Benjamin Davies

Just automatise it. Putting things in the right place is a fairly straightforward thing to practice, and there is no reason you couldn’t automatise the homes of all your things.

This is useful for fungible or semi-fungible items, or items that are easily categorised, but not helpful for unique items.

Grouping items by category goes a long way in reducing what needs to be remembered. I don’t need to remember where every sock goes because the simple algorithm “if sock: put in sock drawer” takes care of all socks.

I have a poor memory relating to keeping track of items, and it won’t help if I also have to remember where everything lives.

Should I write down a list of all permanent items and their homes? Ideally I wouldn’t need to do that.

Never put them anywhere else.

I believe this will be a key thing for me to automatise. Many of my things live in sort of ‘interim homes’ on the way to some not-yet-defined permanent home—which they never seem to make it to, of course.

My personal spaces are fairly bland and oddly proportioned. They are not aesthetic at all, even when maximally tidy. Aligning my living spaces with my aesthetic preferences may increase my baseline motivation to keep them tidy.

I noticed today that things in my shared spaces have better defined homes than the things in my private spaces, in the sense of #2840. Relationship maintenance may be a factor, it might be a trivial factor compared to what I describe in #2840.

I’ll test giving everything in my private spaces a dedicated home. From there it should be easier to understand how important ‘relationship maintenance’ is as a factor in my unconscious and inexplicit motivations for tidying up.

That doesn’t mean it can’t be part of the solution.

This would work well for some open threads, but not others (like anything I have left unaddressed on Veritula).

Idea: Keep a document tracking open threads, updating it every night. Every morning, feed it to Gemini Flash and have it coach me on what I could work towards resolving today.

Closing threads is a common problem in my life. I should look for ways to increase my propensity to resolve/finish things I start.

The solution needs to allow for the fact that not everything needs to be resolved, that having some open threads is inevitable, and that some of those threads are acceptable to leave open indefinitely.

As I think about this, I notice that—once I solve a given problem with a new idea—I have no habit to consciously acknowledge that a problem has been solved, much less to write down that it has been solved. The ex-problem fades from my mind as I set my mind on a new problem.

I could try to make it a habit to explicitly acknowledge when I do find solutions to problems. If the solution is found on Veritula, it would be natural to acknowledge it here too.

I like the idea of explicitly acknowledging progress in this way, because it might help me become more prideful in the Objectivist sense.

Would you like to try formulating an explicit methodology for how you want to use Veritula?

This seems like a good idea.

Similarity is fine if it is less narrow, but ‘thread’ doesn’t seem any less narrow than ‘discussion’ to me. A ‘thread’ usually means a reply chain.

I can’t decide if this communicates a grouping of ideas. Seems borderline.

“Go check out the Karl Popper context on Veritula” would only make sense if you are already a Veritula user who is accustomed to using this terminology.

Makes me think of “subject of discussion”.

I have an inexplicit criticism of this relating to “school subject”.

This actually seems anti-discussion. Sounds like a grouping of ideas that are only related by conceptual proximity, rather than building on each other.

This makes me think of “discussion topic”.

Similar to ‘discussion’.

Would you like to try formulating an explicit methodology for using Veritula?

This is ambiguous. To be clear, are you asking if I would like to make an explicit personal methodology for using the site, as part of my effort described in #2899? Or are you inviting me to formulate an explicit methodology for users of Veritula in general? (I realise these aren’t mutually exclusive.)