I did this a few years back while bored at school, and it has actually been surprisingly useful.
I find the easiest and quickest way is to try to write the number in a way that makes it look like the letter; eg for H imagine drawing two lines above and below to make it look like an LCD 8. Using this I thoroughly memorized the letters’ numbers in about 15 minutes. You’d need to periodically rememorize to keep the numbers fresh, though.
Until about a year ago I couldn’t touch-type either. I fixed it painlessly by removing my keyboard’s keys and reinserting them in random positions.
This would only help you if you already know more-or-less where the keys are, but you’re too lazy to go a bit further and type without looking at the keyboard. It works because looking at the keyboard no longer helps, and you have to keep your fingers on the home keys to keep your sense of where the keys are.
If you manage to memorize the new letter arrangement, just rerearrange.
Oh MAN, I had a big long list here somewhere...
Frequently expose myself to shocking/horrific pictures, so that I am generally less sensitive. I’ve been doing this for a while, watching horror movies while doing cardio exercise, and it’s been going well. One might also try pulling pics from (WARNING) shock sites and using spaced repetition to schedule exposures.
Become insensitive to exposure to cold water by, for example, frequently taking cold showers or ice baths. This apparently helps with weight-loss as well. I’ve done this with immense success. After you’ve practised this, you will literally feel like some weird heat is being generated from someplace inside you when are exposed to cold water, and not feel cold at all. See here.
Become awesome at mental math. I’ve been practising squaring two-digit numbers mentally for some time (school, what can I say) and I’m really good at it.
Learn mnemonics. I was fortunate to teach myself this early and it has been insanely useful. Practise by memorizing and rehearsing something, like the periodic table or the capitals of all nations or your multiplication tables up to 30x30 or whatever.
Practise visualization, i.e. seeing things that aren’t there. Apparently some people lack this ability, and I don’t know how susceptible this is to training, so YMMV. Try inventing massive palaces mentally and walking through them mentally when bored. This can be used for memorization (method of loci).
Research n-back and start doing it regularly.
Learn to do lucid dreaming. Besides being awesome in and of itself, this can help you practise things or experience weird stuff.
Learn symbolic shorthand. I recommend Gregg. I did this in my second year of high school, and it’s damn useful for actually writing stuff and taking notes as well as as a conversation starter.
Look at the structure of conlangs like Esperanto and Lojban and Ilaksh. I feel like this is mind-expanding, like I have a better sense of how language and communication and thought works after being exposed to this.
Learn to stay absolutely still for extended periods of time; convince onlookers that you are dead. Being in school means you have ample opportunity for practice.
Learn to teach yourself stuff. Almost everything you can learn at high school or university can be taught better by a good textbook than by a good teacher (IMO, of course). You can get any good textbook on the internet.
Live out of your car for a while, or go homeless by choice.
Can you learn to be pitch-perfect? Anyway, generally learn more about music.
Exercise. Consider ‘cheating’ with creatine or something. Creatine is also good for mental function for vegetarians. If you want to jump over cars, try plyometrics.
Eat healthily. This has become a habit for me. Forbid yourself from eating anything for which a more healthy alternative exists (eg., no more white rice (wild rice is better), no more white bread, no more soda, etc.). Look into alternative diets; learn to fast.
Self-discipline in general. Apparently this is practisable. Eliminate comforting lies like that giving in just this once will make it easier to carry on working. Tell yourself that you never ‘deserve’ a long-term-destructive reward for doing what you must, that doing what you must is just business as usual. Realize that the part of your brain that wants you to fall to temptation can’t think long-term—so use the disciplined part of your brain to keep a temporal distance between yourself and short-term-gain-long-term-loss things. In other words, set stuff up so you’re not easy prey to hyperbolic discounting.
Learn not just to cope socially, but to be the life of the party. Maybe learn the PUA stuff.
That said, learn to not care what other people think when it’s not for your long-term benefit. Much of social interaction is mental masturbation, it feels nice and conforming so you do it. From HP and the MOR:
For now I’ll just note that it’s dangerous to worry about what other people think on instinct, because you actually care, not as a matter of cold-blooded calculation. Remember, I was beaten and bullied by older Slytherins for fifteen minutes, and afterward I stood up and graciously forgave them. Just like the good and virtuous Boy-Who-Lived ought to do. But my cold-blooded calculations, Draco, tell me that I have no use for the dumbest idiots in Slytherin, since I don’t own a pet snake. So I have no reason to care what they think about how I conduct my duel with Hermione Granger.
Learn to pick locks. If you want to seem awesome, bring padlocks with you and practise this in public :P
Learn how to walk without making a sound.
Learn to control your voice. Learn to project like an actress. PUAs have also written on this.
Do you know what a wombat looks like, or where your pancreas is? Learn basic biology, chemistry, physics, programming, etc.. There’s so much low-hanging fruit.
Learn to count cards, like for blackjack. Because what-would-James-Bond-do, that’s why! (Actually, in the books Bond is stupidly superstitious about, for example, roulette rolls.)
Learn to play lots of games (well?). There are lots of interesting things out there, including modern inventions like Y and Hive that you can play online.
Learn magic. There are lots of books about this.
Learn to write well, as someone else here said.
Get interesting quotes, pictures etc. and expose yourself to them with spaced repetition. After a while, will you start to see the patterns, to become more ‘used to reality’?
Learn to type faster. Try alternate keyboard layouts, like Dvorak.
Try to make your senses funky. Wear a blindfold for a week straight, or wear goggles that turn everything a shade of red or turn everything upside-down or an eye patch that takes away your depth-sense. Do this for six months, or however long it takes to get used to them. Then, of course, take them off. The when you’re used to not having your goggles on, put them on again. You can also do this on a smaller scale, by flipping your screen orientation or putting your mouse on the other side or whatnot.
Become ambidextrous. Commit to tying your dominant hand to your back for a week.
Humans have magnetite deposits in the ethmoid bone of their noses. Other animals use this for sensing direction; can humans learn it?
Some blind people have learned to echolocate. Seriously.
Learn how to tie various knots. This is useless but awesome.
Wear one of those belts that tells you which way north is. Keep it on until you are homing pigeon.
Learn self-defence.
Learn wilderness survival. Plently of books on the net about this.
Learn first aid. This is one of those things that’s best not self-taught from a textbook.
Learn more computer stuff. Learn to program, then learn more programming languages and how to use e.g. the Linux coreutils. Use dwm. Learn to hack. Learn some weird programming languages. If you’re actually using programming in your job, though, make sure you’re scarily awesome at at least one language.
Learn basic physical feats like handstands, somersaults, etc..
Use all the dead time you have lying around. Constantly do mental math in your head, or flex all your muscles all the time, or whatever. All that limits you is your own weakness of will.
So anyway, that’s my idea-dump. Tsuyoku naritai.
I was thinking it might generally help you to suppress your emotions, which I think is the key to success in many areas. Watching a horror movie is a conflict between your caveman-brain screaming at you to run and your rational brain telling you not to. If you can listen to reason rather than instinct on this, perhaps you will be better able to do so when faced with other situations. For example, if you are in a religious community your instinct tells you to conform, whereas your reason (hopefully) tells you the religion is false.
I also think it might help with general rationality—it’s not good to have massive holes in your mental map where there are things you’re too scared to think about.
Ironically, ever since I’ve started watching horror movies, I haven’t had a single nightmare, whereas I used to have them rather often.
Feeling revulsion about things seems like a useful survival trait.
I’m not planning to lose my sense of revulsion any time soon, only to become able to ignore/suppress emotions when they’re not useful, like when deciding on a charity to sponsor or whether to eat revolting celery or non-revolting cupcakes.
Controlling your emotions is probably better-taught by participating in an adult- literacy program, or voice-only technical support
Horror movies are entertaining, and if you have cardio equipment you can easily do 2 hours of exercise painlessly while watching one. If you already use spaced repetition, it might take at most 10 hours total over the course of your lifetime to get a hundred shock pictures and rate the due ones daily for how much you flinched when you saw them.
The first option in particular seems orders of magnitude more efficient than spending hours answering boring tech-support calls for low pay.
This is an awesome post. Some thoughts:
You can get basically any even slightly popular book for free on the internet. You can use this to compare books before you decide on one to buy. You can get books either through torrents or (more easily) through file-hosting services. For the latter, you can usually find what you’re looking for easily by googling the author’s name, book title and ‘rapidshare’. This is probably illegal.
Interest can be a useful heuristic for deciding on books, since it filters out things too far above or below your level.
Another heuristic: whenever you read anything, keep in mind that, a year from now, you will almost certainly have forgotten almost all of it except what you put into spaced repetition. I find it ridiculous that so many people, a few years after getting out of school, have barely anything to show for it.
Yet another heuristic. Pick a field you like and use, say math. Realize that you will never know all the math there is to know. So whenever you read a book, ask yourself whether you would really prefer to know this over more math.
Amazon reviews of books are usually brilliant and show at a glance how well-written and controversial a book is.
Perhaps reconsider whether you need to read fiction at all. If everybody else thought immersing yourself in imaginary worlds was some strange perversion, would you still do it?
Anyone have any experience or advice about optimal dosing? What is the maximum amount of caffeine I can consume while still avoiding dependency? What pattern of consumption is best?
Personally I find caffeine to be amazing for basically everything, but it becomes too weak after you build some tolerance, and withdrawal seems to affect me particularly badly.
In addition to the memory test, we should also use some fluid intelligence test (like RAPM). It would probably be good to use unspeeded RAPM and other fluid intelligence tests (rather than speeded RAPM, which is controversial.).
Also, we should investigate different modes, like multiple stimuli and arithmetic and crab n-back.
There is an integer between (what we call) 3 and (what we call) 4.
Several thinkers (Godel, Cantor, Boltzmann, Kaczynski, Nash, Turing, Erdos, Tesla, Perelman) became more and more eccentric or insane shortly after realizing the truth about this NUMBER WE DO NOT SEE!!...nor can we… our eyes do not OPEN far enough… you can try holding them open as much as you want, but you’ll never see...never ever see… The world beyond the veil… The VEIL OF REALITY… It’s there to protect us, from them: the Ancients...the Darkness...that...which...we...CANNOT...understand. Nor should we… the oblivion of ignorance!! For to have knowledge...is to be DAMNDED!!
I remember that problem from one of Gardner’s books. It’s one good example of how generalizing can help you avoid pitfalls—try more than one spiral, or shapes other than cylinders.
Smell the roses
While you smell the roses, 100 people die horrible painful deaths. What would you like to do next?
My point is, until the Singularity (if then) other people’s suffering will outweigh rose-smelling by people who can control their emotions at will anyway (and by other people), even if they’ve invested in research to zero marginal utility.
What I meant was ability to delay gratification, to actually live by a utility function that does not hyperbolically discount, which is more or less A.
I’m not on this level yet, but I think I can get there through prolonged effort. Unfortunately, I think it’s mostly genetics and practice (which is exactly what everyone’s trying to avoid, lol).
I would try to figure out how painful the deaths are and how trivial the pleasures are.
I don’t think this world’s an edge case yet though—decreasing pleasure now seems like it would increase long-term expected pleasure, e.g. by working more and using the money to make FAI more likely, or giving it to any effective charity.
Might not (probably won’t?) work for you, but as a data point, my routine, which works for me:
Don’t expose yourself to bright light within 2 hours of going to sleep.
Around an hour before your ideal going-to-sleep time, take an ice-cold 3-minute shower in the dark.
Do n-back (black screen, black n-back background) until you are really really tired.
Get in bed and stay there until you fall asleep.
What seems to have worked really well for me is just practising willpower by intentionally exposing yourself to pain and stress. But then again, that requires willpower.
For example, eating restrictions, n-back, exercise, music starvation, standing up or squatting while doing things, not watching TV, not playing games.
I do less hyperbolic discounting. A few years ago, if I was given the choice between playing flash games and studying, I would choose games, but if the choice was to be made a month in advance I would have chosen studying. Now I always choose studying.
I still value the same things over the long term, but now my short-term and long-term values are mostly the same. Hyperbolic discounting / akrasia does not affect my judgments as much.
If I was given the ability to force my future self of one month later (or my past self, if that were possible) to study, I would. But at any given time I would usually choose not to study.
This is like a study I read about where people were given a choice between a bag of chocolates and a bag of fruit. If they were told they would immediately be given the food, most chose chocolate, but if they were told it would be delivered a few days later, most chose fruit.
I’ve tried to learn Esperanto and French using Anki. I’d recommend that you don’t actually explicitly learn the grammar of your target language. For fluency, you need to be able to use correct grammar without conscious thought. Using grammar SRS cards, eg. ‘conjugate this verb’, will enable you to know correct grammar, but not at the intuitive, subconscious level you need for real fluency.
The best way around this, it seems, is to train RECOGNITION of the meanings of many example sentences. This can be done two ways.
Firstly, through lots of exposure to media in the target language, eg. audiobooks. You don’t need to understand what’s being said, so long as you familiarize youself with the pronunciation, tone and stress patterns of the language. You will gradually start to understand what’s being said, both from your SRS (see below) and just through osmosis, the way small children learn their home languages.
Secondly, by training understanding of many sentences in the language through SRS. You should not try to translate English sentences to sentences in your target language, you should only try to understand whatever the sentence in the target language means. In an SRS, you can add the sentence (in your target language) to the question field. Leave the answer field blank. If you fail to understand the sentence, look up all the words, idioms, etc. that you don’t understand and add them to the answer field.
More on this technique: http://www.alljapaneseallthetime.com/blog/all-japanese-all-the-time-ajatt-how-to-learn-japanese-on-your-own-having-fun-and-to-fluency http://www.antimoon.com/how/howtolearn.htm