Learning, attention, habits, and understanding myself — lately with AI in the loop.
Early this year, I noticed I'd put on some lockdown-weight. I wasn't super worried but wanted to get back to my typical, healthier weight level. My first intuition in this situation was, "let me go on a diet." Diets can work. But they are expensive: you spend willpower every day on avoiding the
My nervous system is in a civil war over my actions. The dopamine-seeking side keeps winning. Dopamine itself is crucial: it's a neurotransmitter driving you to achieve external goals. The bad part is being driven to the easiest, least meaningful ones. I try not to feed the enemy. Soft-blocking addictive websites and subsections like recommendations helps.
I recently reflected on my productivity and discovered, to my horror, that I’m doing pretty badly! I used to be very organized and do lots of creative, important work consistently every day for months on end. Somehow, I had lost that in the past 3-5 years. Doing what comes naturally is a lousy method for doing open-ended,
As the coronavirus pandemic escalated, I was travelling around the world. The timing was unfortunate, but the endless hours of flying also presented an opportunity for reflecting on the virus. Most people correctly focus on the immediate effects of the virus: survival is required for anything interesting in the future. However, many people will change their habits permanently and that
I’ve often needed to enter a domain where I previously had no expertise: e.g. when I started my blog, when I decided to consciously work on my social skills, or when I decided I want to understand business better. Getting an initial understanding of the new domain is really hard because there are many competing frameworks and schools
I’m reading a book on happiness and meditation which contains the following story. In Chinese history, during the reign of Emperor Shun (who lived sometime around 2200 BCE), what was then known as China was plagued by frequent destructive floods along the Yellow River. The emperor ordered a nobleman called Gun to solve the problem. Gun’s strategy was
