Becoming Eden

Tag: optimization

  • Understanding Body Language, Touch, and Appearance

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    by

    will
    in

    When it came to understanding body language, fashion, all of that kind of stuff, I used to be a typical clueless nerd. I didn’t perceive it, and I didn’t think it really mattered. I know better now. It matters. A lot. Over the years I have seen a lot of objections to learning to perceive…

  • How to Deal with Email

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    by

    will
    in

    One of the biggest problems that I commonly hear from my friends is that processing email is completely unmanageable. The most important thing to remember is that your attention is the most precious resource that you have, and you need to guard it jealously. All of the following principles flow from this fundamental insight. The…

  • Self-Improvement: What It Is And Why We Care

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    by

    will
    in

    We like to talk about this concept we call “self-improvement” a lot. On the face of it, it’s a relatively simple and easy concept to understand: we are improving our selves. End of post! …except it’s still a little bit vague what I mean by that, even in my own mind. Let’s forget about defining…

  • Exploration/Exploitation Applied

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    by

    will
    in

    In my previous post, I discussed the exploration/exploitation tradeoff that is inherent to optimizing under significant uncertainty, and alluded to some of the ways that this influences my thinking. In this post, I want to give some examples of how using this framework has actually changed my behavior. From a Global Parameter… As far as…

  • What I Wish I Knew in College

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    by

    will
    in

    I feel like I only learned how to optimize effectively during my senior year of college. At that point I was mostly set into my college path: I was an economics major, I had already used my off-terms, I was involved in particular organizations, I had my group of friends, etc. What I could change…

  • Lessons From (and For) the Quantified Self Movement

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    by

    will
    in

    The very first time I heard about Quantified Self I was excited by the world of possibilities contained therein. I pride myself on my self-awareness, and it seemed like adding quantitative rigor to this process would allow me to uncover new patterns below my current awareness – and ideally, to change them. Besides, I liked…

  • The Exploration/Exploitation Framework

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    by

    will
    in

    We all have a variety of mental models that we use to interpret the world around us. In many cases we have very specific models, e.g. I know that turning the key in the ignition makes my car turn on, and this does not assist me very much in my understanding of the world. At…