A microproductivity technique (inspired by geometric rationality?)
how I finally dealt with my box of old hard drives
Epistemic status: meware that I use regularly, but that doesn’t always occur to me to try. I’m agnostic about whether it’s connected to any of the deeper structure of the universe.
tldr; there’s something right to me about transmuting the effort I’d use to dismiss a productivity bid dismissively into dismissing it constructively
Geometric Rationality
I quite liked the geometric rationality sequence Scott Garrabrant posted on LessWrong about two years ago. Especially the part about the different rationale for Kelly betting. I had been a bit uneasy ever since I learned about Kelly betting. The procedure seemed quite important, and the assumption that I cared about the log of my money seemed kinda wrong in a way that seemed load-bearing for the whole plan. Hearing his argument about minimizing internal politics by eliminating a bunch of stakes about where to draw boundaries was a big relief. Overall, the geometric rationality stuff got inside my head enough that deconverted me (pretty completely I think?) from being a VNM rationalist.1 (I’m still happy to call myself a regular rationalist.) Afaict, the thing I’m about to describe about how I try to relate to some of my todo items is directly downstream of the shift I had from reading the geometric rationality posts. I won’t spell out the connection here in any detail, but it felt important to me to mention it.
My old box of computers
For a bunch of years, I had a box of old computers and hard drives. One day, I wanted to get the data off them. The box mostly sat around in my closet not hurting anyone. It wasn’t urgent. It also didn’t seem that important to me. It had never once seemed plausible to the prioritization algorithm that I’d been running that my top priority was to deal with that box. And for a long time, I never dealt with the box.
I did think about the box sometimes though. Mostly, when I did, I was in touch with some cognitive load I had from keeping the box around, and something like guilt that it was still there. When I felt those feelings I would mostly be like “Look, part of me that wants to deal with the box, one day we’ll get to it, but look at all these other more important things we have to worry about this week. Today won’t be the day.” And it worked okay; I kept accepting that various days weren’t the day I would deal with my box.
This back and forth I kept having with myself felt pretty fine, but it didn’t seem exactly wholesome, and IMO it had calculation problem vibes2.
I like to think that if someone offered me $25 and about 300 chances to bet on either heads or tails when heads was 60% likely, I would Kelly bet myself to the maximum payout of $250. Evidently, 2/3 of the participants in an experiment that worked like that bet on tails at some point. I would never? On the same hand, would dealing with my box of old computers be like betting on tails?
Working on it for at least a few seconds
Maybe it would, maybe wouldn’t, but for me I don’t think that’s was a useful framing. I prefer to think of what to with stuff like this in a more bottom up way. In any case, I was definitely having repeated thoughts about the box.3 So, I made a deal with myself where whenever I thought about the box, I would spend at least a few seconds (which is about how long it had been taking me to dismiss my thoughts about the box) working on dealing with my box.
You might wonder what progress someone could make on this type of project in a few seconds. IME there’s a sort of thinking things through/visualization process I can do that usually works. Basically, I go back and forth between focusing on a pretty abstract “towards-y” mental representation of dealing with the box and letting that lead to me imagining the concrete steps I’ll do next.4 And IIRC, it worked great for me to do this with my box of old computers. In little chunks when I thought about the box, I would do things like:
think the box is currently in the back of the closet, and here’s what it would be like to walk towards the box
think “oh I guess I should find a local data recovery place”
remind myself that I had already dealt with the one computer that could still boot up and plug into a hard drive
do a quick search for local data recovery places and save the link in my notes
pick the place that seemed the most promising and save that name in my notes
As you might imagine, eventually this project took on a little momentum of its own, and I “found myself” deciding to use an available afternoon to take the old computers to the data recovery place that I had picked out. That worked great, I moved the data onto an external hard drive, and I no longer have the box.
Mostly nothing new
Obviously, breaking aversive or overwhelming tasks into small pieces and tackling them that way is extremely old news. David Allen is also even into people trusting their intuitive prioritization, which is ~the same as what I did here.
But, for me at least, there was something new and more explicitly bottom up in what I tried with my box of old computers. Where like, sure my top-down focus mostly “gets to” allocate my top-down focus5, but maybe it “doesn’t get to” inhibit my bottom-up whims. But then, correspondingly, acting on my whims doesn’t have to mean trying to recruit my top-down focus to sustain them past their inherent momentum.
For all I know, what I’d describing is pretty close to what everyone is already doing, but if so then no one has ever thought to mention it to me. (Every time I figure out how to do stuff that’s relevant to my life, I wonder if everyone else already knew it.) If so, I hadn’t seen an account of it, so now I’ve written one. And over the course of writing this (in small chunks), I also dealt with one additional thing I had been putting off for months :-).
Other blog posts that had a pretty related and huge effect on me were the ones Zvi’s wrote about slack. Arguably, the stuff I read on LW about decision theory was in the same reference class too. Oh, and re: VNM rationality, this podcast was also about how its assumptions don’t hold.
There’s a little in this blog post I wrote about unschooling about how I relate Hayekian anti-coercion and the calculation problem.
Presumably I could have figured out something like “I’m going to think about this once a year and not otherwise”. I’ve done stuff like that before sometimes. But in this case I didn’t, and this blog post is about what actually happened.
I mostly learned how to do this from Bill Harris’s Holoysnc life integration courses, which I wouldn’t say that I quite recommend, but which did have a pretty big effect on how I see the world.
I don’t think this is merely a tautology, but maybe I’m confused. Another blog post in my draft is about rendering all of the relevant things unto their relevant Caesars. If I ever write that one, then maybe it’ll help me figure out what I meant there.