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Wellness Wednesday for February 1, 2023

The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:

  • Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.

  • Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.

  • Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.

  • Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).

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What are your personal small-scale failures of rationality?

A failure of rationality would be something that you 100% intellectually know makes perfect sense, but you fail to execute or act on anyways. Avoiding low-hanging examples such as exercising, eating well, etc.

Failure mode 1: Assymetric laziness

When a task has steps A, B, C...Z. Doing all the steps will result in a much superior output than just doing a majority of the steps, sometimes from step A to step Y.

The final few step(s) don't even take that much additional effort. For example often times I make a soup or a stew and skip adding some lemon juice because I will have to walk to the fridge, find the lemon, cut it, then store it properly after use. But all of that is exceptionally easy, and the lemon juice would make the food significantly better.

Another failure mode related to this is, if I start doing something suboptimally, I just continue suboptimally even though fixing it would take minuscule effort. For example at a recent bbq, I could have easily gone to my car and pulled out a foldable table to make it much easier for me to cut and arrange the food, instead, I did not do that for much longer than I should have because going to the car takes effort.

Any tips to not fall for this trap?

Failure mode 2: Asymmetric cost/benefit

Caught a girl smiling at me multiple times at the grocery store. No, I am not hallucinating or overextending the implications of a simple smile, it was blatantly obvious. I'm regretting not approaching and striking up a conversation quite badly. At the moment I thought "nahhhhh it ain't gonna work out". But the cost would have been an awkward conversation, the benefit would have been meeting a girl who might be into me, and probably more.

Even better, if I were immune to awkward conversations and rejections, approaching people becomes a 0 cost affair.

Everyone knows about this, everyone says this, it's so obvious, but no one does it. I can't figure out a scenario in which this an a negative expected value over the long term unless you really really really bungle up all your approaches, or the probabilities of success are much much much smaller than I think they are.

Failure mode 3: Reluctance to shuffle a schedule

When I make a planned schedule, I have a strong tendency to stick to the ordering.

However, things are dynamic and that means schedules should be readjusted frequently. I have a strong reluctance to readjust a schedule even though doing it means I achieve better medium-term time allocation. I almost wasted 6 free hours not doing something yesterday, because I planned it for today, keep in mind, those 6 hours, nothing would have been done.

I ultimately did it, but I aim for a default mental state where that comes naturally and not at cost of much thought and willpower.

Failure mode 4: Low weightage to novel experiences

I should prioritize explore over exploit when it comes to doing new things, trying new food, etc. But I tend to default to exploit. I understand this is just the natural conservative tendency, but I intellectually know exploring has been better for me in the past.

Failure mode 5: Overly pennywise

I recently spent far too long on whether I should buy a 2 USD game on steam. Or pay a road toll of 1.5 USD. These amounts are rounding errors on my total expenses, there is the opposite failure mode where small amounts of daily spending add up to a somewhat substantial amount, e.g buying coffee instead of making it at home. I might have overcorrected against this failure mode.

It seems to me that I default to being thrifty on all expenses not only the big ones, and this creates a lot of unnecessary stress and time wastage than it should.

Caught a girl smiling at me multiple times at the grocery store.

Is this common? This has never happened to me. I thought it only happened in movies.

You've never noticed it happening to you.

On three separate occasions, I've taken a girl out to a restaurant, and afterwards had her comment that the waitress was obviously hitting on me the whole time and that it had been touching/hot/ego boosting that I was focused on her and didn't notice the waitress.

Maybe it's the preselected thing or she just had nre jealousy glasses, but I've never once in my life noticed a waitress hitting on me. So... It's probably happened to you and you had no idea.

Yeah, I've heard those types of comments on rare occasions. I've always been highly skeptical.

But now that I think of it, I have had a strange woman grab my penis, another run her hand down my back, another make a weird comment about wanting to see me naked (when I was a teenager and she was middle aged), and a few compliment my looks. So, you're probably right that I'm only picking up on the obvious stuff. This is all still very rare though.

Maybe it's the preselected thing or she just had nre jealousy glasses

That's what I assumed on most occasions because it came from a girl I was dating.