Author Archives: david

Strategies, not promises

This is a small motto for changing things that you do. I’ve believed in it for a while, and I think I’ve mentioned it once or twice on here, but I don’t think I’ve ever written it up.

The scenario is this: There’s a thing you want to change about yourself. You want to do more of something, you want to do less of something, you want to do something differently, etc. What do you do?

The most common approach people seem to try to take is to apply willpower to the problem: You resolve to do better, and you firmly commit yourself to doing so, and you try your very best to change things.

This is the “Promises” solution. I don’t know if it works for you, but it certainly doesn’t work for me and I’d be surprised if it worked for most people.

The problem is that you are generally already burning about as much willpower as you have to use, just in the course of your every day life. If you had much more to burn you’d probably have found something to fill it up. You might be able to eke out a bit more, but generally if a major behaviour change is required what will happen is that you will end up managing for a few weeks and then will have burned through your reserves and fail to be able to summon the motivation to continue. Worse: The next time you try to do something like this it will be harder because you’ve learned the lesson that you’re not the sort of person who can make this sort of promise and expect to keep it.

So what to do instead? Well, obviously I think the answer is “Strategies”, but what does that mean here?

Essentially it’s that you have to acknowledge that behaviours do not exist in a vacuum. There are reasons for those behaviours. In order to change them you need to address those reasons, either by removing them or providing counterbalances for them.

Examples:

I don’t go to the gym because it’s easy to put off doing it to another day. Solution: Schedule going to the gym for a specific recurring time and day.
I drink too much coffee because I don’t get enough sleep. Solution: Get more sleep (easy, right?)
I never get very good at this because I always get frustrated at a certain point and give up. Solution: Use some sort of commitment device (e.g. beeminder, but there are others) to push you past that point where you get frustrated.

The specific strategies that you adopt don’t matter that much. What’s important is that you try to figure out specific concrete things you can do to change the underlying behaviour, so that you can solve it without having to throw willpower at the problem.

The obvious reason why this approach is better is that you’re more likely to succeed, which is after all what you wanted.

The less obvious but actually more important reason why this approach is better is what happens if you fail. Which you may. You might have picked the wrong strategy, or at least an incomplete one – you won’t always have correctly identified the reasons for your existing behaviour, or your proposed solution might not be adequate for addressing them. That’s OK.

See, the great thing about failed strategies is that you can fix them. There’s nothing wrong with having failed. It’s not evidence of a character flaw on your part. You just didn’t get it right this time. So you can learn from what didn’t work and from it try to figure out something that will.

It actually took me much longer to realise this second part than the first – long after I originally coined the motto – but I think it’s the more important one. The most important thing about change is to be able to keep it up – promises impede your ability to change further whether they succeed or fail, but strategies improve your ability to change further, when they succeed but especially when they fail.

Definitely not a Mexican recipe

I feel it’s important to state that this is totally not a Mexican recipe and I make no claims of authenticity, mainly so my friend Paulina won’t be mad at me for perpetuating the various bad imitations of Mexican food that abound (not that this will stop me from sending her pictures when I encounter things like the “Mexican mac ‘n’ cheese” I had in the north of England of course).

Lets call it pseudo-Mexican. Or Mexican inspired. Or we could call it Fusion if we were feeling fancy. I originally made it as an improvisation, but then I made it again because it was tasty.

Ingredients:

500g Gnocchi (I told you it wasn’t Mexican)
3 cans red kidney beans
3 medium sized onions
4 medium sweet peppers (I used a mix or red, orange and yellow)
1 small red chilli pepper
Ground cumin
Dry Oregano
Hot smoked paprika
Salt
Black pepper
Vegetable oil for frying

The spice quantities are problematic because I still haven’t measured them out. The ratios are about twice as much cumin as oregano and twice as much oregano as paprika. I’d guess that it’s about 2-3 tbsp of cumin, but I’d recommend tinkering with the levels until it’s tasty.

Cooking is simple:

Dice the onions and peppers (including the chilli pepper), put them into a frying pan with hot oil and salt to fry. Stir, and once the onion has gone translucent, add the spices. Keep stirring for about another 10 minutes, add the kidney beans (drained), stir for another ten minutes, add the Gnocchi, and you guessed it stir for another 10 minutes.

By that point the kidney beans should have broken up a bit but the gnocchi will mostly have kept its structure. The result is a fairly thick mush that will hold together quite well.

The first time we ate this we just had it in bowls with guacamole on the side. The second time we put it in corn tortillas with some salsa verde as well and that worked a lot better, though both ways were pretty good.

A satisfying resolution to trolley problems

Note: This post is based on a conversation I had with Dave about a month ago. I was recently reminded of it by a discussion on moral philosophy and thought it might be worth writing up.

Certain types of moral philosophers are very keen on trolley problems. You may have encountered these. They’re endless variants on approximately the following problem:

A runaway trolley is hurtling down a track. If it continues on its original route it will hit and kill 5 people. You have the opportunity to pull a lever which will divert it onto another route where it will only kill one person. No you can’t be a smartarse and come up with a clever solution which avoids these options, because reasons.

I’m not a fan of trolley problems. I think they oversimplify the landscape in which you make moral decisions. Most decisions are not this clear cut: Not only do you have uncertainty about the outcomes (which you can reason about), you also shouldn’t entirely trust your own reasoning process in these circumstances because you’re in a heightened emotional state which will introduce weird biases. So although you the person being asked this question might have perfect knowledge about the situation and know that you are detached from it and acting without emotional involvement, the hypothetical you standing there with lever and a difficult decision to make does not have these reassurances. Have they missed something? Are they sure their judgement isn’t horribly compromised by the fact that they’re in a panic? Do they even have time to think things through or must they just act or not act before the decision is taken out of their hands?

Still, thinking through what you should do in these sorts of scenarios before you are in them is exactly what you need in order to sharpen your moral sense and ensure that you act correctly without having to think things through, right?

So here you are. You have two options. You can choose not to act, and let 5 people die, or you can act and kill someone, saving five peoples’ lives.

I think there are legitimate and consistent moral systems in which you choose not to act. I think they’re not the sort you want to apply when designing larger scale systems of action, but I think as a personal choice it’s completely valid and it might well be the option I’d take if you put me at the lever of an actual trolley.

What I want to talk about is when you choose to act. I think there is a strictly superior option which cannot be finagled away by redesigning the question that anyone who thinks that they should pull the lever should follow instead.

Which is that you pull the lever and then you turn yourself in to the relevant authorities for having committed murder.

Oh you will, and you probably should, get a reduced sentence because of all those lives you saved, but you’ve taken a life, and you should be treated accordingly.

Why should you be punished by the system when you’ve done nothing wrong and in fact made the correct moral choice?

Well, why should the person whose life you took be punished by your actions when they’ve done nothing wrong and were just an unfortunate innocent bystander?

That’s not a judgement, it’s just an analogy. I am pointing out that you have already committed yourself to a system in which actions are taken not because of some intrinsic justice or fairness, but because they produce the greater good.

Lets adjust the problem slightly. Suppose you’re tied to the track along with the other person who is going to get killed when you pull the lever. Now two people will get killed when you do, and one of them is you. Five versus two, still a great deal from a moral calculus perspective, right? But I bet you’re going to think a lot harder about it.

And this is why I think it works out: When you find yourself in a situation where your reasoning is suspect, it’s very easy to think that your actions are justified if they help , and that that gets you off the hook for the consequences of them. The fact that you will always be held accountable for the consequences of your actions creates the right sort of barrier to that: By requiring an element of self-sacrifice in order to cause harm, it forces you to think about that justification much harder, and maybe decide that on balance you don’t want to have to make this call.

This doesn’t necessarily produce a better outcome in every case. Indeed, in every case where acting was the right thing to do it produces a worse outcome than pulling the lever and getting off without punishment. What it does is in aggregate produce a better outcome, because it makes it harder for people to decide that the ends they want justify any means, and it helps to put the brakes on the excesses people commit because they decide that it was the right thing to do.

David seeks app for fun and exercise logging

As part of my attempts to exercise more, I would like to track how much I am actually exercising. This means that I am currently seeking something that satisfies the following spec:

Basically, I want to be able to log what exercises I’m doing in a moderate amount of detail. Something to the tune of:

Date: Blah

Pushups: 5, 7, 5, 5, 8
Swimming, moderate intensity: 10 minutes
Barbell Squats, 20kg, 5, 5, 5, 5, 5
etc.

I would like to have historical stats, etc in the app but it’s not required.

What is required:

I have to be able to enter data on my android phone (it’s OK if this is mobile web, as long as it’s vaguely usable mobile web rather than accessing some completely unsuitable for touch desktop site)
There has to be an API I can access the data with from devices that are not my phone
It has to actually let me record detailed information about the workout
It has to actually work

My least worst contenders at the moment are fitocracy (fails the API requirement. I could scrape the site but I don’t really want to. There is an open source project which implements an API for it based on that, but it looks broken and bitrotted) and myfitnesspal (less good in all regards for this than fitocracy except that it has an API, but I have to apply for access to the API and tell them what “my company” wants to use it for. This is not really better than scraping the site)

Things I have considered and rejected:

Endomondo, looks nice but fails 3 hard. It lets you bucket into a bunch of nonsense high level categories and record how much time you’ve done on them. This is totally uninteresting to me.
Runkeeper, fails 3. Not its fault, it’s not really for this.
The Squat Rack. Barely squeaks by on 2. Fails 1. Mostly fails 4. Looks like it would do exactly what I wanted beautifully if it actually worked. Probably worth checking back in 6 months time.

My fall back plan which I’m suspecting to be the best option is to have a paper notepad and a weekly TODO item to transcribe my notepad into a google docs spreadsheet. Is this really the best that’s on offer?

Exercise for people like me

I have a history of failing to exercise, and as a consequence am a bit out of shape.

A few years ago I managed to get in shape through means of a personal trainer. After about a year and a half of that I was feeling much better about myself – both in the sense of how I looked and how I felt.

The whole experience was awful. It was expensive, it was painful, and in the long run it just convinced me that I hated exercise even more than I’d previously thought I did. So when I moved away from the company that put me in the area of that personal trainer I lost all motivation to go to the gym. I then spent the next two years losing all that fitness I’d managed to build up at great pain and expense.

I’m now trying again, and this time I’m reasonably committed to not back-sliding. I’ve been tinkering with how this works and I think I’ve hit on an approach that works for me. I thought I’d share some of it in case others have similar problems.

It’s all centred around the basic principle that the single most important thing of an exercise program is that you keep doing it. A minimally effective exercise program that you’re doing can be turned into a more effective one. An exercise program that you’re not doing probably won’t be. Moreover, an exercise program that is great for you but you stop doing after 6 months is much worse than one that is pretty good for you but you’ll keep doing for the rest of your life.

I’m hoping that in the long run I’ll manage both of course, but if I can stick to pretty good for the rest of my life I’ll be OK with that.

Basic principles

You’re going to arrange this as if you’re going to be doing it for the rest of your life. This involves making it into a habit.

Obviously for me “make it into a habit” means “put it into Beeminder”. I recommend this as an approach, but it’s not necessary. A diary, or a recurring calendar event, probably work just as well if you don’t need the kick from Beeminder to help you stick to it.

My current goal is to try to get in about 3 sessions of 40 minutes each on Monday, Wednesday and Friday. This seems to be a good schedule, but I’m not really sticking to it yet – I mostly manage to make it Monday, Wednesday and Friday, but I’m not really up to 40 minutes. I seem to be averaging more like 30. That’s OK though – I started at much less than that and was struggling to make it to two half hour sessions a week. The idea is to work up to it. Don’t try to do more time than you can really bring yourself to do – start with something you can fit in, when that becomes normal and habitual increase it slightly.

The second stage is to prevent a rapid burn out. I don’t know about you, but I get… enthusiasms. If I start doing a thing I’ll basically go “Woo, I’m doing a thing. I must do the thing more. Let me do lots of the thing”. In exercise this manifests as my pushing myself way too hard, making some good initial progress and then hitting a wall. I then get dispirited and stop doing it.

So, step 1 is to not do that. I know I can make progress. Partly because I’ve done it before, and partly because well bodies are basically designed to be able to make progress at this. I’m not so uniquely bad at exercise that I won’t make any improvements. So, secure in that knowledge, the trick is to make steady progress.

What does that involve? It involves doing things that are easier than you think you can do. The exercise program should be pitched at basically one tiny notch above “too easy”. Sure you can do that level of weight? OK. Cool. Now take 5 kilos off it. Sure you can do that number of pushups? OK. Do about 2/3rds that (actually for me this manifests in the fact that I’m doing the 100 pushups program. I’m confident I can easily do 10-15 pushups, but instead I’m starting myself on the easiest version of the program and repeating each week. I have a history of trying this program and hitting walls). Once this level has gone from “I can totally do more than this” to “this is embarrassingly painfully easy” you can make it harder.

There are a couple reasons for this.

The first is that if you constantly push yourself, it will hurt. Especially the next day. You might be OK with that, but I’m not. Pain is rubbish, and if I’m going to the gym often enough this will mean that I’m spending about half my life in pain. If anything is going to convince me I hate exercise, that will.

(I know you’ve heard no pain no gain. It’s macho bullshit that has no useful grounding in biology. Your muscles will improve fine without constant agony).

The second is that it stops you hitting a wall. What I’ve found in the past is that the degree to which I can push myself does not improve as fast as my baseline strength. If I’m constantly pushing myself to my limit then my strength will improve, but each time I increase my strength the rate at which I can increase my strength will drop significantly. This will cause frustration

Finally, we’ve already established that you’re here for the long haul. It doesn’t matter if your progress is a bit slow because you’ll get there in the end, and when you do you’re much more likely to stay there.

Getting started

Step one is to find a gym to go to. You can do this at home if you like, but I’ve found having a place which puts me into exercise mode really does help.

You’ll need a program design. For this you probably do want a personal trainer, but only for a session or so, to design a custom program for you which will be exactly like all the other custom programs that they’ve designed for everyone else. They can show you some good exercises, give you a basic framework to fit everything into, etc. Make sure to ask them what exercises are actually for.

Now you’ve got that program you can basically throw it away.

Well, not throw it away, but basically redesign it to actually fit your needs.

First, take all the exercises you hate, and replace them with something vaguely similar you don’t hate. You don’t need a good reason for hating the exercise, there are just going to be some you don’t like. That’s OK. Replace them. Do some searching online to try to find equivalent exercises that you’re less likely to hate (Example: I really hate situps. Turns out I think leg raises are perfectly fine. I don’t really know why. I also hate plank and have no problem with push ups).

Will this result in a sub-optimal program? In one sense, yes: You’ll probably hate some really good exercises and lose out a bit by not doing them.

In another, more important sense, no: If you hate your workout you’ll resent doing it, you’ll do it less, and then you’ll stop. A slightly sub-optimal workout that you do is infinitely better than a great work-out you don’t.

Also figure out which bits of the program you want to skip at first. Chances are your personal trainer will have over designed for you. Personal trainers are like estate agents for exercise: “I’d like a half hour session design” “OK here’s one that will take you 45 minutes. It’s got a really nice view of the lake”. They’re probably right about how much time you should be doing, but you’re almost certainly going to want to work up with that.

So now you’ve got a gym, you’ve got a plan. Go to that gym.

While you’re going to that gym… Figure out everything that makes it annoying for you to go there. Try and find the best way to fit it into your schedule, try and find all the other things that get in your way (e.g. for me it was bringing the gym kit to work, so I changed things around to just have enough clothing in there for several visits to the gym and only do a wash when they’d all been used. The whole process became much more pleasant).

My program

You shouldn’t follow my advice here. I can figure out the bits about motivation, and some of the bits about biology, but exercise design there are probably way more competent people than me and if you can find them let me know. There are lots of people who say they know what they’re doing but I struggle to take the “BECOME RIPPED IN JUST SIX MONTHS” posturing seriously.

But, for the sake of illustrating what this looks like in practice, here’s my current program:

3 minutes on the exercise bike to warm up. I tried replacing this with skipping today and it basically destroyed me. Skipping is hard. I’m going to try to figure out how to integrate that into my workout, but I haven’t yet.
Do the current week of the hundred pushups program (I’m currently on my fourth week, which is actually the second week for the second time)
Do a super-set of 3 sets of 10 barbell squats (no weights on the barbell right now, it’s just the bar. I think the bar is about 10kg but I’m not really sure. It might be more than that) with 10 bent leg-raises.
Do a super-set of 3 sets of 15x 10kg barbell bench press with 15x35kg underhand pull-downs.
Do about 15 minutes on the exercise bike.

To be clear again: I don’t know what I’m doing and you probably shouldn’t follow the same program as me. I mean, eh, if you want to you can, it’s probably not awful, but don’t take this section as advice.

Also, does this program sound too easy? Do you feel like making fun of me for my puny bench press? If so, I don’t think you’ve been paying attention to this post…

What next?

What next is simple: You keep this up forever, because nothing else is going to work.

Keep increasing the amount of time you spend in the gym until it hits the point you want to achieve. When exercises get too easy, make them a bit harder. Keep practising until they get easy again and repeat the process.

Does it work? I don’t know. By all rights it should, and based on initial results it seems to be putting me in the right mindset and I’m hopeful that I’ll be able to stick with it, but ultimately I’ve only been doing it for about a month and a half and I intend the rest of my life to be a lot longer than that. I’ll keep you posted as to how it goes.