Mission QP20

Projects Quantified Prestige
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Last year my health that has been compromised by ME/CFS has improved significantly. This enabled me to engage with a lot of interesting and important projects, for example:

  • Writing articles about basic income
  • Engaging with political transhumanism
  • Creating and improving this Fractal Future Forum
  • Doing some science fiction world building

In My Personal Progress Report for 2015 I listed what I’ve achieved last year. It’s really amazing that I have found the time and energy to do those things, and they have been quite worthwhile. However, those projects didn’t create the resonance I hoped they would. My hope was that what I’ve done would help the development of Quantified Prestige by directing some attention to that project, which is most important to me. Unfortunately, this indirect strategy hasn’t really worked out. My conclusion is that I need to work on QP much more directly and promote it more directly and aggressively. And that’s the underlying reason for starting Mission QP30:

The idea of Mission QP30 is simple: I will try putting at least 30 hours into the development and promotion of Quantified Prestige each week. That should help me to remain focused, which has been a significant problem for me over the last year. Without putting at least so much time and energy directly into a big project which definitely depends on my own work and input, achieving any real progress and resonance is really difficult.

Of course, this means that the other projects I am involved in will get less of my time and energy. That doesn’t mean that I will neglect them, but it most certainly means that I need to improve the effective and efficient usage of my time dramatically. Actually, I prefer that modus operandi, because I tend to waste time when I have the impression that I have enough time at my disposal. I need to become more disciplined, but at the same time Mission QP30 feels energizing to me, so that I’m confident that I have a really good chance at achieving my mission goal.

Note that my mission goal is purely putting in at least 30 hours a week into QP-related tasks consistently. Mission QP30 itself does not imply any specific targets about how far I want to come with QP. That’s because I think that putting enough time into QP is the most critical thing I need to do at the moment. Also, I have no direct control over the results of my work, but I have control over how much work I put into QP.

Nevertheless I can at least write down some of my hopes about what I might be able to achieve with QP30: My main hope is that I will have a functional demo version of QP running by the end of this year, perhaps even with a Fludo currency module. Furthermore, my hope is that there will be at least a dozen people actively using the demo version each week, so that we can start observing the dynamics of that reputation system in “real life action”. Of course, I could be more optimistic about what I might possibly achieve, but I don’t think that it’s a good idea to set up very high aims, because I don’t tend to be really motivated by unrealistic goals.

So, let me start with QP30 now! :slightly_smiling:

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So, I’ve been going about mission QP30 for almost two weeks now, and I’ve come to the conclusion that I don’t like the effects of this intense focus on QP and closely related fields. It made me neglect a lot of my other commitments to a degree that I consider to be unhealthy. Therefore, I see the clear necessity to reduce my commitment to QP.

Therefore, I modify mission QP30 to mission QP20.

I will try putting at least 20 hours into the development and promotion of Quantified Prestige each week.

Well, I should have started more modest from the beginning, but I’m a very ambitious person, often to the point that this ambition clashes so much with reality that it becomes dysfunctional. As human I make mistakes and I am willing to face the consequences of those. :blush:

Anyway, I hope that 20 hours per week will be enough to make substantial progress with Quantified Prestige this year. Let’s see what I can do. :slightly_smiling:

3

So, I have been running mission QP20 in the background for the last months, and managed to formally satisfy the 20 hours requirements of it, albeit with partially questionable accounting methods. This effort has put a lot of pressure on me, especially in conjunction with the increasing workload in the rest of my life. I have been operating close to my breaking point during April. It has become apparent to me that this is taking a serious toll on my overall energy level and performance.

My mental acuity is far from its previous heights, especially when I’m at least somewhat sleep deprived. From my personal health logs I know that I need solid 8 hours of sleep, otherwise my physical and mental performance start deteriorating. Luckily I don’t need to be at my best performance to do sufficiently good work, but it’s still a big problem. It’s also my self-discipline that’s seriously negatively impacted by the sleep deprivation I am suffering through. Most recently, my body started failing to let me sleep longer than 8:30 AM, which makes it extremely hard for me to repay my sleep debt by sleeping longer on weekends.

Even though I succeeded at managing the worst parts of ME/CFS, there are still some symptoms that show me that there are still some aspects of it present in the back. So, my health is certainly not a problem that is solved. Through the experiences from the recent weeks my empirical performance limit for doing any kind of meaningful work is around 65 hours per week. Considering that I’ve suffered from ME/CFS for so long that’s surprisingly good. On the other hand, it’s still 35 hours away from the 100 hours a really healthy human being could pull off. Why is that even important? Aren’t 65 hours per week not enough? No, of course not. I’m trying to change the world here. Aiming for less is not acceptable for me. And doing that on a mere 65 hour per week budget is close to impossible, especially when most of that time is not even used directly for the purpose of world improvement.

My conclusion therefore is that I need to focus on really optimizing my health, first. It’s not enough to manage ME/CFS so much that I can achieve a level of baseline functionality that I’m at right now. I need to reach a level of excellent health that would allow me to pursue my ambitions with a sufficient amount of energy. Of course, I am optimistic about that being possible. My trajectory of health improvement over the last years has been rather impressive for me. And I’m still making progress in certain areas. So, my projection is that my health will be really good, if not robust, a few years from now. It’s just really important to take the goal of improving one’s health as very serious priority, so that enough massive effective action is taken towards that direction.

Some of the research I’ve done on ME/CFS recoveries seems to indicate that increasing levels of exercise seem to be the last piece in the puzzle of recovery. This also fits to my own experiences. With decent amounts of moderate aerobic exercise my health seemed to improve significantly. My guess is that I would be doing best with around 10 hours of aerobic exercise per week. The best intensity seems to be one that makes me seriously sweat, but doesn’t leave me exhausted during or after a workout.

With all of that said, I am aborting mission QP20 for now, because my plans have become increasingly long-term, and it seems to be the best course of action to prepare myself optimally for the long haul as soon as possible.

Aborting QP20 means that I will spend less time on QP, and much more on optimizing my health, which is of course the basic capital I need for everything else. This will also leave me some more time for Fractal Future, and other projects. Most importantly: I stop forcing myself to work close to my breaking point all the time, which is not sustainable anyway.