"Applied Rationality Training Regime" #13: Resolve Cycles

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January 13, time for Training Regime Day 13: Resolve Cycles where the idea is kinda the goal-seeking version of high-intensity interval training: you push hard for a short time, in this case 5 minutes by timer, to decide how you're going to handle a bug; then you push hard for 5 more minutes to solve it. Really? I wasn't at all sure how to interpret this, and found it helpful to read a post by Owen Shen connecting this enhancing-your-resolve,on-a-cyclic-basis CFAR tactic with two other (CFAR? Rationality community?) labels

[1] most people are not Actually Trying in life. It seems to me that, often,
when people are doing a task, they are looking for excuses to stop,
rather than reasons to continue.... [2]Taking Time is a related idea, where you’re, um, actually taking time to do things. Where Actually Trying is about powering through, Actually Taking Time is about sitting down and doing things right....formalism...ritual...

 

 But maybe not helpful enough. Solve it? Never mind. Okay, having written this in one 22-minute Pomodoro, shut up and set the timer.... Go!

 

[Later that day...] Well, I'm wondering what size of problem is supposed to be actually solved in five minutes. I really don't get it. I have made progress, it was a useful way to make progress, but solved? And I should Resolve to approach the problem as if my life depended on solving it in five minutes? I need some examples of what actually one solves this way. Oh well, I will use a less ambitious version of the Resolve Cycle for the moment. It's quite true that I can push myself harder for a five-minute timer than I can for a Pomodoro timer, and that's a good thing; a story worth telling pretty often. Not a wasted lesson. Meanwhile, happy birthday to Clark Ashton Smith, the sort of story-teller to whom H.P. Lovecraft wrote fan mail -- which started their friendship, lasting until Lovecraft's death. But as Lovecraft put it. "And with strange aeons even death may die." I think I need a strange-aeons timer for solving Big Problems.