#inkhaven

At a conference/festival last year, there was a Shibari workshop on the schedule for some reason, although the topic of the event was prediction markets. This led to the following exchange (all names changed):

Adam (who at the time was basically a stranger to me): Hmm, "Shibari"... What is that, some kind of Jewish ritual?

Me: No, it's-

Barbara: EVERYONE SHUT UP! Ok. Nobody tell this man what shibari is.

Everyone: ...?

Barbara: We’re playing 20 questions.

Thus began what was by far the best game of 20 questions I have ever witnessed. There were... appreciably more than 20 questions.

[literally ten minutes of questions later]

Adam: Ok, so! Shibari... is a Japanese social export, it's an activity somebody does, it's in some way artistic, it does not involve drawing, it does not involve writing, it involves an inorganic object and an organic object, and... the organic object is a human, right?

Everyone: Right

Adam: And the inorganic object...

Barbara: Well...

Chris: The inanimate object

Adam: The inanimate object, which, oh, which is organic, which suggests that it's clothes... Is the inanimate object clothing?

Everyone: No

Me: To clarify, the inanimate object is always organic in terms of 'organic chemistry', but might or might not be, like, made from biological material

Adam: Ok. And so, you have an inanimate object, and you have a person... The person does not have to do anything during the... shibari activity. You are doing a manipulation to the inanimate object, with the person, for purposes that are fun... Is it for the entertainment of a group?

Barbara: Could be? ...

Adam: So it could be for the entertainment of a group, but it could be for the entertainment of the individuals?

Everyone: Right

Adam: Ok. The inanimate object - the equipment - right? It is not specialised, but is a common object, correct?

Everyone: yeah

AI

Adam: Does it have anything at all to do with AI?

Everyone: [laughter] No

Adam: I had to check. In this setting, everything turns back to AI at some point

Me: I would say no

Frank: Not yet!

Me: Right, not yet. But yeah, 'No' is definitely the answer to that one

George: I trust Rob Miles on this

Barbara: As an expert in shibari?

Frank: As an expert in AI Shibari. I think that's what it's called.

Chris: Oh, yeah it kind of is!

Can one shibari by accident?

Adam: Ok. Is it something that one might do without knowing that it is shibari?

Everyone: [cacophony of disagreement]

Me: Interesting question!

Frank: Very interesting question.

Barbara: It's totally plausible that someone would do something that would qualify as shibari without knowing the Japanese artform

Me: Yeah, and they might also have seen things about it but not know the name of it

Chatting during shibari

Adam: Does it involve talking?

Everyone: No, not necessarily

Adam: God Dammit. Agh, I thought it might be... talking using some prop or something

Barbara: For me it always involves talking, but it's...

Adam: One doesn't have to?

Barbara: It's just 'cause I don't stop talking

[laughter]

Adam: And it doesn't involve betting markets in any way?

Everyone: No

How technologically advanced is shibari equipment?

Adam: Ok. Is the object technologically difficult to make?

Everyone: No

One guy: Yes

Everyone: What? No it isn't!

Adam: Is it only available in an industrialised economy?

Everyone: No

That one guy again: Yes!

Everyone: NO!!!

The guy: No, you're right, I'm sorry... But it is difficult to make

George: Every object is difficult to make!

Barbara: Maybe you're confused about what shibari is

Ed: Yeah, you should be up there with Adam

Adam: Would it have been available before industrialisation?

Everyone: Yes!

Adam: Ok. Um... is it a stick?

Everyone: It's not a stick

No cheap tricks allowed

Adam: I feel like I'm gonna get close to covering everything...

Me: I feel like we were very close just now, when you were like "Well what could this object be?"

Adam: Ok so the object is important. It's... before industrialisation... Does it begin with a letter before-

Everyone: No, no, we're not doing that. N/A

Adam: Ok so it starts with an N and an A...

[laughter]

What is this dang object?

Adam: Ok... so... is the object artificially pigmented?

Everyone: Can be, but not necessarily

Adam: Is it commonly painted?

Everyone: No

Adam: Is it commonly dyed?

Everyone: Yes

Adam: Ok, is it something that it's very common to dye in other purposes?

Everyone: Yeah

Adam: Does it involve a vegetable, of some kind?

Everyone: ...No?

Adam: Does it involve a plant?

Everyone: [confusion about what 'involve' means]

George: The object can have... some relation to a plant

Me: eehhh, that's more confusing than helpful. We already said that it can be biologically derived

Adam: But it would have been available before industrialisation?

Everyone: Yeah

Adam: So it's got to be something that is... around. Is it something that requires human modification to make into the form we know and love?

Everyone: Yes

Adam: Uh.. does this processing require specialised skill?

Everyone: Yeah, some skill for sure

Adam: Would I be able to do it? Like, without training?

Everyone: Probably not

Ed: On a long enough time horizon you'd figure it out, but the answer is basically no

Adam: Like, you throw me in with the tools to make it and say "come out in an hour", could I...

Everyone: No, probably not

Adam: But other people would be able to make it in an hour?

Everyone: Yeah, with the right skills

It’s not a weapon

Adam: Does it involve a weapon of any kind?

Everyone: No.

George: How creative are you allowed to-

Everyone: The answer's no

What shape is the object?

[long pause]

Adam: Well... does anyone else have any questions?

Barbara: You're asking such good questions though!

Ed: Yeah you're doing a good job

Danielle: I think you should ask more questions about the shape of the object

Everyone: Oh, great suggestion

Adam: Ok, is it spherical?

Everyone: No

Adam: Is it cylindrical?

Everyone: Yyeeaahh, sort of, yeah.

Adam: So it's not a pure cylinder but it's cylindrical-ish?

Everyone: Yeah

Adam: Is it an ovaloid?

Everyone: No.

Adam: Is it an ellipsoid?

Everyone: No

Adam: Is it uh... hmm... But it's longer than it is wide?

Everyone: Yes!!!

[scattered applause, we're close now]

Adam: Is it a plank of wood?

Everyone: No!!!

Barbara: It still isn't that!

Frank: No, his previous guess was stick

Adam: Yeah, a plank of wood requires processing and I couldn't make it... like it fits a lot of the other questions

Barbara: No you're right, that's fair, I'm convinced. It is a plank of wood.

Where is the object?

Adam: Could I find it inside a building or outside a building?

Everyone: Yes...

Adam: Wait. I mean. Ok, can you find it in a bathroom?

Everyone: Not really

Adam: Can you find it in a kitchen?

Everyone: Probably not

Adam: Can you find it lying on the ground?

Everyone: Yeah possibly

Adam: Is it something that people commonly use?

Everyone: Yeah

Adam: Is it something that people would pick up if they saw it lying there?

Everyone: Nah

It’s really not a weapon

Adam: Is it something that is dangerous at all?

Everyone: Can be, but not especially

Adam: Is any part of it sharp?

Everyone: No

Adam: Can any part of it fragment?

Everyone: [???]

Adam: Like, is it brittle?

Everyone: No

Adam: So it's firm?

Everyone: No

Adam: Is it flexible?

Everyone: Yes!!

Adam: Ok! Is it a pool noodle?

Everyone: [laughter]

Adam: Which is cylindrical, flexible, and organic, dyed but not painted...

Everyone: No, we're so proud of you, you're doing great

Me: But we did say "pre-industrial"

Pinning down the object

Adam: Ok ok. Is it a solid?

Everyone: Yes

Adam: Is it any of the solid hybrids, like a colloid or a gel?

Everyone: No

Adam: Does it retain its shape after being bent?

Everyone: Uh... yes?

Adam: So it doesn't spring back with any force?

Everyone: No, it doesn't spring back

Adam: Ok... so... Is it Japanese in origin, or is it found around the world?

Everyone: [assorted contradictory statements]

Me: The origin of the practice is Japan, but the origin of the object is all over

Adam: Is the object put on a person?

Everyone: Yes!

Adam: Is the object... um... is the object rope?

Everyone: YES!!

[scattered applause]

Me: The object is rope!

Adam: Ok!

Me: Now bring it home

Bringing it home?

Adam: Are things hung upon the rope?

Everyone: Uuuuummmmmm. Ambiguous? No.

Adam: Is the rope itself... does the rope look good?

Everyone: Yes!

Adam: Ok! Is this putting-on... a mark of esteem?

Everyone: No?? ???

[laughter]

Adam: So the object is a rope, and you're putting the rope on somebody

Everyone: Yes!

Adam: You're... putting rope on somebody!

Everyone: Yeah!

Adam: Is that... is that not the practice?

Everyone: No, no, it is, it is!

[confused cheering. Are we done?]

We’re not done

Chris: But, no, come on, there's more to it!

Ed: You're missing something critical!

Chris: You're so close!

Adam: Ok. Do you... hang someone?

Everyone: [strongly conflicting opinions]

Barbara: Only if you're doing it extremely wrong

Adam: Ok. But you can tie knots?

Everyone: YES!

Adam: Ok! Do you tie... is it a bracelet of some-

Everyone: No!

Adam: So it's not an adornment of any kind...

Everyone: Well...

Where on the body?

Adam: Is it put on your neck?

Chris: No

Danielle: Well, can be...

Adam: On your head?

Everyone: Can be

Adam: On a limb?

Everyone: Yeah

Adam: It's on a limb

Me: Not exclusively

Adam: On an arm?

Everyone: Can be

Adam: On a leg?

Everyone: Can be

Adam: On... uh... I've run out of limbs...

What does it mean?

Adam: Ok, it's rope, you put it on somebody, it's Japanese in origin... does it... signify something?

Everyone: Not really

Adam: Hmm. Do you tie the rope in a loop?

Everyone: ...Yeah??

Adam: I'm wondering, is it the casting of ropes upon people, like uh...

Chris: It's not a lasso, no

Frank: I like the idea of shibari as, like, a carnival game...

Barbara: I'm unclear on what the win condition is here...

Ed: I feel like there is a really important component that we haven't got yet

Everyone: Yeah, when he gets that component, he’s won

Are people into shibari?

Adam: Hmm... Did you find yourself fired by enthusiasm to do it upon being told about it?

Several people: Yes

Me: Personally no, but...

[laughter]

Adam: So it has mixed appeal?

Barbara: That is absolutely correct

Can one shibari... too hard?

Adam: Is it um, does it involve the tying of knots?

Everyone: YES

Adam: Ok. Are there knots that are peculiar to shibari?

Everyone: yeah

Adam: Is the learning of knots, or the tying of knots upon other people the important part?

Everyone: Uh... yes?

Adam: Do you tie someone up and they attempt to escape?

Everyone: Uh, not necessarily, but like, often.

Me: Yes is closer than no, I think

Adam: Ok, you tie rope on someone. Do you have to use some sort of special rope for it? Can you use any rope?

Barbara: You can use any rope, but some are better than others

Adam: So you wouldn't want to use any rough ropes, or...

Danielle: No, you do, that's actually preferred

Adam: You prefer rough ropes?

Chris: Some do

Frank: It depends

Danielle: Natural fibers tend to be rougher

Adam: Does it chafe?

Danielle: It can, but ideally not

Adam: Would you do it even if you were injured in the process of doing it?

Frank: No

Barbara: You would not want that to happen generally

Adam: Uh... Does it look cool?

Everyone: Yes!!

Origami?

Adam: So you're tying knots that look cool... is it like an origami for knots?

Everyone: [confused disagreement]

Ed: It's not about the knots

Chris: It's totally about the knots!

Frank: It's all about the cones...

Adam: Like, in origami you fold paper in ways that look cool, maybe you tie knots in ways that look cool?

Everyone: [loud disagreement]

Diagnosing the problem

[long long pause]

Chris: Ask the question in your heart!

Adam: ...Neckties?

Everyone: No?

Barbara: I keep thinking "But, he already has it", and then he asks a question that makes me say "No, he doesn't have it at all"

Frank: I think there's a question you want to ask, but you're not...

Everyone: Yeah

Chris: Yeah, ask the question that you don't want to ask

Danielle: I don't think he has the question...

Adam: Would it cause any gratification in someone?

Everyone: Yes!

Adam: Would it... Would it cause sexual gratification?

Everyone: Yes!!

Adam: Is it a practice... under the category of kink?

Everyone: Yes!!!

Adam: Is it tying somebody up for bondage purposes?

Everyone: YEAH!!! [Pandemonium, hollering, applause, Adam is lifted above the cheering crowd]

After the hearty congratulations were done, I wandered off, elated from the experience, and I bumped into a group of friends.

"Friends!" I said, "I just had the funniest experience. This guy didn't know what 'shibari' was, so we-"

"Shibari?" a friend interjected, "What is that, like, a Jewish building?"

In which I court the enmity of everyone who thinks the love of dogs is what separates good people from bad people.

I went to Muir Woods yesterday, on the other side of the Pacific, and had that same feeling. The trees were certainly larger, but I looked at the clover that grows in the shade of the trees, the pine needles coating the floor, the babbling brook, the ferns and mushrooms, and I thought of home.

Convergent ecology is when biomes converge on the same collections of similar plants following similar roles, and that explains at least some of it. All three of these places — Busan, San Francisco, Duluth — have heavy fogs that roll off a large body of water, and so the mosses can grow everywhere, and the ferns are plentiful. They're cooler places, so you get firs.

I kept looking at the rocks in Muir Woods, which are mostly hidden beneath the soil and pine needles. Duluth sits in one of the most geologically unique places in all of North America, the Midcontinent Rift, where a billion years ago the entire continent threatened to split apart, then didn't, leaving behind volcanic bedrock, dark basalt and red rhyolite. In the Muir Woods, it's the Franciscan Complex, a jumble of ocean-floor rocks, chert, graywacke, and serpentinite, all scraped off the bottom of the Pacific Plate. Very different, but both result in thin, nutrient-poor, damp soils that encourage the growth of specific kinds of plants.

When my wife and I hiked the Igdae trail in Busan, I kept being amazed by the similarities, seeing the same basalts, the same rhyolite, the same way that these rocks jutted out into the water and were shaped by erosion, covered in lichens, with the trees hanging off them. I chattered with my wife about it, and briefly thumbed through my phone to find pictures of home, to make sure this wasn't a traveler's pareidolia. And later I would read about the geology of South Korea, and how these hiking trails went along rock formations that were formed by a very different sort of geological cataclysm from the Midcontinent Rift. There, I loved it, the way everything seemed to echo what I already knew.

Even if you feel like everyone wants the same thing, all else equal, you should make clear that you want that thing. Just telling companies you care about money and find it motivating will sometimes get you raises you wouldn't have otherwise. Notice that this is very different than "I'm only in it for the money" - you don't need to rank your preferences. Strict approval voting. Just tell 'em what you like.

For example, I like money, compliments, kisses, feeling included, feeling special, naturally expiring gifts like flowers, letters (including digital ones i.e. heartfelt emails), sweets, hearing from people, talking about my baby, and being invited places.

I think all of these are pretty common things to like, to the point that if you asked "do you like X" for most things on the list the person you asked would suspect they were being pranked or Socrates'd or something.

Even so, people routinely have vague positive feelings about other people (maybe even you), and are not sure how to act on them, and if there's a big bright sign that says "this thing will work" then they might try that thing. People are busy and wrapped up in their own stuff and often spare cognitive capacity is the bottleneck. Find a way to remind people of your name, and what you like.

FAQ

Q: What if what I like is relevant to Dating?

A: I don't know. I was cursed/blessed (blessed) by a magnificent medallion that made it impossible for me to contribute to dating discourse, sorry, you are on your own

Q: What if I like something embarrassing?

A: A little bravery is often charming but you can also just focus on the stuff that you like that is totally safe

Q: What if I am afraid of putting myself out there, and thereby making it feel more painful if I don't get the thing I like?

A: Knock that off

Q: How do I gracefully fit this into conversation?

A: That's the neat part! You don't. You can just assert it baldly. Like a three year old.

Q: Really?

A: Yeah. A lot of happiness is just orienting towards what you like, rather than orienting to what you don't like. Also, happiness is infectious. If you say "I like ice cream" you are actually doing everyone around you a favor, by reminding them of ice cream, and liking

Q: Won't it seem like I'm tacitly making demands?

Inkhaven and Empt’s Shack

today I don’t care about your lore and therefore, ft. Ioke as Faith.  today I also wish tumblr’s dash font made a better distinction between l and I. Yes those are two different characters.

Two very nice mods from @halosmods :)

I recently learned how to find North using the sky, and it turns out to be so easy that I feel stupid for not learning much earlier. Perhaps you would like to learn too! It could save your life in some unlikely scenario, I guess, but actually in everyday situations it's just pretty handy to be able to look at the sky for a couple of seconds and tell which direction you're facing.

I’m not any kind of expert at this, I just learned how to do it recently. I don’t know the proper names for things, and lots of the things I say are going to be technically not quite correct. But I’m not trying to teach astronomy, I just want to quickly find which way I’m facing, and these simplifications work very well for that.

Also, this whole thing will assume you're at a moderate northern latitude, which you very likely are if you’re in Europe or the USA.

How to start

Say you’ve got a clear night with a half moon in the sky.

Getting a rough direction with the Moon is extremely easy - all you need to know is that the terminator (the line between light and dark) points south. So you just take that terminator line and mentally extend it down to where it hits the horizon, and that's approximately South.

That’s close enough for the girls I go out with.

If it’s not a perfect half moon, so the terminator line isn't straight, you just kind of take the direction that the curved line is facing, overall. You basically want the tangent at the middle of the terminator. Or if you prefer, you can draw the line connecting the top and the bottom of the terminator, which ends up being the same angle. These images show both options:

With a crescent moon this is even easier, you can just take the line between the “tips of the horns” of the crescent.

Extend that line down to the horizon, and that’s approximately South.

Now, if the moon is very low in the sky, so the terminator is at a steep angle, then this method will be extra inaccurate. But that's ok, because if the moon is that low, you don't really need to trace the terminator line to find south, because you know that the Moon just rose or is about to set, so the moon itself is basically East or basically West, and you can tell which by looking at the terminator.

If that doesn’t feel obvious, that’s perhaps to be expected, and I should tell you about The Ecliptic.

Basically all the big stuff in the solar system is always on more or less the same plane. So the Sun, the Moon, and all the planets are always found close to a single line, which crosses the sky from East to West. If you’re near the equator it goes almost straight overhead, but at moderate northern latitudes, like you probably live at, it’s tilted over pretty far to the south. So the Sun and the Moon will rise more or less due East, be more or less due South at their highest point, and set more or less due West.

That means if the Moon is just above the horizon, like in this example, we can look at the angle of the terminator and see it’s tilted way over to the right, so we know South is to our left, and the Moon must be about to set in the West.

(In fact I got this from sky visualisation software, so it’s helpfully showing us where West is anyway)

Another way to think about this is: The Moon moves through the sky in a direction roughly perpendicular to the terminator. So we can take our terminator line and draw a line at right angles to that, and that’s roughly the path the Moon is travelling along:

We can follow that line to the horizon and see where the Moon will set, i.e. basically due West. So the Moon’s terminator points South, and kind of acts like the vertical line of a T shape, with the arms of the T pointing towards East and West.

Hopefully you can convince yourself that all this makes sense by thinking about shining lights on basketballs and so on, but you can also just use the method without being able to visualise clearly why it works.

All of this is approximate and simplified - the Moon’s orbit is actually 5 degrees off the Ecliptic, and the Ecliptic is 23 degrees off the Celestial Equator, and so on. None of it really lines up and you’ll often be off by like 40 degrees, but I don’t care. This method is extremely quick and it's usually good enough, especially in cities laid out on a grid, where you only need to get it to within 90 degrees.

And if you want more accuracy, this is still a good thing to start with, because if you can quickly find roughly-South, that makes it much quicker and easier to look roughly-North and locate the stars necessary to pin down exactly-North.

What about the daytime?

Since the Sun follows basically the same path as the Moon, you can also get rough orientation from its location. If it’s low in the sky, it just rose or is just about to set, so you know it’s East or West. You can’t tell which by looking at the Sun itself, since it doesn’t have a neat terminator line like the Moon (and you shouldn’t really look at it anyway), but the neat thing about the Sun is that, unlike the Moon, it always rises in the morning (East) and sets in the evening (West). If it’s the middle of the day it’ll be to the South.

But also, don’t forget about the Moon during daytime! It’s often out during the day. And in fact, it’s often not out at night! Or sometimes it’s out, but it’s Full or New and you don’t have a terminator line to use. You can’t rely on just the Moon, even for coarse orientation. So let’s talk about stars.

Bold Orion, Mighty Hunter

Orion is a lovely constellation that’s very distinctive and easy to spot, and you can use it to find roughly-South very quickly, just like you can with the Moon.

He’s meant to be a hunter, with a belt of three stars, and a sword hanging from it. You had to make your own fun, back in those days.

It’s a sword, ok? He has a sword on his belt.

The point is, the sword points South just like the Moon’s terminator line does. So if you can’t see the Moon, maybe you can use Orion’s sword.

Now we have two ways to quickly find roughly-South, and therefore roughly-North. Let’s get more accurate.

The North Star

The sky provides us with an improbably convenient star called Polaris, which we call The North Star, because it’s almost perfectly over the North Pole.

This location is unique, in that it makes Polaris essentially the single static point that the whole rest of the sky rotates around. For a given latitude on Earth, Polaris is always exactly the same height above the horizon, in exactly the same direction, and that direction is North, to within less than a degree.

It’s also really bright for its region of the sky - there’s no brighter star within like 30 degrees of it.

Polaris is so extremely convenient that I consider it to be (very weak) evidence of a loving god. Finding the exact strength of that evidence, in bits, is left as an exercise for the reader.

So Polaris is an A+ gold star, now all we need is a way to find it.

First off, because it’s always at exactly the same height above the horizon, once you’ve found it a few times it gets easier, because you know where it is vertically. If you’ve also used the Moon or Orion to narrow your search down to like a quarter of the sky horizontally, you can often spot Polaris very quickly.

But it helps a lot to be able to find it using constellations.

Ursa Major

This is the one everyone knows, the Big Bear. People also call it The Big Dipper, The Drinking Gourd, Big Spoon Energy, or The Plough.

Here’s an image from WaddenSky:

To find Polaris, you find the Big Dipper, take the line between the two stars on the end, and extend that line up by about 5 times its length, and there’s Polaris. Easy enough.

The main thing that can make this tricky is, as I said, Polaris is the fixed spot that the whole night sky rotates around, so the Big Dipper could be dipping bigly all over the place. It could be like it’s shown there, it could be almost directly overhead and upside down, it could even be partly below the horizon, and invisible behind the trees:

So, you don’t want to put all your eggs in the Big Frying Pan.

Cassiopeia

Cassiopeia is basically just as good as The Big Dipper when it comes to finding Polaris. She looks like a big M, or a big 3, or W, or E (Σ, really), depending on what orientation she feels like right now. And the nice thing about her is, she’s on pretty much the opposite side from The Big Dipper, so if you can’t see one, you can see the other. Learn how to spot both, and you’re set.

To find Polaris from Cassiopeia, you basically draw a line between the two ends of the zigzag, and make a right triangle twice as long, from the bottom of the 3 (or the right side of the M, and so on).

That’s really all there is to it: find roughly-South using the Moon or Orion, use that to look roughly-North until you either see Polaris itself, or find it using Ursa Major or Cassiopeia, and now you’ve got North to within one degree. Usually takes something like 5 seconds.

And there you have it! Now you can find your bearings quickly and easily using just the sky, no matter what!

I was never actually diagnosed with ADHD, because getting a diagnosis would have involved some paperwork.

Suffice it to say, I have a lot of problems getting things done, especially now that I'm self employed and don't have a lot of external structure to keep me on task. But over the years, I've developed an interlocking set of habits, mechanisms, and processes that I call The System, which allows me to function much like a real person would. It takes inspiration from various organisational and accountability systems, but I'm not aware of anything quite like it.

I'm going to lay out how it works in this post, and hopefully people interested in Getting Their Shit Together will find some inspiration here.

OODA Loops

The backbone of the system is a tree of nested OODA loops. The OODA Loop is a concept from the military, which stands for "Observe, Orient, Decide, Act". The idea is that you do these things at regular intervals, in a loop.

So when I'm working, once an hour I do the following:

Observe: What have I been doing for the last hour? How's it going? How does it compare with what I intended to do?

Orient: What goals/plan did I set myself for today? Am I on track? Should I change anything?

Decide: Given all that, what do I want to do for the next hour?

Act: Actually do it

I have a template in Roam so I don't have to remember these questions.

Principle: Never remember things with your brain if you can possibly avoid it

FocusMate

I also usually do my hourly OODA using an excellent website called FocusMate. The consumer surplus I get from FocusMate is absurd, it's the only service I use where I'd happily pay ten times the price.

The way it works is, the site shows you a calendar. You select a time slot when you want to work, and click "book". It will then match you with someone else who wanted to work at that time, and when the time comes, the site puts you in a video call with that person. You quickly introduce yourselves and say what you plan to achieve that session, then mute yourselves and get to work. At the end of the session, you tell each other how you got on, and then there's a short break before the next session can start. I tend to pretty much fill my work hours with FocusMate sessions.

One unexpectedly great thing about FocusMate is actually the... networking? You can join Groups of people with shared interests, and it prefers to match people in the same group. This is nice because it's more likely that your partner will see the value in what you're working on, which is motivating. Over years of working this way, you get matched with the same person many many times, and you see them progress through their career or PhD etc, in little conversations a few minutes long. It's a lot like regularly bumping into someone at a co-working space; I’ve made good friends this way.

Anyway, the main value of FocusMate is in making sure I actually show up and stay on task. If you're late for a session, it hurts your score/rating, but more than that, having someone not show up for a session is kind of annoying, and I don't want to do that to people. This means if I book a FocusMate session, I pretty reliably actually do it. It's hard to just start working at 9am sharp, but it's easy to be on time for a 9am meeting with a colleague. Someone’s waiting on you.

Principle: Use soft social expectations and obligations to make things happen

FocusMate helps me to actually consistently do the hourly OODA loop, and the loop itself is very powerful, because it means that I rarely lose more than an hour at a time to distraction. I do often get off track, but on average it's only 30 minutes until I stop and Summon Sapience, and have a chance to fix the problem.

There's a real skill to accurately diagnosing what went wrong in the last hour and figuring out how to fix it, but I get to practice that skill multiple times a day, with clear feedback and record-keeping, so I keep getting better at it. We'll talk about some of the things involved in that later.

Nesting OODA Loops

Now at this point you may have one or two questions, like: "What happens if something goes wrong that makes these hourly loops not happen at all?", or "Where do these daily plans/goals you talk about in the Orient step come from?".

The answer to both of these questions is the same: The Daily OODA Loop. Every day at a scheduled time, I have a call with an accountability partner, where the structure is very similar to the hourly loop:

Observe: What have I been doing for the last 24 hours? How does it compare with what I intended to do?

Orient: What goals/plan did I set myself for this week? Am I on track? Should I change anything?

Decide: Given all that, what do I want to do tomorrow?

Again, I have a template for this to make the process easy and avoid me needing to remember the steps.

The other benefit of that is, if I have any small quick habits I want to do every day, like logging how much sleep I got, or writing down one thing I'm grateful for, or booking tomorrow's FocusMate sessions, I can add those tasks to the Daily Check-in template, and they'll reliably get done every day.

Now I know what you're thinking, something like "Where do those weekly goals in the Orient step come from?" or "What if your accountability partner flakes out on you?". And yes, the answer is Weekly Check-ins, with a different accountability partner! The structure should be familiar:

Observe: What have I been doing for the last week? How does it compare with what I intended to do?

Orient: What goals/plan did I set myself for this month? Am I on track? Should I change anything?

Decide: Given all that, what do I want to do this coming week?

"And the monthly goals?", you ask? You can't catch me out, dear reader, it's OODA loops all the way up. Ideally with a different partner for each level. Monthly, Quarterly, Yearly. I don't do five or ten year plans, but I could. At each level, if I want to make sure some other quick habit or routine reliably happens at that cadence, I can tack it onto the appropriate check-in template. And when things fall apart (and they do), the higher levels catch it and give me a chance to fix things.

Getting back on track

Principle: It would be great to design a system that can never fail. Realistically it's better to design one that quickly recovers from failures

I plan to work for an hour, but I know I'll often get distracted and fail. The hourly OODA loop catches that and puts me back on track. But sometimes I'll just... wake up on the wrong side of bed, and fail to do any hourly loops at all, and waste a whole day. But my accountability partner will make sure I do my daily OODA, and we'll diagnose what went wrong and how to stop it happening tomorrow. If my daily partner misses the call, I can hopefully do it on my own at the scheduled time. But if not, or if this happens a lot, I'll note it during the next weekly check-in, and make plans to improve the situation. And so on and so forth.

You must expect the system to fail sometimes, at every level. This is critically important because it prevents Failing With Abandon, that brittle failure mode where you say "Agh, I've missed this habit three days in a row, my streak is ruined, I guess this doesn't work for me, I give up". Knowing to expect failures, you can replace that with more productive metacognition, like "Hmm, I missed that habit a lot this week, why did that happen? Is there an obvious fix to try? Is this habit still serving its intended purpose? Should I decide to stop doing it, or change it, or replace it with something else?". The failure of any given part of the system doesn't break the whole thing, it gets caught by the other parts and becomes another routine step in the normal ongoing process of updating and adapting The System.

Principle: Nil desperandum. Updating your plan is all part of the plan

That’s all there is to it

The core of The System isn’t complicated - regularly scheduled planning and goal setting, with space to review and update things to fix problems, and redundancies to catch when things break.

"Isn't that a lot of overhead?", I hear you ask. Yeah, it kind of is. If you can reliably stay on track over all timescales with a lighter system, you should do that. But I found that having some accountability and goal setting helped me a bit, so I added a bit more, and that helped a bit more, and I recognised the trend, and added a lot more, and that helped a lot.

"If a bit helps a bit, maybe a lot helps a lot" -- Zvi Mowshowitz, approximately

Empiricism is an important virtue; it's great to try things and find what works for you, and there's a noble tradition of people doing that and blogging about it. We should be doing this more.

The problem is that experimenting on yourself can be pretty slow and tricky and inconvenient.

This post is about Taguchi arrays, which fix that by allowing you to get much more useful information from far fewer experiments. The method is commonly used in industry for process optimisation, but it isn’t complicated and is very easy to apply to DIY experiments. (Thanks to NightHawkInLight for making me aware of this!)

The default way kind of sucks

Suppose you're wondering what will work best to improve your sleep. You've got one of those sleep tracker devices that gives you an integrated Sleep Quality Score, so you've got a clear metric to optimise. Let's do some empiricism!

Now, what interventions to test? A lot of people say melatonin is good. Apparently 0.3mg is the ideal, but maybe 1mg works better, and it's more commonly available. Other people swear by magnesium. You can get magnesium glycinate easily, but some say magnesium l-threonate is better, although it's more expensive. You've heard exercising helps, but is cardio or strength better? And you've got some of those blue light blocking glasses, but they look kind of goofy. There’s a ton of things to test.

One thing at a time

The big piece of accepted wisdom here is to only change one thing at a time. If you change more than one thing and your sleep gets better, you won't know which thing did it. Or, one thing you change might help and the other might make things worse, so they cancel each other out and you learn nothing.

Changing one thing at a time, we need at least 8 experiments:

Baseline

0.3mg Melatonin

1mg Melatonin

Magnesium glycinate

Magnesium l-threonate

Cardio

Strength

Goofy glasses

In principle we could do this in 8 days, just trying each thing once.

But that's going to be really noisy. Just one measurement per item is hardly going to tell us anything; we should try each thing on more than one night to get more signal. Maybe do each one for two or three days? That's 16 or 24 days, which is kind of a lot. Give each thing a week and that’s 2 months of experimentation.

And also, we care about finding a good overall setup, not just which individual things work. Probably there are some interactions here, like, what if magnesium works really well, but only if you also exercise? We'd never find out using this experiment.

Test everything?

To really know, we'd want to try every combination. So, 3 levels of melatonin (none, 0.3mg, 1mg), times 3 options for magnesium (none, glycinate, l-threonate), times 3 exercise options (none, cardio, strength), times 2 for red glasses (yes or no), means... 54 days, to try each thing once. That's not great.

There's got to be a better way!

This is where Taguchi Arrays, aka Orthogonal Arrays come in!

You go to an online Taguchi array generator like this one, add in your factors and their levels, and it spits out something like this:

Before you start, it’s a good idea to randomly shuffle the order of the rows, so secular changes or cumulative effects don’t bias things.

Then you go through the rows one night at a time. Each night you follow the protocol listed, and each morning you record your Sleep Score for that protocol.

Now to analyse the results. The genius of orthogonal arrays is that for any pair of factors, every possible combination of their levels appears the same number of times. This means that you can safely compare averages.

So if for example we want to know how magnesium glycinate compares with magnesium l-threonate, we can take the average of the sleep scores of nights we took glycinate, and the average of nights where we took l-threonate, and just see which is better. This is safe to do, because all the other variables are equally represented in those sets, so they won't bias things. You can go through and check - the 3 glycinate nights have one of each of the melatonin levels, and one of each of the exercise levels, and two have glasses and one doesn't, and the exact same is true of the L-threonate nights, and of the "no magnesium" nights. And this nice property is also true for all of the possible values of all other pairs of factors.

So using just 9 nights of experiments (just one more than the original 8 night experiment which told us very little), we get at least three nights of data to average together for each level of each factor, rather than just one! And we're testing all possible combinations of levels for each pair of factors at least once. With just these 9 experiments, we can find out a huge amount of information, almost as much as we'd get from the full 54-day factorial experiment!

Limitations

Now, this works best for situations where you expect the result to be approximately a linear combination of the factors, with only simple interactions between pairs of factors. For example, if there were some major interaction between three factors, like if melatonin worked wonderfully but only if you do cardio and also don't wear light-blocking glasses, this wouldn't catch that. But real life experiments tend not to have much of that kind of thing.

And of course if you have a situation like, magnesium only starts to help with sleep on the third night in a row you take it, this won’t detect that. But that’s a problem with using ‘sleep score on the same night’ as the metric, not an issue with Taguchi methods.