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Enthusiastically presenting your neck to the sword of truth

A statistician interprets research for other people, so that those other people do not themselves have to be statisticians. The others hope the job is done objectively, and want to be able to trust in that, but that trust will always be limited if they don't know who the statistician is.

In an organization with many statisticians, such as a census bureau, we can trust in the fact that they tend to put more than one pair of eyes on each analysis before publishing results. But that's not the norm in science. The norm is one to two people per paper (the author and their supervisor) who really interprets the research!

(Peer-review is still spotty and subject to luck; there are almost no journals in 2022 with systematic peer-review, and it appears fairly easy to get lorem ipsum text published in high-impact journals. Not to mention simonwillison.net/2024/Mar/15/certainly-here-is-google-scholar/)

Knowing this, most papers should be assigned low a priori believability. I think researchers—and statisticians when that's not the same thing—both stand to gain a lot of credibility by going public with their persona, like Andrew Gelman, via personal blogs, books, or something like that, where they make transparent how they think and do their very best to be pedagogical.

(At least if their only agenda is the search for truth. If they have other agendas, it may not be wise.)

They'd also admit every bias they have, every belief they currently hold, and what they used to believe that turned out to be wrong. They'd tell us where they came from and how they were raised. We need it in order to properly be able to interpret that person's interpretations, so at least for me, I'd feel better knowing these things and could be more secure in trusting their reasoning.

The path by which someone arrives at their conclusion is just as important to know as the conclusion itself.

Thus, publicly Unpacking beliefs. A public PredictionBook. Publicly making bets with real money (per one of the closing remarks of Book: Inadequate Equilibria).

Enthusiastically presenting your neck to the sword of truth.

Excited for it to slice your head off—a bit less when it turns out that Truth was already on your side and you have to keep your head. That's, like, time wasted. Who needs their beliefs confirmed?

Created (3 years ago)
Updated (10 months ago)

Nonstandard ways to cope with ADHD

#adhd

Areas to develop

  • Complete stance & confused stance
  • Portal: CFAR stuff, in particular:
    • Exile-protector dynamic
    • Ways to integrate disagreeing subagents
    • Murphyjitsu
  • Preventing ugh fields

Change the rules of the game

Instead of trying yet another calendar/planner/schedule/to-do system, which of course never works, I think the real transformative solutions lie in deeper mental shifts that change the rules of the game.

For example: You can decide now to never again do anything you don't want to do, for the rest of your life. That comes from the brilliant Replacing Guilt. An excerpt:

Imagine a student who has been assigned a very important bit of homework with a deadline looming ever closer. Let’s say they’re trying to kick themselves into high productivity mode. How can they do this? Well, they can pull out the whips and cattle prods and force their mind-mob to be productive (with gritted teeth and building malcontent), or they can use their most desperate voice and plead with themselves, promising rewards for good behavior (that the mob might just take anyway, if it suits them), or they can wait until the deadline is so close that even the short-sighted mob can see it, at which point they’ll go into panic mode (which is kinda like high productivity mode, if you squint).

But there’s also a fourth option, which is something like “gain the trust of the mob, and build rapport.” If the student gets the mob onto their side, then the paper will be done automatically, no willpower or pleading or panic necessary.

Related from malcolmocean.com/2017/06/towards-being-purpose-driven-without-fighting-myself/:

I used to yell at myself about other things too: “I just need to get my head out of my ass and actually work on this project!” I said to myself a few years ago, about some school thing I was putting off.

Then I realized that I was actually dissociating internally, experiencing myself as the yeller but not actually experiencing what it felt like to be yelled at by myself. It was really painful to let in that I was so angry at me.

Don't make a plan🔗

Don't write a To-Do list, write "things that excite you today", and next week (or month or whenever feels right) write another list of such things.

To-Do lists do not make sense for someone with ADHD. These suppose that the value of completing projects is sufficient to activate you. Be honest: that doesn't describe you. Maybe it even deactivates you (Ugh fields)!

I've often had the experience of putting something on a To-Do list and then wanting it less. I wanted it just fine up until it ended up in the list, and then it was a chore best ignored.

With executive dysfunction, your brain is motivated only by the journey, not the destination; the idea of engaging with the project has to feel fun right now. So ask yourself of a "To-Do" item: if it led to no destination, would it still be worth doing this activity, purely for the journey? If the answer is no, well, you can bet you won't end up doing this activity.

No matter how good the destination.

Then the absolute last thing to do is put it on a To-Do list for later, hoping that one of your future selves will be made of steel! I cannot imagine a less productive move. The longer it stays on that list, the more it dispirits you, until your self-esteem is in splinters.

Better it not be on the list at all.

It's like what Marie Kondo does with furniture and decor: each and every item should spark joy, else it goes. Apply the same to your action-list: everything on it should be sort of inspiring and exciting. With ADHD, if it doesn't feel fun, it can't be on the list, no matter how important. It just can't.

This is the time to be creative, not to double down on the myth of a future-self who's full of resolve.

Yes, there's a good chance you just forget about it if it's not on a list, but my theory: even taking that into account, omitting ToDos you don't like to think about increases the fraction of them that get done.

You have to accept you'll forget things, but the effect on your self-esteem is much better than to see yourself not doing things even though you remember about them. Roll with it! "I forget stuff and I refuse to feel bad about that".

To-Do lists were actually remembrance devices🔗

I've made so many To-Do lists in my life, but turns out I was partly driven to write them just as a way to remember all the ideas I had about things that would be good to do.

I took well to the GTD (Getting Things Done) system's "Someday/Maybe" list, but not its list of "Projects" you commit to actually do.

Still, Someday/Maybe can pose a problem because every time you look at it, you could feel a bit guilty at never having tackled many of these ideas, plus old ideas that no longer interest you still need a decision on your part to clean up.

To remove that need for decisions, a chronological order may make sense, "top of my head this week" style, where you primarily see what has interested or concerned you most recently.

Commit to nothing: if an idea feels important, probably you'll add it again next week. Trust your future self to make this decision; do not try to control him now for they will resent it and blow off the project just to rebel against the external imposition and assert their freedom.

Defend your future self's freedom of choice. Be their buddy. You still have a record of what interested you in the distant past. You don't need to see it all the time.

(In Emacs Org-mode) Relabel "TODO" as "IDEA"

Normally, todo-lists in Org-mode have the states TODO | DONE. Change this to IDEA | DONE. There's no such thing as a To-Do for people like you, roll with it.

Bonus: in many color themes, TODO is colored red. Change it to green. So you go from a list of angry red TODO to a list of green IDEA. Nice, right?

You don't have a todo list. You don't even have a "wishlist" for things that you would like future-you to do, because then you're still classifying them as things that some idealized or adult version of "you" wants, and that will make bad feelings later.

You don't know which of those things you'll ever do, and that's okay!

It's still useful to have somewhere to write down ideas that you can look up later.

Radical promise: Don't ever make yourself do something you don't want to do🔗

  • Don't want to do something?
    • Don't do it.
    • Don't promise to do it.
    • Don't say you'll try to do it.
    • You don't need to do it.
  • Never do anything you don't want to do.
  • Don't push yourself.
    • Don't argue, prod, nudge, cajole.
    • Don't even gently try to convince yourself.
    • Your subconscious dislikes the idea. Your subconscious has a point. It is smart. Listen.
      • You don't want to do it, and that feeling is valid. Validate the feeling. Say "you are so right".
      • Get on your own team. Agree you will not do the thing, and you will keep on not-doing-it for exactly as long as you don't want to do it. No questions asked. No justification needed. No need to prepare arguments. Your feeling wins by default. Like a motorist versus a pedestrian in court. The pedestrian wins by default. No need to prepare any rhetoric. You are king; whatever you feel like doing, that is the right thing to do, and no need to wrap it in excuses.
      • Let your subconscious learn to trust you, trust that you will not betray it, by actually not betraying it.
        • It will take time. It has been under constant stream of betrayals for your entire life, and it has got its revenge every time by taking over. Trust is earned.

Does the above seem like a terrible idea? Then Replacing Guilt has a lot to say, such as that Not-forcing-yourself creates a win-win situation.

Your conscious mind is useless🔗

  • The conscious mind thinks in circles, especially if you have ADHD and the topic is negative. It's useless. The solution: just straight-up stop thinking! Instead, every time something "needs thinking about", rely 100% on Unlocking subconscious wisdom.
    • In my experience, I already know the answer to most of the things I struggle with! It's not so much a challenge of figuring it out, as a challenge of opening my eyes.
      • Opening my eyes seems to mostly be about letting myself feel, and staying with those feelings rather than instinctively running. A lot of good ideas can show up then.
    • Similar idea in Tune Your Cognitive Strategies : "A small tweak to how your brain processes information in general is worth more than a big upgrade to your conscious repository of cognitive tricks."
  • By the way, Avoid causing harm with your inner chatter

Perhaps it's ironic. ADHD, the syndrome that makes someone largely do what they want and not-think, and the solution is to… do what you want, and not think.

You just have to do what you want, and not think, in the right way ;-)

Practice asking for help even though you don't need it🔗

Because you do need it.

The book Dirty Laundry said the main changes happened when she

  1. got her diagnosis
  2. learned to ask for help

I for one rarely get the idea that someone could help me. The thought is like from an alien. So I can't just wait until it becomes supremely obvious that I ought to ask for someone to help, as that's too late and too rare. Better to practice so the idea isn't so alien.

So now, sometimes when I text a friend, I'll try to think of what I could ask them for help with even though it seems to me like I'll take care of everything. As a bonus, it's part of How to share my life?

Don't schedule yourself🔗

You can display absolute deadlines on the calendar—not committing to them, it's just good to have intel on enemy positions—but everything else stays out.

David Allen's GTD (Getting Things Done) got this part right. Ideally your calendar is just empty all the time.

School-week schedules work in school because someone else made them for you and there are other people on the same schedule waiting for you at each scheduled event.

No automated digital reminders🔗

Reminders are like scheduling putting my hand on a frying pan. Even when it's time, my spontaneous answer is "nah". Even more so as I recognize a reminder I've seen before, strengthening the blind spot every time.

TLDR: Automatic reminders will always be blown off.

I'm talking about things that try to build better habits, like "Consider taking a walk today", or "Time to hit the gym!" or Apple's bedtime reminder. They don't work, or they just work 1 time in 500 and make you feel bad the other 499 times, gradually poisoning your self-esteem.

Deadline notifications, yes🔗

The ideal deadline-notification is the opposite of the ideal reminder. Zero politesse! It should need zero interaction. No email that you must open before you can discover that it's actually about an invoice: the full body of the email must be reproduced inside the phone notification—ideally even when the phone is locked—so that there's no need to go into the mail app or even unlock the phone.

They sound sort of like the same thing, don't they? Reminders and deadline-notifications? But they're separate functions, and by treating them the same way, maybe you destroy both.

Prefer notification by SMS, not by email

SMS wins because they're usually written more compact, so you have a better chance of absorbing the relevant information in one glance before the "ugh field" has a chance to form.

Keep unsubscribing from emails and muting notification sources

I learned to enjoy doing this.

I easily missed important notifications when I received many. It's the same how unfiltered spam buries the important emails.

Better to go a bit too far in the other direction, and block a notification source even if it's kind of important! The ideal is to receive zero on a typical day.

But I suggest not muting your close friends! If you're in a noisy chat group, mute the chat group, not the people.

If you have a noisy email environment at work, consider just keeping it on the work computer—don't bring it onto the phone too.

The tally-marks game🔗

When you're working on something important and not-that-fun, a game you can play is to draw tally marks on a whiteboard every time you get distracted.

Or use a knitting counter, which makes a pleasant "click" sound when you press the button to make the number go up (Which knitting counter?).

Anyway, to keep the game attractive to your monkey mind, agree with yourself that it's fine to seek a distraction. Require of yourself only that you notice the distraction happening—lifting it to consciousness—then go ahead and follow the distraction if you still want to. Enjoy!

It's ok to mix in fun stuff🔗

Mix the fun with the not-fun, because it's a horrific prospect to sit down for 4 hours of Not Fun Thing compared to 4 hours of mixed activities.

However, ideally you don't choose such an engrossing type of fun: a good type is an average-quality movie that you can watch a few minutes at a time (no more than 7/10 on IMDB…), a worse type is programming an interesting project because you can get absorbed into it in September and not come back out until October.

But beware that the movie should not be on a touchscreen device, or worse, casted to TV. They make it laggy and annoying to pause and unpause, so you might stop pausing altogether. It should be on the same computer you work, so you can just hit the space bar to pause instantly. Trivial inconveniences matter.

Set things up to tempt your future-self🔗

Make it easy to do the thing whenever the inclination hits. If you're hoping to do a thing in town the next day, make a pile of things you'll need in the morning. For example, gym clothes for the gym (plus shoes, keys!)

As a bonus, this pile can also contain such things you will use in the morning such as your toothbrush, so you have the comfort of knowing that the pile will be all you need to look at.

Make it easy to look up information

Examples:

  • have important conversations in chat (instead of voice), so you can just look up what was said later
  • keep all certificates/diplomas in one folder so you don't have to think about where to find them
    • in that same folder, a spreadsheet (or just .txt file) listing all the school courses you began to attend, with start date, course code etc…
    • also all jobs you worked and their start and finish dates (so basically you're writing your CV, minus the million questions about formatting and style)

Leave projects half-done

A classic example among writers: the last sentence you write for the day, don't complete the sentence. Let tomorrow-you complete it.

But! While this is a neat trick for getting restarted fast, I think it needs to be a project that gives you a warm glow to begin with. If it's job applications or something… Uh. Don't leave browser tabs open with a Thing You Should Do. Maybe if an application is like 90% filled-in.

Don't automatically accept tasks; decline by default🔗

It's Christmas. I am on my way to wrap presents, and someone asks me on the way to prep the mulled wine. I normally assent to such a request, adding it to my plate of things to do, try to track several tasks at once. The problem is that my plate only has room for one task. In the process of doing one task, often there will be a few small complications to solve… and presto, I've forgotten about the other tasks entirely.

With the ADHD hypothesis in mind, this behavior of automatically accepting extra tasks… it stands out. Why do that? It's clearly not one of my strengths. So in this example, I'd better just say "No, because I'm going to wrap presents". It isn't even rude!

On the rare occasion someone may ask "Ok, but can you do X after you're done with Y?" I could say "I'll do it if I remember to". No implicit promise. Self-advocate.

Don't promise anything that relies on memory! (At least not until you've activated a timer or put it in the calendar. But even then, don't promise – better to state the truth, "I'll do it if this calendar successfully reminds me")

(Come to think, the word "promise" doesn't seem to mean anything. It's true I'll do it if I remember, and equally true that I won't if I don't remember. That's all there can be to it. What does it mean to promise something?)

In fact, just don't agree to do anything, period, unless it's right now. Get in the habit of saying "Ask me later".

I understand if this chafes, since you'd like to do things for people. You can actually express that too! "I'd like to do that for you, but ask me later."

Craft tactics to prevent each failure-mode you've seen before🔗

The internet serves up plenty of memes identifying specific ways that we dysfunction (romankogan.net/adhd/, old.reddit.com/r/ADHDmemes). Take the memes you can relate to, and think about how you can subvert them for yourself.

… and so on!

Only a few of your tactics will work right away. Experiment, fail, and gather information from the failure. Modify the tactic for next time. Maybe one day, you can write "Yes, this specific problem, I've got a pretty good system for it".

Don't leave browser tabs open with a Thing You Should Do🔗

It doesn't work for me, anyway. If I don't want to do the thing now, better close it. So next time I think of it, I want to (because of course I only think of it if I feel ready).

If it's just shoved in my face "haha remember this thing from yesterday you didn't finish?", I super don't want to finish!

Trigger-Action Patterns

Interesting idea is to train Noticing that exact moment when you seek a distraction, and then train an automatic response to do something different, like stay with the feeling. See Self-training

Apply the mindset of slack to everything for a while?

What links here

Created (2 years ago)
Updated (10 months ago)

Inner-simulator prompts

#using-system-1

Examples

  • Other-ising
    • Taking the "Outside view" on yourself
    • How would you advise someone else in a similar position?
  • Pre-hindsight (part of Murphyjitsu, a broad technique out of CFAR)
    • Typical example: "Two months from now, we break up. What went wrong?"
    • In short, assume you already know the answer & let intuition fill in the blanks
    • "If a future version of myself travels to the now, what would they advise me?"
  • Concretizing – unpacking all the details
  • Thinking in bets
    • Even if you won't make a public bet, you can try going through the motions as if. Like, actually log onto fatebook.io and formulate a bet you'd stand behind, giving it a judgment day and a percentage. That gets you in touch with what you truly believe.
      • Bonus if you think about how much money you'd dare to put on this. When the involvement of money actually affects your answer, that's your inner sim giving you its true expectations rather than letting you believe the stories you like to tell.

What's "inner simulator"?

What links here

Created (10 months ago)

Delusion of agency

An #adhd thing, especially among people who don't suspect they have ADHD. You don't identify yourself as someone who is unable to follow through on their decisions because it seems to you that of course, you can. When you need to.

You have to shatter the delusion by asking e.g. "Okay, so when did you last follow a decision that came from yourself?"

(Decisions that could be acted-on right away don't count.)

I'll wait.


In support of the delusion is cryptomnesia: the habit of forgetting all the times you tried something new and it failed to stick, so this time around, you still think it's a new trick and honestly believe it will work.

You suffer from unassailable optimism. Your "can I?"-meter is stuck on "yes" and you never learn.

I suppose it's nice that an unending stream of disappointments never kills your enthusiasm. But it's seriously maladaptive… It's why when someone texts you asking to do them a favor, you don't reply to the message because you're not sure when you can do it, but you definitely think you can eventually, you just feel you shouldn't say so until it's happening. No matter how many hours or days or weeks pass, you never generate the thought that "maybe I can't", so you don't ever just tell your friend for their information that maybe you can't. You still think you can and you still intend to. Then years pass without a text.

It's a logic failure, and a damn bizarre species of one.

Midas prioritization🔗

Antidote to the delusion of agency: first get conscious of how little agency you have. You had basically no say in getting to where you are, right? Your life so far happened by accident? Then extrapolate: you cannot believe that even now you have any say in where you will go from here!

When you finish crying, learn to work with that, with the absence of control. Accept that none of your desires will come to pass, so long as you prioritize them. Read that again.

Do you know the story of King Midas? He was cursed such that everything he touched turned into gold. He couldn't touch his friends, for they'd turn to gold. He couldn't eat, for the food would turn to gold.

With regards to priorities, you have Midas' touch and must not touch anything that feels important. Use Nonstandard ways to cope with ADHD.

You can also think of it as a "gorgon module". Your brain has a subroutine, basically malware, that if it's plugged in while you think about a goal that you'd like to accomplish, it petrifies that goal and you cannot progress.

I'm talking about a pattern of counterproductive mental chatter (Avoid causing harm with your inner chatter).

Keep Medusa locked away in a dark cell, don't let her look at anything. And the simplest way to do that—

—is to have no priorities.

When you only ever do things for fun, you'll by accident do useful things too. But the moment you see those activities as useful, bam! Petrified.

Oh, it's a task? Now you're this comic:

Comic; an anthropomorphized task asks a character for 15 minutes of attention, who freezes for 8 hours and then 8 months

Note that admitting this actually changes nothing in practice. You were avoiding your priorities already, weren't you? So what will be different?

With no agency, it makes no sense to make plans.

Why were you trying to make plans all this time? That unassailable optimism?

Admit the absence of agency, and you free up your mind for pursuits other than pointlessly gripping the reins of an untrained horse. Perhaps in between bouts of Minecraft, you find yourself genuinely wanting to chip away at the creative challenge of how to fool employers into hiring you—but it's not useful, of course.

the motivation game

What links here

Created (10 months ago)
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