I would very much like to read a post on lesswrong about meditation and its benefits to rationality. Since it is used for achieving happiness it might be something for lukeprog.
Metus
Karma: 2,480
Khanacademy is excellent since it has a tree diagramm of subjects on which you can see how far you have come and what material you need to learn in order to understand the topics. The big problem with LessWrong’s sequences is that they are highly entangled in contrast to the highly hierarchic way people usually learn. The other problem is that the useful or better articles came later in the sequences so that one has to read older, less interesting ones in order to understand the vocabulary of the newer articles. Maybe the sequences should be rewritten with this in mind?
That would be a great idea. I am sure there are people from many countries here that would be willing to translate website content. See for example the recent request for a german meetup.
I like this and had a similar idea. It did not involve “leveles” but a learning tree, extremely similar to the one found at http://www.khanacademy.org/exercisedashboard . So you would not need “character classes” or “levels” but had an immediate view on the persons abilities. Based on the learning tree you can of course introduce “levels” as a branch of the learning tree and calculate “character classes” based on the proportion of the mastered skills.
Ultimately, this amounts to order all human knowledge into a single hierarchy, but can fortunately be performed step by step. Khan Academy is a first attempt at this though aimed at children, not adults.
The requirements seem partially too high and the third rule is simply silly. Why is strength so much more unimportant than memorising 250 words? 250 words is too much. Strength is very well defined in your link as “minimum strength required to live a comfortable life”. Endurance seems a bit high and what is defined as “running”? It would be better to define a certain time to complete a certain distance to be more precise. 1 mile seems a bit much though. Finance is a bit too high. Creativity is way too much, start by writing limericks or haikus or something similarily small. These are merely my opinions.
Overall your approach seems to suffer from the problem that a designer needs to know everything about every subject to properly define levels and still cannot account for individual differences in talent or experience. I therefore suggest here again an approach similar to a learning tree as seen at Khan Academy: http://www.khanacademy.org/exercisedashboard . It can in effect emulate the behavior of a leveling system but is much more flexible and more importantly the task of cataloging all human knowledge and skills can be split up so that experts in the respective fields can design the learning branches for their fields. “Levels” then can be rewardet for completing certain tasks on those branches but “sublevels” for different fields of knowledge can be awarded too.
That does not seem right. If you, arbitrarily, decide that some skills are optional, others not, you devalue those that are optional. The whole point of the leveling system is to encourage people to fill their gaps, in this case physical, handicaps aside. And the first thing of a journey of 1000 miles is the first step: Make the L1 requirement for sports easier, though “strength” is pretty easy already.
It would be maybe better to know how many levels you plan to make. If it is, say, 100, it may be better to start with the smallest step possible. If it is 10, then you are right in setting the requirements higher.
I see your point, but that is not what I was going at. Disabilities can render you unable to do anything particular. It just does not seem right to make certain requirements optional as that renders them practically meaningless. Then it is better to abandon those requirements altogether since then the comparability of two “level 1” people is given, but in the case of optional requirements is not.
This, then, is only a fault of your metric. If you want to measure endurance you can use different means of measurement as suggested in the other child post. Especially in the case of inability to walk you can measure endurance with a wheelchair. Running is just one of many options to measure endurance.
Hiking promotes endurance so it is not surprising that you could run 16 miles at first try since the asthma disables you lungs but not your muscles. Though we would have to define what is “running” by giving a velocity so we could be more precise.
Please see my comment below, second paragraph, for my take on this problem. ( http://lesswrong.com/lw/71r/leveling_irl_level_1/4mro )
Please see my comment below, second paragraph, for my take on this problem. ( http://lesswrong.com/lw/71r/leveling_irl_level_1/4mro )
Please see my comment below, second paragraph, for my take on this problem. ( http://lesswrong.com/lw/71r/leveling_irl_level_1/4mro )
Thank you for clarifying. English is not my mother’s tongue. In that case I think we have to know what “running” is so we can talk about how much that is or is not. Though I am not really interested in such details.
Thank you for your writings. This is exactly what this site needs more of: Applied rationality.
LessWrong as place for scientifically literate advice
Thank you. Is the style ok?
To provide an example of what I described under the heading “A provisional solution”, I link to one of lukeprog’s articles, “Scientific Self-Help: The State of Our Knowledge”. I do not take credit for any of his work.
[Advice] lukeprog shows in this article how to obtain valuable self-help advice and provides three simple examples with notes on happiness, study methods and productivity. Link: http://lesswrong.com/lw/3nn/scientific_selfhelp_the_state_of_our_knowledge/
Sounds plausible. Ultimately I want to be proficient enough to forego such notice but in the meantime I will have to follow your advice. It would make the article nicer in that the disclaimer would not be split in two parts.
In any case, I think the most important finding is that glucose restores willpower. When making an important decision, pop a soda. How much can this help with akrasia?
Can you maybe give an introduction to all those utilities at Quantified Self? Or maybe a dedicated post about them?