What it’s like to become an intuitive person: Daniel

Nature-published AI researcher gained 6 hours per day after unlearning.

I caught up with him recently.

How did you used to spend your time?

On an average day I might do around 6–8 hours of work and then 5–6 hours of just going home and vegging out in some form… watching YouTube...

More than 50% of my waking life was avoidance… I wasn’t getting that much work done.

What do you do with the new time?

I do a lot more things… Being social, spending more time with friends... reading good books to improve my thinking... writing things, putting myself out on the web more, communicating my ideas... working on passion projects like a  life dashboard that tracks various metrics

I’ve mostly stuck to hosting something every week… bouldering… board game night… theater trips… hot pot party. We just did another one yesterday.

Has your orientation to research changed?

People would ask me, ‘Are you available for a meeting at this time?’ And actually it would be mildly inconvenient... I’d be like, ‘Oh, sure, let me make that work for you.’ Whereas now I’m like, ‘Okay, these are my convenient times. Can you make this work?’

I used to struggle with retrospectives - ‘what went well, what didn’t go so well.’ I would always not have a very good sense of this. Now... I mostly just gave really good answers and my teammates liked what I said.

I recently sent a cold email [to a professor whose work I was interested in]... in the past I’d have stressed a lot about making a concrete pitch but this time I settled with “I feel there could be interesting synergies” and left it open. [Update: The professor is also interested in collaboration and invited Daniel to visit.]

How’s dating?

I would be quite obsessive… trying to fully determine what the person would be like just by reading their profile... I had this very high bar… Now it’s like ‘Okay yeah, good vibes, let’s try.’

Have you taken any new risks lately?

I never asked anyone out for 27 years and asked out two people in the last couple months.

How’d that go!

She said No… and I felt good about the fact that I asked her out.