Due Diligence

[nyuanshin]

Structure is the essential component to flourishing which is most conspicuously absent from my life. I've managed to shut off some persistent sources of distraction, but this is unsatisfactorily ad hoc and doesn't strike at the root of the problem; I need better heuristics for keeping distractions from appealing to me in the first place

Comments

[smandal]

Isn't diligence a behavioral control? I wonder if prudence is a better fit.

I've come to a similar thought about myself, thought the particulars seem a bit different. In any case, if you nature is to chase the dragon, then it pays to think holistically about how to make it worthwhile.

[nyuanshin]

I'm thinking of it as a design principle -- something I can use to look at my own behavioral programs and ask "does it exemplify this desirable trait"? Prudence is pretty awesome too though and might even be better, so thanks.

[nyuanshin]

It's not so much a behavioral control as a high-level perceptual control -- if I set a high reference value for perceiving diligence in my own actions, the rest of my nervous system should fall into line over repeated trials in order to minimize error. If it fails to, that's interesting and would suggest some intrinsic conflict with other unrecognized principles.

If this sounds a little airy, it's because I'm still working on a good vocabulary for this stuff.

[queueball]

There's much I find valuable in your recent entries that I don't, at the moment, have the whatever to wordify, but I wanted to note that your third graf here reminded me immediately and powerfully of a bit near the end of In the Beginning ... Was the Command Line:[S]omewhere outside of and beyond our universe is an operating system, coded up over incalculable spans of time by some kind of hacker-demiurge. The cosmic operating system uses a command-line interface. It runs on something like a teletype, with lots of noise and heat; punched-out bits flutter down into its hopper like drifting stars. The demiurge sits at his teletype, pounding out one command line after another, specifying the values of fundamental constants of physics:

universe -G 6.672e-11 -e 1.602e-19 -h 6.626e-34 -protonmass 1.673e-27....

and when he's finished typing out the command line, his right pinky hesitates above the ENTER key for an aeon or two, wondering what's going to happen; then down it comes--and the WHACK you hear is another Big Bang.