A Call For Advice:
I’ll start off by introducing myself.
My name is Caleb, I’m currently 14 years old and taking High School. I’m an INTP, I stand 6′2″ tall, and enjoy composing music in my spare time.
Now, the purpose of this post is not to bring new research or ideas to the table from me, (probably going to take a while before that happens), but rather to request it, for a specific project I’m doing.
I’ve been reading LessWrong for about a year and a half now, and in that time I’ve made a multitude of improvements to my life. Since I came here I’ve started meditating, working out regularly, reading a number of books on psychology, and becoming more aware of my own biases. Rationality has become my passion, and I work on it daily.
The Plan
Onto the purpose of this post. On August 4th, I will be turning 15, and I’ve decided to initiate a very large project, which for lack of a better name, I will dub “The Plan”.
I intend to spend the days leading up to my 15th Birthday by taking information from an enormous variety of sources on what life improvements can be made, what skills are most useful, and what areas should be studied, to reach the ultimate goal of gaining as much benefit possible, as quick as possible.
There’s tons of things to consider, even assuming I have a tireless work ethic and can implement this immediately. What types of utility increases are there? Which are more important? Should all time be devoted to the quickest increases in utility, or should energy be set aside for starting some long term goals early? Does it make more sense to improve yourself, so you can make more money? Or to make some money, and use it to improve yourself?
Obviously I’m not going to find a perfect answer, and attempting to plan out my whole life is doomed to fail, but I’d at least like to have a better idea of where to go from here. (Besides, even if I fail, I’ll still have learned a lots of useful information.)
The Question
So, I pose this question to the LessWrong Community:
If you were me, and turning 15, what would you recommend that I do over the next year, to give me the biggest utility bonus the fastest, both in intelligence and wealth?
Hopefully, even if it proves an impossible question, we’ll see some interesting discussion.
First off, take a look here and here.
This is the first thing that jumped out at me. I would recommend the Confidence Spiral approach, where you set small goals you can reach and use that to gradually ramp up your projects. Measure what you do in terms of improvements over default, rather than subtractions from perfect. For example, I’m going to recommend a bunch of books and blog posts in the remainder of this comment. You could read them all at once and try to apply them all at once- but it’s better to read a book, attempt to apply it, then read it again in a month or year later with your new knowledge of having tried to apply it. Once your attempts to apply the first book are in place (but before you do the review), then start the second book.
There are three parts here.
Utility bonus: Being happy is a skill. Read How to be Happy, Scott Adam’s Happiness Engineering, and a book on cognitive behavior therapy, either feeling good or a workbook targeted at anything you want to be better at. (Effective therapy teaches people interpersonal and intrapersonal skills whose lack are generally at the root of their problems. Even if you don’t have any problems at the clinical level it’s useful to use the skills to make yourself better than default, to make developing those problems less likely, and to be able to give solid advice to other people who do have problems at the clinical level.)
Intelligence: Your maximum intelligence is pretty much fixed at this point. You have two options open: be at a higher fraction of your maximum intelligence more often, and skill growth. You’re already here, so I won’t mention rationality besides to mention that my current favorite book on decision science is Decisive.
The first is done mostly by clean living- eat well, get plenty of sleep, and minimize cognitive load by moving obligations out of your memory into external storage. If you want to do this rigorously, use Quantified Mind to track the effects of interventions, but for most interventions the problem is not knowing whether or not they’re working, but putting in the effort to sustain the intervention. Your high school that starts at a terrible time- actively develop the skill of going to sleep early to get a full 9 hours of rest. Melatonin might help. Getting Things Done is the book that details how to use todo lists and external memory to reduce cognitive load, but it won’t be that important for you. Use Anki to memorize things you need to know for school, as well as things that you come across that you want your system 2 to have available.
Skill growth comes not from demonstrating what you can do but learning what you can’t yet do well. This means that practice needs to be deliberate to be effective, and will often be effortful. (That doesn’t mean it won’t be fun- but make sure you’re consistently challenged, and not avoiding areas where your skills are lacking.) Here, read So Good They Can’t Ignore You,
Wealth: The standard way these days for clever young people to earn extra cash is by providing basic technical services to people in their social circle or their parent’s social circle that don’t know where to look for professional technical services. This will be stuff like website design, computer repair, putting things on eBay, and so on. I haven’t seriously investigated this in a long time, and so this could be out of date.
Long term, your wealth will in large part depend on your social skills. Read How To Win Friends and Influence People, Getting to Yes and possibly Never Eat Alone (the name is a good tip, but the book contains much more). Get to know people in positions of influence, and try to make it as pleasant for them to be around you.
Your advice has not gone unappreciated, this is exactly what I was hoping for. I’m glad I could get some information, even if I asked for it the wrong way.
Sorry this has come so late, but I’ve been really puzzling over your statement about intelligence. What type of intelligence are you referring to when you say my maximum is fixed?
Are you saying something similar to, “I can practice baseball every day for 30 years, and improve by a huge margin, but I will only be ever so good, simply because my mind will only ever go so fast, and my body can only strengthen so much?”
First off, there was an html error in my Never Eat Alone link that I’ve fixed.
Mostly “my mind will only ever go so fast.” I mean it primarily in the sense of IQ; to my knowledge there are no interventions that obviously raise adult IQ, so much as there are interventions that lower IQ and they can be avoided. For example, people who are creatine deficient (primarily vegetarians) have lowered IQ, but there doesn’t seem to be an IQ bonus for getting large amounts of creatine.
Though there probably is an upper limit to how strong you can get, it is unlikely to be a tight constraint over the course of your life. Your maximum IQ will (hopefully!) be a tight constraint for you, and that means focusing on things that you can control pays higher returns (with the caveat that you can and should avoid interventions that make you less intelligent). The anti-pattern to avoid here is thinking that something will make you generally smarter, and being smarter will magically fix your problems (especially if they’re problems of ignorance or willpower). Look for specific improvements (like Anki for memorization of rote facts).
For example, a baseball player might know that having longer arms (or something) would make them better at what they do, but once they’re an adult they’re very unlikely to have a safe and reliable way to extend their arms. But they can develop their muscles, their baseball-specific reflexes, their ability to read the field, and so on. Each of those things requires realizing a specific way to improve, and then practicing that.
You should put this in the open thread. I didn’t downvote this, but don’t want Discussion be cluttered with “here are some superficial facts about me, now please optimize my life”-type posts.
Yes it would be annoying if that was the case, but it’s not and i think “what should a 15 year old do to become an awesome adult” is very good information to have in a top-level post.
My apologies, I hope it didn’t do any damage while it was up.
No harm done. I see you reposted your comment in the open thread; that is exactly what it was made for. Good luck.