Others in the thread have already hinted at this fact: logic and optimization are lasers that can be pointed at anything. Point it towards money and of course it’s irrational to forfeit profits for good wine. Point it towards the good wine and of course it’s irrational to forfeit evenings drinking good wine with friends.

Put another way, one man’s trash is another man’s treasure.

Of course, this doesn’t mean most people don’t share some common values. Most people want both wine and profits!

Not only is logic and optimization a laser, but optimization can happen at many levels.

There are many experiments where the most egg-laying hens are selected and bred, but often these hens are aggressive and kill each other. However, when whole groups of hens (e.g. a group of 5 hens) are chosen, some of the hens do not lay eggs but are peace-makers and create the perfect environment for egg-laying eggs to lay many eggs.

In this example, optimization happened at the group-level and not at the individual level.

Similarly, rich people who leave high-tax societies end up in a ‘Lamborghini in a road made of mud’ situation. However, if rich people contribute to the societies that made them rich in the first place, everyone benefits. There are lower anxiety, depression, and suicide rates for everyone (including the rich) in more egalitarian societies. Here you can see the laser and the levels: the laser is either pointed at the luxury car or the quality of life, while the level is either the individual or whole society.

Group-level selection seems irrational for those who think that being an egotist is the only way.

Of course, life is not just about lasers and levels. It’s about values. Rationality is a tool. It can help us live valued lives or trip us up. If you want good wine, good cheese, money to buy something else, good friends, and a good society, that’s what matters.

To get organized, Getting Things Done in Standard Notes and my email’s calendar app.

To work, Scrum in Taiga.

To handle life, the Healthy Minds app and Calibre to read Acceptance and Commitment Therapy books.

You can actually train for this!

You can train yourself to become more attuned to your interoception. This will make it easier to identify internal prompts like anxiety or hunger. In fact, a friend of mine was studying to become a psychotherapist and last year had me serve as a guinea pig for interoception interventions. In summary, if you find mindfulness practices that involve your body and your own thoughts, you’ll be more attuned to your interoception. Things like active meditations can help a lot. You can check out evidence-based and peer-reviewed programs like Healthy Minds.

You can train yourself not just to notice your interoception, but also to use interoception to build habits. I suspect this is what the people who do not use external prompts (like stickies) do: they have habits that kick in with not-so-evident prompts. They could be using something called an ‘action prompt’ or an ‘internal prompt’. I’m using the language of Tiny Habits because it’s helpful in this context.

Tiny Habits can teach you how to create habits of all kinds, whether you use external, action, or internal prompts. Tiny Habits prefers prompts that are actions (e.g. “After I put the toothbrush down then I will pick up the dental floss”). But internal prompts are perfectly viable (e.g. “When I feel the heat on my skin and the tension in my jaw, I will describe my inner emotions to myself as if I was listening to a good friend”).

You can understand cues and habits more in depth with contextual behavior analysis. CBA or a qualified professional can help us notice when we struggle to pay attention because of conditions like ADHD or anxiety. Something else that CBA can reveal is that, sometimes, we struggle to pay attention because we haven’t developed the mental information highways that can make our thoughts flow freely. Things like relational frame training can help us build those highways faster. Another option is to learn to think visibly (Harvard’s Project Zero) about our everyday life, so that we build dense information highways that we can later use in daily life.

Of course, the fact is that plenty of humans use external prompts deliberately to help them coordinate and remember things. There’s a reason Scrum boards and Kanban are so popular. There’s a reason calendar apps and Getting Things Done are so popular. There’s a reason many societies have daily, weekly, or yearly rituals. You’re among friends :)

No 🤷

Thanks for the reply! So Excel maybe is not as fast as the meme would suggest, I suppose.

I agree with you. I love ggplot2. And I’m good at it. So it’s my software of choice when doing data analysis and when making graphs.

However, I understand that there’s an upfront cost to pay to use it: learning to code, tidying data, etc…

And beyond that, I don’t really do data analysis with spreadsheet software like Excel or LibreCalc. So I don’t know if a proficient LibreCalc user would be able to compete with a proficient ggplot2 user.

Honest question: do you think this could improve with practice? Or does the ggplot workflow necessarily makes it all slower?

Not me, but a friend believed Obama was not American. Conversations over time (couple of months) changed them.

Not a proper conspiracy theory, but I used to be a dualist, thinking that souls exist and they’re separate from bodies. All of this changed with a long conversation with a materialist. He helped me see how my beliefs were historically determined, socially programmed, and not based on atemporal scientific principles. Overnight change to materialism.

The answer is contextual, just like people are contextual. Sometimes, my circles are all busy or stressed out and we can’t really be there for each other. Other times, strangers have saved me, like the couple that took me in when lockdowns started and I was far from home.

Have you heard of the Stanford Prison Experiment? Or the Princeton Seminarian experiment? Or the Milgram Experiment? All of them confirm that people are contextual. That’s lesson 1 in psychology, but we humans easily forget it. We focus on the person and forget the context. That folly of ours even has a name: Fundamental Attribution Error.

Thanks for the suggestions. Had time to try to print it. Didn’t work. I’ll try the other options later.

I’ve always poured it out, but I’ve never really sat and thought why…

Not a troll post.

Fair enough. I’ll take your question seriously.

Without any context, it sounds as if everything that you’re perceiving right now is shit. Maybe your relationships are strained and you feel lonely or guilty. Maybe the news hits you harder every day. Maybe money is tight. Maybe you’ve suffered a great loss. Maybe nothing has happened at all and you’re sitting there, contemplating whether life is worth it. I don’t know your situation.

And whatever it is, it’s valid. Heck, I sometimes feel like life is shit.

Now, I’m not here to say we should look at reality with rose-colored glasses or to look at reality with naive optimism. No. I’m here to say that we have a choice. We can choose what to focus on and how to respond to reality.

Is it really true that “everything is shit”? Is the fact that your body has managed, against all odds, to sustain your life shit? Is the fact that humans can grow and change shit? Is the fact that we can be better as people shit?

Still, shit happens. And we have to be ready to accept that. Regardless of how much shit there is, we can always choose how to respond to it.

For one, we play a massive role in our interpretation of shit. There’s solid science behind this. You could look at theories of cognition such as the Theory of Constructed Emotion, Relational Frame Theory, or even the shallow but effective Cognitive Behavioral Therapy frameworks. All of those theories think it’s crucial to notice the lens that you and I are looking at the world through. Not only should we notice the lens, but sometimes we should clean it or direct it elsewhere. Otherwise we spend our whole lives stooped over a pile of crap, when we could stand, look around, and notice the world around us from a different perspective.

But that’s not the only thing that matters. We don’t just want to see the world differently. We also want to live valued lives. Once again, this is possible regardless of how much shit there is. How so? Well, what kind of person do you want to be? A kind person? A person that is reflexive and open minded? A person that notices and appreciates beauty when it appears? A person who is proactive about their future and that of others? A person who is compassionate towards others? A person that’s curious about the world and how to improve it?

It’s not easy, being kind, appreciative, and proactive when you’re bogged down by shit. But you’re not alone. There’s brilliant and insightful people who have dedicated their lives to finding out how to do it. If you’re interested, I’m happy to talk about empirical ways of doing it. For now, it’s more important to ask what the alternative is. Is a life spent stooping over shit a good life?

Before getting in the shower, what is keeping you from getting in?

Something similar happens to me. I get shocked every time I meet someone who was born in the USSR.

Ah. I see that it seems as if I’m saying that hand-washing is the result of a theory of cognition, and that this theory of cognition suggests that hand-washing has been deeply ingrained in our psyches for millenia, somehow eliciting the results from the experiments.

I am not suggesting that. Sorry for not having been clear before. I’m tired so I’m sorry if this response is not clear as well. I’m happy to clarify any further misunderstandings.

This is the theory that I’m referring to:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GnSHpBRLJrQ (of course, there are academic publications on Relational Frame Theory, but this video shows its practical implications quite well)

Learn it in one. Derive it in two. Put it in networks, and that’s what you’ll do.

We have relational frames surrounding hand-washing. We also have relational frames for thousands of other thoughts and behaviors. When those two (hand-washing frames with other frames) combine, they can affect the way we think and act in ways that are novel and perhaps unusual.

Please let me know if this isn’t clear.

Europe isn’t a brand, it’s a life/style.

Thank you so much for taking the time to research and share you findings.

As to Atkinson Hyperlegible, I suppose its merit could be, at most, making it harder to confuse characters such as B8, O0, or 1Iil.

Beyond these benefits (and as you mentioned), there is just not enough information on whether Atkinson Hyperlegible definitely helps or not.

Also, thanks for the link on dyslexia. I suppose that, to an extent, promoting fonts like Open Dyslexia could lead to the unintended consequences described in the article.

Yes. I suppose I’d like to try it. Maybe the cost is worth the benefits.

This gave me chills and teared me up. A friend is paralyzed from the waist down. I really hope I can see them walk again with something like this.

Indeed, it is a small sample size.

However, I think it’s possible that these results are true. If you understand relational frame theory, then you can see how the act of washing hands can activate some schemas or deactivate others.

Seen through this lens, the results of these experiments are not special, but are simply implications of an already established theory of cognition.