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gwern comments on The Math of When to Self-Improve - Less Wrong
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I suspect that a profit-maximizing human as smart as you appear to be who only had the credentials for a minimum-wage job would be working the minimum number of hours each week they could get away with in order to feed, clothe, and house themselves while they used as much of their spare time as possible to cook up something better. At this point converting time to money confuses things because their utility for money drops off so quickly once they have their basic needs covered.
Upon reflection, I revise my opinion to "if your lack of credentials and chutzpah means the best jobs available to you pay minimum wage only, improving your credentials/chutzpah is a more profit-maximizing use of time than intelligence enhancement." If you're a student then you're already working on your credentials and your earning power is going to go up soon, so if you're going to work for money it makes sense to put it off until then, and you should value your time at something rather close to the amount you'll make after graduating (assuming you've got a typical discount rate).
Try http://www.diigo.com/ -- it lets you do full-text searches on the pages you've bookmarked (along with a bunch of other cool features). At least, if they haven't removed that in the latest version.
I know that knowledge of economics is considered crystallized intelligence. I don't see what this has to do with the possibility that the process of learning something new and wrapping your head around it builds fluid intelligence. If fluid intelligence doesn't help me learn stuff faster, is it really worth having? Doesn't it seem likely that learning things makes you better at learning things? If this is true, could an increase in fluid intelligence be the mechanism for it?
Well... I suspect we may be having vocabulary issues here. Gf is defined as "the capacity to think logically and solve problems in novel situations, independent of acquired knowledge."
If your existing Gc already applies to a situation - say, your algebra applies to the economics you're learning - then to some extent the problems of economics are not 'novel'.
It's only a pure-Gf problem when the problems are highly novel. In that case I find it intuitively plausible that a lot of irrelevant Gc wouldn't help much.
Example: if I memorize a couple thousand English words (pronunciation & definition) for the GRE for a large increase in my Gc, why should I expect any increased ability to write proofs in mathematical set theory which will initially draw on Gf as a strange and alien subject?
I agree that memorizing words wouldn't help your fluid intelligence.
If doing your first few set-theory proofs draws on Gf heavily, then strictly intuitively speaking it seems to me that this ought to improve Gf just about as fast as anything. Of course, solid experimental results rank above my intuition--but the dual-n-back result isn't solid.