"Applied Rationality Training Regime" Review#2

 

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  January 27, and I've been trying to go over the methods and adapt them to current issues, with some partial success (maybe). Yesterday, I thought I was going to give Marian, the Noticer of unhelpful humor,  a bunch of named sister-spiders to help in noticing some of my failure-of-social-skill bad habits, but something happened which I remember from trying to write fiction: once you create a character, they've been created and to a considerable extent they say what they want to say. 

  Marian says she'll deal with her sisters, or leave them out of it; she just wants a list of the bad habits with examples she can use for TAPs. She wants these TAPs to be managed as a checklist, and so she asks for a Systemizing spider named Checklist Charlie (I'd thought about defining him on day #10 but hadn't quite settled him in my head; I guess I was too busy being balky.) Charlie starts as an animation of an old shopping-list trick. You can associate numbers with rhyming words one-gun, two-shoe, three-tree, four-door, five-hive, six-sticks and so on, and make a little cartoon-image story for your eggs, butter, milk etc with a gun firing eggs, a shoe filled with butter, a tree whose fruit is milk cartons... whatever. Repeat the list a few times and it really does help memory. Okay, Charlie's standing, TAP-dancing, on two of his legs but he has six for memory and as a cartoon he can pull out more if needed, so number-one is his gun-claw and it holds a TAP with a trigger and the action being the first item on the checklist. That's fairly easy, even when I find that a given trigger (being in the kitchen by the coffee pot) ought to trigger several things. In that case, even though Charlie's not really recursive, he can have a baby checklist spider hanging from that claw. This actually worked this morning -- but in one case I had used the wrong trigger and didn't get triggered until too late. Working on it...

And does this really help Marian? She thinks so, because she thinks my social-skills failures are grouped together, and she's not at all clear about what I said in the  We are having a continuing discussion with Spider-Duck about how that works.