay, I'm looking over the bullet journals which I kept for a few years but had abandoned. I've been thinking what parts of that I should resurrect, or extend. We'll see. 

Meanwhile, happy birthday to Lord Action; "power corrupts". But also, "Liberty is not the power of doing what we like, but the right of being able to do what we ought." And maybe that can be true, and maybe it's the right way to see commitment to Do The Right Thing. Maybe. Or then again, maybe not. We'll see.