There once was a hare who mocked a passing tortoise for being slow. The erudite tortoise responded by challenging the hare to a race.
Built for speed, and with his pride on the line, the hare easily won—I mean, it wasn’t even close—and resumed his mocking anew.
Winston Rowntree, Non-Bullshit Fables
My neck is asymmetrical because some years back I used to often lie in bed while using a laptop, and would prop my head up on my left elbow, but not my right because there was a wall in the way. In general, using a laptop while lying in bed is an ergonomics nightmare. The ideal would be to lie on your back with the laptop suspended in the air above you, except that that would make typing inconvenient.
So a friend recently blew my mind by informing me that prism glasses are a thing. These rotate your field of vision 90 degrees downwards, so that you can lie on your back and look straight up while still seeing your laptop. I have tried these and highly recommend them.
That said: You should probably not do non-sleep/sex things in bed because that can contribute to insomnia. I recommend trying a standing desk, by putting a box or a chair on top of your desk and putting your laptop on top of that, then just standing permanently; it will be painful at first. Also currently experimenting with only allowing myself to sit down with my laptop if I’m at the same time doing the highest-value thing I could be doing (which is usually ugh-fielded and unpleasant because otherwise I’d have already done it).
Another thing: I have a crankish theory that looking downwards lowers your unconscious estimation of your own social status (which seems to be partly what is meant by “confidence”/”self-esteem”). If that’s true, prism glasses and standing desks could increase confidence.
A tulpa is an “imaginary friend” (a vivid hallucination of an external consciousness) created through intense prolonged visualization/practice (about an hour a day for two months). People who claim to have created tulpas say that the hallucination looks and sounds realistic. Some claim that the tulpa can remember things they’ve consciously forgotten or is better than them at mental math.
Here’s an FAQ, a list of guides and a subreddit.
Not sure whether this is actually possible (I’d guess it would be basically impossible for the 3% of people who are incapable of mental imagery, for instance); many people on the subreddit are unreliable, such as occult enthusiasts (who believe in magick and think that tulpas are more than just hallucinations) and 13-year-old boys.
If this is real, there’s probably some way of using this to develop skills faster or become more productive.
To encourage yourself to do some massive, granular task:
Upon completion of each granule, give yourself a reward with some probability.
A reward is a small piece of food or a sip of a drink, etc.
Never eat or drink anything except as a reward for working on the task.
This really works extremely well for me; I have been doing this for about 2 months, at first only with anki reviews and more recently for several other things. The feeling is very similar to addictions like video games or entertaining websites; I often think “I should probably go do X, but let me instead do just one more anki card” and a half-hour later I realize I still haven’t done X.
More things:
Make the rewards unlikely and small so that you stay constantly hungry. Bonus: caloric restriction.
Create a timed reminder, say half-hourly, to do just a few granules of the task. This encourages episodes of the “just one more” effect.
Put reinforcers within arm’s reach, both temporally (make granules easy and quick, so that hunger feels like an urge to do the task rather than an urge to cheat the system) and spacially (so that you are constantly reminded of your hunger and tempted to do the task).
I repeat: this works extremely well for me and I strongly encourage other people to try it. More details here.
Here is a graph showing the number of Anki reviews I’ve done every month for the past year, as an example of the results this method can produce.
probably unethical anyway
Sure, but it’s a way to sell a small part of your soul for lots of money. You can then do an arbitrage operation, by using that money to buy lots of cheap soul, e.g. through efficient charity.
Some clusters that seem related but not much discussed on LW:
The “aspiring Mentat” cluster, which includes the entire mnemonics subculture, various brain-training groups, the mental math subculture, and some parts of the magic tricks / mentalism subculture and professional gambling subculture. Some weirder parts are the lucid dreaming groups, the hypnosis groups, and the tulpamancy groups. Slightly overlapping subcultures are those around various games, e.g. chess and speed-solving of Rubik’s cubes. For an example, see the book Mind Performance Hacks, or the Mentat Wiki. This overlaps with some very obscure Russian inventions, such as the TRIZ system of innovation, the theory of “psychonetics”, and the Trachtenberg system of speed mathematics. There’s also some overlaps with conlang subculture, such as Ithkuil and Lojban.
The “aspiring Ubermenschen” cluster. Some names that come to mind as prototypical: Tim Ferriss, Jason Shen, Sebastian Marshall. This is a part of the larger productivity culture, which includes e.g. Cal Newport, the GTD people, etc. They tend to monetize their writings, for obvious reasons. There’s a spectrum here from the saner groups to the more woo-ful, e.g. Steve Pavlina. This overlaps with a “drugs for self-improvement” subculture, which includes various nootropics groups, and parts of the steroid subculture. Also overlaps with the self-tracking / quantified self subculture.
The “outlandish schemes to improve the world” cluster, which includes e.g. Esperanto, veg*anism, the writings of Buckminster Fuller, various anti-nationalism movements, etc. (Veg*anism definitely correlates with Esperanto, for instance. Of course, a lot of veg*ans don’t engage in the rest of this cluster.) Overlaps with more woo-ish things like various forms of non-theistic spirituality.
Some others:
The psychoactive drug subculture.
The cypherpunk subculture. “Hacker” culture in general is very close to LW memespace.
The manosphere.
Also groups associated with various professions, such as tech people, econ people, and math people.
Sprinkle an emetic (a vomit-inducing drug) into foods that you want to stop eating, such as chocolate. It is well-known that nausea causes a long-lasting aversion to the food preceding it. (For instance, this is a problem for chemotherapy patients—the drug therapy causes nausea, which they then associate with food.)
I haven’t tried any of this, but I’d be very surprised if this wasn’t an easy, long-term solution to the problem of people wanting to eat food that they don’t want to want to eat.
Maybe this could even be extended to non-food addictions, such as video games or mindless internet browsing. One person I know quit smoking cold turkey this way (by throwing up after smoking a cigarette, not with an emetic).
I’d guess that the decline is largely due to people posting content on personal blogs, Facebook, etc. Every day I see a lot of interesting, rationality-relevant posts on Facebook from people that are connected to LW. I think those posts would be better if posted (or cross-posted) on open threads here, since that would make them visible to more people and allow for better commenting.
Covert conditioning is an interesting variant of operant conditioning where, instead of using an external stimulus to modify someone’s behaviors, you just have them imagine themselves doing things and then receiving rewards or punishments. For instance, an alcoholic could imagine drinking alcohol and then immediately feeling nauseated. Or a student could imagine deciding to do his homework and then suddenly winning a million dollars.
Unfortunately, I’m not sure whether covert conditioning works. The linked Wikipedia article doesn’t really give much evidence. If covert conditioning works, it seems like it could be very useful, especially in situations where ordinary reinforcement techniques are hard to use. For instance, one could easily reinforce sociability, which is hard to reinforce through ordinary methods because you don’t want to look weird in public. Or one could train oneself to avoid unhealthy food by imagining that it makes one nauseated, precluding the need for actual emetics.
(Not going anywhere in particular with this, just curious what people’s thoughts are.)
Upgraded reflective senses would be really cool. For instance:
Levels of various interesting hormones like cortisol, epinephrine, testosterone, etc. For instance, cortisol levels are higher in the morning than in the evening, but this is not obvious. (Or am I lying to prevent hindsight bias?)
Various things measured by an implanted EEG. For instance, it would be cool to intuitively know the difference between beta and gamma waves.
Metabolism-related things like blood insulin, glucose, ketones.
Galvanic skin response. Heart rate variability.
We already have weak senses for most of these, but they’re not always salient. Having a constant sense of them would allow you to do biofeedback-like training all the time.
Make a list of all the projects you could undertake, then use Fermi calculations to estimate the costs and benefits of each on various axes (time, money, status...), with time discounting. Combine the axes into one measure of how much you’d profit from doing each project. Then actually use the numbers to decide what to work on next.
You might also intuitively guess the profit from each task and take a weighted average of that and the more analytical calculations, because system I often outperforms system II.
I’m currently in the middle of this; so far the top items match my intuitions (e.g. go do more CoZE), so I’m not benefitting much from the analysis. Part of my reason for creating this thread is to gather more ideas for things to do and to get other people to help me research how worthwhile possible projects are.
Having political beliefs is silly. Movements like neoreaction or libertarianism or whatever will succeed or fail mostly independently of whether their claims are true. Lies aren’t threatened by the truth per se, they’re threatened by more virulent lies and more virulent truths. Various political beliefs, while fascinating and perhaps true, are unimportant and worthless.
Arguing for or against various political beliefs functions mostly (1) to signal intelligence or allegiance or whatever, and (2) as mental masturbation, like playing Scrabble. “I want to improve politics” is just a thin veil that system 2 throws over system 1′s urges to achieve (1) and (2).
If you actually think that improving politics is a productive thing to do, your best bet is probably something like “ensure more salt gets iodized so people will be smarter”, or “build an FAI to govern us”. But those options don’t sound nearly as fun as writing political screeds.
(While “politics is the mind-killer” is LW canon, “believing political things is stupid” seems less widely-held.)
Should we listen to music? This seems like a high-value thing to think about.* Some considerations:
Music masks distractions. But we can get the same effect through alternatives such as white noise, calming environmental noise, or ambient social noise.
Music creates distractions. It causes interruptions. It forces us to switch our attention between tasks. For instance, listening to music while driving increases the risk of accidents.
We seem to enjoy listening to music. Anecdotally, when I’ve gone on “music fasts”, music starts to sound much better and I develop cravings for music. This may indicate that this is a treadmill system, such that listening to music does not produce lasting improvements in mood. (That is, if enjoyment stems from relative change in quality/quantity of music and not from absolute quality/quantity, then we likely cannot obtain a lasting benefit.)
Frequency of music-listening correlates (.18) with conscientiousness. I’d guess the causation’s in the wrong direction, though.
Listening to random music (e.g. a multi-genre playlist on shuffle) will randomize emotion and mindstate. Entropic influences on sorta-optimized things (e.g. mindstate) are usually harmful. And the music-listening people do nowadays is very unlike EEA conditions, which is usually bad.
(These are the product of 30 minutes of googling; I’m asking you, not telling you.)
Here are some ways we could change our music-listening patterns:
Music modifies emotion. We could use this to induce specific useful emotions. For instance, for productivity, one could listen to a long epic music mix.
Stop listening to music entirely, and switch to various varieties of ambient noise. Moderate ambient noise seems to be best for thinking.
Use music only as reinforcement for desired activities. I wrote a plugin to implement this for Anki. Additionally, music benefits exercise, so we might listen to music only at the gym. The treadmill-like nature of music enjoyment (see above) may be helpful here, as it would serve to regulate e.g. exercise frequency—infrequent exercise would create music cravings which would increase exercise frequency, and vice versa.
Listen only to educational music. Unfortunately, not much educational music for adults exists. We could get around this by overlaying regular music with text-to-speeched educational material or with audiobooks.
* I’ve been doing quantitative attention-allocation optimization lately, and “figure out whether to stop listening to music again” has one of the highest expected-utilons-per-time of all the interventions I’ve considered but not yet implemented.
Yes. Contrarian position: This thread would be better if we upvoted contrarian positions that are interesting or caused updates, not those that we disagree with.
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:
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..
Polyphasic sleep?
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.