One of my favourite videos of all time

Why eating more chocolate might be better for your diet

In The Big Think Book, Cave mentions the puzzle of Sandy thinking at the beach and concluding that there is definitely more than one thousand grains of sand. She then reasons that she can't tell the difference between one thousand grains of sand and one thousand and one grains of sand. So she concludes that there must also be more than one thousand and one grains of sand.  That is, if she is confident that there is more than one thousand grains of sand on the beach, and she can't tell the difference between one thousand grains of sand, and one thousand and one grains of sand (without counting, of course), then there must be more than one thousand and one grains of sand.

But using this reasoning, she follows on and says that she can't tell the difference between one thousand and one grains of sand and one thousand and two grains of sand and concludes that there must also be more than one thousand and two grains of sand. You can see where this is heading, and going up one grain at a time she would get to billions and hundreds of billions.

Now I'm not going into the philosophical side of this (read the book yourselves), but the logic is that we should be able to tell the difference between one thousand grains of sand and two thousand grains of sand, correct?

We should then be able to use this to deal with other problems in life. For example, when we say 1 piece of chocolate won't affect our overall diet, and using the reasoning of the grains of sand, we end up eating 6 pieces (or the whole bar, because who stops at 6?). But if, and only if, we've convinced ourselves that we're going to eat the chocolate, maybe we're better off eating 3 pieces instead. That way we can more easily rationalise its effect on our diet and prevent ourselves from eating 3 more. So we might be inclined to think that 1 piece is better than 3, however if that 1 piece leads us to eat 5 more (one at a time) then we're better off eating 3 pieces at once.

This can (and is) applied in many other problems of similar nature, and the situation also applies in reverse. For example, breaking down a big problem into a group of smaller problems, and tackling them one at a time makes them much more achievable. Or "taking it one step at a time" as they say.

How I'm going to convince myself to read more

“Sometimes, you read a book and it fills you with this weird evangelical zeal, and you become convinced that the shattered world will never be put back together unless and until all living humans read the book.” -John Green, The Fault In Our Stars

I don't read enough.

There's 2 problems I seem to come across when I get into reading books.

Problem 1:
Getting bored because I read too much too soon, leaving me with little to no motivation to continue reading the next day.

Solution:
What I noticed is that there's only a certain length of time I can continue reading a book until the words stop making sense.
The idea is to follow what we learn in economics 101, namely, utility (satisfaction) maximisation. My motivation starts off low, then increases as the book gets intriguing, and then sentences lose their meaning because I've been reading it for too long and it hasn't yet finished. The original thought would be to stop reading when they start to lose their meaning, right? Wrong! The idea is to stop reading where my motivation to continue is maximised.

At this point you might be like "That's stupid. You're stupid! Why would you stop reading when that's literally the peak reading time?! " Exactly! It's at its peak, the marginal utility is going to start decreasing from then on. You see the idea is that there's no way I'd finish the book in the next half an hour, but I do want to continue reading the book. If I stop reading when my motivation is at a maximum, I'll be more likely to pick the book up tomorrow and continue. But if my marginal utility starts to diminish, my average utility will start to fall and I'm less likely to continue reading tomorrow because what I'll remember is the lower (average) utility that the book offered.

Problem 2:
Once I finish a book, I don't want to instantly start a new one because either I've fallen for problem 1 and absorbed nothing by reading too much at once, or I just want a couple of days to reflect on the book I just read. Next thing I know, the couple days have turned into a couple of years.

Solution:
Read 2 or more (but less than 5) books at any one time. The reason for this is that once I finish one book, I'll always want to continue to finish off the other books. This way, there won't be a time where I'm not reading a book and as a result, I won't necessarily delay starting on my next book since I've already started it. The reason it has to be less than 5 is so I don't overwhelm myself with so many books that I ignore reading all of them. Obviously the number of books will also have to be limited by the stresses of my daily/weekly/monthly schedule.

This could combine with the first problem that if I really can't stop reading at peak motivation, I could continue reading the next book.

Nevertheless, trial and error will help me find the best way to consistently read more books.

Two new additions to the first ever reading collection

When Darryl Bro! (thedimplydiary.wordpress.com) gets you into reading books more often.