Behaviorism Followup

I think setting up a strongly-positive incentive gradient for my days is, unsurprisingly, working, though it's a bit more difficult to maintain when other people are involved. I'm going to try continuing this in the coming week, perhaps transitioning towards more desirable projects. It's very easy, in an obligation-focused environment, to forget what you actually wanted to do (instead of what some vague other supposedly expects you to do).

Behaviorism

I'm doing a theme week again!

Specifically, I have probably mentioned before that I am not a morning person. This week, I thought about why that is. Right now, there isn't any particular reason to dislike mornings, besides the process of getting up. Why do I dislike that? At the current point in time, no rational reason! I can set my own hours, do what I want when I get up, and arrange my schedule more-or-less as I so desire.

However, this was not always true. Over the years, I developed a strong negative association with getting up in the morning. This can be attributed to a number of factors: school starting at a developmentally-unhealthy time through almost the entirely of K-12, massively insufficient sleep during a good deal of college, unpleasant obligations upon waking—years of this before I decided to develop the usual chemical dependency! The opposite result should be more surprising.

The theme for this week, then, is going to be attempting to reverse this situation. My plan is pretty simple: since there wasn't all that much on the agenda this week anyway, I'm going to start the day doing something fun. I want to do this as early as I can, and continue for a significant period. My hope is that, by the end of the week, I'll be looking forward to getting up in the morning, rather than internally resisting the change.

If this doesn't work, I'm willing to extend the project until school starts, but it may not take nearly that long to change my attitude. Once that occurs, I can start in on constructive activities earlier and earlier in the day (particularly since I have more discretion in choosing my agenda than I did before receiving my degree).

Short Update

I'll probably have a post up in the next week or two over here or at the new blog, depending on how discussions of the content matter go with some friends this week. I might have published it sooner, but Dad has been off work for nine (9) days now and that's really not at all friendly towards my goals.

Asteroid Day

I pushed out an extensive blog post for Asteroid Day, which I think is going to become an annual feature. My 2019 Planetary Defense Progress Report follows onto the inaugural update I published last June, and covers even more ground describing the international effort to detect and deflect deep space objects which could threaten Earth. If that sounds interesting to you, I really do recommend you take a look; I worked hard on this and hope plenty of people can learn from it.

Even better than last year, I got to discuss Asteroid Day in person with some of my friends who saw the post and were curious. Ancillary benefits!

This week, of course, is Independence Day, so my Dad has the week off work. Unfortunately, he doesn't seem to understand that just because he's on vacation (read: eager to give himself a week-long asthma/allergy attack from cleaning the basement) does not me that I am in a situation to be further disrupting my routine. This last week was off-kilter enough; I'm just hoping to carry on with my personal projects and so on.

We even have a large-scale home maintenance operation underway which was forced upon us unexpected (but which we would have needed to do eventually), so I suppose I don't understand the urgency to exert a great deal of effort on something which is lower priority. Honestly, the idea of self-utilitarianism would be useful for society as a whole. What I mean by this is a selfish interest in your future self, avoiding hyperbolic discounting, thinking seriously about what order to do things in. As a general rule, the actions which will provide you the most long-term utility should be done first: ceteris paribus, fixing something that negatively affects you every day should be done before something that negatively effects you every once in awhile.

I think that this is self-evident, but self-evidently it is not. So far, I have not had much success explaining it to people who are used to making unordered, unweighted lists.

Continuing Education

I got my acceptance letter to grad school this week, which means that in two months time I will either be employed or pursuing my master's degree. At this point, the latter seems more probable. I would have liked to have waited to pursue graduate study, but my desires have had very little to do with reality these last twenty-five years.

In the meantime, my personal research programs are staying alive. I finished Superfuel and Rocket Propulsion Elements this week, which moves me a bit further along. I wasn't particularly impressed with either book and may write reviews at some point soon. (I need to take Superfuel back to the library tomorrow so hopefully I can get something up on Goodreads in short order.)

That's about it. I have some plans for this week, but nothing particularly noteworthy in the conventional sense.

Father's Day

Father's Day is proving much less over-bearing that Mother's Day did, though in part that's because Dad wanted to go see a movie today instead of book group (which isn't this week), and my presence was not required for that. We're going out to eat this evening and that will probably be a bit tiring. Consequently, I'm writing this now instead of later so I can get ready for bed immediately after we get back.

I was hoping to get a few things done this morning, but unexpectedly I suffered a severe bout of insomnia last night. I have some hypotheses but I'm not really sure why. Regardless, today was not a particularly productive day; tomorrow needs to be better.

The last few weeks, I've been thinking about intentionality and how to implement changes in one's life (prompted by material we've been discussing in the local rationalist group). More recently, I've also been thinking about the goals and ideas that I had at various points in my past and wanting to take steps towards achieving a healthier mindset. Among other things, I've decided to completely give up my fiction writing for the foreseeable future so that I can focus entirely on my technical projects and independent research.

Oh, I should mention that I'm about to finished Rocket Propulsion Elements and will be advancing to spacecraft design texts in the very near future. My reading progress as a whole has been quite satisfying as of late.

Mercury

I crossed another planet off my list while I was at the local university observatory on Friday night. Mercury is up above the horizon after sunset, and visible through telescopes and the naked eye. By my count, that just leaves Uranus or Neptune (I can't recall which, but I think it's Neptune) left for me to see with my own two eyes.

The fact that astronomers thought they saw surface features on other bodies when their telescopes weren't all that much more powerful than those I was looking through...really says something about human psychology, most likely.

Tomorrow, it's back to the problem of getting people out there.

Twenty-Five

As of today, I have been an independently-breathing human being for a full quarter-century.

As recent birthdays have gone, this one has been pretty good. I woke up early, ate lunch with some friends, got a car wash, and went out for dinner with my parents. Last year there was a power outage and I accidentally ordered a spinach quiche at dinner. The year before that I could barely walk because I spent the day before crouching down constantly to show Cub Scouts how to launch model rockets.

We'll see how the coming year goes; the last year has felt largely like a zero on the sum of my life. At the same time, I feel a lot more mature than I did a year ago—but that's true every year. I think that's how growth works. The experiential and developmental aspects of maturation (which are...all of it, oui?) take time to occur.

A higher gain might be nicer, though.

Memorial Day Weekend

All told, I think I did pretty well this week (despite some atrocious weather). I took care of several administrative matters, finished reading Spacecraft Mission Design, and started getting up early again. Technically I fell down on that last one this morning, but not particularly dramatically compared to recent Sundays and I'm on track to continue.

Part of that is that I need some space to work on my own tasks even despite the plan to do lots of stuff together on Memorial Day. Specifically, Dad wants to assemble some shelving units to organize the basement (which really doesn't seem like a priority to me given the functionality deficits on the main floor of the house) and of course we're doing the cemetery circuit. We'll probably cook out, too—I should ask if we need to take that meat out of the freezer tonight. That's...more than I'd really like, and Dad is off Tuesday to complicate matters. And he works from home Wednesday and Thursday, so.

Back to the library with me, most likely. I didn't get to it as many days as I would have liked this week, so I'm due for a correction. The next book of theirs I'm reading is non-technical, which I think lowers the activation energy requires while building up the basic habit.

I might stop doing Links

I'm definitely not doing them this month. May is almost over and I haven't saved any interesting articles to share. And I'm not in a hurry to go digging up links just to make the post.

This is directly a product of my hard-fought battle of wasting less time on social media—a battle I think I'm winning, this being but one more piece of evidence. But that itself is due to a strong philosophical opinion against news and for passivism. Several of the commentators whose opinions I value keep reiterating points about the value of focusing one's attention and fighting the distractions of our information-overloaded culture (see, for example, CGP Grey and Meredith Patterson for different perspectives on this problem). Honestly, I'm not convinced that they go far enough. It's not just about a difficulty focusing, but about the selfish valuation of your own time and effort.

On that note, my pace of reading books has been really go, and I'm not experiencing an overwhelming distractedness or anything like some people describe. If anything, it's the reverse; I read The Stand in eleven days, basically dropping everything once the plot started to pick up around page 250. To some extent that's because Stephen King is an engaging writer, but it also indicates a certain ability to engage with longform narratives still survives.

Returning to the main point, I'm just not all that enthusiastic about compiling a list of links just for the sake of compiling it. I don't even enjoy doing it, and consider how many stories have proven mistaken, illusory, or simply non-consequential. Why should I bother writing summaries for all of them? What purpose does it serve? Some stories are worthwhile, yes, but honestly the ones that excite me for whatever reason are probably worth discussing in greater detail.

That's why I'm probably giving up on link posts. This is hardly a hard commitment, but I would be somewhat surprised if I decide to resume link posting when I could be, I don't know, reading spacecraft engineering books.