Meetup this week

[Sandy Maguire]

Hi everyone,

Since it looks like wolf + others are going to be in Seattle this weekend and I was rather looking forward to having one in Vancouver, would anyone be interested in meeting up this week? I'm not sure if there is regular time/place, but I am relatively flexible.

Looking forward to meeting you all,
Sandy

[Wolf Tivy]

Sorry about that, Sandy.

Please do hold a meetup. I look forward to meeting you (hopefully next week?)

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[Andrew McKnight]

Yes, let's still meet. Benny's Bagels at 3:30pm Saturday?

I'm always happy to meet new people and we don't need Wolf to be there, though there will be a difficult-to-fill Wolf-shaped vacuum for us to plug.

[Wolf Tivy]

I'm sure you can manage without me. :)

[Sandy Maguire]

Sounds good. I'll see you there!

[Sandy Maguire]

To confirm, this is Benny's, 2505 W Broadway?

I will be wearing a red bandana for easy identificatory purposes.

Sandy

[Andrew McKnight]

That's the one. I'll keep an eye out for your bandana.

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[Wolf Tivy]

How'd it go?

[Andrew McKnight]

It went well. Only 4 of us, but we had a bunch of good conversations. We've decided to do some Rejection Therapy June 1st before the meetup.

[Kenneth Bruskiewicz]

> Rejection Therapy

Hooray! I'll be back then. Looking forward to a time and place.

Love y'all.

"It's immoral for a sucker to keep his money." - Canada Jones

"There's a sucker born every minute." - Attributed to P.T. Barnum.

Litany against Barnum-Jones:
If the fair market value of snow is X, I wish to pay X for snow. If the fair market value of snow is not X, I do not wish to pay X for snow. Unless the auctioneer is a sucker.

Ignore the following. It is a nonsense sentence that disables Google ads from displaying next to my emails by triggering sensitive keywords. 

I enjoy the massacre of ads. This sentence will slaughter ads without a messy bloodbath.

[Sandy Maguire]

I had a blast! Hopefully each of Vancouver's meetups is that much fun.

Some things I promised I'd post are:

My rough guide to goal factoring: http://sandymaguire.me/Goal%20Factoring .

And online speedreading software: http://textcelerator.com/

I also have an email describing how to set up yed for goal factoring if anyone would be interested.

Sandy

[Kenneth Bruskiewicz]

> I also have an email describing how to set up yed for goal factoring if anyone would be interested.

Yes.

> And online speedreading software

The orienting response is an objection I've seen against the consistent usage of speed-reading software. Textcelerator looks interesting to me due to the up-and-down pattern that the text travels with, but appears that on both sides there is mostly conjecture on whether or not it would work.

(You'd think that with the popularity of speed reading we'd have better information about what works. I haven't researched nearly enough to tell if this is the case.)

> My rough guide to goal factoring

Beautiful. Stating Geoff Anders' time-frame is useful to me. I look forward to seeing the article's completion.

[Andrew McKnight]

By the way, I spent 5 hours goal factoring in yed yesterday. I'm addicted already.
Oh, and Sandy mentioned http://tomato-timer.com for Pomodoro. I'm testing that out today.

[Davison]

Speaking of goal factoring, there was a recent goals presentation recorded by the LW NY group. The presenter's email from the group list is pasted verbatim below with his permission:

<snip>

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Mark Lippmann <mark.l...@gmail.com>
Date: Mon, May 20, 2013 at 1:37 PM
Subject: Re: [OBNYC][Self Imp][Meetup] Strategic Goal Elicitation
To: overcomi...@googlegroups.com

Good timing, Ray:

I've attached slides, slides with presenter notes, and a txt bibliography.

After uploading and transcoding, video will be here:

http://youtu.be/uhql6m4cHuE

This is what we covered, in about this order:

"goal types that predict happiness,"

"evidence for nonsymbolic cognition,"

"evidence that nonsymbolic cognition is useful,"

"evidence that you can get better at nonsymbolic cognition,"

"demonstrating that you're (of course) already doing nonsymbolic cognition and you can do it deliberately,"

"focusing, freewriting, and goal elicitation prompts,"

"some final tips and thoughts and questions and comments by other people"

Feedback and questions welcome! (Thank you to those who have already done so.) I am most definitely interested in the feedback Ray specifies upthread. You could cc both of us. (Emails in general are best--I'll respond!, but feel free: http://www.admonymous.com/lippmann )

-----------

</snip>

The LW threads that Mark pointed to in the discussion group are:

http://lesswrong.com/lw/f53/now_i_appreciate_agency/

http://lesswrong.com/lw/8q8/urges_vs_goals_the_analogy_to_anticipation_and/

http://lesswrong.com/lw/2p5/humans_are_not_automatically_strategic/

http://lesswrong.com/lw/8q8/urges_vs_goals_the_analogy_to_anticipation_and/

http://lesswrong.com/lw/5r9/suffering_as_attentionallocational_conflict/

http://lesswrong.com/lw/15c/would_your_real_preferences_please_stand_up/

http://lesswrong.com/lw/1xh/living_luminously/

http://rationalconspiracy.com/2013/01/24/what-caring-is/

Davison

[Sandy Maguire]

@Andrew: Oh right! I forgot! The pomodoro I use is actually http://tomatoi.st/ . It gives you a unique URL when you first connect, and you can use that to track your entire session. Awesome to hear about the goal factoring though!

[Kenneth Bruskiewicz]

There is an old program I use for my goal-factoring that resembles WorkFlowy but is more powerful in certain ways. It's called BrainStorm and it's a leftover from the days of Windows 98, I believe.

http://brainstormsw.com/

It's an outlining program that has some very fast traversal and sorting capabilities, and the way that the program is structured allows one to manage complex lists that are highly detailed by only allowing the viewing of one particular entry at a time. That sounds crippling, but after some experimentation I've found this a lot more effective at rapid goal-factoring than other programs, yEd included. The only thing I've used that is as comparably useful for managing complex lists is org-mode for Emacs, but the two compliment one another greatly.

(If you're interested, there is a tutorial here: http://www.cyborganize.org/clarity/fast-start/how-to-brainstorm-effortlessly-with-brainstormwfo/ it takes a tolerance of market-speak but it's one of the few tutorials out there and it's very informative. Seven minutes.)

I would recommend downloading the demo and giving it a shot. The biggest downside is the price-tag, but even when the trial expires you can still use it to create lists and export to .txt or other file formats; you lost the capability to save in their proprietary format, however, and reading the list becomes one-way.

My workflow is basically Brainstorm -> org-mode -> [some future macro for converting lists to Dot/XML that I need to code] -> yEd, if I need to create an image visualization. Then yEd is where I do future fine-tuning. I don't think that brainstorming the purpose of why you do things benefits from the point-and-click model, and as long as you can touch type you can complete goal-factoring a lot faster and in a "stream-of-consciousness" if you use an interface more closely related to plaintext.