= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Procedural Knowledge Gaps
I am beginning to suspect that it is surprisingly common for intelligent, competent adults to somehow make it through the world for a few decades while missing some ordinary skill, like mailing a physical letter, folding a fitted sheet, depositing a check, or reading a bus schedule. Since these tasks are often presented atomically - or, worse, embedded implicitly into other instructions - and it is often possible to get around the need for them, this ignorance is not self-correcting. One can Google "how to deposit a check" and similar phrases, but the sorts of instructions that crop up are often misleading, rely on entangled and potentially similarly-deficient knowledge to be understandable, or are not so much instructions as they are tips and tricks and warnings for people who already know the basic procedure. Asking other people is more effective because they can respond to requests for clarification (and physically pointing at stuff is useful too), but embarrassing, since lacking these skills as an adult is stigmatized. (They are rarely even considered skills by people who have had them for a while.)
This seems like a bad situation. And - if I am correct and gaps like these are common - then it is something of a collective action problem to handle gap-filling without undue social drama. Supposedly, we're good at collective action problems, us rationalists, right? So I propose a thread for the purpose here, with the stipulation that all replies to gap announcements are to be constructive attempts at conveying the relevant procedural knowledge. No asking "how did you manage to be X years old without knowing that?" - if the gap-haver wishes to volunteer the information, that is fine, but asking is to be considered poor form.
(And yes, I have one. It's this: how in the world do people go about the supposedly atomic action of investing in the stock market? Here I am, sitting at my computer, and suppose I want a share of Apple - there isn't a button that says "Buy Our Stock" on their website. There goes my one idea. Where do I go and what do I do there?)
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d){kind=logo}
Comments (1477)
LW makes frequent reference to coming to above average decisions with some kind of market.
And this market can be used to find right answers, the right calibrations between group values, something like this?
Where can I find information on this, or how does it work?
The favourite local writer on this is Robin Hanson, but the general idea has a big literature: the name to search for is "prediction market".
Awesome post. Once I stop being the useless jerk jock LW perceives me as I shall compile the information here simply as an exercise that computes good in birdbrain yet I have no idea how useful the result will be (zero because sadly nobody's going to read it :( brb suicide)
How do you convince yourself to have self-confidence in a given situation, even in the face of direct empirical evidence that such confidence would be misplaced in that situation?
This seems to be a thing that many successful people are very good at - shrugging and acting like they're good at whatever task is at hand, even when they're clearly not - and then getting people to "buy in" to them because of that confidence rather than because of any evidence of actual skilled performance.
How do you kickstart that process?
(EDIT: was this a bad question to ask?)
Doing a wide range of tasks I'm not familiar with, and learning them well and quickly, has done wonders for my ability to just say, 'Fuck it, I'm me and I can do whatever I'm paid to. I've done stuff I didn't know how to do before.'
It also helps to know what the complexity of the task is have little self-affirming narratives - if you know that people who you don't consider smarter than yourself have done something, and have some idea about stacked complexity, then it becomes a lot easier to say something like "This really isn't that complicated, I just don't know how to do it yet, but that guy does it and he's an idiot - and he probably didn't spend years really learning it."
If you can draw parallels with what you already know, that can help too.
Think how you would perform the role of a self-confident character when acting in a play?
I guess... I'm not sure how well I can visualize the answer to that. I can visualize self-confident characters in plays, I just can't visualize being one; as soon as I imagine me as the actor, imagining self-confidence immediately breaks suspension of disbelief. (Like imagining Danny DeVito as a leading man in a straightforward, non-subversive romcom).
Screw suspension of disbelief. You're really into theater now, you want to figure out all about how acting works, and so you want to learn out how to do all sorts of characters to develop a good range, no matter if you're actually good for casting into one or not. So now you're trying to figure how to do the confident self-affirmed character, starting from the nuts and bolts. Figure out how they use their voice, how they move themselves, what body language and stereotypical interactions they use in various stock situations and so on. You're not being in a social situation yourself here, you're figuring out the mechanics for making a theater scene come together, with yourself as one part of it.
Also maybe look into some actual books on improv theater that have been recommended here occasionally?
Hmm. My emotional reactions as I attempt to push myself towards doing this seem to indicate that I don't actually want to learn these things - or at the very least, that I anticipate that trying to learn these things will be unsuccessful and embarrassing.
How much can one describe or specify men's haircuts to the haircutter? Can one have good results from this? What can one do to make one's haircuts more robust against aging or being unkempt?
This should really be a recurring (or otherwise highly visible) thread.
Much-belated edit: Here
"I am beginning to suspect that it is surprisingly common for intelligent, competent adults to somehow make it through the world for a few decades while missing some ordinary skill, like mailing a physical letter, folding a fitted sheet, depositing a check, or reading a bus schedule. "
I need to learn almost all of that...and several other things.
How would someone in El Salvador legally move to Canada in no more than 3-4 years? How much money would that take and how does one find a job?
I tried looking at the newspaper for one but nearly all of it was either terrible or requires something I don't have (like X years of previous experience or being 25-30 years old. Some ads even looked for people of a certain gender for some reason.
There is a skill for folding fitted sheets? Damn. That'd be handy.
Once you know it exists, you can think of what it should be, probably.
Hint: Znxr gur pbearef tb vagb rnpu bgure.
Scrubbing and attention Scrubbing, the follow-up.
Short version: I have problems with scrubbing effectively because I miss spots and have to iterate cleaning several times. There's various advice about scrubbing, of which using hotter water and not using the curly metal scrubbie seem to be the most immediately valuable. What I think of as an attention problem may be less serious than I thought-- I need to proofread what I write, so the same may apply to cleaning.
Plausible advice I haven't tried yet-- approach cleaning in 30 minute chunks so that a feeling of accomplishment/completion is possible.
Is pair-cleaning an option for you? You know, like when you were a little kid, and company was coming over, so your mom would give you 10-minute tasks to do for an hour. Except you and another person do it for each other :D
How do I clean carpet floors? (I mean regular maintenance, but tips on removing particular kinds of stains also welcome.) I don't have a vacuum cleaner.
You borrow a vacuum cleaner.
You can get some sorts of debris (long hair, mostly) and the stuff that clings to it by shuffling around barefoot, or by hand, or with a rake.
Thanks! How do I borrow a vacuum cleaner? Context: I'm living in dorms for two weeks, most people are away on holiday, those who're still here are on completely different schedules from mine, there's no place clearly marked "Hang out and meet other humans here". And I don't even have an oven to bake conversation-opening cookies.
I looked into renting a vacuum cleaner, but that doesn't seem to exist.
If your dorm is like the ones I'm familiar with, there may be a shared cleaning supply closet from which your RA or similar can fetch you a vacuum that you are free to use. Failing that, you could put a sign on your door offering five euros for the use of a vacuum and see who knocks.
Related discussion thread.
A HN regular just started a website that looks like a great match for this thread: http://cluedb.com.
Random presentation of clues implements the notoriously addictive variable ratio reinforcement schedule, as used by Farmville/WoW/etc. Potentially a big timewaster here.
This might have a less procedural answer than a lot of the questions here, but how would one bridge the gap between agent-mediated travel, with a schedule drawn up for you ahead of time by someone that presumably knows what they're doing, and just hopping on a plane and hoping for the best?
This is more of an issue for long trips to unfamiliar places; selecting a hotel for a few days' stay isn't hard, and renting a car isn't much harder, but creating an itinerary beyond that is a skill I haven't acquired. Particularly if I'm going somewhere where the local language isn't one I speak well.
In addition to "Learn to touch-type. Learn to type with ten fingers.":
I am often amazed and astonished that people do not know how to operate the search engine of their choice properly and thus fail to find their desired information. It is your main internet-information retrival-tool, make yourself familiar with its advanced possibilitys, also know as operators. e.g. for google, see this chart: http://www.googleguide.com/advanced_operators_reference.html
I found most useful (for google) the following ones:
Quotationmarks around a phrase, e.g. "less wrong" searches for the exact phrase.
the "site:address phrase" command searches for your phrase only on the specified site, e.g. site:lesswrong.com "nuclear plant"
the exclude-command "-" (minus) excludes one word from your results: rationality -rand
Nice link. I'd been thinking a-b was the same as "a b" all these years. For the record, it means ("ab" or "a-b" or "a b").
Is there an easy way to put hyperlinks in posts? I've just been editing the html...
And the formatting in the post editor seems to do weird things with my text size, how do I fix it without going into the html?
Regardling hyperlinks, use the link icon. It's two to the left of the anchor icon. As for text size issues, I would guess a result of setting the style (the drop down menu on the left) wrong, but that might be wrong.
This is another question that may lack a simple answer, and indeed there is a good chance that this is simply a wrong question in the first place.
Background: So going by LW and indeed much of the rest of the internet it seems that speaking to arbitrary strangers in public is in fact not in general considered creepy and unacceptable (which makes this a case where I would have done better with the typical mind heuristic, as opposed to what I guess is some sort of version of Postel's Law, as I am not myself in general creeped out when others approach me).
Now much has been said on this topic here already - I can't find the thread right now but I recall reading, e.g., don't do this in enclosed spaces if you're new to this (leave the other person a (literal) line of retreat). And how isn't something I think I have a problem with either, nor am I worried that I can't tell when people want me to go away.
What I am wondering is - well, regardless of the above, there do seem to be certain spaces which, though public, people have some expectation of privacy in. (I.e. they would consider other people approaching them creepy.) So what I am wondering is how can I distinguish those spaces with this expectation from those without. I have been basically erring on the side of caution by treating all public spaces as the former when I don't have good reason otherwise.
Of course I suspect this may be a wrong question because I'm not certain the suppositions I'm putting into it are correct; in particular I'm suspecting I may get the response "you need to learn to judge people, not spaces, better". But if it is in fact a wrong question any help in righting it would be appreciated.
Related - I originally thought of it as the same question, but now I realize it may not be - is the question of, in what spaces is it OK to simply butt in if I hear a bunch of people talking about something interesting? (Again this is something I currently don't do...) On the internet and at parties are two examples where this seems to be always OK, but I'm pretty certain this doesn't apply in general. I suspect this may also be a wrong question for reasons similar to above.
This is my strategy: when entering any space, I call attention to my arrival by loudly making some comment to either the group in general, someone I know, or anyone who looks friendly. Obviously, this works best in familiar settings, maxing out its fitness in, say, your own home. ("Honey! I'm home!") I find, however, that it works virtually anywhere that isn't supposed to be quiet. People who want to be social will smile and engage you. In places like bars, cafes, or restaurants where this might be taken as obnoxious, tone it down, but feel free to speak to anyone around you. Most people are amenable to passing comments at the very least.
Could you give examples of comments (and appropriate contexts) in contexts other than your own home?
Also, it might be better to avoid addressing people in places where a lot of conversations go either between people-who-know-each-other or between drunk people and the people near to them. (In my case, it is a bus stop or the bus.) People-who-know-each-other (for example, by virtue of taking the same bus every day) might just think 'ooh, another one', without even going on to a noun.
Say you go into Starbucks and there's a long line of customers waiting to order a drink. Approach the end of the line and go "Whoah, long line!". Chances are, you'll get someone's attention. People will turn around and look at you. When they do, make eye contact and say "We're gonna be here a while!" or something like that. You're immediately building rapport by referencing a shared context, as well as broadcasting your own confidence and willingness to socialize. It works great.
A more difficult scenario, but still quite doable, is a bookstore. Find someone reading a particular book or type of book, or looking through a certain section, and engage them on it. "Hey, good book!" They're looking through the psychology section? Say "Psshh, Descartes. What did HE know?" This sort of thing will elicit a smile from almost anyone. The important thing is to not LOOK awkward, even though you may feel awkward.
Yes, this approach is cheesy. And some people may find you annoying. But those are people who are likely annoyed with life in general. Overall, you can generate a lot of positive results this way. If you want to generate maximum socialization, be THAT guy.
I spend a fair amount of my time off work either on public transportation or in coffee shops, and have found that how receptive people are to starting conversations varies widely within these settings.
On public transportation, there are observations one can make which can aid with determining whether someone is open to conversation. If they are already engaged in conversation with another passenger and appear either happy or lost, it is more often appropriate (people who are happy tend to have farther to go on their mood spectrum to get to creeped out or annoyed, as well as sometimes, as with the people I befriended a couple weeks ago, being in the mood to share their happiness with others, and people who are lost generally appreciate direction or at least a clarification of where they are on the map). A person confined to the seat next to you is less likely to be happy about a conversation, as they will feel they have less of an exit than, say, in a section where all seats face a middle aisle, meaning the area in which the conversation takes place is felt to be larger. In my experience, few people like to start conversations on their morning commute. So the important factors which determine whether it is appropriate to speak to someone on public transportation are time of day, physical position, and mood.
Coffee shops follow similar guidelines: it is often appropriate to chime in to existing conversations (as long as the conversation is not romantic or argumentative in nature). When a person might be forced by lack of seating to share your table, it is not appropriate to start a conversation if both of you have laptops, as you can be reasonably expected to be engaged with other people or projects. If the other person does not have a laptop or other electronic device with which they are engaged, it is generally appropriate to start a conversation.
I have found coffee shops environments where it is sometimes received well to butt in to interesting conversations. This has led to a few rebuffs, but also some highly interesting conversations. When people were gathered in the coffee shop for a purpose, such as a poetry reading, there was a significantly higher proportion of interesting conversations to rebuffs.
Public transit talkiness varies a lot by city. In Boston, it's minimal. I understand in other cities, conversation is much more normal.
It's my experience as a young woman that the only people who try to talk to me on public transit are men. If you're a man, know that young women you try to talk to are probably going to assume you're sketchy because they've been approached by so many other sketchy men before.
I veto talking to anyone who is reading. A possible exception might be if you've read what they're reading and ask their opinion of it, or similar.
An anecdote: I was once reading Prattchett in a trolley-bus, and the ticket seller, a young man, exclaimed 'Oh! You read Prattchett in the original!', and I was like, shit, he's after my book and said 'Yes,' in an uninviting voice, and he went on his way... ...and I still regret not taking the time to talk to him.:)
I have the same issue, and I personally think it's stupid (as in, in what way is talking to a stranger in public weird?). Thinking it's stupid doesn't make it much easier to overcome my own inhibitions about it, but it is somewhere to start.
I think tact is the key. Interrupt as politely as you can, and gauge their reactions when you do. If it is clear they are not interested in your input, then turn around and leave them alone. No harm, no foul. If you have something to contribute, though, and the individuals weren't specifically seeking a private conversation, then they will probably be interested in what you have to contribute.
This reminds me of a recent episode of the Ricky Gervais Show (basically Ricky and his friend make fun of another friend of theirs the whole time, funny but it gets old), where one of the hosts went swimming, noticed the guy in the lane next to him had an excellent front crawl (which the host has always struggled with) and asked the guy if he could give him some tips. Ricky's response was "Oh god, you didn't! Why would you do that?!" My thought the whole time was why in the world is that wrong? If the guy isn't interested he'll say no, and that will be it. If he is willing to help out a fellow swimmer then he will, and they may become friends over it. Where is the loss for anybody there?
I have a half dozen friends now that I wouldn't have if I hadn't done something very similar a couple years ago, at a swimming pool too, no less. I simply started talking to the lifeguard before and I after I swam. Not quite as out of the blue as the Gervais Show co-host, but it was similar.
Still, some people find it rude. I don't for the life of me understand why, except for when they are clearly having (or are attempting to have) a private conversation, or talking about a personal. Otherwise, where is the harm? And really, the risk for me personally is extremely low. So some stranger thinks I'm odd, so what? Most people are odd in some way, friendliness is far from the worst odd trait you could have.
Strangers are a potential threat. So when a stranger comes up to you and initiates a conversation, there's some reason to be on your guard.
This is combined with basic etiquette. If someone makes a small request, it is considered rude to refuse. The problem here is that creepy weird dangerous strangers can take advantage of this fact by making a small request, which then makes you feel obligated to comply. So now a complete stranger, who may be dangerous, has ensnared you. You're now doing something that he asked, instead of something that you want to do. And he can keep you dancing to his tune by making more small requests. So if you follow the rules of etiquette, a complete stranger, possibly dangerous, can monopolize you for a significant length of time.
I see this happen all the time with telemarketers. The phone will ring. Somebody will answer it. Then they'll be at the phone for a long time, maybe half a minute maybe a couple of minutes. And it turns out that it was a telemarketer, and the reason the person stayed at the phone for a long time was that he just couldn't think of a polite way to end the conversation. You go ahead and try it. If you try to disengage, the telemarketer has a scripted response ready which cancels your attempt.
For my part, I'm not trapped by telemarketers. But I simply hang up. I say "no thanks", and the telemarketer goes on to the corresponding point in his script, and I simply hang up on him while he's in the middle of a sentence. That's rude. But I do it, because there are no personal repercussions for me in doing it.
Being rude to a stranger face to face is not as easy to do. If you're rude to someone, they might get angry, and one thing might lead to another. So it's easy to hang up on telemarketers (for me, but importantly, not for everyone) but not so easy to "hang up" on a stranger right in front of you. For this reason, being approached by a stranger represents a more serious potential problem, a social trap that may be more difficult to get out of.
So what do you do? There are plenty of ways to initiate a conversation. One is to be already with somebody. If you're not alone, if you already have a conversational partner, and if you're deep in conversation with them, then you are obviously less in need of company, so the possibility that you might try to trap a stranger into a conversation is correspondingly reduced. Another method is to get the other person to initiate the exchange.
The thing to do with telemarketers, I have learned, is not to immediately hang up.
You just let them get to what they want to sell you, then say, loudly but politely and without a pause for them to butt in, something like "Let me stop you there, [name], I'm afraid I'm not interested, but thank you very much for calling." If they don't back down, THEN summarily hang up.
I prefer this to simply hanging up because doing the latter always makes me feel bad for several minutes afterward for having been rude to somebody who is, after all, trying to make a living.
No, it really is to hang up.
Your emotions seem to be doing both you and the telemarketers a disservice - perhaps due to an instinctive misunderstanding of what kind of social transaction is taking place. The telemarketer is not socially vulnerable and nor are you in a position where perception will have future consequences. They also don't WANT to have an extended positive interaction that has no chance of success. Wasting five minutes on a mark that has no chance of giving a commission is strictly worse than an instant hang up. Your instincts are right that they are "after all, just trying to make a living" and you are just getting in their way.
I'm not saying it is necessarily worth retraining your emotional attachments in this case. You seem to attach pride to the act of wasting telemarketer time and guilt to the act of hanging up. This, combined with assertiveness practice you get and the cost of retraining yourself may mean that it is better to stay in the behavioral local minima.
My own attitude is that time spent talking to me is time they aren't spending making a sale, so getting off the phone is the nicest thing I can do for them under the highly constrained circumstances. So as soon as I recognize them as telemarketers, I politely say "Sorry, but I'm really not interested; have a good day" and hang up, without waiting for them to do anything in particular.
I disagree that strangers as a potential threat is one of the driving motivators for this practice. It may be a rationalization for it, but it is not a natural position to take.
In sparsely populated areas, where strangers are less frequent, strangers are often assumed to be friendly. People are still wary, of course, because there is always the possibility that a stranger is dangerous, but this is not a particularly strong reason to avoid them completely. The occasions where this seems to not be true are when individuals want nothing to do with anybody new, regardless of who they are or where they come from or what potential threat they might be (i.e. the old man with the "trespassers shot on sight" signs posted doesn't want anything to do with anybody).
In sparsely populated areas people will often take random strangers in need into their home for a night or two, far more than any small request the average stranger in a city might make, yet the people in the sparsely populated areas don't seem particularly put off by this.
Your second point I think hits closer to the mark. People believe it is rude to say no, and so seek to avoid situations where they can be trapped into small requests like you mentioned. Instead of learning to say "no, sorry", or "I'm sorry but this is a private conversation", we ostracize those who are friendly (a really sad state of affairs common to any large-ish city).
This I disagree that this is rude. It is not rude for you to hang up on him after you decline his offer outright and he disregards you. That is extremely rude of him to do so. He is required to continue based on the nature of his job, but it is still rude. Taking his rudeness onto yourself is wrong.
It may be polite to oblige small requests, but it is not particularly impolite to decline them. You are not beholden to strangers, and there is nothing in the rules of etiquette to make you so.
This I think is also one of the major problems with people using a cell phone in inappropriate places. People seem to think it is rude to not answer the phone, even when it would be incredibly rude to those around you to do so. It's a conflict and most people seem to choose the caller on the cell phone for some bizarre reason, even when it isn't likely to be any kind of emergency.
You are talking about what ought to be. I am describing what is - how people think and behave. What we can observe is that many people have a great deal of difficulty getting off the phone when a telemarketer calls. The reason, I think, is clear: they are reluctant to end the conversation unless the other person lets them go, because this is conversational etiquette. That's why it's difficult. You saying that it ought not be difficult isn't a description, it's an exhortation. You're talking in exhortatory/advisory mode when saying "I disagree that this is rude". I'm talking in descriptive mode: ending a conversation when the other party has not let go violates the etiquette that many people have thoroughly internalized. It doesn't matter that some alternative etiquette would be superior if analyzed from a utilitarian standpoint. The one people have internalized is the one that produces the behavior.
Another entity who takes (unintentional) advantage of our reluctance to disengage until we allowed to is the bore, the tedious person who won't shut up. I see the same behavior relative to bores that I see relative to telemarketers. Though people want nothing better than for the bore to shut up and let them get on with their day, they stay and pretend to listen to the bore until the bore is done talking, which may not be for a long time. Again, it doesn't matter that, analyzed from a utilitarian standpoint, the optimal behavior is to disengage. I'm describing, not advising. My advice is to cut them short, but that is neither here nor there.
Of course that is true, and it is not at all what I was advocating. And you're right that suggesting people learn to say "no" is an exhortation. It was also quite beside the original point (though I did bring it up first, certainly).
The point is that politely interrupting a conversation that does not appear to be particularly private or personal, for the purpose of contributing to that conversation, is not rude. Neither is asking a question. It can certainly become so if you ignore the hints to stop, but it does not start out that way.
I also doubt the bore enjoys boring people, so getting irritated at him when you aren't willing to tell him to stop seems pretty inconsiderate to me.
I'm sure they like to think they're entertaining. Which, ironically, incentivises their investing very little in finding out they actually are. I honestly would expect someone to react pretty badly to being told or hinted at that they're abusing your patience - and I think that's why people get pissed off with such people. There's little option to exit the conversation properly.
IME, bores tend to just find themselves with fewer and fewer friends as time goes on - often without ever finding out why. Because how can you tell them? Costs you social points for dubious gain.
Also, tautologies are tautological.
Indeed, I meant only to suggest there is a polite and impolite way to do it, and that interrupting in and of itself was not rude.
I could have phrased it better.
I agree that the usual politeness rules don't apply with telemarketers. I go with "No" or "No, thank you" and hang up.
This is actually relatively polite, not just compared to yelling at them, but also in comparison to keeping the conversation going (some people do this deliberately) when the telemarketer is certainly not going to make a sale.
This reminds me of a story I heard of a comedian who really put the screws to a telemarketer.
The comedian pretended to be a detective investigating a homicide when the telemarketer called, and started grilling him about his relationship with the deceased (i.e. the comedian). He even went so far as to find out what city and office building the guy worked at, and told him not to move because local police would soon be on their way to pick him up for questioning.
It was hilarious, but incredibly mean. I wouldn't be too surprised if the telemarketer found himself a new job as soon as possible after that.
http://www.tommabe.com/videos-find/video_murder_scene.htm
Perhaps I should further specify just what sort of spaces I'm clear and unclear on. (All "maybe"s, "probably"s refer to my own uncertainty, of course - for simplicity I'm doing writing this as if I hadn't read any of the cousin posts yet.) The examples listed here are whatever I think of, mostly relevant ones but not all - I don't think there's a zoo anywhere around here and I haven't been to one in quite some time, but the example occurred to me while I was writing this so I threw it in. I expect I'm right about the things I'm certain of but should that not be the case corrections would be appreciated!
Definitely OK to approach people: "Private public spaces" - anywhere where a person you don't know can be assumed to be a friend of a friend - small parties, common rooms in dorms or co-op houses
OK to join existing conversations, maybe not OK to approach people initially: "Purposed public spaces" - anywhere where a person you don't know can be assumed to share a common interest - a common room in a school department building, e.g. Game stores probably fit here too. Also probably competitions of any sort.
Probably OK but currently avoided by me: Outside - on the street, on the quad, in the park. Here the location doesn't let you infer much of anything. (Unless something unusual is occurring, then clearly OK as people gather around it.)
???: Fast-food places or food courts. Non-quiet spaces where people go to get work done (but which are too general to fall under #2.) Zoos, museums, other similar places. Bookstores.
Probably not OK: Libraries.
Definitely not OK: Anywhere where you shouldn't be talking in the first place. Most restaurants.
Again, thanks! The sibling posts have already clarified things some.
In ambiguous environments, it is best to determine ok-ness on the basis of the people.
Good situations: You are both doing the same thing - looking at the same genre of books in a bookstore, the same exhibit in a museum or zoo, both walking dogs in a park etc. This makes it easier to talk as you already have one thing in common and you can comment on that to see if they are receptive to conversation.
Something unusual happens - a delay on public transport, something wacky is going on in the quad etc
If you mean quad as in university, you already have a thing in common - you're at the same university. It is likely to be okay to strike up a conversation.
They're waiting for something. In a queue or waiting for public transport etc - may be bored
They're having a cigarette - they probably have time for a quick chat and if you smoke too there's a kind of unspoken thing with smokers where they will have a chat
Presence of alcohol but not a restaurant
Bad signs: Person is wearing headphones or reading - they are busy and unlikely to want to talk
They are a woman under 40-ish and you are a dude: potential difficulties, see below.
-
So there is a thing with a guy approaching a strange woman - she is likely to inductively infer that you are not just after a friendly chat. The best thing to do is use caution and watch for signals that she doesn't want to be approached and be ready to back off if your intentions are misinterpreted. A good thing to do here is to make sure that it is immediately obvious that you are talking about something that is not her - comment on your shared situation ahead of saying anything like 'hello' or 'how you doing'. Commenting on the books or the museum exhibit or something like that lets her know that you're looking at that, not her tits.
I can't tell if people actually don't care or if they are just oblivious, but I hate when people try to strike up a conversation while I'm using a public toilet. Bad when it's a urinal, worse when it's a stall. Maybe this falls under "spaces where people go to get work done"?
My suggestion: take a crash course in etiquette by going to another city nearby, and then spend a few days walking around asking questions, or inviting people to do stuff with you, etc. Condition yourself to get used to the occasional weird look, learn what you can get away with, and possibly make friends with people you would otherwise never meet. If all else fails, drive out of the city and pretend the entire thing never happened. Or you will get some amusing stories to share with me when you get back. How can you lose?
I am only partly joking, my social skills are so mediocre I have seriously considered doing exactly this at some point. I might throw in some speed dating as well for good measure.
I do this all the time, with fantastic results!
A current example is my temporary move to Boston/Cambridge. I've walked around asking random strangers questions such as "If you could live anywhere in Boston, where would you live?"
I've received great advice, and made a few friendships and event invites from doing so!
I endorse this advice wholeheartedly.
I don't agree with this one. It is highly variable.
OK, good to know. "Highly variable" is not particularly helpful but I suppose if it's true then there might not be much more to say.
Regarding variability:
Are you in a section of the library where talking is forbidden? Probably don't talk there unless you wish to flaunt rulebreaking.
Don't interrupt people when they are thoroughly engrossed in reading a book or look like they are fully focussed on getting their assignment finished by 5:30. Do talk to people if they look more relaxed or generally not busy.
"Obvious" kind of stuff, for a suitable value of obvious. (Also 'obvious' is that you could probably talk to even the busy folks if you are particularly charming or appear high status. That's how social rules work.)
The "don't" part was pretty obvious to me, and generalizes to other places, the "do" part was not. :) I would have assumed people in libraries probably want to be left alone.
In the public space in question, are you more likely to find books or alcohol?
Pretty much any venue with alcohol is going to be a socially facilitating venue, whereas anywhere people take books is going to be a venue where they don't expect to be disturbed.
I recommend socializing in book stores, libraries and outside classrooms. It will not always be appropriate but you can learn what sort of people will open to talking with practice.
I'd agree with all these suggestions. A more discerning rule of thumb might be "are you more likely to find people consuming books or consuming alcohol?"
It's probably also reasonably safe to assume that the typical LWer would prefer to talk with someone over a revealed mutual interest, rather than talking to someone after deadening their selectivity with booze, so places that are about books, but not where people read them, are likely to be good haunts for talking to strangers.
Best yet, find the people consuming alcohol in the place where you find lots of books. They're bound to be up for a chat.
I have heard it suggested that the world would be a nicer place if there were bookstores in which one could simply order a beer, the same way one can today order a coffee.
(It should be noted that the 'order a coffee' thing is only a decade or two old.)
OK, to be honest, I'm having a bit of trouble understanding this thread. Find people drinking in bookstores, libraries? I'm confused. (In school buildings, certainly possible, if we're talking about parties in grad student offices, but then that falls into a case where things seem pretty clear, and I'm only likely to be around if I know some people anyway.)
Oh, pardon me. That was not particularly a serious recommendation. At least, not one that is likely to become relevant all that often. I was mostly being lighthearted so as to signal rapport with sixes as opposed to complete disagreement.
If, as it sounds, you would learn from any mistakes, and if you're somewhere populous enough that a randomly selected person's opinion of you doesn't matter, I doubt that imposing this restriction on yourself is right, or benefits others more than it costs you. You're allowed to briefly creep people out by mistake in order to learn useful things and reap the mutual benefits of non-creepy interactions.
Where do you think the "be conservative in what you do" is coming from in your case?
Hm, this sounds like good way of thinking about it. I already use this principle, but I had not thought it to apply it to such cases.
I'm not clear on how I could possibly answer that.
To clarify, I think I may have been thinking about it in the form of "I'm not likely to interact with these people", rather than "I'm not likely to interact with these people again." (Which raises the question of what if you are likely to encounter them again because you often encounter them in the same place. I suppose this still falls under "one random person, their opinion doesn't matter"; it's just going to take a bit of training to make myself think of someone I can already identify as a random.)
Agree, and with added emphasis! An excellent general social policy.
Where can I get an IQ test? I am an adult and was never tested as a child. Searching google has only given me online tests. I want a professionally done test.
I considered myself intelligent, but some of the sequences/posts on this site are quite challenging for me. It has made me curious on exactly how intelligent I am. I don’t want to be too over or under confident when it comes to intelligence. I try to learn new things and that helps me find the limits of my intelligence, but I figure my IQ will also be interesting to know as well.
Thanks.
Mensa runs IQ tests frequently, worldwide, for a small fee. That's the best choice (and the only thing they're useful for).
I grew up with a very weird opinion about my place in the world as a result of a kindergarten IQ test (they never told me a number, but I knew it was good, because, for example, I got to the point where I had to ask the proctor what it means when someone writes a fraction - of course I didn't know it was called that).
Everything I've done since then has been a let down :) You're better off not knowing. Just use whatever you've got. There are many high-IQ-tested people who have crazy views and behavior, and are unsuccessful and unhappy (I don't deny that there exists some meaningful single general intelligence number, but what does knowing it give you?)
Besides, such tests can definitely be studied for as a skill, as much as any game (waste of time warning: Cambridge Brain Sciences games). So caring about the result just means you're going to effectively waste time practicing.
Private psychologists will probably perform them, but there is also the convenient option of finding out when your local branch of Mensa is having its next round of testing. One of the cheaper options, plus access to Mensa services such as the Travel special interest group (staying for free with interesting people around the world) if you're above the requisite percentile.
I was under the impression that Mensa's most recent test only provides pass/fail rather than an actual IQ score.
It gives you a percentile, which can be correlated.
Note however that IQ is not a property of individuals measurable on an individual basis like, say, height or weight is. Its utility lies in its statistical power to predict the average performance of large groups of people. When it comes to testing a specific individual, except perhaps for the greatest extremes (like diagnosing mental retardation), the fact that you achieved a certain score gives only probabilistic information about you.
Moreover, for individuals scoring in high percentiles, to which you probably belong if you find the stuff written on this blog interesting, there are strong diminishing returns to high scores even statistically. It's like e.g. wondering about your height with regards to your basketball prospects: your potentials are indeed likely to be much greater if you're, say, 6'2" rather than 5'10", but if you already know that you're more than a few inches above average, the difference between, say, 6'9" and 6'5" won't matter anywhere as much.
Why would that be true? Isn't it relative difference in height that matters for basketball? I would have thought that 6'9" would be great news, all other things being equal.
Strictly speaking, the weight of an individual can fluctuate even in the course of a day, due to the consumption or excretion of fluids. It can fluctuate more permanently when you lose or gain body mass in the form of fat or muscle.
I'm under the impression that, in contrast, measured I.Q. of an individual is supposed to stay more or less within the same approximate range throughout the course of that individual's life (with obvious caveats for brain damage, senility, and as you say, exceptional individuals at the extremes of the distributions).
From what I know, there are high correlations between an individual's IQ test scores at different times, especially in the short run. Depending on the study, it ends up being something like 0.95 in the short run and 0.7-0.9 between different ages (I'm just quoting rough ballpark figures from memory -- they of course differ between studies and age spans). Some impressively high correlations were found even in a study that compared test scores of a group of individuals at 11 and 77 years of age.
On the other hand, people can be coached to significantly improve their IQ test scores. At least so says Rushton, of all people.
Then of course, as with all issues where you might want to make some sense of what IQ scores exactly imply, the Flynn effect throws a wrench into any attempt to come up with a neat, plausible, and coherent theory.
But even regardless of all this, one should still not forget that the connection between IQ and any realistic measure of success is itself just probabilistic. This is especially true for high-scoring individuals: instead of worrying whether one's score is 120, 130, 140, or whatever, one would be better advised to worry about whether one is deficient in other factors important for success and accomplishment in life.
I'd point out that this should be extremely obvious a point, given how some subtests are Gc-loaded. You can 'improve' your IQ by studying some vocab, quite aside from the usual practice effects.
(And one of the standing questions about dual n-back is whether it doesn't (partially) amount to training for matrix-style Gf IQ tests.)
This doesn't seem to be so up to at least the 1 in 10,000 level. However, I agree that the predictive power of theses tests is still small relative to the remaining sources of variation (although it is one which we are relatively good at measuring) and they shouldn't be over-weighted.
Thanks for the link, I wasn't familiar with these results.
Per saturn's comment, online tests can be pretty accurate, especially the ones which are imitating (copying) the matrix-style tests; I keep a list as part of the DNB FAQ.
Note the many caveats. In particular, you cannot take multiple tests! Obviously for most of them you can't take it twice because the questions don't change, but less obviously, they're all similar enough that if you take one, you can expect your score on the second to be noticeably increased just from familiarity/experience. (This is why I suggest that people doing dual n-back do before/after IQ tests with a minimum of months in between, and preferably years.)
There is a rough correlation between IQ and standardized test scores.
Some private psychologists will do them. If there's a research university near you, you might be able to get one for free by participating in a study.
However, I discourage you from doing this. The usefulness of knowing your own IQ is already limited at best, and the extra accuracy compared to a good online test isn't worth the amount of time you'll need to spend on it.
Something else I've had to look up: how to convincingly dress like a grownup. (By which I mean less casual than t-shirts and jeans, work-appropriate, flattering, not looking like I just stepped out of a sci-fi movie or an art school.) There are some sites for female style advice I've found interesting and helpful (and edited to remove one I used to like that has gone off the rails).
There is a decent subreddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/malefashionadvice/
I've found that for men, the style articles at http://artofmanliness.com/category/dress-grooming/ are an excellent resource, the authors of them often go out of the way to explain why particular choices are appropriate for particular situations.
Thank you so much for this! Dressing well is one of the factors that can increase opportunities of all sorts, and an area I need to work on.
Related to this, I have immense difficulty dressing well and casually. I'm quite adept at dressing smartly, but there's a nebulous area between "jeans & t-shirt" and "shirt, no tie" where I just can't seem to figure out how to look stylish.
The secret to that is clothes that are simple and fit well.
So well-fitted dark jeans with shirt, no tie or a nice sweater/cardigan is a good look. Even 'jeans and a t shirt' can be a really nice look if the jeans fit you well and the t shirt is something classic like plain white (this also works well with a shirt partly or wholly unbuttoned over the top). There's also chinos which can work (just don't get them in too light or bright a colour if you're not confident about pulling off that look). If you live somewhere cold, peacoats and longer, slightly fitted coats are everywhere right now and they look good.
Advanced level - pick colours that complement your complexion. This is easier to gauge in person, but generally redheads rock green and jewel tones, blonds look good in cold colours and brown-haired guys are more likely to rock warm colours (though there are few people who don't rock blue). Brown-haired and darker-skinned guys are also a lot better at wearing white without having a tan.
Oh and practically nobody looks good in orange or yellow.
I have a kind of embarrassing one, but that's kind of the point of this discussion so here goes.
For some reason I've always had an aversion to social networking websites. I remember when all my peers used xanga, then livejournal, then myspace, and now facebook, and I always refused to use them whatsoever. I realize now though, that they represent a massive utility that I desperately need.
I am worried though, about starting new. Maybe I'm being overly paranoid, but it seems that having few friends on such a website signals low status, as does getting into the game this late.
So should I just create an account and add every single person I am even tangentially acquainted with? Is there a feature on facebook where you can hide who your friends are? Is it appropriate to ask someone you just met to friend you? What other cultural and social knowledge am I missing in this area?
These days having few friends frequently signals maturity or coolness - someone who doesn't add everyone they've ever met to look like they have lots of friends.
I think the sweet spot is between 10 and 200 - go over that and people tend to imagine 'there's no way he could actually have that many friends, he just adds people at random and cares too much about popularity'.
Edit: Having said that, I just went back to my fb, which I no longer really use, and I'm on over 350. But largely that's because I've had it for a long time and not removed people I no longer see or have any real intention of seeing, so I don't only have actual friends as friends either.
Quentin, I worried too about the "few friends = low status" thing when I started on Facebook. But speaking now as an old hand I'm fairly confident that the only people who make such judgments or worry about them are newbies!
And yes, you CAN hide who your friends are.on Facebook. There are many other privacy settings as well. It would be too complicated to go into it here but they have a Help Center which will tell you how. You can find the Help link on the menu that will open up when you click on "Account" (at the top right-hand of any page) or, in small letters, at the very bottom of any page on the far right.
It's OK to ask someone you just met to friend you.
Not only do some people friend every last acquaintance, it's also common to friend people for the purpose of game play (there are numerous game applications you can access through Facebook, and for one reason or another it's often advantageous to play with people who are friends, so people will friend one another for the sake of the game). Then there are people who friend friends of friends because of shared interests or whatever. Bottom line: If somebody has 1,000 friends, nobody assumes that he is best buds with all those folks in real life.
Don't worry too much about the etiquette--if you spend some time with it you'll pick it up. Most people will be happy to help you out if they can (though a lot of people don't know about all the privacy settings. They're really not hard to set but you have to look for the info.)
I quit social networking sites because they made my life significantly worse. If you really need to use them, you can, but don't worry. There is a wide variety of ways to use them, ranging from adding hundreds of people to just a few friends.
Yes, you can do this, but you don't have to. This is one reasonable way of using the site that a lot of people use, but it's also common to restrict things to people you know better.
YES. Absolutely. And it's an essential feature. If you do use Facebook please pay close attention to the privacy settings. You can make everything about yourself private, to the point where no one else, even your friends, can see anything except messages you specifically send them.
Yes, it's pretty common to do this, though you may be surprised by how many people don't like to use these sites.
When you make an account there is a high chance you will get flooded by friend requests right away. Facebook does some shady things with user data for their convenience. Also there are still enough non-Facebookees that you will not be the last to get online.
You can also send friendship requests to people who don't have a FB account yet, if you have their email address. I received the first such request about one year before signing up, and when I eventually did sign up I had about ten such requests.
I think people have very different standards as far as social networking goes. I would recommend deciding from the offset what you want to use Facebook for, and establish friending policies on that basis. If it's for keeping in touch with your nearest and dearest, keep it to a select few. If you want a conduit for talking to everyone you've ever met, add everyone you meet.
If I see someone who only has a handful of FB friends, I assume they're towards the more private end of the spectrum rather than thinking they're somehow socially retarded. Likewise if someone has 800+ FB friends, I don't think they regularly hang out with them all.
There is such a thing as a late adopter advantage. I don't think most people make these kinds of decisions when they first enter into that kind of environment, so you actually have the benefit of deciding off the bat how you want to use it, and how to optimise your usage for that aim.
For people I actually care about, I have better means of staying in touch. My inner circle has had a private voice chat server for years now, and that's part of the reason I haven't really been forced to use a social networking website.
But I'm trying to dramatically change who I am as a person, and this is a necessary step. I have severe issues with self-consciousness and social anxiety (despite acknowledging that this is unjustified as I am affable and attractive) so I am generally looking for ways to ease myself into social normalcy.
You need to be more specific though; or at least you have the advantage of being able to choose specifically what you want to use it for. For example, I pretty much only use Facebook for sharing pictures and videos of my kid. I may go weeks without paying attention to it. I have a wide mix of people including both people at work, family and old friends from highschool who I would normally share this type of thing with when they ask. So now when someone asks about my kid I'll just ask if I can friend them.
A very good friend of mine created her Facebook account just a few weeks ago, and I still think she's cool. So getting into the game late is at least sometimes recoverable from.
Adding everyone you are even tangentially acquainted with seems to be the social convention, including people you've just met; it's common for me to receive facebook invites after meeting someone at a party, for example.
FB has some tools for bulk-link-farming... e.g., it will look at your email if you let it and contact everyone whose name appears in it who has a FB account. I did this when I created my FB account (a couple of years ago) and it worked pretty well.
As far as I know, there's no way to hide your friends.
The teenagers of my acquaintance frequently use fake names on Facebook to subvert searches. The adults frequently create multiple Facebook profiles, more or less for the same reason.
The Friend List feature is a subsitute for multiple accounts. You can have diffrent privacy settings for each list, such as hiding tagged images.
800+ comments now. I think you may have been right that lots of people have basic procedural gaps that need addressing, Alicorn... :)
This should probably be turned into a quarterly (monthly?) thread.
I'm kind of weirded out by the fact that a three-paragraph post originally put in Discussion that took me ten minutes to write is now my most upvoted post of all time.
Unlike some of the more abstruse topics, this one is likely of at least some interest/value to nearly everyone reading the site...
It's like the joke about the mechanic who fixes a car's engine by hitting it once with a hammer. He charges the owner $200 and the guy complains: "All you did was hit the engine with a hammer, I'm not paying $200 for that." So the mechanic gives him an itemized bill: Hitting the engine with a hammer, $5; Knowing where to hit it: $195.
You identified a need and acted on it. Well done. You probably do net get to choose where you make the biggest impact.
PS: my most voted comment used to be just one word
Which word?
this
Will be difficult to top.
It's more that this is just a good way to start interesting conversations, I think.
Keep a regular sleep schedule.
This is something I completely failed to learn so far. Sure, I have some issues with procrastination or a lack of certain time-management skills, but even if I create a schedule for my whole week in advance and manage to follow it through for a couple of days at some point I completely mess it up because I sleep through half a day since I stayed up until 4AM the night before. Or I end up not getting enough sleep for several days in a row and getting sick (which happens far too often). Mostly, if I wake up at a certain time I don't get tired early enough to get a sufficient amount of sleep before I wake up at the same time on the next day (and unfortunately they don't make these time-turners yet).
It seems like every failed attempt to establish a working day routine can be mainly narrowed down to this single thing. I managed to get through High School and still get good grades even though I missed a lot of school days (due to being sick or too tired to go) because it was easy. Even at university it's still possible to pass the exams when you miss half of the lectures (although your results probably will suffer). However, I'm already afraid of my first real job.
I found that having a full-time job fixed my sleep schedule - if I have to get up, I will. Then I'll usually be tired enough to go to sleep at a reasonable time too.
I had that problem but melatonin seems to have solved it.
My biggest problem for keeping a sleep schedule stable is not being able to fall asleep early if I'm stuck with a late sleep schedule. Once I get an early wakeup, early bedtime routine going, it can stay on for weeks, but it can likewise get messed up for weeks.
One nice thing for waking up is a timed light box. It gradually lights up, and is a lot less stressful to wake up to than an alarm. Combine this with a regular alarm that goes off after the light has been getting brighter for a while.
I also somehow got addicted to taking daily cold showers since they were mentioned here or in the IRC channel. A couple of Hacker News posts talked about cold showers helping people fall asleep, so I've started taking a shower an hour before bedtime. I've been doing this for three weeks now and have managed to maintain a pretty stable sleep schedule.
The key is the wake-up time. You can always force yourself to get up once the alarm goes off, no matter how little sleep you've gotten. The opposite is not true without drugs to assist you (though it sounds like the cold shower helps, makes sense).
I do this about every four weeks. My work schedule is such that I work 160 hours in two weeks, and then don't work at all for the following two weeks. This means I have to get up very early when I'm working and not at all when I'm not. The net result, since I lack discipline when I don't have a goal set for the day, is that by the time I go back to work I am regularly staying up until 3am or later and waking up around noon, while I need to be at work by 7am when I'm working.
The fix for this is to force myself to get up at 6am the very first day I'm back at work. No easing in to anything, just cold turkey - alarm goes off I've got to get up. This means for the first day or two I'll be running on 3-4 hours of sleep, but the need to sleep builds fast and by the third day I'm usually going to bed at a respectable time.
The key for me is that I must have a purpose for the day. I've tried to maintain this in my off time, but since I don't have a specific place to be "on time" each day I tend to let my wake up time drift instead of getting up on-schedule. The fix for that is apparently having a regular morning schedule during my off time, but I haven't put much effort into it.
Another important thing to remember when you are forcing yourself awake after insufficient sleep is to not dilly-dally. If you are tired when you wake up, the worst thing you can do is hit "snooze" and go back to sleep. It probably won't make you any less tired unless you sleep for another hour (at which point you are almost certainly late for whatever it is you were getting up for) and it will make it a lot harder to get up.
There's an extra problem I run with drastic sleep cycle changes. Say I'm sleeping from 3 AM to noon. Then I do the cold turkey wake up at 6 AM, so far so good. Next evening I go to bed at 21:30, then my brain apparently goes, "hey, it's a lot earlier than usual, must be an afternoon nap", and helpfully wakes me up sometimes at 1 AM. (Other people's brains might not have this feature.) This tends to lead to having to go multiple consecutive days with little sleep if I want to change the cycle, instead of just the one, which gets considerably less fun. The fix to this might be to do something on the cold turkey day that gets me sufficiently tired that I'd just sleep 9 hours straight on the next night, whatever the bedtime.
The cold shower thing is still working, so far I've had only one night when I've failed to fall asleep after taking the shower.
I've been fighting to regulate my sleep schedule for about 30 years now, and I've tried lots of things. These are the things that seem to help me, or that Studies Have Shown.
What works best is to simply "man up" and regulate your sleep schedule, to quote the international sweat-shop shoe company "Just Do it".
1 Pick a "get up time", set you alarm and GET UP. This helps to make sure you're ready to go to bed on the other side. If you stay up until 4 in the morning playing Warcrack, play another 2 hours then go for breakfast. You'll be tired all day, but that night you'll be able to reset more effectively. 1.1 Do Not Nap, this makes it more difficult to get to sleep at a reasonable hour. 1.2 OTOH some people do really well to take nap in the afternoon (every afternoon) and stay up a little later. I can't do this. YSSMV.
3 Avoid caffiene after noon to start with. If this helps you may want to let it slip to 3 or 4 in the afternoon, depending on how you metabolize it. Definately no caffine with dinner or afterwards. NONE.
4 When the sun goes down start to darken your surroundings a bit--turn off unnecessary lights, use desk/table/spot lights instead of room lights etc.
5 Set a realistic bedtime and stick to it.
6 Your sleep quarters should be used ONLY for sleeping, sex and dressing. Do not read yourself to sleep, no computers or television. 6.1 Heavy curtains and limit light as much as possible. The goal is not only to sleep, but to sleep WELL. 6.2 A fan, or some source of "grey noise" might help as well. 6.3 A regular sex partner can help you get to sleep :) Well, so can an irregular one, but the sheets may need changing more often.
The other side of this is that some people seem to have body clocks that insist on running a certain way. I've been getting up at about 10 to 6 for the last 2 months every day of hte week. F'ing HATE IT. I can do 10 minutes to 7 so much easier, but there is no flex in my work schedule.
If you're like that--if these sorts of things don't work--they you have a decision to make. There are professions that allow you to work different, or sometimes even irregular hours, but they are generally not particularly high paying or influential (except for "Author", but you have to get published first).
There are people who just live better working second shift or graves. If you're like that you're going to fight it your whole life.
Also you can try finding a sleep clinic and see if you need professional intervention.
If on a computer, software like F.lux or Nocturne can help with this.
When you are getting into the routine this one of the hard parts. So use whatever assistance required. For me that has included a bottle of energy drink and a modafinil tablet sitting on top of the alarm clock. Sure, you can turn it off but it isn't much more effort to down the stimulants at the same time. A sledge hammer approach. It more or less guarantees you will be able to get up 30 minutes later. I often deliberately allow myself another 30 minutes to sleep after I've taken the stimulants so as to cooperate more effectively with my instincts. They don't like me @#$@#$ing with them and forcing them up but they don't care at all if I give them stimulants and let them do their own thing.
(The above is not something I tend to use long term.)
At about this time you can also take a dose of melatonin (which is essentially what you are doing with the light manipulation anyway). I have found this useful from time to time.
Put your alarm clock far out of reach so you have to get out of bed to switch it off. Put everything you need for your morning routine next to the alarm clock. This will make you much less likely to go back to bed.
I use this technique from time to time. But as Cyan suggests it isn't a reliable long term solution. It still amounts to trying to bully yourself into compliance. And that just isn't the best way to deal with allies - be they internal or not. I know myself and know how I respond to attempts at dominance. I'll do it if necessary but it rapidly burns out any sense of loyalty. And I want myself on my own side.
I did this when I was a teenager. A few months later I found myself regularly jumping out of bed, taking two long running strides across my room, hitting the snooze button, running back to bed, and getting under the covers without ever properly waking up.
My brother does this. Personally I've never had trouble waking up...if anything my problem is falling asleep and staying asleep all night. I tend to stay on an early-to-bed, early-to-rise schedule, which is convenient for work and class but inconvenient for social life...overall I think I prefer it to constantly having to fight my internal clock. My main problem is mid-afternoon sleepiness on the days when I don't quite make my 8 or 9 hours.
I solved this problem by maxing out my alarm's volume and putting it in the shower.
That is...genius. And hilarious.
That'd be a good fix for one or two people living in an apartment, but the shower was at the other end of the house and was used by everyone in my family.
When you have a spare hour, set your alarm to go off every five minutes and practice 'being asleep', hearing the alarm, jumping out of bed, turning it off, and running to the shower. After 20 repetitions, the idea is that the next morning, when you hear the alarm, you'll run to the shower without needing to get fully conscious first. I dunno, something to try at least.
Good idea -- I'll do that.
That might still be an improvement over hitting the snooze and rolling over. I would intuitively expect someone to wake up faster if they had to keep jumping in and out of bed.
Did you keep everything you need for your morning routine next to your alarm clark? I found that was the key element to stop me from jumping back into bed. It's habit forming. You get to the alarm clock and then go through your routine. Otherwise, if everything's out of reach or disorganised, it's easier to just go back to bed than deal with it.
The next step of my morning routine was to stumble down the hall to the bathroom. There wasn't an additional object necessary to do that. Or one could say that the next step was showering, but I couldn't physically move the shower next to the alarm clock.
I've considered using melatonin before, but some cursory searching didn't reveal an easy way to get my hands on it from Melbourne. Since you live here too, I presume you have found a source. Would you be able to share that with me? Thanks.
Some pharmacies have begun to sell it, however the dosage can sometimes be ridiculously small. I got mine online. Possibly from cognitivenutrition.com. Maybe bulknutrition. The price was trivial. I got 3 mg capsules although I may perhaps get 1mg capsules if I buy again.
I take 0.4 mg an hour or two before sleep, then 0.3 mg timed-release (sold by LEF) just before getting into bed.
That took a lot of tweaking to find.
This advice seems reasonable. However, I don't see why timed-release melatonin wouldn't be helpful in preventing early awakening (especially assuming you want to sleep past dawn), and I don't understand their recommendation to use timed-release only when trying to shift sleep by more than 1hr (1hr earlier, I presume).
What are the downsides of taking larger doses than necessary?
Surprisingly few, at least considering melatonin's role in there among the neurotransmitters doing some rather drastic regulation. People can (and do) take thousands of times the natural level of melatonin without too much trouble. (It is a ridiculously powerful antioxidant. The kind of thing people like to experiment with.)
Something I find is that if I have, say 6mg I can reliably expect to wake up about 4 hours later, alert. I exploit that sometimes if I need to drastically alter my sleep patterns. But it isn't what you usually want to aim for.
I haven't heard of nasty headaches (I don't doubt that it could well be possible...) but mild headaches are common. Similar to the kind you get when you are mildly dehydrated. Quite probably related, too, because they respond well to drinking a lot of water. As do the dry mouth and eyes that sometimes occur.
Grogginess during the following day is perhaps the most annoying side effect.
I bought some for someone else a matter of days ago (she's living kind of hand to mouth at the moment, so I sprung the cost for her,) but I didn't notice until after I placed the order that I had selected the highest available dosage, 10 mg per pill. Would it be best for her to start with fractions of a pill per night? Her sleep issues are pretty serious.
10 mg? Wow. I didn't know they sold them that high!
If I was using it myself I would just take the 10mg tablet and see what happened, it isn't going to do anything particularly harmful. But if I was supplying them for someone else I would either split the dose or buy new ones. Some people are reluctant enough to try pills that an initial bad experience will turn them off completely.
It is actually pretty hard to say. Response to melatonin in humans is just bizarre. For some people 0.1 mg is too much while others could gulp down that 10mg tablet and it'd be just right. The degree of sleep difficulties don't necessarily come into it.
It could work wonders if her difficulties are melatonin or sleep-clock related or it could do absolutely nothing. :/
She's bipolar, and apparently bipolar individuals tend to be chronically low in melatonin.
U-shaped response curve, so it starts losing effectiveness & nasty headaches are the consequences of a melatonin overdose that I know of.
and also grogginess in the morning if you get anything less than 8hrs of sleep, at least in my experience
In my experience too.
Even when you stay up late, get up on time anyway. (I'm assuming here that you're already trying to keep a regular schedule and just messed up one night.) And do not get hooked on caffeine to wake up; you are (at best) wasting your money.
(The "you" here is general advice, not just dinasaurus.)
Do you exercise?
Not every day, but yep in general.
Definitely exercise helps. Working out first thing in the morning is probably the best way to ensure you'll be a) energized to start your day, and b) tired enough to go to bed at night. However, that might be tough if you already are on a deadline to get to work.
I wouldn't recommend working out at night if you're already a night owl. If you're at all like me, you'll end up super-awake right when you should be going to bed.
I like the grooming questions especially.
Besides by keeping clean, how do I go about smelling nice? Who should and shouldn't wear perfume and cologne? What kind? How do you use it?
Other people have already said that most people tend to smell okay all by themselves. I prefer a little help in that area, though.
There's the standard advice of wearing a deodorant/antiperspirant, which I find necessary. I can't help with perfume, but for cologne, I was never happy with anything until I spent an hour with a scented oil salesman at a stall in the mall. He helped me find the perfect combination of scents for me, which not only smells great to me but, from what other people tell me, compliments my natural smell nicely (if you're wondering - vanilla and egyptian musk).
In other words, get a perfume/cologne salesperson to help you. If the first one you find doesn't seem particularly helpful, don't buy anything, and go find another one (you can space out visits, or visit different stores, if it's uncomfortable to just go find another salesperson). One who is good at their job will know their scents well and will help you find one that you feel compliments you personally.
The tips provided below are good, but keep in mind that your decision about whether you should or shouldn't wear perfume and/or cologne is based on a lot of other factors, many of which can't be easily assessed on the Internet. It depends a lot on who you're trying to signal to-- in some groups, wearing perfume/cologne can actually be bad signaling, as it shows you're a "try-hard."
I don't wear perfume/cologne at all--I enjoy many scents, but there are so many people who are sensitive to fragrances that it seems rude (my SO can't stand perfumes, so I don't wear any anymore). I'd avoid it in crowds and offices, and recommend only wearing it if you're going to be spending time with someone that you already know enjoys it--otherwise there's absolutely nothing wrong with simply keeping clean. Most people smell pretty okay naturally unless they've gotten very sweaty/dirty or haven't washed in a long while. (Some people even prefer natural smells over perfumes.)
As for use: less than you think. Only you and someone in your "personal space" should be able to smell it. Don't spray it all over--use very small amounts on "pulse points": wrists, behind ears, throat. (This is harder to do with sprays than oils; it's easy to spray too much.) What kind: something you like. What smells good sprayed in the air in a department store may not smell as good along with your own natural scent, so you may want to test at home before wearing something in public. Ask someone at a department store or perfume shop to help you if you really have no idea what to get, and don't be embarrassed about it; if they are at all good at their job, they will be able to guide you toward scents of different types based on what you like--fruity, musky, floral, woodsy, light, heavy, what-have-you. If you don't know where to begin, think about other smells you like: fresh-cut grass, vanilla, ocean air, Irish Spring soap? If you have a significant other, ask what they like too...
(This is knowledge I have not used in a long enough time that I'd completely forgotten I had it!)
Anyone who wants to can wear perfume/cologne (it's essentially the same stuff, just a different word for a different gender of user). If you're wondering whether you should try it, then try it! Go to a large department store and try out their testers, then walk around for the day and see if you and your companions like it. The effect immediately after application is often not the effect after it airs a bit. You can even try mixing scents. The one thing I strongly recommend is to avoid the really cheap stuff. If the budget is tight, try different good high-quality scents for free for a while, so you can be sure you'll like what you get.
The way I've seen perfume applied usually sprayed on one wrist, then the wrists are rubbed together, and then the wrists are lightly touched to the neck and clothes. This avoids getting too strong a smell, and if you overspray the wrist, you can wash it off.
When I use cologne, I spray it in my armpits instead of deodorant, and maybe on my throat. That's not necessarily typical--it's sort of the old way cologne was used, and works for me because I have light BO. You can also use cologne the same way I described for perfume.
In the U.S., cologne is not usually considered an appropriate substitute for deodorant, but individual tastes run a broad gamut on that. Some people are allergic to most perfumes and colognes--they do have actual botanicals in them.
It's pretty important not to overdo perfume/cologne, as there's a lot of variation in people's sensitivity to odors (and odor preferences). One squirt or dab is usually more than enough. In addition, the person who is wearing the scent becomes habituated to it after a few minutes, so "I can't smell myself anymore" isn't a good reason to put on more.
This isn't a general smelling-nice tip, but: imitation vanilla extract? Decent bug repellent. And smells much nicer than the standard varieties.
How to Buy Stocks
First Option:
Second Option:
Third option:
The last option is very rarely a good idea. You cannot pick good stocks- good stocks do not exist. What exists are good companies and good opportunities. Companies that everyone knows are good- like Apple- are rarely good opportunities, but sometimes the company is so good that it's worth buying at a premium. I'm up 9x on Netflix over 4 years, even though I bought it at a fairly high price, because I recognized that it was going to reshape its industry and eat Blockbuster's lunch. I'm up 50% on BP because I was able to identify the point of maximum pessimism and buy then. That's 2 significant winners over the last 4-5 years of active investing. I'm in the black overall only because of how awesome Netflix was; there's a lot of stocks I bought that lost a bunch or merely tread water. I now take the opportunity approach seriously.
The moral of the story is that you should hunt opportunities where you have something the market lacks, and then bet big on those opportunities. If you don't have any more knowledge than the market, bet on the market as a whole in an index fund. I had more foresight than the market as a whole when it came to Netflix (but not to many other things I bought) and a sterner stomach than the market when it came to BP, but without that edge I'm not comfortable betting on anything but that the general trend of the market is up.
(You can still lose when you've got an edge- one of my friends called the tech bubble and shorted the market, but was early by a few months and lost quite a bit of money- but it's the best and most consistent way to win.)
Did you beat the SAP500 or are you only in the black?
For this time period, it turns out that which comparison you make doesn't matter- the S&P 500 was about the same when I started investing in 2006 and when I wrote this comment in 2011. Since I wrote this comment, the majority of my money has been in index funds (I sold BP after I owned it for a year to lock in the 50% gain while avoiding the tax hit for short-term trading), so comparisons to the index funds I'm holding don't seem particularly enlightening. The primary investment decision I've made since then in dollar terms--not investing in Bitcoin when I first seriously considered it because of laziness--turned out to be a huge mistake (but still a retrospective validation of the opportunity approach).
Somehow along the line, there should be a check of: "Can I be sued for insider trading if I make this trade"
My addition to the Third Option would be: if you know something's a good company, wait until a cyclical (but fundamentally extraneous to the company's business prospects) market downturn and buy it while everything is crashing. You almost definitely won't hit buy while the share price is bottoming out, but once the market recovers and the economy overall continues growing, you will probably get good value for your purchase.
(Of course, this depends on you being cash-flush enough to invest countercyclically! Most people can't do this, because most people are going to be in personal cash crunches exactly when the market or economy overall goes down.)
This assumes that you can generally beat the market by buying stocks when you think there a market downturn and selling them when you think the market as a whole is high. This assumes that the efficient market hypothesis is wrong on a fundamental level.
Well, the Efficient Market Hypothesis is wrong on a fundamental level -- its stated conditions for market efficiency often fail to prevail in the real world. Panics are one of those times, and being more rational than other people is not a free lunch, but in fact a Substantial Effort for Good Return Lunch.
(I've seen one paper actually proving, rather humorously, that EMH is completely true IFF P = NP.)
I think this is basically wrong, because opportunities are time-sensitive. If a company is undervalued now, it's not obvious it will remain undervalued until the next cyclical downturn, and you pass up on the benefits of any market correction in the valuation of the undervalued company.
I do agree that it makes sense to invest countercyclically (where you have more of your wealth in stocks when you think the stock market is undervalued, and more of your wealth in cash / CDs / etc. when you think the stock market is overvalued), but determining whether the stock market as a whole is undervalued or overvalued is a difficult task, and it takes planning and forethought to ensure you are not cash crunched when the economy dips (which you should do now).
I also think that correctly pricing downturn risks is a subset of correctly pricing shocks in general. How much damage will the oil spill actually do to BP? How much damage will Jobs's death do to Apple? How much damage will Buffet's death do to Berkshire Hathaway? How much damage will a general economic downturn do to Apple?
I'm pessimistic on Apple's prospects without Jobs, because of what I know about his management style, but time will tell how that turns out. I'm optimistic about BRK's prospects without Buffet, again because of what I know about his management style--and so if the market dips significantly when they take his pulse again, I'll buy BRK (like I bought BP when the market overestimated the damage). And here we're in the same sort of situation- if you think that BRK is will grow in both the short-term and long-term, but there's an upcoming predictable dip (Buffet's death), do you wait for the predictable dip to buy, just buy now, or split some funds out to buy now and other funds to wait for the dip?
Disagree. The point is not to pick out undervalued stocks, but to ride the cycles.
If you want to ride the cycles, shouldn't you just market-time the broad index of your choice? Picking "undervalued" companies to ride the cycles implies that you have two skills (which, I think, are mostly orthogonal) -- the stock-picking skill and the market-timing skill.
Fair enough, although I would generally say to pick the stock via fundamentals and industry-specific knowledge.
I have a related question about buying stocks. Suppose (for example) that I knew with 100% certainty that the global demand for home robotics would grow tenfold in the next decade.
If this was the only information that I had that wasn't generally known, is there any action I could take based on this information to reliably make money from the stock market (at least over the next ten years)?
Start a company developing domestic robots and make a success of it. Then (optionally) take it public.
Knowledge that domestic robots will be a bigger thing than other people expect doesn't translate into having comparative advantage at producing domestic robots.
Given the failure rates for new businesses, that doesn't sound like a very reliable strategy.
The failure rates for new businesses are closely linked to the tendency of entrepreneurs to try solving problems people don't actually care about. If you actually had the certainty that Raoul589 implies, your success rate would be way higher.
Well, okay, that also assumes that you're competent enough to run a business, which I suppose many people aren't. Also Raoul might not actually know anything about making robots. So yeah, that makes sense, gwern.
Certainty is irrelevant, even if you are certain you still have serious problems making any use of this knowledge; there is no convenient stock named RBTS you can just buy 500 shares of and let it appreciate.
Example: in retrospect, we know for certain that a great many people wanted computers, operating systems, social networks etc - but the history of computer / operating system / social networks are strewn with flaming rubble. Suppose you knew in 2000 that "in 2010, the founder of the most successful social network will be worth >$10b"; just how useful is this knowledge, really? Do you have the capital to hang out a VC shingle and throw multi-million-dollar investments at every social media thing that comes along until finally in 2010 you know for sure that Facebook was the winning ticket? I doubt it.
Ahh good point. I mean, hence the argument to start your own company. But right, you won't necessarily win.
Suppose that you are literally certain (you're not just 100% confident, you actually have special perfect information) about the future tenfold growth in demand for home robotics. Are you claiming that there is literally no way of using this information to reliably extract money from the stock market? This surprises me.
Would you expect Vaniver's indexing to at least reliably turn a profit? Would you expect it to turn a large profit?
I'll reuse my example: if you knew for certain that Facebook would be as huge as it was, what stocks, exactly, would you have invested in, pre-IPO, to capture gains from its growth? Remember, you don't know anything else, like that Google will go up from its IPO, you don't know anything about Apple being a huge success - all you know is that some social network will some day exist and will grow hugely. The best I can think of would be to sell any Murdoch stock you owned when you heard they were buying MySpace, but offhand I'm not sure that Murdoch didn't just stagnate rather than drop as MySpace increasingly turned out to be a writeoff. In the hypothetical that you didn't know the name of the company, you might've bought up a bunch of Google stock hoping that Orkut would be the winner, but while that would've been a decent investment (yay!) it would have had nothing to do with Orkut (awww!); illustrating the problem with highly illiquid markets in some areas...
Depends on the specifics. Suppose the home robotic growth were concentrated in a single private company which exploded into the billions of annual revenue and took away the market share of all the others, forcing them to go bankrupt or merge or shrink. Home robotics will have increased - keikaku doori! - yet Vaniver's fund suffered huge losses or gone bankrupt (reindex when one of the robotics companies suffers share price collapses? Reindex into what, exactly? Another one of the doomed firms?). Then after the time period elapses and your special knowledge has become public knowledge, the robotics company goes public, and by EMH shares become a normal gamble where you could lose money as easily as make it.
(Is this an impossibly rare scenario? Well, it sounds a lot like Facebook, actually! They grew fast, roflstomped a bunch of other social networks, there was no way to invest in them or related businesses before the IPO, and post-IPO, I believe investors have done the opposite of profit.)
In case it's not clear: I'm not trying to contradict you; I am trying to get advice from you.
Suppose that you got a mysterious note from the future telling you that the demand for home-robotics will increase tenfold in the next decade, and you know this note to be totally reliable. You know nothing else that is not publicly known. What would you do next?
I'd advise finding a market bottleneck, like ColTan mining. You'll see any technology that can replace tantalum capacitors from further away than you'll manage to see software or design shifts.
Do more research. Is this even nonpublic knowledge at all? The world economy grows at something like 2% a year, labor costs generally seem to go up, prices of computers and robotics usually falls... Do industry projections expect to grow their sales by <25% a year?
If so, I might spend some of my hypothetical money on whatever the best approximation to a robotics index fund I can find, as the best of a bunch of bad choices. (Checking a few random entries in Wikipedia, maybe a fifth of the companies are publicly traded, so... that will be a pretty small index.) But I wouldn't be really surprised if in 10 years, I had not outperformed the general market.
By "you know this note to be totally reliable" I assume you mean you have a fair idea how it got there (eg you just built a time portal. with the intention of sending through financial advice, and a hand, bearing the same tattoo you have, pushed through with the note) and not that you're psychic and literally know things with 100% certainty? IOW you have a high probability estimate that it's genuine, but not an infinitely high one (seems more realistic and applicable if nothing else.)
If you have 100% confidence in something, you then logically should go for maximum leverage, regardless of the risk, and so stock up on derivatives, like options and futures, rather than buy and hold stocks or indices.
But of course people are generally poorly calibrated, so someone who thinks they are 100% right will probably be wrong half the time.
So, from a time savings perspective you would want a fund that specializes in home robotics. If one of those exists, though, that suggests that your knowledge isn't as unique as you'd like.
What I would probably do is find a news website for home robotics producers- a trade magazine is what used to fill this niche, and might still do so- to have a good idea of how relative companies are doing. This looks like a promising place to start, but that gets you as informed as similar investors, and you'd like to be more informed.
Then, try to keep a portfolio that's fairly balanced in all noteworthy home robotics companies. I'd probably go the 'buy and hold' route- try and keep your portfolio roughly apportioned relative to market share by buying up shares of companies underrepresented in your portfolio every month. This is the 'indexing' approach- basically, you trust that the home robotics market as a whole will go up, and that the market is better at predicting who will go up than you will.
If you're more confident in your ability to predict trends, you want to hold companies relative to their expected market share at the end of your trading period- to use an old example, the first strategy would have you holding lots of Blockbuster and some Netflix and the second strategy would have you holding lots of Netflix and some Blockbuster.
There is a giant obstacle here, though, which is that a large part of the stock price is determined by the financials of the company, which take a relatively large investment of time and energy to understand. If you're indexing, you basically offload this work to other investors; if you do it yourself, you can have a decent idea of what the companies are worth on the books, and then adjust by your estimate of how well they'll do in the near future.
If I was keeping my porfolio indexed to the market, wouldn't I be selling Blockbuster shares each month as Blockbuster lost market share? Why would I end up holding lots of Blockbuster?
I apologize, I was unclear; I'm recommending 'buy and hold indexing' where you correct imbalances by buying the stocks you have less of with new investment income, rather than correcting imbalances by selling stocks you have too much of to buy stocks you have too little of. This is a good way to invest for individual investors who have a constant influx of investment funds and who pay trading fees that are a large percentage of their order sizes.
If you have a large pool of capital that you begin with, or you want to actively manage money you've already invested, then you may want to actively correct imbalances. It's helpful to work out the expected value of a rebalancing trade, and make sure that's larger than the fees you pay (and you may decide to only rebalance once it gets above some larger threshold). Here, you do end up with mostly Netflix- but you bought a lot of Blockbuster when it was expensive, and sold it when it was cheap, whereas the projection investor who knew that Netflix was going to worth 30 times what Blockbuster would be would have put 3% of their money into Blockbuster and 97% into Netflix, and so the majority of their current shares would come from when they put a lot of money into cheap Netflix stock. I haven't heard about that sort of projection investing playing well with rebalancing- and if I remember correctly, it was designed for allocating a large pool which you have complete access to, rather than doing dollar cost averaging with a constant income stream.
At a guess, I'd say you should buy stock in companies working on home robotics.
Right. Is there no more sophisticated strategy though?
Buy Google - if home robotics turns into a thing they'll probably be running it, whether because they set a bunch of geniuses on the problem or they bought out the company that first started making these robots.
More seriously, I suppose you might be able to extrapolate some other information from that - for example, human servants would be even less useful, and materials/services used to produce robots might become more valuable.
In this case, if you're one of the people that bought into the company before Google bought it, you can make quite a bit more than if you bought into Google, just like it would have been better to buy into Kiva than to buy into Amazon. This often requires being a venture capitalist or angel investor, though.
I suppose buy Google is a less sophisticated strategy, at that. As well as a joke.
Perhaps buying stock in companies that make microchips? Those home robotics companies are going to be spending a fair amount on microchips to fuel their growth...
How to Buy Stocks Note: This is just nuts and bolts. Any terminology you may need can be found on Investopedia.
Shameless Plug: If you happen to fancy Scottrade, I can be listed as your referral so we can both benefit from free trades. Referred by: SOLOMON KNOWLTON ReferALL code: OPRH6640
I've been investing in stocks (occasionally) and mutual funds (consistently) for about thirty years, and I endorse Vaniver's advice heartily. I think overall, I'm up on stocks, due to doing most of my stock investing in cyclical stocks that I can buy and sell repeatedly over the course of many years. This has worked for me with both SGI and Cypress, which I repeatedly bought at low prices and sold at high prices. If you try this and find that you're not buying low and selling high, then you should stick to mutual funds and a buy-and-hold strategy. I've dabbled in other stocks where I thought I knew something and could time it, but few of those have turned out well. Happily, I knew I was dabbling, and kept the amounts low, so I got a valuable less for a relatively low price.
Mostly, I invest in mutual funds. I have subscribed to a newsletter that specializes in rating No Load funds (there are a couple). This gives me a monthly opportunity to review the performance of the funds I'm invested in, so I can tell when they stop being in the top performers and roll my money over to a different investment.
I record the monthly performance of each of my investments in a spreadsheet (used to be a paper notebook). The newsletter tells me which quintile the performance is in compared to the fund's peers. I highlight 1st and 2nd quintile in green, and 5th quintile in red. When the number of reds gets to be high compared to the greens, I look for a different fund with better recent performance. The commercials always say "past performance is no guarantee of future returns", but it's the only indication you can use. Most of the time performance is consistent over periods of a few years, so you have to look back a year or so when evaluating, and monitor continuing performance in a consistent way.
This whole process takes far more attention than most people are willing to put into it (a few hours a month on an on-going basis, and several hours every six months or so when choosing new investents), and few investors do even as well as the rate of growth of the broad market. That's why investing in the S&P 500 or an even broader market index is a good idea. If you put your money in a broad index and let it sit, you'll do better than 3/4 of investors.
Vanguard is only one decent brokerage. I personally use Schwab, but there are several others with reasonable prices.
Why the S&P index (VFINX) and not the Total Stock Market Index (VTSMX), which has broader coverage and the same expense ratio?
The last time I looked, VFINX had better historical performance than VTSMX. I don't know if that is still true / what periods that was true for, but the difference between the two shouldn't be that large. I personally hold both, and consider either a fine choice.