Does anyone feel like they've gotten the hang of the exercise at the end the first chapter of @vgr's book _Tempo_?
I have the sense that something about feeling and working with Tempo might be a high leverage growth edge for me, but...I don't have a handle on it at all.
He says that the exercise is supposed to be easy and straightforward, but I don't get it.
My doodles don't seem meaningful to me?
And while I'm doodling them, it feels either forced or arbitrary. I don't really know what I'm doing.
(Also, tempo seems like a pretty different thing than the intensity and valence of emotional beats?)
This is all very embarrassing. Especially because this is just the sort of thing that one might stereotype a "rationalist" as failing to get.
I'm experimenting with having a trigger to call to mind / remember my vision of myself as a badass and the "feel" or ethos of the life I want to live.
The point is NOT to change my behavior directly, or even to shift my state, but only to make cognitively available what I care about, in moments when I might have forgotten it.
Like, if I'm mindlessly watching youtube videos, I can notice, and fire the trigger, and bring my vision of myself to mind.
I just noticed that one of the things that I get from fiction is a kind of vicarious...pride? ...camaraderie? from competent people trusting each other.
In for instance, in urban fantasy, there's something that feels deeply Good about the moments when the wizard and the cop work together to get the job done.
Neither one fully understands the other's work, or the constraints that they work under, but they _do_ trust each other's expertise and each other's moral commitment.
But I think it is basically how human impulse control works. If a person chronically makes "bad" short-term-oriented choices, it may very well be because they _correctly_ don't depend on themselves to be able to execute on a long term strategy.
Suppose you were offered the following opportunity: Using highly advanced, but completely safe, psychological methods, your values and personality can be permanently altered.
The changes would be minor enough that you are not just being overwritten, replacing your mind with a different person; your parents would still recognize you as you. But they would be big enough that you would make different life choices and have a different life trajectory.
All of the changes would be in the direction generally considered "good": you'd become happier, more diligent, more conscientious, more prosocial, less neurotic.
A realization that probably is obvious to people who are more savvy than me:
For most people, a lot of behavior is motivated, not on the basis of the merits of the behavior, but because it provides a template for social engagement.
I'm in Las Vegas for a conference today. I was wandering around the casino in which the conference is being hosted, and watching the people.
I was poking around in gift shop and saw two women looking through the clothes.