Sparring Mind

I recommend reading this: http://www.sparringmind.com/changing-habits/ and other articles by the same guy. He links directly to a lot of productivity studies, and you're in a good place so you have plenty of time to try things out. Good luck!

Music scientist Phillip Dorrell [0] has argued for the existence of currently hypothetical "strong music," a class of musical stimuli presumably discoverable by strong AI. The idea makes sense if you accept the concept of "intelligence explosion." Any property, in this case the rewarding effect of acoustic stimuli in humans, can be powerfully maximized. There must exist patterns in music-space that would have profoundly greater impact on human minds than those our low-wattage brains can find. So through a really powerful search and optimization process that can more efficiently explore remote, undiscovered regions of music-space, we get a "music explosion." What these songs would sound like is the real mystery. Would they sound anything like the music we're familiar with? Would they lead to musical wireheading? It also seems a bad idea to measure musical goodness by, say, how many times humans will replay a certain audio file. If you use this measure, I don't think you'll end with what you want at all. See also "supernormal stimuli": https://www.sparringmind.com/supernormal-stimuli/ [0] https://whatismusic.info/

I recently found that nearly all of my procrastination problems in life could be relatively straightforwardly traced back to internet surfing on sites with infinite sources of novelty. As the meme goes, one nacho cheese Dorito has more extreme nacho cheese flavor than a medieval peasant would get in their entire lifetime. [https://twitter.com/matthewpcrowley/status/621078253827002368?lang=en] Our brains just aren't equipped to deal with novelty of this magnitude. I'm relatively convinced that if I want to achieve my goals, especially as a solo founder working from my apartment, I'm going to _have_ to make an extraordinary effort to curb this, since the default is to just consume all evening (and for a work from home person like me, all day). I also have recently wondered if I've brewed the perfect cocktail of procrastination for myself as I may have some non-hyperactive ADD combined with this low accountability environment. So, all of the normal procrastination advice applies, but I found it useful to make it harder to access these sources of infinite novelty. Especially while working, but even during the evening. There are a number of blocking apps, but most of them can be trivially defeated by a developer with admin access. The two that I've found to work the best for me are http://getcoldturkey.com for Windows 10 and https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=cz.mobilesoft.appblock for Android. I see no real reason to ever need to waste time on my phone. I've…

Obligatory comic on supernormal stimuli: https://www.sparringmind.com/supernormal-stimuli/

The concept in comic form: https://www.sparringmind.com/supernormal-stimuli/

This related comic is pretty good: http://www.sparringmind.com/supernormal-stimuli/

This isnt just games. Lets be frank. We can become addicted to anything given the right physiological triggers. Capitalism has optimised itself to the point where you are nothing more then meta data. Its at the point where a team of accredited people can sit infront of the meta data, and your product, and they can design ways to trigger dopamine responses. Putting "any" kind of "modern product" in your childs hand will lead to one thing. Now put a connected device in their hands, and your putting your child in the hands of unlimited amounts of teams, using unlimited amounts of tickery, to earn profit from your child. Now add back in a dynmically manipulated game environment, where these tools are utilised by predators to exploit your child for their version on profit. This is the challenge of being a modern parent. Junk food, everywhere, all the time. https://www.sparringmind.com/supernormal-stimuli/