What am I a sucker for?

Large electronicy rectangles

I have previously purchased 2 ipads, 1 kindle fire, 1 kindle scribe, ~3 normal kindles, and some off brand tablet. I never use these.

That isn’t quite true. I occasionally use my kindle scribe out of penance for buying another expensive electronicy object that I don’t use even though I’d much prefer to be using pen and paper.

Why? Why do I do this?

Whyyyy?

Well, I’m a complex character with many hidden depths, and so I can’t be quite sure. Though my sense of my psychology around the time of purchase is:

• Graspy brain lobule: Oooh… maybe if I buy that it will mean I’ll start reading again/ I’ll be able to draw mindmaps in colour which is potentially the key bottleneck to my productivity.

• Sensible brain lobule: Remember the 500 other times that was true?

• Grapsy brain lobule: But, what if this time it really works? Imagine if it does work and I don’t buy it, and I forever am unable to read and am unproductive, imagine how sad that would be when we could have solved it so easily. And everyone else will be so productive because of their ability to create pretty mindmaps and will get all of their work done in 2 hours and spend the rest of the time sitting at the beach sipping margaritas whilst I’m working 30 hours a day just to keep up. Imagine how sad that would be. Why do you want me to be sad?

• Sensible brain lobule: That seems…

• Graspy brain lobule: [clicks purchase] Yay, it’s coming tomorrow! Also, given that tomorrow I will be super productive my comparative advantage right now is having a nap.

Self improvementy things

As a teenager I spent probably between 50 and 100 hours learning how to speed read. Probably the most embarrassing thing here is how long it took me before giving up. How did I not realise?

Well, a couple of things seem relevant here

1. According to the book, it requires practice, lots of practice to get good and the improvements are often non-linear.

2. They book provided the tests for how to tell if it’s working. And I did pretty well on the tests!

I also attended a workshop by the Centre for Applied Rationality at some point. What’s interesting to me about this is that I now don’t think that I got much out of it, but just afterwards I was very positive.

Dating apps

The free version of Hinge is pretty good. And yet somehow I bought the premium version for little additional benefit.

One interesting thing about Hinge is that it markets itself as the dating app that is ‘designed to be deleted’.

‘Yes, we are aware that products in this reference class are incentivised not to solve your problem but to ensure it persists, however we not only recognise that but our whole mission is based on recognition of this cycle and we intend to do the exact opposite’

(Similarly, self-help and self-improvement books often start off explaining why other self-help and self-improvement books are a sham, and the reason why they are different.)