i have been reading behave and determined books by robert sapolsky and therefore because of bayesian updating, i now believe there is very less free will.

what is something we definitely now know is that the neurotransmitters in the brain affect how we behave.

imbalance of neurotransmitters can make us a bad person and a bad decision maker.

we make multiple decisions in our day to day lives, big and small.

i don’t know why i started, but i track my study hours - a very high quality data source. i was talking to an llm and it suggested a decision log.

human lives in the 21st century are very happening relative to how humans have lived mostly throughout history. memory is fallible. our brains literally fool us when we recall memories - they just bridge the gaps they can’t recall - and we cannot tell whether they are true.

so a good data collection point is this - decision logs. whatever big decisions you make - have a log.

i do not know the ideal template but thinking myself and not outsourcing it to an llm, i think the following should be included

  • what the decision is
  • pros and cons you’re considering
  • your health state during the time of decision making
  • the probability space of the outomes at the time of decision making
  • the worst and best case scenario you consider at the time of decision making

and then what’s value adding is taking a look back at the log after a point of time - when you now have additional information. a likely outcome is that your amygdala was overestimating the negatives. what looking back does is probably like rlhf - reinforcement learning from human feedback (although maybe this is a totally wrong example and the prior is high because i have no technical knowledge about ml except for yt videos) in that your future self will give feedback to your past self and learn from it.

so later on, you have to give your past self feedback

  • did the decision go right or do you regret it
  • what your past self was wrong and right about

and that is the idea. the thing about this is that its a long term project. you’re constantly evolving but evolution is slow. but the joy and awe of reading the thought process of your past self - 2 years younger, 5 years younger is worth it. do it for your future self.

time to sleep.