= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Post ridiculous munchkin ideas!
A Munchkin is the sort of person who, faced with a role-playing game, reads through the rulebooks over and over until he finds a way to combine three innocuous-seeming magical items into a cycle of infinite wish spells. Or who, in real life, composes a surprisingly effective diet out of drinking a quarter-cup of extra-light olive oil at least one hour before and after tasting anything else. Or combines liquid nitrogen and antifreeze and life-insurance policies into a ridiculously cheap method of defeating the invincible specter of unavoidable Death. Or figures out how to build the real-life version of the cycle of infinite wish spells.
It seems that many here might have outlandish ideas for ways of improving our lives. For instance, a recent post advocated installing really bright lights as a way to boost alertness and productivity. We should not adopt such hacks into our dogma until we're pretty sure they work; however, one way of knowing whether a crazy idea works is to try implementing it, and you may have more ideas than you're planning to implement.
So: please post all such lifehack ideas! Even if you haven't tried them, even if they seem unlikely to work. Post them separately, unless some other way would be more appropriate. If you've tried some idea and it hasn't worked, it would be useful to post that too.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d){kind=logo}
Comments (1240)
This isn't even to the level of a hypothesis yet, but I think periodontal disease, which effects a great deal of people, may be significantly ameliorated by taking an NSAID like ibuprofen 20-40 minutes prior to brushing and flossing, due to the reduced gum inflammation decreasing periodontal pocket depth and allowing access to the pathogenic bacteria.
Is there a similar advice repository that is one level more meta? I want to be able to invent ridiculous munchkin ideas on my own.
An idea that may be too removed from the general field of expertise here. For those who live in suburbs (and have gardens/front yards/...), look at your weeds. Some of them, like Conyza canadensis (incidentally, a very aggressive alien in Europe), may hyperaccumulate certain substances (in this particular case, Hg, Pb, As and some other things you don't want in your food beyond micro levels). If you leave them to grow until just fruiting and then take out with roots, you will reduce pollution there (and the aliens' spread). However, you will need to put them somewhere, which may be inconvenient.
While technically true, will it make any difference? How much heavy metals (e.g. in mcg) would one plant accumulate? How many plants will it take to reduce the heavy metal pollution of a patch of ground by, say, half?
I started doing this a while ago.
There are a lot of fake memory cards going around on ebay. You can tell they are fake because they are going for a lot less (a third or less of the price, exact amount varies) than other places. They actually are just hacked to be less capacity than they claim. You can verify the exact capacity by using a program called h2testw.
I buy a few cards, wait for them to ship, dispute the transaction, and usually I get the money back without having to send back the item. (Once I had to send it back, but ebay paid for the shipping. Usually not, though.)
Viola, free memory cards. If you have paypal credit, it's even better, as you don't have to pay until later and you may cancel it before the payment is due. I'm ripping off scammers, so no ethical problems either.
I've got one. I actually came up with this on my own, but I'm gratified to see that EY has adopted it
cashback credit cards. these things essentially reduce the cost of all expenditures by 1%.
...but that's not where they get munchkiny. where they get munchkiny is when you basically arbitrage two currencies of equal value.
as a hypothetical example, say you buy $1000 worth of dollar bills for $1000. by using the credit card, it costs $990, since you get $10 back. you then take it to the bank and deposit it for $1000, making a $10 profit. wash, rinse repeat
the catch is, most of them have an annual fee attached, so you it's a use it or it's not worth it scenario (note, though, that for most people, if they use it for rent and nothing else, they'll save about the same as the annual fee). also, most of them need good credit to acquire, so if you're a starving college student with loans, kiss that goodbye. also, you cannot directly withdraw cash and get the 1%, so you have to come up with a way ton efficiently exchange a purchasable resource for money.
Spread your genes without having children:
Donate to sperm/egg banks.
Sign up for genetic studies where your beneficial genes will be targeted if humanity decides to go a Gattacca-like route.
BTW, see Gwern's essay about that.
Encourage people who are genetically similar to you to reproduce.
In academia, Munchkining has recently taken off.
These techniques for getting tenure have long existed, but they have been codified only in the last few years.
Self-citation
Multiple publication of the same materials.
To aid in citing several of your own articles that are effectively the same article, rotate "first author" privileges among coauthors so that multiple self-citations don't occur near each other in the alphabetically ordered bibliography.
And many more. Here is a selection.
Get brain-fog from eating an excessive amount of simple carbohydrates? Try donating whole blood (thereby causing new blood to be created that will be closer to default levels of blood-sugar, insulin, etc...).
This works. Donating blood seems to improve insulin sensitivity.
In India, the internet service provider "Tata Docomo" provides a wireless service called "Photon Plus" that uses a Huawei dongle to connect to the internet. I use this dongle and my plan consists of unlimited internet usage with speeds of 3.2 Mbps upto 5GB and then it is reduced to 153 Kbps (yeah! Imagine that!) for the rest of the month.
I have worked out a hack that gives me the full speed even after I have exhausted the 5GB data. I don't know if this is true about other service providers, but Tata Docomo tracks data usage every time I disconnect from the internet. So, if my earlier usage was 4GB and I have used 2GB in my current session, it won't be added to my total until I disconnect and end the session. So, even if I cross the 5GB limit in my current session, I still get the 3.2 Mbps as the records don't have me crossing the limit yet.
Thus, every month, I use the dongle for browsing etc until I reach close to the 5GB mark. Then I disconnect the dongle and then reconnect it, then I line up ALL the downloads that I have been saving for the month and don't disconnect again until all of them are completed.
Using this trick, I have been able to download more than 15GB data every month for the past 4 months. Unfortunately, there is a safety mechanism that the Tata Docome people have implemented, that disconnects the dongle automatically if it has been left connected for more than 24 hours. So, now I only have 24 hours to do my thing. But that is quite enough for my needs :)
(I remembered this yesterday while writing a comment about something else, but LeechBlock stopped me before I was able to write it here.)
The black keys on a piano keyboard form a pentatonic scale; that is to say, so long as you have an anywhere-near-decent sense of rhythm, nearly anything you can improvise using those keys alone will sound good. Non-musicians will be pretty unlikely to notice what you're doing, if they aren't very close to you.
IIRC There's a video (TED talk?) out there of a guy using this for audience participation, to great effect.
Edit: Here.
Wow, that's a big help to me. I can never remember the pentatonic scale, so that alone acts as an easy reference no matter what key I'm in.
I use classical conditioning on myself with genres of music to either help me focus or to relax. Basically I just always (and only) play a certain type of music when I'm working, and then switch to another type of music when I want to start winding down for the day.
I use these two stations because they have no words or commercials: (work): http://somafm.com/thetrip/ (relax): http://somafm.com/dronezone/
It definitely helps me. Sometimes if I forget to turn off the music I end up working way too late. Also, it's incredible how the focus and desire to work comes on almost instantly when I put my headphones on. I use very good passive noise cancelling headphones (they reduce ~25db of sound), so literally all I hear is the music, and I have to take them off to talk to people/leave the computer, which probably strengthens the effect
Try to take advantage of possible Sapir Whorf effects by constructing your own language to use for thinking in. I got this idea after finding a link here to this New York Times article which has several examples of such effects.
Random brainstorming on potential things to consider including:
It would probably be best to do this after learning at least one other language that is quite different from your native language. Also, keeping ways words can be wrong in mind is likely a good idea.
This would likely also have the same effects as thinking in any foreign language
I may or may not actually try this after I've learned Korean sufficiently well.
Incidentally, learning a new language isn't required for this.
One can, for example, adopt the habit of saying "I want X to work" or "I expect X to work" or "I would be happier if X worked" or "I would be happier if I expected X to work" instead of "X should work" while continuing to speak English.
Put differently: the habit of setting trigger-points around certain words ("should," "think", "want", "can", :will", etc.) to ensure that I actually know what I'm saying when I say them is useful.
Around two years ago, I tried devising a language for roughly this purpose. I concluded that it wasn't a worthwhile use of time; devising it is easy, but becoming fluent takes way too much time, especially since there's no corpus (or a very small corpus, if you use something like Lojban).
I write down and regularly review all my ideas, experiences, etc., and I've found it very useful to invent my own words (interspersed in normal English) for concepts that need annoying circumlocutions in normal English. I also use the derivational morphology of Esperanto and my own conlangs.
For an interesting example of a personal language created as a psychological experiment, see gjâ-zym-byn.
Don't go overboard with that -- IIRC, extremely few people succeed in becoming fluent in Lojban. IOW, think twice before flouting a linguistic universal.
Not everyone would agree that “I want it to work” is a correct restatement of deontic modality. (The one I use when wanting to avoid the ambiguity of “should” is “it had better work”.)
That effect is due to the fact that you're forced to use your System 2. It probably disappears after you become too fluent in the language (for example, FWIW, I don't ‘feel’ that happening with English).
Also, +1 or ygert's suggestion to read The Language Construction Kit, and you may want to check out the resources I mentioned in my reply.
Scott (Yvain) did this in his fictional world. For example:
Certainly a ridiculous munchkin idea! It's a cool idea, although I would estimate that the actual difficulty of getting it working is very high. If you do manage, that would be quite awesome though. If you are serious about actually trying this, check out The Language Construction Kit . It's a pretty cool website giving tips and advice on language construction. Perhaps it could be useful.
More resources about language construction
I think this one is particularly useful for hylleddin's purposes.
Bitcoin hoarding for charity: Buy some amount of bitcoin, and keep it in a series of of wallets dedicated to various causes. Precommit to hoarding all of the amounts for a significant time, but spend the ones with the most warm-fuzzy results the soonest because that results in pumping up the value of bitcoin.
Eventually, at a point where the value cannot be pumped further by expending more on warm-fuzzies, spend hoarded amounts on utilitarian-optimal causes in a way that leverages economies of scale to achieve maximum impact.
First-time poster, long time lurker. This discussion piqued my interest.
If you have your own business, a very cost effective way of promoting it is to get a part-time job, (or 'side quest' in D&D parlance) that involves delivering something such as catalogues, phone-books or even takeaway food or a paper-round in the location where your business operates. You can easily slip in your own flyers or business cards in along with whatever you are delivering. The wage from the part-time job will easily pay for the extra printing and mileage costs. I do this and my p/t employer hasn't found out yet or even explicitly or implicitly forbidden me from doing this; in fact, my p/t boss is pretty wily entrepreneurial sort of chap so he would probably actually approve so long as I am still good at his job.
I've started watching TV Shows at 2X speed. This has been incredible:
I started doing this a few months ago. It started when I realized that I already listened to Audiobooks at 2X-3X, and that TV Shows are basically the same thing.
Some tips:
I highly recommend people who use cars to somehow do this in their cellphones and connect the cellphone to the car soundsystem.
I cannot stress how much Traffic is not traffic anymore as soon as it become introduction to evolutionary anthropology. Bostrom told me there is cellphone software for accelerating podcasts, but it only worked for paid ones. Does anyone know one that is free?
Actually, I would suggest not focusing your attention on evolutionary anthropology while you're supposed to be piloting a multi-ton vehicle at high speeds.
Most people are far worse at driving than they believe themselves to be.
Now, assuming you're not in a car at the moment, you can probably hack something up using mplayer - there's at least one android port of that. You may need to write your own UI, though, and I suspect it'll reduce your battery life significantly. (Android native players take advantage of decoding hardware, mplayer probably doesn't. Also, the fourier transform required to speed up voice without affecting pitch is expensive.)
When you're driving a daily commute your mind is going to wander unless you have extraordinary focus control / mindfulness training. It's not obvious to me that it's more dangerous to have it directed to evolutionary anthropology than to what you're going to do when you get home (or wherever else it wandered).
There's a difference between accidental mental wanderings and deliberately focusing on a sped-up textbook.
If you're listening to a sped-up textbook without focusing on it, I'd say you won't get much out of the experience.
I have friends who do this with lectures and audiobooks, which seems at least more productive-sounding.
I've personally found playing anime at 1.1x to be a difference which is barely even noticeable, but further speed increases to be somewhat annoying, and 1.5x+ to be unwatchable. It's likely low-hanging fruit for many, but YMMV.
It depends a lot on the quality of the speed-up algorithm. One cheap way of speeding up audio is to drop samples, but this significantly reduces audio quality.
Personally, I find anything above 1.2x to be annoying, but I still do it - not to save time, but to improve my japanese-understanding capability.
Here's why I think this is something most people can do:
I am personally a "native-level" English speaker, having spent 6 years of my childhood in English-speaking countries. I am now in a non-English-speaking country though.
A friend of mine who is also doing this is not a native English speaker, and while his English is quite good, it is clearly not native-speaking level. However, he also manages to watch almost all shows at least at 1.5X speed.
Of course YMMV, but I would encourage people to at least try this out and see if it hurts their enjoyment of shows or not.
I wonder, is it possible to slow down shows for those of us trying to learn a new language who have not yet reached 1X fluency? Assuming it's technically feasible, does it help? I'll have to try that.
Very interesting idea, hadn't thought of thought. You can technically slow down shows in VLC by pressing the - key, it slows to 0.67X speed I believe.
Please let us know what you find, I may try it out myself for practicing Spanish.
Interesting. I definitely do this with Coursera... but you haven't noticed any dramatic timing being thrown off?
Not really, in the sense that everything is half the time so the timing between things is still intact.
Are there some "dramatic sequences" in which I miss part of the intention of the directors/etc.? Yes, I'm sure there are. But for at least a large portion of the shows I watch, most of the important stuff is in the dialogue anyway.
Disclaimer: I'm probably a less visual person than most, which means I don't pay as much attention to the visual aesthetics of shows as others do. Also - some sequences even I don't watch at 2X, mostly action sequences and the like.
Throughout history, a proven and popular method of acquiring wealth is to marry somebody rich.
How to accomplish this is left as an exercise for the reader. ;)
Besides using evolution
I would recommend moving into a country where not so many people are freakishly rich.
The more obnoxious and evil the distribution of income, higher the likelihood that there will be no income social strata at the top of the "piramid". In other words, in the US there are so many people whose net wealth surpasses 10 million dollars, they can afford to intra-marry. This is not the case in Istambul, São Paulo, Jeddah or Lima. Some of them will be stuck with "poor" people, like you :)
This is not a guess, the toddler-infant unit of my school is in a very expensive neighborhood, and I've seen the mating patterns of the wealthy from a very young age.
This brings to mind the dollar-coin-frequent-flyer-miles scam a few years ago. Where basically, the US treasury started making dollar coins and no one used them. To encourage their circulation, they would sell boxes of coins online with free shipping. Munchkins started buying them with credit cards that gave frequent flier miles, then would deposit the coins at their bank and pay off the credit card. Result: millions of frequent flier miles for free.
The US treasury no longer accepts credit cards for online dollar coin purchases.
Where's the scam in this story?
I guess I should have said scheme.
If you have a reasonable ammount of money that you would like to save long-term and (potentially) remonetize 10+ years later on (for example for your retirement or whatever) then decide against playing the stock market (duh) or putting it in low interest bank accounts and buy the right stamps instead.
My dad is a passionate collector, but I have hardly any interst in collecting useless historical artefacts because I'm more interested in the future of humanity than its past. However even without any historical interest in the particular subject, stamps are an amazing thing to put your money into, because:
Few stamps ever fall significantly in value, some remain stagnant and most rise significantly over time. So having many rather than a few really valuable ones is good and in a timeframe of decades many individual stamps can easily double or triple their value.
They are very small, light and portable. Unlike most other art-objects you could potentially remonetize quickly. Much lighter than coins or anything else, really.
If you remonetize them, you don't pay extra taxes which you may have to pay for gains from playing the stock market. If there will be a tax on that at some Point in the future (which is unlikely for some reasons I won't get into), it can be easily avoided - illegally and probably legally as well.
You can remonetize them very, very quickly for a very good price by knowing the right person / auction house.
Unlike numbers on a bank account they are inflation proof.
No inheritance tax, your significant others will get all the dough if they remonetize it themselves.
The downsides are that you have to put some significant time into this topic to know what a good deal is, learn how the market and auction houses operate and to build a diverse or highly specialized and sought-after collection that is very likely to rise in value compared to other possible collections you could compile (which overall will almost certainly rise in value too, but maybe not as much as a collection you put some thought into).
Also you obviously need to keep them safe from theft and environmental hazards. (If you want to make the collection a one-time endeavor instead of an ongoing process, you can finish up your collection and put it in a small or medium safe deposit box in any bank.) Consider optimal storage conditions as well, since stamps are essentially made of fancy paper.
If none of this interests you, then at least take this advice: If you ever inherit a stamp collection, don't sell it on a flea market, inform yourself and sell it properly. Just recently a friend of my dad asked his advice on a collection he was about to sell for low double digits to learn that it was worth at least 20000$.
I wonder if Magic Cards (Specifically the Power Nine cards and Beta Dual Lands) are not a good investment? They have multiplied by about 10 in price over the last ten years. I've known people who had 300 Serra Angels, a terrible investment whose price decreased from 8 dollars to about 1 or less over the years.
Magic is both a collectible and a game, I don't know how that factors in expected value return.
Usually the top 0,3% (in future relative scarcity in Type1 and Legacy) increase steadily in price no matter what, top 1% unless they are reprinted (in which case both up and down can happen) and most of the rest goes down. But only with years and years of experience can a player tell whether a card will belong to the select few. Svi may have informed opinions on that.
Just to spend some time calibrating future-me confidence in Magic price calibration, I'll say some outrageous hypothesis: Up: Time Vault, Mana Drain, P9 except timetwister, FOW, Karakas, Fetch, Duals, mutavault, moxen. Down: All non-tribal creatures pre-2008, jace, all dual trual lands except above, baneslayer, wrath of god. There you go future 2017 me, stop trusting yourself that much and never invest in what you mind thinks it is superexpert at without much evidence.
I wouldn't know about magic cards, sorry.
Stamps would be my choice because they have many advantages over other types of collectibles. Magic cards may share many of the benefits stamps have over other collectibles considering the similar format, but stamps surely have special perks magic cards don't.
Stamps have the advantage, that they are the number 1 collectible in Germany and many other parts of Europe and they have been forever. Coins and other things don't come close in terms of how widely they are collected and the bigger the demand, the easier it is to monetize if you have a worthwhile collection that is interesting to the collector base. There are stamps which one can assume will be interesting for many decades to come - there is for example a deep fascination with the Third Reich so stamps that came from Germany and the occupied territories during that time are generally sought after. What's also interesting is "catastrophy mail", that is mail that was delivered on planes or zeppelins that were destroyed while the letters themselves could be salvaged from the wrecks.
There are many nieche topics that stamp collectors could choose to base their collection(s) on, which may indeed suffer from vaning interest over time in the collector base, but there are also some other topics that will probably remain interesting in the very long run and thus demand will always be there and fluctuate less than the demand for other topics.
I know that magic is huge but will it remain so for another fifty years? (Assuming the absence of apocalyptic scenarios). I'm quite sure stamps will be there because they are carrying historical information and are an integral part of the first "reliable" long distance communication technology humans managed to make work (apart from books perhaps, though they usually had no specific individual as recipient in mind and thus really are quite a different communication technology).
If you are much better than the market at predicting how cards will trend, you should probably be working for Star City or some other secondary market giant.
Probably the continuous uptrend in the P9 et al. can be understood as rational if the continued growth of the game is uncertain. There's always the black swan possibility that Wizards will catastrophically fuck up in some way and hence let them tumble down. In addition, the growth of eternal formats is itself limited by the availability of staples. I would suspect there's an upper limit to how expensive the Moxen and friends can get on this basis alone - logarithmic growth of the game entails linear growth of Vintage and Legacy. This is, after all, why they created Modern, for which Modern Masters is possible.
Those don't seem like substantial downsides, and ones that would be incurred already by a lot of smart philatelists.
The efficient markets hypothesis asks: why can stamps be a decent investment compared to something like an index fund? Especially since there are things like hedge funds for collectibles, and stamps are a leading suspect (along with wine and art and comic books).
I strongly advise against following this plan. Collectibles are not a good longterm investment, stamps included. That is, they tend to underperform stocks, real estate, and other investments, substantially so once transaction and carrying costs are factored in. The Wall Street Journal recently polled a number of experts about this. Their opinions were essentially unanimous, differing primarily in how bluntly each was willing to say, "Don't do this."
Did you consult a tax attorney on this? I have no idea what you're referring to when you claim you don't pay "extra" taxes on selling your stamps. Selling your possessions is certainly income and would at least be subject to income tax (and the rate would be higher than a capital gains tax rate on stocks).
I'm from Germany, here they tax gains in stock trade with a higher rate and the government tried to extend this higher rate on trade with stamps and other "art" formats multiple times, but realized its unfeasible and for now gave up. Currently you pay a whopping 25% in taxes on capital gains over ~1000$ and have other substantial losses. A few years back it could even climb as high as 50% if you were unlucky. Also you don't pay any special taxes here if you simply sell your private collection.
I think the current US tax rate on capital gains is at 0% if you earn little, 15% if your income is in a "medium" range and it can climb to 20% if your wallet is really thick.
This is not based on any personal research but on what my father told me, yet seeing how much time he is (and especially has been) spending in this field, that he keeps up to date, and that generally speaking he is a reasonably smart man, I have no reason to doubt his expertise in this topic. Naturally he's enthusiastic about this but he wouldn't warp facts. Every time I visit I unsually tend to leave with more insight in this field than I really want to. He also keeps close track on how the value of his private collection rose over the past, how it still rises, and I know what the figures look like.
Back on track, I should have made the disclaimer that I'm not really familiar with US tax law. The main point I'm making here however is that it is a very safe long term investment that is practically guaranteed to pay out substantially more than what you buy it for in the long haul. This should hold true regardless of what country you're from.
I wasn't aware you're not in the US. If your country has high capital gains taxes compared to income taxes, the balance might be different in the US. However, stamps and other collectibles have many problems:
-- Stamps can get stolen, lost, or burned in a fire. It's hard for this to happen to stocks (unless you're behind the times and have them as a pile of paper certificates)
-- If you buy a type of collectibles that you're actually interested in, your desire to keep a co llection of something you're interested in may lead to poor decision-making on a financial level
-- When buying stamps and other collectibles, you generally have to pay retail prices, and when you sell them, you only get wholesale prices. And you can sell a stock any time; selling a collectible is a big deal and takes effort.
Also, I find it very doubtful that stamps aren't subject to inheritance or estate taxes.
I agree. It may be easy to avoid paying tax on the gain in value, but that does not mean one is complying with the tax law.
That said, if one is holding stamps as an investment, it is plausible that gains would be taxed at the capital gains rate instead of the ordinary rate (in the US).
Disclaimer to any reader: I am not your lawyer. I am not a tax lawyer. I didn't do any legal research. Don't rely on my opinion for any reason. Definitely don't rely on this opinion to try and pay less taxes. If this is a real issue for you, hire someone to do the research, or do it yourself.
Learn some basic voice production for stage techniques. How your voice sounds is an absurdly strongly weighted component of a first impression, particularly over a phone or prior to direct introduction, and being able to project your voice in a commanding fashion has an overpowered influence on how much people listen to you and consider you a 'natural leader.' In particular, learn what it means to speak from the diaphragm, and learn some basic exercises for strengthening your subsidiary vocal chords like Khargyraa and basic tuvan throat singing, and you'll be surprised at how much it makes people sit up and listen. You might coincidentally have your voice drop into a lower register after about a month of such exercises, it (anecdatally) happened to me and several people in my voice production for stage class in college. (class of 25, 6 people had their voices drop within the first 4 months, teacher said those numbers were normal.)
Most people just assume you're born with a voice and have to deal with it, which is demonstrably untrue, and so they consider your voice to reflect your character.
You seem to have knowledge about how to do this effectively - please share that knowledge or the sources for it.
@Zaine, I considered a lesswrong post on it, but it is very difficult to give general advice on the topic due to interactions between identity and voice, the fact that many people already use many techniques and so could get bored with a list, etc etc. How would you advise structuring such a sharing post?
I would identify a representative set of specific circumstances which would benefit from 'vocal training techniques', then go into detailed explanation of the physiological changes that effect a benefit in each specific circumstance. Now that the generally applicable part has been covered, you can detail various techniques designed to achieve the effects. As each person will have differing degrees of success with different exercises, list many, but at the outset state the ultimate goal for the technique the set of exercises are designed to develop, exempli gratia "You will feel X once it has worked" (I don't know if this is possible).
If you are clear that one is only learning how to use their body more effectively, I should not think considerations of identity will prove problematic - if it does, abandoning the exercises undoes the effects, correct? I would also mention that incorrect use of one's voice over long periods of time damages it; increasing one's ability to use it correctly will help preserve their ability to produce voice into the future.
I've read some basics on this, around 2006, but it's hard to think of more to say than "let most of the force in your breath come from lower." I do find that sitting up straight or standing is much better for this than slouching or lying down, etc. I generally do voicework standing (I only do the minimum for my own projects; I'm not much of an actor). It's the same breathing principals for playing a wind instrument, a lot of martial arts, meditation, etc. (The latter just focuses on breathing without the forceful projection, but the principal of controlling the breath with muscles lower than your throat and upper chest remains the same.)
@cae_jones, the technique you are referring to here is technically known as 'Diaphragm Breathing.' It is very effective and good both actively and passively, and used in voice training for stage, singing, and a variety of martial arts and meditative schools. It will also become second nature very quickly when practiced, and is the single best technique to know the existence of, which is why I taught it at the first rationality minicamp and the first boot camp.
Here is the technique, in brief form. YMMV.
Take a deep breath, placing one hand on your chest and one hand on your stomach. Note which hand moves. If your upper chest hand moves, you have much to gain. If your stomach hand moves, you will have an easy time making progress. If both move, you are partway along already.
To improve your diaphragm breathing, keep one hand on your stomach and fake a yawn. Your stomach hand should move, a lot. Not a little bit, but noticeably. It should feel like you just got fat :).
continue fake yawning in this fashion until you can separate the breathing from your stomach from the concept of a 'fake yawn,' and whenever you have a moment include either fake yawns (at the beginning), or diaphragm breathing (same thing, without the ostentatious yawn) in your quick meditations.
This is cool! -- but how does being able to do it make a difference when you're speaking normally? (Other than the voice-lowering thing you mentioned.)
While I'm asking questions: Did you or any of your classmates find it did long-term harm to the high singing voice? (I'm specifically interested in the male voice just below the break.)
'How does being able to do it make a difference when you're speaking normally?' The vocal exercises drop your register immediately, particularly even a moment or two of Khargyraa will sort of... remind you that you have a lower register under your normal voice for no extra work, and sticks with you for about an hour if stressless or fifteen mins if stressed (public speaking, etc.). Also after extended use you develop the additional vocal muscles- it's like working on your core to increase your run times, by improving a range of seldom-used muscles you gain capabilities in your mains.
'Did you or any of your classmates find it did long-term harm to the high singing voice?' We weren't singing students. It was a Voice Projection for Stage class, followed by Diction and Dialects. Personally i've found that my high singing voice is more accurately pitched, but that may be due to an entirely different suite of exercises i've been pursuing simultaneously.
That would be rather surprising for me, considering that I already have a deep bass singing voice. Or are you talking about your speaking voice and not your vocal range? Because I often speak at a much higher pitch, especially when I'm trying to sound friendly.
Yes, i am referring to your normal speaking voice. Khargyraa and Tuvan techniques in particular add undertones to your normal speaking voice, making it seem deeper and more resonant when the exercises are performed regularly. It is not that your 'normal voice' becomes more resonant, but that the concept of 'normal voice' is actually based on a combination of vocal chords and you simply add to the mix, increasing the apparent depth and resonance of the timbre which the brain sums the voice into. In short, yes, I am referring to normal speaking voice, though it also allows some fun things when singing. Like metal screams without injuring vocal chords, at any register.
How do you guys feel about sharing hacks to increase your status, given that status can be a bit of a zero-sum game? I think I may have identified a nootropic that has the effect of making one feel and act higher status, but I'm not sure I want to just tell the entire world about it, given the positional nature of status.
Edit: see here for more.
There no reason why we should give more status to tall people or who are otherwise physically strong. It's much better to give status to those people who are smart enough to apply hacks.
Actually, like skin color and facial structure, height is a pretty good indicator of intelligence. (This isn't genetic or even A->B causative; it's simply a fact that height and IQ are both highly dependent on childhood nutrition).
I don't say this to advocate heightism any more than I would advocate racism; I'm merely pointing out that in our current environment, they happen to correlate pretty well, and anyone under 6'2" should pause and contemplate the implications of that.
I had the impression that the height/intelligence correlation was actually quite weak:
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2013/04/why-are-taller-people-more-intelligent/#.UZsQvIpDsqg
Um, I don't think you're using this correlation correctly. Because we have a model where nutritional deficiencies lead to both short height and low IQ, the amount of information we get is dependent on where we are in the height and IQ spectrum. Basically, if you're uncharacteristically short, say -2 sigma or lower, then you should be worried; if -1 sigma or lower, a slight suspicion; 0 or higher, little information, rather than the "if you aren't more than +1.3 sigma, contemplate."
Except that this correlation is much less informative than, say, IQ tests.
Tesla was just under 6'2", I'll spot you him.
Einstein was 5'9". Christopher Langan is 5'11".
Wolfram Alpha couldn't give me a height for Feynman, Hofstadter, or Darwin.
Nutrition is not the only derterminant of height.
Certainly; nor is it the only determinant of intelligence. "Highly dependent" != "solely dependent". But someone who wanted to maximize the chance of interacting intelligent and successful people would do well to pay attention to height, for multiple reasons - not the least of which is that everyone ELSE who wants to maximize the chance of interacting with intelligent and successful people tends to pay attention to height (even if they themselves are not tall).
Also, note that your "name X highly intelligent people who were not at optimal height" strategy is primarily anecdotal, and also that 6'2" to 6'4" is the optimal height for maximizing your height-based status gain, not the baseline height.
There probably are lots of things you could pay attention to instead that would give you more information.
(I'm 6'2", just in case anyone suspects this is sour grapes.)
A very small number of people read LW, and a fraction of those people are going to apply any status hacks. Only a small number of people are going to apply status hacks, and they are the people who are diligent enough to research and implement them.
Posting such hacks is not going to push everyone to universally adopt them and return everyone to the previous status quo.
And even if it did, some of the actions that would increase one's positional status also have positive-sum effects (though in this specific case of voice training, they don't seem to be overwhelmingly large to me).
I'm not sure that someone can just feel higher status - I don't think status is a single, persistent variable. Like my karate teacher is high-status when it comes to karate, but when it comes to the associated history I think he's about as useful as tits on a bull.
The upshot of which is that while I think there are probably things that relate to multiple domains, confidence for instance, the questions to do with increasing those individual things seem less loaded to answer in terms of whether you should post a hack.
Being high status is difficult. Acting high status is probably easier, and likely to increase your actual status somewhat simply because people mistake you for high status and so treat you as high status and it's all self-referential.
Disclaimer: it's also possible you would be seen as having ideas above your station and promptly quashed.
If you have a reason to wish to favour non-munchkins over munchkins in regards to status then it would follow that censoring such things is appropriate.
Which one? There are plenty of substances that have the effect of making one feel and act higher status. I am somewhat curious which one you are referring to.
Just tell people in such a way that only the kind of people you'd want to have higher status will pay attention.
For example, by posting it on lesswrong!
Well, the more people who know about it, the greater the chance that one of them will tell someone about it who I'd prefer not to have high status. I guess there are decently big taboos against taking drugs in our culture, so it probably wouldn't spread like wildfire. Actually, right now I have the opposite problem: I have friends who I'd like to be higher status and I'm trying to persuade them to try it but they won't.
I'm curious as to how you went about identifying such a nootropic.
I didn't deliberately set out to find it, really. I'm also not quite sure how well it works yet. The effects are supposed to be cumulative, meaning the longer you have been taking it, the more of a confident jerk you become, and you continue being a confident jerk even after coming off of it (maybe). I doubt it's that much of a game changer really, it's a pretty commonly used nootropic and not many people list improved confidence as one of the effects--perhaps because the effects are subtle and only come with continued usage, or perhaps because they simply aren't very strong effects to begin with. It might be useful for people who have chronic social awkwardness though.
(if anyone reading this ever sees me act like a confident jerk, please tell me)
How do you know it works better than a placebo ?
That sounds like very useful advice. Do you have some suggestions for where to start learning this? E.g. particular books, classes, or Youtube videos?
Yes, I do have particular books, classes, youtube videos, lectures, exercises, and other resources. It is highly dependent on your particular vocal tendencies, so your mileage will vary for all of them.
But just as i don't feel comfortable posting physical fitness advice due to the above issues, i don't feel inclined to share the techniques which worked well for me or have worked for my students without providing the support to ensure you gain maximum benefit from them. So I will simply state some intriguing names of techniques and remain available to answer questions from your own journey, instead of listing techniques which will be mostly useless and are easily disproven in the majority of circumstances.
That being said, here are a couple of links.
Diaphragm Breathing/Speaking: http://www.roleplayingtips.com/readissue.php?number=3
Khargyraa Techniques: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uCom9ZCJAmE
The best tip for the Khargyraa stuff is just to watch that video and maybe this one and then wing it for a while, trying to get the sound right. If you manage it, try just saying some stuff in a normal voice and note the difference. It is immediate and surprising.
This link is nice because the guy is such an amateur! He clearly learned, like, one technique (probably from youtube) and then posted his immediate results on youtube, so it's a good starting point. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X54KBdi5_xg
I know how to project voice, and I do it when singing all the time, but I always forget to do that in normal conversations.
@army 1987, it is the difference between knowing how to do push ups well, and run well, and do situps, and being strong in the sense that a blacksmith is strong. One is a sort of ability to perform a bounded activity, the other comes from constant use of the muscles in question over time. When you've done the right exercises, you don't have to remember, you're just strong and you have a life which makes you stronger every day.
I have discovered a way to carry a credit card balance indefinitely, interest-free, without making payments, using only an Amazon Kindle.
How my card works is, any purchases made during Month N get applied to the balance due in the middle of Month N+1. So if I make a purchase now, in May 2013, it goes on the balance due June 15th. If I don't pay the full May balance by June 15th, then and only then do they start charging interest. This is pretty typical of credit cards, I think.
Now the key loophole is that refunds are counted as payments, and are applied immediately, but purchases are applied to the balance due next month. So if I buy something on June 5th, and return it on June 6th, the purchase goes toward the balance due on July 15th, but the refund is applied as a payment on the balance due on June 15th! So you can pay your entire June balance with nothing but refunds, and you won't have to worry about paying for those purchases until July, at which time you can do the whole thing again. The debt is still there, of course, because all you've done is add and then subtract say $100 from your balance, but absolutely no interest is charged. This process is limited only by your credit line (which you cannot exceed at any time) and by the ease with which you can buy and return stuff each month.
Here's where the Kindle comes in. Repeatedly buying and returning items from a brick-and-mortar store is incredibly time-consuming and risky. You have to buy stuff, keep it in good shape, and then return it, interacting with human clerks each time, without raising suspicion. Not efficient. But if you have a Kindle, you know that when you buy a book, after you hit "Purchase" a screen comes up that asks if you have bought the item by accident, and if so, would you like to cancel the purchase. If you hit the button to cancel the purchase, what happens is that the purchase is still applied to your card, but it is refunded a couple of days later. Bingo. Automatic refunds, obtained at home at no risk, with no human oversight.
But e-books on Amazon are like $10, so you'd have to sit there all day hitting "buy" and "return" to shift a significant amount of debt, right? Wrong. If you know where to look, the Amazon kindle store has lots of handbooks, technical manuals, and textbooks that cost hundreds of dollars. Start out searching for "neurology handbook" and just surf the "similar books" list from there. Buy and return a few of those, and you're set for another month.
Obviously you have to pay off the debt at some point. This is not free money. But if you're in a tight spot for a few months, it's incredibly useful. And hey, if the inflation-adjusted prime rate is 0%, why should you have to pay interest? You're good for it.
This is by far the most munchkin-like idea I've ever had, and I'm pretty happy about it. I've been using it since January, making real payments toward my card as I can, and covering the rest with Amazon buy-and-returns. I know I'll pay down the debt when I have a better job, but in the meantime it is really nice not to have to pay any interest on it.
Excessive returns will possibly get you banned from Amazon for life, with no warning, as many have discovered.
But probably not for e-books as there is no recognizable loss for Amazon controlling.
I would worry the effect this may have on your credit rating if anyone catches you at it, together with possibly more serious effects. This could potentially be considered fraud. Altogether it seems much more sensible to simply live within your means and pay off your credit balance each month.
This is the "ridiculous munchkin ideas" thread, not the "sensible advice you've already heard" thread.
A more pertinent worry. Especially with cards that give a percentage of each purchase as "reward points" or something, I'd be worried about this.
There's even a special page on the Amazon website for the express purpose of cancelling ebook purchases within the last 7 days: http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=200144510
Upvoted for the fact that the author actually implemented the idea into practice. Too many other posts on this thread are just theorycrafting.
That was what impressed you? Not my creation of a real-life financial perpetual motion machine?
As far as I understand (and I could be wrong), your machine does not actually generate money, but merely defers payment until some future date. It does so by essentially exploiting a bug in the Kindle + Credit Card system, and it has an upper limit of whatever your max credit line is. My guess is that if this trick becomes popular, someone will patch the bug (probably Amazon, credit card companies are pretty slow).
So, don't get me wrong, it's a nice hack, but it's hardly perpetual or earth-shattering. One similar trick I know of is to have several credit cards, and use them to keep transferring the balance between them before interest accumulates; but this is less efficient, since the "free balance transfer" special offers occur relatively rarely.
The hack generates money if you invest the "loan" into something that pays interests in less than a month. Not enough money to be worth your time, of course; but it's still infinite free money for a given value of "infinite".
The hack generates money if you invest the loan into anything that pays interest. It requires fiddling to be done monthly but the investment can be anything and can be ongoing.
We could perhaps consider it a time value generator limited by max credit. This could be reasonably analogized to a perpetual motion machine with an ongoing finite output.
Okay, "perpetual motion machine" might have been hyperbolic -- the comparison I had in mind was to what we might call a "weak" perpetual motion machine, which doesn't generate energy but is exactly frictionless, so it twirls forever without energy input.
Interesting! Didn't know about that variant.
What does Amazon have to gain from patching it?
I'm assuming that the constant churn of purchases and returns costs them money. For example:
Here's a method for learning a complex subject that seems to accelerate acquiring instrumental skill and the ability to use the knowledge creatively. As a bonus, you make progress on projects you've deferred for want of technical skills you're learning now.
Project Mapping: a) Make a list of projects you're working or intend to do sometime. The more the projects excite you, the more effective this technique. b) Take a bite of your subject (a chapter or topic, smaller the better) c) Go to your project journal. Pick one or more projects from the list to connect to the material you learned. If they can't conceivably connect ... then why are you learning this? d) No matter how great the gap between the complexity and difficulty of your project and the simplicity of the elementary material you just learned, even if it's just whole number addition, describe ways to apply the knowledge to some aspect or part of your project. This is the actual "secret sauce" of the technique. e) Return to each bite to "rehearse" it by adding even more ideas, and feel free to connect in and use more advanced material you've learned, too. f) If you can, set your rehearsal schedule for each bite to initially just half an hour apart, but space them out by double the previous time between rehearsals. Force even boundaries on days or weeks to help simplify the schedule. Something like: 30m, 60m, 2h, 4h, 8h, 16h, 24h, 2d, 4d, 7d, 2w, 1m, 2m, 4m, 8m, 1y
A note on the "secret sauce" (part d): You'll often need to force your brain to believe, especially when learning the fundamentals of a subject, that you can apply it to your byzantine mega-idea. Try for five minutes. If it's just too hard, maybe create an easier project to stand-in.
This isn't much use now (at least not in the northern hemisphere) but in wintertime, an uninsulated attic is effectively a refrigerator your parents don't know about. Whether you use this knowledge to store secret artisanal cheeses, or beer, is up to you.
My first thought :)
A ridiculous munchkin idea which has long been floating around this community is increasingly looking less ridiculous: transcranial direct current stimulation is shown to improve mental arithmetic and rote learning of things like times tables with differences significant even 6 months after training. Original paper.
Has it been demonstrated to be safe over a long period of time?
How can somebody (without access to a lab) practically implement that technique?
The hardware is pretty cheap.
Relevant link from just yesterday: http://hackaday.com/2013/05/28/shocking-your-brain-and-making-yourself-smarter/ :).
Do you know anything about the long term safety of the method?
I recall reading that one of the best predictors of reported happiness is how much a person tends to compare herself to others. (I'm fairly sure I got that from the book "The How of Happiness" by Sonja Lyubomirsky)
You can probably get a quick but decent estimate of where you are on that "comparison-tendency" scale by recalling if you ever feel a sting of jealousy or if it otherwise negatively impacts your mood, or initiates a mental comparison when you see that someone else is up to something really amazingly cool on facebook. How do you generally tend to feel when you see people who are better looking or richer, or <insert desirable characteristic that others have and you don't> ?
I compared myself a lot with others some years ago, but all it took for me to get rid of that nasty mind-habit was to become aware of it every time I was doing it, and realizing that its a stupid and unhealthy habit. Thinking back it probably took me somewhere between 4 and 6 months until this way of thinking became essentially extinct and ultimately even somewhat alien. And I'm happy to say that I'm much happier now, arguably in part because I kicked that habit of thought.
So if you're suffering from this bad habit as well, the way I got rid of it was by simply realizing that it's bad, noticing it when I was doing it and simply moving on. Over time the frequency decreased on its own. The happiest people apparently hardly even know what exactly is meant by "comparing themselves to someone else". Seeing someone who does better than them in any desirable area simply does not trigger any kind of negative emotions, or feelings of inadequacy whatsoever. The opposite in fact, they tend to feel glad for people who are doing well, even if those people are doing better than oneself is.
I'd like to confirm that indeed Sonja's book is your source. Less comparison correlates with higher happiness.
I am enjoying this sentence fragment immensely.
The trick to resolve the apparent paradox, I think, is to keep a firm distinction between describing people and emotionally evaluating people and then understand that the idea is only about cutting out the latter.
The Scientific 7-Minute Workout
I have a horrible thought.
Most (legally acquired) debts are dischargeable in bankruptcy. That puts a floor on the amount of money one can lose. If your net worth is "almost nothing" and you can find suckers, er, I mean, organizations with loose standards that are willing to lend you money, then the expected utility of risky bets changes in a way that favors you - because going bankrupt while owing $10,000 isn't much different than going bankrupt while owing $500,000. Of course, going bankrupt is still pretty bad either way, but the upside of winning a risky, highly leveraged bet can also be correspondingly large...
Personally, I don't think this is a good idea and is probably unethical anyway, but it is the kind of crazy thing a certain kind of munchkin would do...
I knew someone who did this: bought large amounts of jewelry-making and other crafting supplies on credit, went bankrupt, and then made a living by using the supplies. It feels like theft to me.
IME the likelihood of success in risky ventures decreases faster than benefits increase.
Whether it's unethical would seem to me to depend on who you are raising the money from and what they perceive the rules of the game to be. From my perspective, doing the submissive, 'morally cautious', un-winning thing rather than the game theoretical thing is unethical.
You'll hurt your credit rating, right? Which makes it harder to find places to rent, 'cause landlords will want to know your credit rating. And of course, harder to get credit cards, auto loans, mortgages.
Yes, of course. If your risky bet doesn't pay off, you're screwed - but there's a limit to how screwed you can get.
Sure, but it's a way to sell a small part of your soul for lots of money. You can then do an arbitrage operation, by using that money to buy lots of cheap soul, e.g. through efficient charity.
I thought this was what 90% of the economy is made of almost everyone doing?
Mitt Romney made the vast majority of his money doing this. He'd buy a company cheaply that has a lot of debt (in particular, pension obligations). He'd then jump the queue for getting paid out and shaft all the other debt holders (in particular, pensioners).
If you don't have any collateral and someone loan's you $500,000 it's partly their problem for engaging in the loan.
This is called moral hazard. If the "suckers" who loaned you the money are "too big to fail" and in turn need bailing out, it is a form of negative externality.
Plenty of examples here in the recent financial crisis...
Indeed it is!
Compare strategic default.
Boring munchkin technique #2: invest in tax advantaged index funds with low fees. Specifically, in the following order:
Max out your employer's matching contribution, if available. It is near impossible to beat an immediate 50% or 100% return, even if you have to borrow money in order to take advantage of this.
Pay off credit card debt. Do not keep any high interest loans. Do not keep a revolving balance on credit cards.
Depending on circumstances (e.g. if you lose your job, is moving back in with your parents an option?) have a few months of living expenses available in ready cash.
Put as much money as you can afford into tax advantaged retirement accounts. In the U.S. that means 401K, 403b, IRA, SEP, etc.
Allocate all your investments except possibly your emergency fund into low cost index funds. 1% fees are way too high. Vanguard has some good funds with fees as low as 0.1%.
I could say more, but that's the basics. Do that and you'll probably be in the 90th percentile or higher of successful investors. If folks are interested in hearing more, let me know; and I'll whip up a post on rational financial planning. If there's a lot of interest, it might even be worth a sequence.
I would also be interested in hearing more about your take on financial planning.
Tax-deferred retirement accounts make sense if you expect your tax rate to be lower in retirement than now. I expect tax rates to increase, so would rather pay the tax now than when I take the money out. In US, Roth IRA allows that.
"Your Money or Your Life" is worth reading. Build up your savings and decrease your spending until earnings on savings equal spending. After that, you don't have to work for money. Worthwhile work still enhances health and happiness, though.
Robert Frank's books on economics make the point that relative income is more important than widely recognized. Two examples he may have missed: 1) it's not just how much education you have, but how it compares to the competition. So the best-educated get the best jobs, but that doesn't mean everyone would have a good job if everyone was better educated. 2) losing health insurance is a disaster if you are competing for health services with the insured. But if everyone loses health insurance (e.g., Medicare collapses), doctors will have to lower their fees.
That number is a bit out of date; they recently cut fees for many (most?) of their funds. Now I'm only paying 0.05% on my main index fund. I'm pretty cheerful about this.
I made a post replying to the retirement suggestion.
It makes me very confused. I just don't get why people care about retirement plans so much... Elharo, if you can respond to my inquiry, that would be awesome...
I would be interested in hearing more about rational financial planning. :)
Missing attribution.
Boring munchkin technique #1: What if I told you there was a place you could go where they would give you books? paper or ebook, whichever you prefer. And if they didn't have the book you wanted, they would order it for you? And when you were done with the book. and didn't want it cluttering up your apartment any more, you could give it back to them; and they would store it for you until needed it again? So not only does this service get you books. It effectively increases the amount of living space you have, and the general neatness of your apartment or house. How much would you pay for such a service? $50 a month? $100 a month? $5000 a year? How much do you spend on books now that you have to store and manage?
Of course, you already know there is such a service, and it doesn't cost you even $10 a month. It's the public library. If you haven't stopped into your public library lately, it's time to check it out again. Public libraries have become a lot more effective in the last decade. You can now order books online, and have them delivered to your local branch, so if you remember a time when the library rarely had what you wanted, check again. It's no longer just a place to browse to find something to read. It's a place where you can find exactly the book you want. If library fines bother you, libraries will now send you email reminders to renew, and let you renew online. If you use ebooks, you don't even have to go to the library to pick up or return the books. Most libraries are much more convenient than they were even a few years ago.
It's not perfect. Most libraries don't have a lot of the more technical books, ebooks aren't as available as they should be (blame the publishers for that since they don't license a lot of ebooks to libraries) and occasionally you may have to bring a paper book back to the library before you're done with it because someone else wants to read it. However if your reading tastes aren't too esoteric, and you have access to a good library system in a major metropolitan area, then you can get 90% or more of your books from the public library. You will still buy a few books that they don't have available, or that you really want to consult every day for a year; but you can save a lot of money, time, and space by visiting your local library before you visit amazon.
Or you could get it even more conveniently, even faster, and even cheaper from the internet. Even if you for some reason hesitate to pirate, it's easy to find a legally free alternative to anything.
Get a bunch of capital.
Go to a poor country (specifically, a country where food and buildings are cheap).
Build a great big school.
Offer the following deal to parents of gifted children: they send their children to you, and you'll educate them for free, for ten years. At the end of ten years, the newly educated young adults either go to college, get a job, or be a bum. If at any point they do start working, you get (say) 10% of their income for 10 years.
Do it smartly: Skimp on "humanities"; no ancient literature for these kids. Reading, writing, math, science, programming. Get them ready for future jobs by giving them deep, versatile, malleable skills.
Do it cheaply: Use technology as efficiently as possible, so you don't have to pay for too many instructors. A campus wide internet connection and a $100 netbook per kid should get most of the possible value; maybe have some real computers for the programmers. Obviously you still need some instructors.
Do it morally (this might rule it out completely, since you are kind of creating indentured servants, and also because you are sucking cognitive resources from that area).
Profit!
This is feasible because the biggest resource is still human cognitive resources. I'd bet that poor countries have untapped smart brains.
How do you enforce the 10% salary tithe?
One obvious difficulty in educating children for free and then expecting them to pay you back after they become educated is that, most places, minors cannot enter into legally binding contracts. So the kid graduates, gets a great job (in a country that won't recognize the contract), and says, "I never agreed to pay you 10% of my salary, so I'm keeping it."
Depending on your country, even adults can't under a fair number of conditions. Having very unequal bargaining positions, for instance, violates the idea of freedom of contract - which will render it unenforceable in some places. I think it's called undue influence.
Very feasible but lots of work. I wouldn't invest in someone starting such a venture unless they had demonstrated the ability to make money by working hard as an independent business owner in the past, but I'd be happy to invest in and advise such a venture if it was run by the right kind of person.
Right, let's get started. Ten years sounds like a nice round number, but is it optimal? To answer that first we need to consider what age children to admit. We want them young enough to become fluent in English quickly; all the high paying jobs are in English speaking countries, barring Asia - should we consider teaching Chinese as well? Maybe, but let's think about that later.
To ensure they still have a wide range of pronounceable phonemes, they should be younger than seven. The younger the better, though, and we don't want them to learn wrong things we'll have to reteach, so before schooling age: at the maximum, five. Should we go younger, though?
Well, what do children learn from their families? Affection might be one, assuming they're from an affectionate family. If they live in a culture where many children are the norm, then they may learn responsibility as well. They may also learn abuse, if that's their family culture. Perhaps they'll gain life experience? I'm not confident about that.
Well, if we go younger, then how young? Pre-bowel control training? Certainly not pre-solid foods; breast-feeding will contribute to their IQ. Children learn from anything and everything pre-four or so - this could be an advantage for language learning but also a waste of resources if they'll be learning in their home environments anyway. I want to move on, so let's settle on 3~5 for now.
How long to teach them for? Assuming efficient teaching and excellent recall of learnt material, from three to thirteen may be enough, but we have puberty to consider. Should we keep them in an environment with similarly aged children? I don't think that's the right question, as it assumes similarly aged children are naturally nasty to each other around puberty. This gets into teaching structure, but assuming curriculum can be ability gated rather than age gated, children of different ages will all work together; I don't imagine an age gap of greater than three years, though, considering they should all be gifted - responsibility may not be an effect.*
Oh! In the absence of parents, the younger children might need emotional support. Older children can provide that! The school structure could accommodate this by rooming older children with younger children, or just naturally bringing them together for activities. The first generation will need adult role models in order to jumpstart the cycle.
The school should have a library - humanities will be included for pleasure reading. To promote easy bonding via shared interests, publicly listed clubs will be encouraged to the exclusion of the formation of cliques. An older child rearing younger child social dynamic may contribute to this atmosphere.
A caveat: beware the 'utopian society' experimental villages. We should look at cultures that have the desired values already, and use them as foundations.
* That was a bit of a tangent - sorry about that. So, if they won't tear each other apart emotionally during puberty, should we still keep them? Teens started working when in their low teens in the past, but whether they can handle a present day adult job I'm unsure. Oh, right, I've been presuming we'll teach them everything they'd learn at university plus possibly more. Social experiences must be included in that, so maybe they should stay on - if only just to work on original projects.
We could use some parents of the children for security - but must not allow them access to the kids as they are unnecessary confounds. I'm thinking of a large gated complex hundreds of acres in circumference for physical activities and to diminish any feeling of being trapped. I'm thinking a country without an armed militia, militant group, or bothersome government would be ideal. Eurasia might have some candidates, but I'm not sure how fertile the land is, and Russia and China have bothersome governments. South America, perhaps? Is there a governmentally stable African country with fertile, undeveloped land? PR of Congo comes to mind, but I don't know much about their government's politics.
That's enough for now - if I come back to this, I'll write below the line.
Upvoted. This is a quite interesting thought experiment, and maybe even worth a post of its own. I encourage you to write more on this subject.
This. I've been known to say that if I were a billionaire, my third priority would be building a ridiculous castle and living out my days as an eccentric headmaster.
This belies the more down-to-Earth intention that if, after looking into it in more detail, FAI and life extension both seem like they'll be insufficient in my lifetime to prevent biological death (even if not information theoretic death), investing in injecting sanity (even if concentrated in a few world-beaters) into the world would be a likely next priority. (Cf. MIRI, CFAR.) So I'm definitely interested in the idea of rational!Academy.
Quick cost analysis: Assuming they get good programming jobs, you'd be getting at most, say, 10000 USD per year per kid or $100,000 USD per kid. A country low on this listpercapita) has a GDP of under 5000 USD. Assuming you want decent facilities and educators, you'll need, say, 3 times the GDP per student per year. If you're giving them 10 years of education, that's $150,000 in cost. This doesn't work out even assuming a 100% success rate in getting them very high-end jobs. If you go for a very, very cheap place you might be able to get that to, say, $5000 a year in expenses per kid which works out if you get good success rates.
So this gives some obvious ways to get this to work: * You need to go for really as cheap a country as you can find and take full advantage of tech to reduce costs * More than 10% for 10 years might be necessary. * Alternative sources for funding - alumni donations are the current system most places use but would be weird to have on top of mandatory payments * Don't educate them for 10 years or only do part-time education for some of it. (Can you give them the netbooks and have them study on their own for half the year while they live with their family?)
3x GDP/student/year? That's an absurdly high estimate.
Would work for an apprenticeship program. Not so sure about a school; too much overhead.
Step 1 isn't getting the money. Step 1 is getting trustworthy people together.
Here's what happens to your program. You get someone to administer "gifted" tests. All their friends and family are suddenly "gifted". They cheat or bribe their way into staying in the program. They then take the "education" they got and go work somewhere with your impressive-looking credentials.
Then your reputation tanks as employers find out that you're yet another foreign school which churns out impressive-looking credentials that do not reliably signal ability.
Note that my second paragraph is a big big part of why some schools and countries have a much easier time getting employed in the US than others.
This kind of a plan sounds great, but is IMO close to untenable in the real world.
Out of what ? Sure, you can build the building itself. But you also need (among other things) electric power, a reliable food supply, clean water, medical care, computers, plus a ton of muscle to protect you from people who will want to take all of the previously mentioned stuff. Poor countries have none of that. Well, they might have some muscle, but reliable security is tough to buy.
You will be overwhelmed with offers in a matter of days. How do you decide which children are gifted ?
How will you enforce that ? Actually, before you can enforce anything, where will your graduates find work ?
Where will you get them ? Do your kids speak English ? Do your instructors ?
Trust me, this will be the least of your worries.
Generalizing about 'poor countries' like this annoys me.
I recommend teaching nonsense. A little bit of science fiction, mythology, and an introduction to the world's multifaceted culture (the Internet helps, but not nearly as much as people seem to imagine) may result in more creativity and attention to lessons children in poor countries would find boring. Yes, we want useful people, but a great part of that is creating a free, strong human being, not a clever machine or a rebel.
I wonder if #4 could be (sort-of) implemented as a very long-term loan? College loans in the US can have a lot of those features, they're just not income-adjusted.
Another way to profit from this is spreading ideas to the students - when someone spends 10 years in a boarding school, they're going to be very influenced by what other people in the school think. It would be really dark-artsy to go all-out in indoctrinating the students into your values, but they're bound to absorb some things from their teachers unless you intentionally try to prevent it.
I think one of the difficult things would be identifying the gifted children. You might a lot of parents applying "just in case", and it would be a balance between that and missing a lot of gifted children because they didn't know about the program or couldn't pass a barrier like an application fee. And if you're recruiting from extremely poor populations, you'll want to take children in as young as possible so they don't spend too long on an insufficient diet, so you might have to find an intelligence test/filter that works for children who can't read yet.
Overall, I like this idea very much. It could make for interesting meta-charity, too.
Possible problems:
Education in a poor country may be highly regulated. You may need to bribe government officials all the time just to be allowed to teach anyone there. (Corruption may be one of the reasons why the country is so poor.)
If the country is poor, your former students will get very low salaries, if they decide to stay in their country. Ten percent of their income may be just enough to cover the costs of education, not enough to make a profit.
In the worst case (most poor countries), you can expect many of your students getting killed in some civil war or dying from medical problems, and maybe even you will be accused of witchcraft and burned.
Are you planning to teach all subjects alone? In a very poor country, you might have a problem to find sufficiently smart teachers.
All fair points, to which there might be workarounds... but the title of the post is "Post Ridiculous Munchkin Ideas".
Seth Robert's idea of putting a noseclip on your nose while you it to lose weight is ridiculous to most people. It's not ridiculous because there are practical problems with putting noseclips on your nose.
It ridiculous because normal people just don't put noseclips on their noses when they eat. If there are practical problems with implementing your idea why should a munchkin do them?
I don't think that's supposed to literally mean to post ideas that are ridiculous, but rather to post ideas that are not the sort of thing one normally thinks about.
Create artistic programs with a "pet" in order to educate and amuse. A friend of mine once jokingly mentioned that the Microsoft Paperclip was his childhood friend. I wonder if a far more interesting character would become popular, and provide greater incentive to buy the art program and then to learn it...
The Vocaloid phenomenon sounds like an instance of this.
One of the alternatives to the paperclip was a cat. If the cat was the default, rather than that annoying paperclip, I think the Office Assistant wouldn't have been so reviled. ;)
Oftentimes, when I'm not in a good mood, I simply decide to be in a good mood, and soon I am in a good mood. It's surprisingly effective. You just have to consciously tell yourself that you decide to be in a good mood and try to be in a good mood. Of course this doesn't work all the time. I'm generally a happy person, so it's perhaps easier for me.
Of note: doing this does expend willpower, but I've found the more often I do it, the more "in a good mood" feels like my default state, and the less willpower it takes on average to get there.
I was once in a horrible mood... I felt really guilty/regretful about something I'd done earlier, and felt terrible. Then I was distracted for about half an hour by math homework, and when I was walking outside a few minutes later I caught myself whistling. I was like "Whoa, self! You're supposed to be upset right now!" and almost descended back into the pit of despair, but then I stopped midstride and said "Wait a sec. Why would I want to be upset?" and so I didn't. I kept whistling and had a great day.
Seconded; all the above statements are true for me too.
Need some dead animal flesh in your diet on a budget? Organ meats are cheap, healthy, but (ymmv) still tasty. The chicken livers I got this week were less than a dollar per serving, and they're full of vitamins and protein. Chicken hearts are ~$2 per pound at my store and have a milder flavor if you find livers unpalatable. Not sure if I should have posted this here or in the Boring Advice Repository.
Must ... resist ... urge ... to plug vegetarianism ...
A word of caution though: you could easily get too much vitamin A from eating liver. This might lead to permanent liver damage among other problems.
Related: chicken feet are also about $2/lb at my store, but yield many times more broth than a similar amount of meat or bones. It's also much tastier than canned broth, and you can make it very strong and store it compactly in the freezer for a long time. And you get to chase your roommate around with a terrifying scaly dinosaur foot whose claws open and close as you pull on the tendons.
Some butchers will give away soup bones for free as well.
I learned how to crank out patents. My thinking, over the years, shifted from "Wow, I can really be an inventor," to "Wow, I can Munchkin a ridiculously misconfigured system" and beyond that to "This is really awful."
My blog post: "The evil engineer's guide to patents".
Since Munchkining means following the letter of the rules, while bypassing the unspoken rules, we should consider how often it is accompanied by moral dissonance.
Darn it. I was just about to suggest "be a patent troll" as a Munchkin-y thing to do.
Apparently, it's really, really easy to get patents accepted, even on things that are very broad, that have been done before, are blindingly obvious, or are even things you don't actually know how to make! The way things stand, you could probably get a patent for a Star Trek style teleporter with a few block diagrams and some fancy-sounding bullshit, and I'm dead serious about that. You know what one guy managed to patent? "Machine vision" - connecting a camera, any camera, to a computer. He first applied for the patent in 1954, but years later enforced variations of it against people who used bar code scanners. You can't make a submarine patent any more, so patenting a Star Trek teleporter probably won't make you any money, but people have indeed made money patenting things that were impractical when they were patented. For example, someone patented remote online backup services, then someone else bought the patent and started suing people trying to offer those services.
In general, because defending a lawsuit in the U.S. is expensive, there are people who manage to make quite a bit of money by threatening to sue people on shaky grounds and offering to settle for less than the cost to defend the case. (Many other countries discourage this kind of extortion by forcing a losing plaintiff to pay the defendant's court costs, but that has a chilling effect on valid lawsuits as well as bogus ones.)
Getting a patent through is far from cheap. While the filing fee is not much, the rest is prohibitively expensive if it's not paid for by your employer, about $10k or so per simple patent, all told. Probably not worth it for a line on your resume in most cases. I wonder if there is a way to munchkin this cost.
The article is aimed mostly at salaried employees, and so the cost is not relevant, so long as the employer wants to pay it, which they generally do.
There sure is. As described in the blog:
(I did the provisional patent thing myself once.)
At worse, even if you abandon it because of cost, no problem: As mentioned in the blog post
I meant getting the actual patent, even if you are not successful at funding it.
Not that I know of. But why would you care about getting an issued patent (particularly in software) if you do not want to be a patent troll?
Considering this from the perspective of how an employer would see my CV, take a look at my list of patents.
Can you even tell the difference: Which are (1) under review at the USPTO; (2) abandoned by a bankrupt startup (two or three, but there is no public record of that, so even I don't officially know); (3) rejected (none, that almost never happens); (4) issued and approved as patents?
But I will grant that listing the $100 provisional patent application in your CV as a "patent application" is beyond the bounds of good taste. I do not list my (long-gone) provisional patent anywhere.
Thus, patents in your resume do provide a real signal (though weaker than many people think): They show that someone (an employer) thought it was worth investing some money in filing it.
This one just jumped into my mind, I've not tried it yet, but it seems reasonable: If you have a good amount of money left, use amazon mechanical turk for easily learnable but boring and time-consuming work.
This is for people interested in optimizing for academic fame (for a given level of talent and effort and other costs). Instead of trying to get a PhD and a job in academia (which is very costly and due to "publish or perish" forces you to work on topics that are currently popular in academia), get a job that leaves you with a lot of free time, or find a way to retire early. Use your free time to search for important problems that are being neglected by academia. When you find one, pick off some of the low-hanging fruit in that area and publish your results somewhere. Then, (A) if you're impatient for recognition, use your results to make an undeniable impact on the world (see Bitcoin for example), or (B) if you're patient, move on to another neglected topic and repeat, knowing that in a few years or decades, the neglected topic you found will likely become a hot topic and you'll be credited for being the first to investigate it.
This reminds me of the story of Robert Edgar, who created the DNA and protein sequence alignment program MUSCLE.
He got a PhD in physics, but considers that a mistake. He did his bioinformatics work after selling a company and having free time. The bioinformatics work was notable enough that it's how I know of him.
His blog post, from which I learned this story: https://thewinnower.com/discussions/an-unemployed-gentleman-scholar
On the bright side, if we forget the "job in academia" part and just focus on the "PhD" part, a PhD can fit these criteria reasonably well.
Before I justify that, I should acknowledge the many articles arguing, with some justice, that a PhD will ruin your life. These articles make fair points, although I notice they have a lot of overlap, mostly concluding that if you get a PhD you'll spend 6+ years running up masses of debt, with massive teaching loads and no health insurance, worked to death by an ogre as you try to spin literary criticism out of novels analyzed to death decades ago.
The obvious solution: don't do a PhD in a country where taking 7 years to finish is normal; don't do a PhD unless someone's paying you to do it; don't do a PhD in a department that assigns you endless teaching duties; don't do a PhD in a country without a universal healthcare system; don't choose a supervisor who exploits their students; and don't get a literature PhD.
A "don't" is less useful than a "do", so here are some possible "do"s I'd suggest as alternatives:
With the usual worries about PhDs out of the way, I turn to Wei_Dai's concerns. The first is the publish or perish issue. If you're just doing a PhD, the publish or perish imperative is often weaker than for postdocs & professors. (This again varies with the field and the institution. For example, as I understand things, top-tier US economics PhD students normally publish 3 or 4 serious papers, and basically staple them together for their dissertation. On the other hand, some UK physics students get PhDs without publishing any journal papers at all.) The ultimate hurdle for your work is convincing your supervisor and the handful of external examiners reading your dissertation that it's worthwhile.
Along the same lines, you don't necessarily have to work on fashionable topics if you're getting a PhD. It's quite possible to work on something boring; it need only be just interesting enough to keep your supervisor on board and satisfy your other examiners. (You'll probably want a margin of safety, though, in case your work ends up more boring than expected.) A more objective (but still approximate) rule of thumb: your PhD should be interesting enough to be accepted by the same rank of journal as the papers it's citing. If your PhD doesn't need to serve as a step up into an academic job, it can be as boring as you like as long as it meets the baseline.
Lastly, what about free time? A lot of PhDs eat virtually all of your attention, but some offer ample free time in the first couple of years if the work involved isn't fiddly. For example, you might end up running lots of simulations with a computer program that's already been written. If so, you might well be able to go to your office in the morning, set a run going, and spend the afternoon doing something else.
One catch is that it's not trivial to tell which PhDs are low-effort before the fact. Even if your supervisor accurately tells you what they expect from you, and the other students accurately report that they don't spend much time poring over their work, you might still get unlucky and end up slaving over a computer or an experiment or some equations for 16 hours a day, because research is unpredictable. (Still, compare it to the main alternative: people routinely underestimate how long they'll spend at the workplace — and commuting! — for normal jobs, too. It's not obvious that PhDs are more unpredictable in this regard.)
Nonetheless, if you plan ahead to do straightforward work for an easy-going supervisor who's not in the office most days, you might well be able to spend most days off campus yourself, doing your own independent research instead. And while you're a student, there's nothing stopping you from visiting other departments at your university to pick the brains over there!
I don't have any tips for this, though.
"don't do a PhD in a country without a universal healthcare system" Funded PhD's in the US commonly include health insurance coverage as part of your stipend.
This is yet more support for your main point: the fact that getting a PhD in some programs/fields is a bad idea does not mean you should avoid a PhD from any program/field.
That plan worked for you, but you're very unusual. You'd probably be an even bigger intellectual celebrity if you took the academic path.
Someone closer to average, like me, cannot do research alone, only in a group of like-minded people.
Weren't you essentially following my plan too, i.e., working in your free time on topics being neglected by academia? (Are you still doing this, BTW, after you quit from being an SI research associate?) Are you implying that the plan isn't working for you?
I'm not sure how you figured that. If I had gone into academia I most likely would have gone into computer science and specialized in something not particularly Earth-shattering like crypto optimization (i.e., making crypto algorithms faster), or if I was lucky maybe I could have pursued my b-money idea. But I never would have had the opportunity to pursue my interests in philosophy (which seems to have a chance of making me more famous in the future when academia or posthumans discover or reinvent UDT).
Even if I had somehow gotten a job in academic philosophical research, it took me 3-4 years exploring various dead ends before getting the idea that the solution to anthropic reasoning / indexical uncertainty is in the shape of a decision theory, and then even more years to formulate it into the form you saw in my LW post. I don't know how I would have survived in academia for those years without any publishable results. Instead what probably would have happened (and what apparently happened to every professional philosopher who actually worked on the topic) is that I would have been forced to quickly come up with some sort of wrong solution just to have something to publish.
Hanson has a post somewhere about how the first-movers often don't get credited, just the prestigious second-movers.
It could be that prestigious second-movers deserve the credit if they are responsible for getting people to pay attention to the previously neglected topics, and possibly we already credit first-movers more than we should (which is why I said "optimize for academic fame" instead of "positive social impact"). Which brings up a question: what determines the topics that academia pays attention to? If we had a good model for that, maybe we could use it to generate some munchkin ideas for making it pay attention to important but neglected ideas?
Sociology of science calls this the Matthew Effect
Ohh. "Kolmogorov Complexity" was actually invented by Solomonoff. Interesting.
I hope the irony was intentional. (Here's the post, btw.)
He has another post about how if you say something outrageous that later becomes common wisdom, you won't be widely admired for having said it first; you will still be thought of as a crank.
Cognitive bias is now much more popular and fashionable than it was when I first started talking to my friends about it after reading Eliezer's posts. I predict that zero people will say "so it looks like this Eliezer guy you keep talking about was ahead of the curve on cognitive bias, maybe it's worth hearing some of his other ideas?"
This setting seems more optimal for actually doing theoretical work of your own choosing without getting distracted by a need to compete or justify your interests. It seems less risky/way easier than trying to get the same benefits while working within academia, but you won't get the external motivation/guidance/sanity-checking and by default won't be as close to the professional community.
Right, you can get the same benefits in academia by getting tenure, but how many people manage that, and even if you do, the most productive period of your life might already be over by then.
This is an important consideration. The external motivation/guidance/sanity-checking provided by the relevant online non-professional communities were enough for me to be productive and not become a crank, etc., but maybe (as cousin_it suggests) I'm very unusual in that regard.
FWIK, some universities allow you to get PhD in computer science by submitting PhD thesis for review and paying some amount of money (~$1200 on my university). This way, one can follow your advice and still get PhD.
Extraordinary claims....
Tell us more. Much more, in excruciating detail. I am reasonably sure I remember reading Eliezer write about the impossiblity of what you just described, i.e. getting a Ph.D. without necessarily having an advisor, funding or a Bachelor's degree.
Seconded.
A PhD is only as good as the reputation of your advisor. If everybody knows your advisor then you won't have a problem finding a job in academia. If your PhD is not backed by a prominent professor with a name, you're going to have a very difficult time finding a good position. It may be a bit easier in CS, where universities have to compete with industry, compared to my field (physics/chemistry/materials science), but generally this is how academia works.
An easily obtainable PhD is generally not the right kind of signal.
I would amend this to be "if everybody knows your advisor you'll have FEWER problems finding a job in academia." Some fields are very, very crowded (theoretical physics, for instance). For a very brief time, I was in a small team at a consulting company where 3 out of the 4 of us had done a science phd under a Nobel winner, and still ended up making major career transitions after half a decade of postdocs. Science is crowded, the more basic the research the more crowded the field. To first order, no one gets a job. If you are under a famous advisor you might move your odds up to 1/10 or 1/5 or something like that.
email me with info about that company, OK?
Sounds like maybe MetaMed should inquire into working with them.
(The below is stated with no modulation for my level of confidence, which actually isn't very high.)
MDMA is a useful way to improve social skills permanently, or help make you more emotionally available.
While under the influence of it, you're very empathic, and very socially fearless. The experiences you have talking to people in this state can then transfer to when you're sober. For instance, you might notice that your openness is well-received, which lets you see that you've been under-confident.
Many people do something similar with alcohol: they learn to socialise when drunk, and that makes it easier to socialise when not drunk. I believe MDMA is better for this purpose, because it doesn't inhibit your memory at all, and you're more "yourself" than when drunk.
To get this benefit it's important to take a well-tolerated dose, and not to drink much: you don't want to be a mangled mess, or the next day you'll just be embarrassed, especially because you'll be mildly depressed from the come-down.
I've found MDMA to be quite addictive, and most users have trouble controlling their use once they are on the drug: they'll re-dose, even if they hadn't planned to, once the first dose begins to fade. So this "hack" is far from free of danger. But I believe the cost/benefit is still better than alcohol for many situations.
What's your dosage schedule? Have you noticed a decreased ability to experience pleasure?
I've found that edX is a very nice way to get an elementary understanding of a number of new subjects. The downside is, I have to wait for a course I like to come around; they're not continuously available.
I'm not sure that this counts as ridiculous enough for this post, but it does seem to be working for me.
(Edit: Fixed the link.)
I suspect link misconfiguration ate a link to coursera, udacity or similar. Consider editing your post.
Thanks; I'd left out the http:// and hadn't proofread.