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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.
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Comments (1240)
Use blue-tinted glasses to boost alertness. More details and discussion here. I haven't tried this, but I'd guess that it would boost alertness and that the boost would be beneficial.
Sounds like high color temperature HID headlights might be the safer option for long night drives, too.
For added effectiveness, condition this as a "productivity trigger". Make a rule that you only put on your glasses to work, and before taking a break, you have to take your glasses off. This actually seems to work pretty well. I've made lots of things productivity triggers: rainymood.com, original-flavor Trident gum, specific heavy metal music, and most recently sitting on my bed.
Keep a spray bottle full of water. Set up a reminder to make you spray yourself with the water every 30 minutes. This might boost alertness through the mammalian diving reflex. I have halfheartedly tried this, and it definitely does temporarily boost alertness, but I don't know how long the effect lasts or whether tolerance develops. I'm slightly concerned that it could damage electronics.
(the study from the wiki article)
Some (but not all) humans experience the autonomic sensory meridian response, a sort of tingling sensation caused by various visual and auditory stimuli. I think it's partly an adaptation to encourage humans to bond through social grooming (removing fleas from hair, etc.). It often causes sleepiness.
So: one thing I've been trying is to use ASMR to make myself go to sleep faster and sleep better, by playing ASMR-inducing sounds through sleep-suitable headphones. I don't know whether this works (planning to measure it sometime) but it definitely feels nice.
To test whether ASMR works on you, and to get ASMR stimuli, go to http://www.reddit.com/r/asmr/top/?sort=top&t=all .
I'm planning to try combining this with periodic audio of someone saying "you are dreaming", as a way of inducing lucid dreams.
Related idea: Become good at inducing ASMR in others. Maybe start with a youtube channel. Become the ASMR equivalent of a porn star. Most people who experience ASMR probably do not know it Is A Thing, so with aggressive marketing maybe you could make some money.
This has a name and a WIkipedia article and a subreddit? Couldn't be carvier at the joints of reality if it tried. Thank you! (Not sarcastic; I've been idly wondering about this for about four years.)
To encourage yourself to do some massive, granular task:
Upon completion of each granule, give yourself a reward with some probability.
A reward is a small piece of food or a sip of a drink, etc.
Never eat or drink anything except as a reward for working on the task.
This really works extremely well for me; I have been doing this for about 2 months, at first only with anki reviews and more recently for several other things. The feeling is very similar to addictions like video games or entertaining websites; I often think "I should probably go do X, but let me instead do just one more anki card" and a half-hour later I realize I still haven't done X.
More things:
Make the rewards unlikely and small so that you stay constantly hungry. Bonus: caloric restriction.
Create a timed reminder, say half-hourly, to do just a few granules of the task. This encourages episodes of the "just one more" effect.
Put reinforcers within arm's reach, both temporally (make granules easy and quick, so that hunger feels like an urge to do the task rather than an urge to cheat the system) and spacially (so that you are constantly reminded of your hunger and tempted to do the task).
I repeat: this works extremely well for me and I strongly encourage other people to try it. More details here.
Here is a graph showing the number of Anki reviews I've done every month for the past year, as an example of the results this method can produce.
From the comment you link to:
Any results from this part now? Also, what other things have you used this with?
Still using this for posture, and my posture is improving (though it's confounded by the posture brace I bought a while back, which seems to actually work). Not using this for standing/sitting; instead I now stand most of the time, and only sit while doing the highest-value thing I could be doing (which is usually ugh-fielded and unpleasant). I've given up on regulating my sleep schedule.
Other things I currently use the food-reinforcements for:
CoZE. For those who haven't been to workshops: this is an awesome CFAR invention; rejection therapy is a subset of it. I walk around with a bag of chocolates while doing this and reward actions. After accumulating a certain number of CoZE points, I allow myself to eat whatever I want for the next couple hours.
Reality checks for inducing lucid dreams.
I have an hourly mental ritual that involves a bunch of visualizations that feel like they should increase agency and do other things.
Coming up with useful new ideas.
Taking supplements.
This seems very interesting, and it's really cool that you've already been working on it. To clarify, you said you don't eat or drink anything unless it's a reward. Does this mean halting all meals?
How do you manage to eat healthily if all food has to stay within arm's reach? I suppose some fruits could stay out, but what about cooked meats or vegetables?
What do you do for recreation times: hanging out with others, visiting relatives, or just going to the beach or something, etc?
Yes, stop all meals. You can get something a bit like a meal if you do a very high-value highly-rewarded task. Also, I let myself eat whatever I want for a few hours after doing something sufficiently awesome (such as accumulating sufficiently many CoZE points, or when I spent 3 hours coding up a system to implement another lifehack thing).
My eating habits are a lot less healthy than they used to be - chips, fruit juice, candy, chocolate-chip cookies, etc., but also healthier things like nuts, popcorn, sandwiches and meat. If you do a high-value, highly-rewarded task, you can finish things quite quickly. At the moment I feel like health isn't as important as good reinforcement, but I'm planning to research that more.
I don't do much social interaction (I don't value it highly terminally, and most of it is instrumentally useless) but have broken the system twice to eat lunch with people, and put it on hold for 3 days while away at a college's admit weekend.
This seems like a recipe for letting yourself get dehydrated. Am I missing something?
I generally work better combining a comfortable outdoor environment, sunlight (outdoors can help at night, but if it's sunny and not blisteringly hot, that's even better), music (louder seems to increase the happiness response, but I haven't noticed a correlation between music volume and productivity), and for me, a braille display (I can't read and listen to music at the same time otherwise, unless I turn the music volume down to the point of pointlessness). I also find that air quality is important, though that could be more psychological on my part (this could have to do with why it's easier to work outdoors, or in well cleaned/ventelated areas). I went so far as to buy an air filter for this, but seeing as my parents were (and still are -_-) the gatekeepers for me and buying things, I never replaced the filter in it (it's supposed to be replaced every 60 days), so I can't comment on whether or not it was particularly effective. If indoors, I've found that I generally function better with more light and moving air (opening windows tends to be more effective than climate control machinery).
I've used the above to sustain output on multiple occasions, but the trouble is, I can't seem to make it last for more than a couple weeks at a time. I'm wondering if there isn't some obvious reason for this; for instance, the past week has been one in which the weather has been too awful to work outside, and I have more and more often not bothered getting a braille display, but I really have to stop and reflect to notice this; otherwise it just seems like business as usual!
On food: * Simple carbs = bad (most brand name cereals, pop tarts, Little Debbie-type things all kill productivity and mood for hours). * Protein = Good, though more sensitive to balance than most other types. * Salty things seem to be generally helpful to cognitive performance. The risks of too much salt make me a bit worried about this one; am I mistaken about said risk? Or does my relatively low bloodpressure help in that regard? * Apples tend to make me sleepy; bananas tend to be more uplifting, although if I'm particularly inactive or eat them with the wrong things (for instance, too many pringles), pain can result. * In early 2011, I experimented with coffee, having avoided caffeine (other than chocolate) for the overwhelming majority of ten years before that. The results were positive, provided I didn't use coffee more than twice a week. (I have not had access to coffee since then.) * I generally only drink water, though gaterAid / fruit juices weren't uncommon as recently as last year. Fruit juices seem to fit into the general pattern of high-carb things (something of a seditive), while GaterAid seemed to be helpful, at least for the first few months.
A hack I could use is ways to improve people skills while effectively blind and living with my parents in a very pedestrian unfriendly town. From a strictly utilitarian perspective, my lack of the ability to summon minions is a huge impediment to many of my projects. (Being completely and utterly isolated outside of the internet sucks in general, of course, but it's impossible to ignore the huge pile of utility I could amass by having PR superpowers.)
Use KCl in addition to NaCl, this should at least double the amount you can use before having to worry about it.
Note: Some people find KCl to taste terrible while others find it pretty similar to normal NaCl.
It seems that nearsightedness is caused at least partly by spending lots of time looking at things that are close to you, such as books or computer screens. So maybe what we need is some way of making these things look like they're further away, without the inconvenience of actually moving them further away.
Fortunately, there exists an invention that can solve this problem: glasses. The idea is thus to use glasses that are the opposite of what optometrists would prescribe for nearsightedness (or that are just weaker than what they'd prescribe). There is some evidence to support the use of these "anticorrective" glasses, but I am incapable of telling whether they're a good idea.
More information here.
so the solution to having to wear glasses all the time is to wear different glasses all the time?
Wearing anticorrectives all the time also causes myopia, according to what I've read. The proposed solution is to wear anticorrectives only when doing doing near work. Not sure whether any of this is worth it, considering that if you don't want to signal whatever glasses signal you could just get contact lenses.
Why use glasses weaker than prescribed when you can use no glasses at all for free?
The idea is to have a moderate challenge so that you get improvement rather than strain or giving up.
It's common knowledge that taller people are more successful. This effect is also pretty strong - for instance, tall people make an average of $789 per inch per year and this has been shown repeatedly in a set of four large-scale salary survey studies.
We don't know that it's causation, but it seems very likely that people judge others' general fitness, consciously or not, by looking at their height (which makes evopsych sense, considering for instance that malnutrition decreases height).
I can think of two ways to Goodhart this (are there more?): you can improve your posture, or you can raise your feet off the ground using elevator shoes or heel lifts, giving you say 2'' (which is $1,600 per year, plus nonmonetary gains) for less than $20.
Intelligence is correlated with height.
It's not as cheap as platform shoes, but it would be economically beneficial and very munchkiny to get limb lengthening surgery. Even a modest 2 inch procedure would easily pay itself back in 10 years.
Cost: $10,000 in India +incidentals
Benefit $800 x 2 x 10 years = $16,000.
If the logistics of it interrupt one's career or education, that would also be a significant cost. But this might be worth it for some people.
It's also supposed to be incredibly painful.
Indeed; if I recall correctly, recovery time is on the order of six months...
Apparently taller people don't live as long and once you control for height, male/female longevity differences go away. (It makes some intuitive sense to me... there are really old people and really tall people, but when's the last time you saw a really old really tall person?)
Given that living just a bit longer could plausibly allow you to live forever, if the right technologies get invented within that extra timespan, I think this is something worth considering.
Never buy anything from Amazon without checking eBay first. I think every generic thing in the world is available on eBay, IME at about half the price.
(May not be worth it for books and other media. But I just bought a pile of stuff for moving house with, down to replacement light bulbs for when we take our expensive daylight CFLs with us. And it's always fun to just casually buy six rolls of packing tape and a 100-metre roll of bubble wrap, even when you have an actual reason to.)
If this is true, there's a huge amount of money to be made buying things on eBay and selling them on Amazon.
Better would be to find good suppliers on eBay and drop-ship from Amazon.
All of the munchkin ideas I can think of aren't so much unlikely to work as hideously unethical. That fits with the classic munchkin, but it takes them off the table as far as I'm concerned. I'd rather not signal willingness to entertain immoral ideas, since there's no disclaimer I could issue that would adequately signal the truth of my being against them.
Use a throwaway account?
Well, it's too late now. If a new account shows up and posts hideously unethical suggestions, kinda obvious who it is.
Worse, anyone at all can now start a new account, post whatever horrid and disgusting ideas they want and everyone will think they are Luke's.
That's actually better, not worse, it gives plausible deniability.
Which is why I said it. So maybe he'll actually post.
... and at the same time, maybe he won't!
Even if you wouldn't do them, it's no use to put unethical ideas at a place where other people might apply them.
That too.
It seems to be possible to create sexual fetishes through classical conditioning, and it's hypothesized that this is how most sexual fetishes are created. It might be possible to use this to increase motivation for some specific task. I have not tried this, though I have unsuccessfully tried using pornographic images as reinforcement for anki reviews, using my picture-flasher plugin.
I think there a fairly good chance that the pornographic images will put you into a mental state where you can't effectively concentrate on Anki reviews.
When I tried this, the images failed to arouse me and just got annoying. If you successfully created a fetish for anki reviews (or mathematical symbols, or reading carefully-reasoned arguments, or destroying ugh fields...), I don't actually think that would interfere much with the task, especially if you were able to abstain from sex/masturbation for a long time (perhaps through some sort of precommitment mechanism, such as a chastity belt with the key either given to someone else with instructions not to give it back for some time, or stored three hours' drive from wherever you live).
A tulpa is an "imaginary friend" (a vivid hallucination of an external consciousness) created through intense prolonged visualization/practice (about an hour a day for two months). People who claim to have created tulpas say that the hallucination looks and sounds realistic. Some claim that the tulpa can remember things they've consciously forgotten or is better than them at mental math.
Here's an FAQ, a list of guides and a subreddit.
Not sure whether this is actually possible (I'd guess it would be basically impossible for the 3% of people who are incapable of mental imagery, for instance); many people on the subreddit are unreliable, such as occult enthusiasts (who believe in magick and think that tulpas are more than just hallucinations) and 13-year-old boys.
If this is real, there's probably some way of using this to develop skills faster or become more productive.
Tulpas and other such experiences seem plausible given how prone we are to hallucinating things anyway (see intense religious experiences for example), and I wouldn't be surprised if some people would be able to create them consciously. However I doubt that most people can do this. The regulars of /r/tulpas are probably not very representative of the population at large, whether through their unusual proficiency with mental imagery or some deeper eccentricity.
Creating a tulpa in order to develop skills faster or become more productive might work, but the question is whether the gains weighted by probability of success are higher than other, more conventional (and indeed, mentally healthy) methods. I think not.
I am reminded of an occult practice I have heard of called evoking or assuming a godform, in which one temporarily assumes the role of a 'god' - a personification of some aspect of humanity which is conceived of as having infinite capability in some sphere of activity, often taken from an ancient pantheon to give it personality and depth. With your mind temporarily working in that framework, it 'rubs off' on your everyday activities and you sometimes stop limiting yourself and do things that you wouldnt do before in that sphere of endeavor.
It looks like people trying to intentionally produce personifications with similarities to all sorts of archetypes and minor deities that people have dealt with across history. People have been doing this as long as there have been people, just normally by invoking personifications and archetypes from their culture, not trying to create their own. The saner strands of modern neopagans and occultists acknowledge that these archetypes only exist in the mind but make the point that they have effects in the real world through human action, especially when they are in the minds of many people. You also don't need to hallucinate to use an archetype as a focus for thought about a matter (example: "what would Jesus do?"), and trying to actually get one strong enough to hallucinate during normal consciousness (as opposed to say, dreaming) seems unhealthy.
I can, though, relay an interesting experience I had in unintentionally constructing some kind of similar mental archetype while dreaming that kind of stuck around in my mind for a while. I didn't reach into any pantheon though, my mind reached to a mythology which has had its claws in my psyche since childhood - star trek. Q is always trolling the crew of the Enterprise for humanity's benefit, in attempts to get them to meet their potential and progress in understanding or test them. He was there, and let's just say I was thoroughly trolled in a dream, in ways that emphasized certain capabilities of mine that I was not using. And just before waking up he specifically told me that he would be watching me with my own eyes since he was actully part of me that normally didn't speak. That sense of part of me watching and making sure I actually did what I was capable of stuck around for over a week.
This reminds me of the Abramelin operation, a ritual that supposedly summons guardian angels.
That sounds like some serious dedication to internal family systems for someone who is very superstitious.
I asked the subreddit about possible practical uses of tulpas, and was told that
Ask them if they're utilitarians.
If they say yes, suggest that according to some versions of utilitarianism they may be ethically obligated to mass produce tulpas until they run out of space in their heads.
By the same logic, you should mass produce children until you can no longer feed them all.
I didn't say I was a total utilitarian, though. But someone who accepts the repugnant conclusion probably should act this way.
Raising children is expensive. There are cheaper ways to increase the population.
This seems like a non sequitur.
Anyway, creating tulpas is presumably much cheaper than raising an actual child, for anyone. So once the low hanging fruit in donating money to a charity that increases actual population or whatever, creating tulpas will be a much more efficient way of increasing the population, assuming they 'count' in the utility function separately and everything.
Or even better, do sperm donation. You're out maybe a few score hours at worst, for the chance of getting scores to hundreds (yes, really) of children. Compare that to a tulpa, where the guides on Reddit are estimating something like 100 hours to build up a reasonable tulpa, or raising a kid yourself (thousands of hours?).
But someone still has to raise the kid at some point, and besides, not everyone can make sperm.
It's possible to donate eggs, though it's not nearly as much fun.
They wouldn't otherwise be working to increase the population, so the cost is negligible.
But someone can. Pay them to do it.
I'm not sure that sperm banks have an oversupply; apparently England has something of a shortage due to its questionable decision to ban anonymous donation, which is why our David Gerard reports back that it was very easy to do even though he's old enough he wouldn't even be considered in the USA as far as I can tell.
I just said there are cheaper ways to increase the population. You have to compare it to them. How does it compare to sperm donation? Saving lives?
I don't think additional sperm donors will increase the population - I don't think lack of donors is the bottleneck.
Saving lives probably doesn't either, if the demographic transition model is true. At least, saving child lives probably results in lower birthrates - perhaps saving adults doesn't affect birthrate.
Ok, but then it's no longer "the same logic." Tulpas are free!
That is not free.
That sounds like a very practical use to me. Many people are lonely. (I remember reading one thing where wasn't there a guy making a tulpa of MLP's Twilight Sparkle?)
You may be thinking of this.
No, it wasn't a video (I shun videos), but I'm reading through /r/Tulpas and apparently they acknowledge it's a really common thing for tulpa-enthusiasts ('tulpists'? is there a word for them yet?) to make ponies: http://www.reddit.com/r/Tulpas/comments/14zbli/the_internet_is_laughing_at_us_and_you_shouldnt/c7hy6mk So I guess it could have been any of a lot of people.
EDIT: I find the religious connection very interesting since it reminds me of the Christian practices I've read about before, so I've asked them about it: http://www.reddit.com/r/Tulpas/comments/1e33z2/comparison_with_charismatic_christian_practices/
It's interesting that demons in computer science are called that way. They have exactly the same functionality as the demons that occult enthusiasts proclaim to use.
Even if you don't believe in the occult, be aware that out culture has a lot of stories about how summoning demons might be a bad idea.
You are moving in territory where you don't have mainstream psychology knowledge that guides you and shows you where the dangers lie. You are left with a mental framework of occult defense against evil forces. It's the only knowledge that you can access to guide that way. Having to learn to protect yourself against evil spirits when you don't believe in spirits is a quite messed up.
I had an experience where my arm moved around if I didn't try to control it consciously after doing "spirit healing". I didn't believe in spirits and was fairly confident that it's just my brain doing weird stuff. On the other hand I had to face the fact that the brain doing weird stuff might not be harmless. Fortunately the thing went away after a few month with the help of a person who called it a specter without me saying anything specific about it.
You can always say: "Well, it's just my mind doing something strange." At the same time it's a hard confrontation.
This is incredibly pedantic. (Also rather unjustified, due to my own lack of knowledge regarding occult enthusiasts.) However:
Although daemons in computer science are rather akin to daemons in classical mythology (sort of, kind of, close enough), they really don't particularly resemble our modern conception of demons. I mean, they can totally get a programmer into "Sorcerer's Apprentice"-style shenanigans, but I've never heard of a daemon tempting anyone.
I have previously recommend to friends that alcohol is a moderately good way to develop empathy for those less intelligent than oneself. (That is, it is a good way for those who really cannot comprehend the way other people get confused by certain ideas). I wager that there are a wide array of methods to gain knowledge of some of the stranger confusions the human mind is a capable of. Ignoring chemical means, sleep deprivation is probably the simplest.
Also, congratulations for going through these experiences and retaining (what I assume is) a coherent and rational belief-system. A lot of people would not.
RSS reader/other notification of new procrastination available.
Computer daemons don't tempt people. There's little danger is using them. At least as long they aren't AGI's. Tulpa's are something like AGI's that don't run on computer but on your own brain.
D_Malik read a proposal for creating tulpas with specifically tell the reader that they aren't supposed to created for "practical purposes". After reading it he thinks: "Hey, if tulpa can do those things, we can probably create them for a lot of practical purposes."
That looks like a textbook example of temptation to me. I don't want to advocate that you never give in to such temptations but just taking there Tulpa creation manual and changing a bit to make the Tulpa more "practical" doesn't sound like a good strategy to me.
The best framework for doing something like this might be hypnosis. It's practioners are more "reasonable" than magick people.
This and related experiences caused me to become more agnostic over a bunch of things.
I would think there should be a general warning against deliberately promoting the effects of dissociative identity disorder etc, without adequate medical supervision.
I think tulpas are more like schizophrenia than dissociative identity disorder. But now that you mention it, dissociative identity disorder does look like fertile ground for finding more munchkinly ideas.
For instance, at least one person I know has admitted to mentally pretending to be another person I know in order to be more extroverted. Maybe this could be combined with tulpas, say by visualizing/hallucinating that you're being possessed by a tulpa.
Since we're talking about Tulpas, I feel obligated to mention that I have one. In case anyone wants anecdata.
What would you estimate the cost/benefit ratio to be, and what variables do you think are most relevant?
Without going into detail, overall my usage of Tulpas have benefited me more than it has hurt me, although it has somewhat hurt me in my early childhood when I would accidentally create Tulpas and not realize that they were a part of my imagination (And imagine them to come from an external source.) It's very difficult to say if the same would apply for anyone else, since Your Mileage May Vary.
I also suspect creating Tulpas may come significantly easier for some people than others, and this may affect the cost-benefit analysis. Tulpas come very naturally for me, and as I've mentioned, my first Tulpa was completely accidental and I did not even realize it was a Tulpa until a year or two later. On the other hand, I've read posts about people on /r/Tulpa that have spend hours daily trying to force Tulpas without actually managing to create them. If I had to spend an hour every day in order to obtain a Tulpa, I wouldn't even bother -- also because there's no way I'm willing to sacrifice that much time for a Tulpa. But the fact that I can will a Tulpa into existence relatively easily helps.
A different variable that may affect whether having a Tulpa is worth it is if you have social desires that are nearly impossible to satisfy through non-tulpa outlets such as meatspace friends. In this case, I do, and I satisfy these desires through Tulpas rather than forcing another human being to conform to my expectations. This also improves my ability to relate to others in real life, since I more easily accept imperfections from them. I suspect that if you're cognitively similar, you may benefit from Tulpas. I can't think of anything else right now, and if you have anything more specific, it may trigger more thoughts on the matter.
What types of social desires do you satisfy through your tulpa which you have not been able to with your online or meatspace friends?
Say you want to write a story - can you offload the idea to your tulpa, entertain yourself for a few hours, then ask them to dictate to you the story, now fully fleshed-out? Can you give them control of your body so they can write it themselves?
A lot of writers seem to have characters who are pretty much like tulpas.
I have a bunch of LW relevant question I'd like to ask a tulpa, especially one of a LWer that's likely to be familiar with the concepts already:
Do you see yourself as non human?
Would you want to be more or less humanlike than you currently are?
What do you think about the possibility that your values might differ enough from human ones that many here might refer to you as Unfriendly?
Does being already bodiless and created give you different views of things like uploading and copies than your host?
I'll probably have more questions after getting the answer to these and/or in realtime conversation not in a public place. Also, getting thee answers from as many different tulpae as possible would be the best.
Edit: I also have some private questions for someone who's decently knowledgeable about them in general (have several, has been in the community for a long time).
I can't imagine that your ROI would be positive though.
I am a sign language interpreter. The effects of coffee are condusive to my work: increase of short term memory, increase of alertness, reduction of fatigue, and effects wear off after a period of time similar to most jobs. Plus delicious.
Agreed. Also, many people seem to develop tolerance to caffeine after using it for a while, so for more benefits you should stop drinking it for a week or two and then drink it when you really need it. I did this when taking my SATs, for instance.
I've experimented with this before, and found that my caffeine-assisted productivity hit its highest levels when I had a cup of coffee every three days or so. More frequently and I built up too much tolerance; less frequently and the stimulant effects were too powerful when I did drink it, giving me distractibility and a tendency to fixate that weren't made up for in alertness and mental agility.
Your body chemistry might vary, of course. Also, that's peak, not sustained, productivity; you're probably better off with a steady intake of caffeine if whatever you have to do will take more than a day or two.
Why's that? Please remember the value of information here! Bright lights cost very little either upfront (maybe like <$100?) or on an ongoing basis (higher electrical bill), while an experiment may be very costly (or so I infer from the near-absence of anyone but me doing randomized self-experiments), and the benefits cumulatively large over the X years a bright light will last before breaking or burning out; hence, the best course may be simply to try it out.
I agree completely, but the voting patterns here made me think LW thought differently.
I interpret that as referring to one's justification for making claims of more-than-base-rate-likelihood-for-weird-off-the-wall-suggestions - especially if you're going to take up a lot of people's time based on anecdotes, you should at least be presenting decent anecdotes.
If you dismissed or didn't bring up anecdotes, I imagine there'd also be a positive response. For example, if one argued for using bright lights like thus, I imagine it'd go over well: 'I found studies X Y and Z where bright lights increased alertness over a day; applying the usual meta-analytical considerations, I guesstimate there's a 20% chance it'll work on ordinary people for a payoff of $Z; and on Amazon these lights cost $A and to run for a year uses $B in eletricity; and turns out, 0.20 * Z > $A+$B. Also I have a rubbishy personal anecdote: after doing this calculation, I tried out the lights and it seems to be working.'
(My own opinion is that lights are stupid easy to test so there's no excuse for not doing a self-experiment. Flip a coin each morning to turn the light on or keep it off, and write down which & how much you think you got done at the end of the day! But if you can't do that, at least trying to get past the honeymoon period is a start.)
If you happen to be a fairly wealthy but not so famous female American socialite, you could leak a sex tape, get yourself on some reality TV shows, stage a fake wedding for the media that nets you $18 million, and spin all this into a variety of fragrance and cosmetic product lines.
And marry Kanye.
The same kind of thing also tends to work if you're famous but not wealthy.
I knew that home film studio would be useful for something...
OK, a serious one now.
If you're looking to motivate yourself towards certain activities, use fictional characters as imaginary rivals.
For example, Stephen Amell is a ridiculously buff dude who plays the titular character in the TV show Arrow. He spends a non-negligible amount of screen-time prancing around with his shirt off. While this does not contribute to my hedonic appreciation of the show, I find myself a lot more motivated to get up and do some exercise after watching it.
I suspect this is my brain alerting me to the presence of a ridiculously buff rival who spends time prancing around with his shirt off, which results in some mechanism motivating me to compete along that axis. I also suspect this would work along different axes of rivalry. Watching lots of fictional smart people achieve lots of awesome fictionally smart things may be a good motivator for academic activities.
On the other hand, fictional worlds are not constrained by such trivial things as "plausibility" - how smart or conscientious or strong a character is is purely up to the whim of the author. Comparing yourself to these "superstimulus role models" might not be a mentally healthy thing to do - look at how many young girls (and boys!) are starving themselves in the pursuit of magazine-model beauty.
That particular analogy (cf. "thinspiration") had occurred to me, though I suspect the general process (look at superstimulatory examples of what you aspire towards) is something most people have an intuitive grasp of, and I (and perhaps other people broadly like me, who are probably over-represented on Less Wrong) simply haven't cottoned on to it until now.
You have to be careful with this sort of thing. It's possible to accidentally make yourself unhappy even if you don;t actually harm yourself or something. I think different people respond to this sort of thing in different ways.
I suspect that for me, this tends to turn on the "Activate low-status sympathy-seeking behaviors" module instead of the "Try to be more high status" one.
Continuing the marksmanship theme, your proposed mechanism is part of why I watch Archer.
This is one thing that you could use a tulpa for - make them a better version of yourself. I guess that could be psychologically unhealthy.
You could also use real people as inspiration; for example, one person who annoys me by being more awesome than me is Yi Sun Shin.
I have a female friend who recently said something along the lines of "normally I think guys who go around topless are kind of dicks trying to show off, but that guy had the muscles to pull it off". I think it was just after that that I started using my resistance bands more.
edit: to clarify, she was talking about a real person who had been wandering around topless.
I noticed that visual confusion tends to give me headaches (I often get them in stores, for example), and that blocking off my peripheral vision by wearing a hood helps. So I bought glasses with thick stems, to make my field of vision smaller all the time.
I'm nearsighted enough that all I use my peripheral vision for is seeing whether there is movement behind me (which I can still do - the glasses only cover the middle part), so the only cost was restricting my choice of frames to styles with thick stems. Anything that prevents headaches is a productivity boost for me, because I tend to procrastinate and loose focus a lot more when uncomfortable.
I'm not sure whether it actually worked - stress and changes in the weather cause so much noise that it would be hard to measure. If my stress level ever gets more consistent, I might try making something even wider that fits over the stems and experimenting with that.
Are you sure it's a matter of "visual confusion" and not having a lot of stuff clamoring for your attention but being blurry because it's outside the radius of your glasses? I definitely noticed things were better visually for me when I switched to contact lenses and lost the blur-circle that existed around the edges of my vision all the time.
I suspect it's not just from bad vision, because I've had problems in visually busy places even as a child, before I needed glasses. I didn't get headaches then, but I had a habit of looking at the ground all the time, which my parents taught my not to do once I got older because it looked weird. I recently tried out looking down all the time in busy places, and found it made me feel a lot calmer, and my head feel less tight. So I suspect that looking down was a way of avoiding looking at other stuff. (I decided it was too costly to use in most cases, though, because it looks really weird.)
Thanks for the suggestion, though. I guess it is possible that blur circle also contributes.
Instead of hoping to find the one Super Cool Trick that'll let you become a superhuman overnight, read five or so (scientifically minded) self-help books addressing the biggest problem area in your life, make a moderate to large amount of effort to implement the knowledge in your life, and then repeat for your other problem areas, until in a year or two you become a superhuman.
This worked for me for productivity and depression, next is social skills/social anxiety.
Also, let your body occupy a lot of space in order to feel more relaxed, feel confident, and signal status.
Let your body occupy little space in order to feel less confident and signal lack of status, thus compensating for typical but unfortunate human tendencies to think much more highly of their opinions than is actually justifiable and to prop up ubiquitous and costly signaling games. Harness the power of negative thinking!
In case anyone here hasn't heard of it, I've started using HabitRPG recently, and have really enjoyed using it so far.
If you don't mind sharing, what habits are you trying to instill?
Right now I don't have any daily habits except "Do 1 Pomodoro of work." I'm in the midst of finals, so it's mostly been a long list of Todos. I get extra points for each additional Pomodoro, and for completing tasks. Oh, and I get points every time I do a pullup, pushup, or set of 5 situps. The latter have been very motivating because they're easy to do and I get points every time I do them, so I've kept those in the blue/green basically all the time.
Obvious idea is obvious: Save and invest a very large percentage of your income - I'm at 25%, but I'm not very ambitious. At 75% you can retire for three years for every year you work, even without assuming any gains from investment income or any other sources of income. If you are 30 and reasonably established in your career, this means you can work for ten years and then retire.
Even at 55-60%, which is what I did, it still builds up REALLY fast. Realistically though, you'll have to work more than ten years unless you're getting pretty good return on your investments.
Not necessarily. There is inflation.
Following the rule of thumb that one can spend about 4% of investment a year for it to remain sustainable, it's sufficient to accumulate about 25 times more than you spend in a year, which at 80% saving rate can be achieved in 6 years (more to reduce risk and/or accommodate possible future increase in spending (above inflation)).
A less drastic version of this, if you are in the US, is to do remote work from a thinly-populated rural state with a low cost of living, and ideally with lower state taxes.
But the problem with that is that you have to live in rural America.
I always figured a better idea was to live in an area with really high cost of living with salaries to match (e.g. be a software developer in Silicon Valley or a quant in New York), but maintain a middle-class standard of living, save a big chunk of your salary, and then go live in an area where the cost of living was much lower.
This one is the sort of thing where there are a bunch of assumption that shrouds reasonable on their own, but implasible in conjunction:
A1: you don't have to perfectly transfer your entire conectome to still be "the same person"; only things that are actually part of your current identity are needed
A2: if your identity changes gradually over time, even into something that if the change was faster it'd be considered disruptive, you're still "the same person".
A3: the human identity can be very extensively modified using behavioural techniques, hypnosis, and drugs that occur in the wild.
Then: you should be able to achieve immortality in a stone-age environment, by first modifying your own identity down to extremely small so it can be entirely transferred verbally, then modifying a victim more abruptly to a sufficiently similar state, and finally building that mind up again to be functional. Repeat for as long as you can maintain the dynasty.
EDIT: Hey! The OP specifically asked for outlandish ideas that seem like they wouldn't work! Am I just being judged relative the many ridiculously good posts here?
That which is made immortal by such a method is not me.
One could certainly argue that, and in such an extreme case I'd even agree that it's not worth it, but nobody should be certain it doesn't work unless the don't believe uploads work, or they know an exact specific reason why it's wrong other than intuition. It's certainly very muchkiny, whether or not it works.
My neck is asymmetrical because some years back I used to often lie in bed while using a laptop, and would prop my head up on my left elbow, but not my right because there was a wall in the way. In general, using a laptop while lying in bed is an ergonomics nightmare. The ideal would be to lie on your back with the laptop suspended in the air above you, except that that would make typing inconvenient.
So a friend recently blew my mind by informing me that prism glasses are a thing. These rotate your field of vision 90 degrees downwards, so that you can lie on your back and look straight up while still seeing your laptop. I have tried these and highly recommend them.
That said: You should probably not do non-sleep/sex things in bed because that can contribute to insomnia. I recommend trying a standing desk, by putting a box or a chair on top of your desk and putting your laptop on top of that, then just standing permanently; it will be painful at first. Also currently experimenting with only allowing myself to sit down with my laptop if I'm at the same time doing the highest-value thing I could be doing (which is usually ugh-fielded and unpleasant because otherwise I'd have already done it).
Another thing: I have a crankish theory that looking downwards lowers your unconscious estimation of your own social status (which seems to be partly what is meant by "confidence"/"self-esteem"). If that's true, prism glasses and standing desks could increase confidence.
Why is this crankish? I consider this totally plausible.
Related: I have a messy selection of anecdotal and apocryphal evidence that exacerbating relative height differences between men and women has an immediate effect on how attractive they find each other, (i.e. if a [hetero] man is standing on a chair and looking down at a [hetero] woman, he will find her instantly more attractive than if he were standing at ground level, and vice versa).
This study is relevant:
Obligatory note re: standing desk ergonomics: http://ergo.human.cornell.edu/CUESitStand.html
The lesson seems to be to mostly sit, but stand and walk around every 30-45 minutes or so.
Relatedly, you can buy goggles that make you see the world inverted up/down or left/right, or rotated. These look incredibly cool but I haven't yet thought of any actual use for them.
You can get 30-degree goggles here ($15) or 180-degree goggles here ($25), or make your own, or get an adjustable thing ($80).
Take Wellbutrin (bupropion) for general mood improvement and increased incentive to Get Things Done. Cycling it does seem to be beneficial, as the body will eventually adjust.
Bupropion did nothing for me.
I suspect this is a special case of the general rule "if you have depression, seek appropriate treatment," which is really really good advice.
The low hanging fruit is to read the book Feeling Good, which has been shown to help depression in studies.
Living in a van seems like it could decrease your cost of living a lot more than it decreases your quality of life. Getting set up in a van would cost about $12k, so it could pay for itself in a year. Here is a good guide on this.
One could also consider going completely homeless; here is an article by a math student who did that.
Until a few years ago, students were permitted to sleep overnight on the ubiquitous couches in the university student center of my Alma Mater. There are tales of a student who eschewed paying for housing and simply slept on the couches of the student center, and used locker room showers, for an entire year.
Unfortunately this individual's munchkinism led to the policy being revised to prevent this behavior - or so the tale goes.
In the crazy economics of Bay Area housing, driveway parking for a van in a desirable location with electricity and shower access is $200-$300/month.
In a related note, I was able to steal showers from a gym for several months because I would go straight to the locker room with my bag (acting as though I was going to sign in later) and shower, then leave in my street clothes. I was only called out once, while I was leaving; I just kept walking and didn't come back for a few days.
How to find a mate when you have really specific tastes:
Why I think this will work: A while ago I posted a romantic/erotic story to Reddit (which is 3/4 male). I hadn't seen the fantasy represented in any romance/erotica I'd ever read, so I figured I was alone in desiring it. Imagine my surprise when two women sent me unsolicited PM's asking me to role-play.
This works better when some of the MOTAS who read the fiction have also met you in the flesh (N=2). Also, having at least one protagonist who shares some of the more prominent features of your personality (i.e., your warped sense of humor if you're liable to inflict that on your mate) might be more effective at selecting on the audience (if they like the protagonist, they may be able to tolerate your own twisted humor) but here I haven't tried it your way for comparison.
But on the other hand, writers are routinely surprised by the audiences their material finds - and don't find. So you need some way of evaluating your current audience to see if your ideal mate is actually likely to be in it, or if your cute pony show turned out to have many nerdy male fans instead...
I think most MLP fans are in the intended demographic. Teenage male fans are simply more salient than grade-school female fans.
If nothing else, the 'unexpected' fans are reducing your yield and may be driving out potential matches.
(If you were into little girls, would you be happy or unhappy about bronies? If you wanted money, maybe happy, if chicks maybe unhappy because on the margin, little girls may be skeeved out by bronies and not become regular readers. You know what, I should've chosen a better example for this topic than MLP.)
Beware of these.
They've sent me photos, their comment history checks out and one of them showed me her Facebook page. I'm pretty sure they're legit.
Well, that's good. Back in the day, I followed a USENET newsgroup that was trolled by a guy pretending to be a girl...
Showering daily seems to be unhealthy; decreasing shower frequency would save time, and it might be easy to control body odor with antiperspirants. Here's an NYT article.
Relatedly, there exist forms of clothing that stay wrinkle- and odor-free for 100 days of wearing without washing, though at the moment a shirt costs $100.
Aren't antiperspirants unhealthy?
For something widely and intuitively believed to be true, I haven't seen the evidence.
Anecdata: My use of antiperspirants is a leading indicator of underarm pimples. In half-blind tests, others have shown to be unable to tell if I have recently applied an antiperspirant or not.
Also, other people have also demonstrated a lack of sensitivity to whether or not I have showered in the last day, provided that I have showered in about the last 72 hours (even through periods of heat, but not stress or exertion, perspiration).
Have you actually asked if they can tell a difference, or have they just not said anything? Because it's considered socially rude to tell someone they need to take a shower.
related, ex-officio briefs are awesome.
I'm hoping the second batch of those Wool and Prince shirts are cheaper. Then I just need to find socks to have a whole outfit that doesn't need constant laundering.
A less radical version of this is to take only short, lukewarm showers. Taking a fast, 3-5 minute lukewarm shower seems to get almost all of the benefits of long, hot, soapy showers with very few of the negative side-effects. It also saves time.
I made the switch years ago, and I find that my dry skin problems are entirely solved. I still take a hot and soapy shower occasionally, but it isn't an every day kind of thing.
I thought that the distinguishing feature of munchkinry is that it's an ingenious solution which cannot be effectively reused, and thus its main utility is inspirational. Like the Kobayashi Maru test hacking, or winning a Game Room battle by rushing the gate, or, in less fictional cases, using airplanes as powerful incendiary projectiles, or winning over $100k by gaming a game show.
Some people use the term that way, but at least in the pen and paper roleplaying world it is closer to how D_Malik is using the term.
If you are a human, then the biggest influence on your personality is your peer group. Choose your peers.
If you want to be better at math, surround yourself with mathematicians. If you want to be more productive, hang out with productive people. If you want to be outgoing or artistic or altruistic or polite or proactive or smart or just about anything else, find people who are better than you at that thing and become friends with them. The status-seeking conformity-loving parts of your mind will push you to become like them. (The incorrect but pithy version: "You are an average of the five people you spend the most time with.")
I've had a lot of success with this technique by going to the Less Wrong meetups in Boston, and by making a habit of attending any event where I'll be the stupidest person in the room (such as the average Less Wrong meetup).
See The Good News of Situationist Psychology.
Is the corollary to this that if you want to become an outlier, i.e. not a linear combination of your peers but a point on the convex hull, you should spend less time hanging around with other people?
Or cluster with outliers. The population is large enough that you should expect to find enough outliers to form a peer group.
I'm going to Hacker School this summer. It has a lot of praise for making people good at programming in a very short amount of time, and it works on exactly this principle; students are selected almost exclusively for desire+ability to get better at programming, and so everyone pursues their pre-existing goal much more effectively than if they weren't all reinforcing/teaching each other.
I think the same might work with online forums. E.g. an interesting way to motivate oneself to learn programming might be to spend a lot of time hanging out on the IRC channels for the tools you want to learn.
Anecdotally, this seems to work. I've become a much better writer while spending a lot of time in a writers' irc channel.
Another historical case, Smokey Yunick, the car racer and mechanic:
I suggest a move to Main.
Hang on, this is the discussion section. The entire post is an invitation to discussion - that is not just its primary, but practically its sole purpose.
Do you suggest a move to Main because more people read Main? That may be true, but anecdotally at least one person reads everything on the site. Furthermore, it seems like abusing the category.
Is it because Main posts have higher status? That's.. probably true, but again seems like conflating category and status.
The solution is probably a code tweak, so although I'm not trying to oppose the move - you're probably right - getting to the bottom of why it's a good idea might let us avoid this situation in the future.
Because Main is for higher-quality posts that people who don't read Discussion read, and then Promoted is for even higher-quality posts for people subscribed to the Promoted RSS feed?
All right, then how about we have a "promotion" axis separate from the "category" axis? Is there enough volume on the site for that, already?
That would require a code change.
Is main also for posts that garner high-quality discussion?
Who can move a post to main? the author? the moderators? both? anyone else?
LASIK surgery is now pretty cheap, and depending on how much you spend on new glasses, optometrist appointments, contact lenses etc., it might actually pay for itself eventually. It should also save you time and effort, and might make you look better.
"Pretty cheap"? I looked up the prices once in the name of VoI and saw numbers in the range of $2,500. I'm pretty sure I can improve my life more than LASIK would with $2,500 worth of other improvements.
But if you would spend 2500$ over ten years of glasses- and contacts-wearing - which is very possible, especially if you're prone to breaking them - then it pays for itself already. Or twenty years, whatever, ignoring alternative ways to invest that money. Add in more for the massive convenience of not having to deal with glasses and contacts, too.
This is why I'm going in for a LASIK pre-op next week. I'm certain it will improve my quality of life appreciably and save me money over the long term to boot.
One of my best friends got LASIK and reported terrible results (to the point where worries about his vision problems were giving him suicidal thoughts).
I'm passing this along without endorsement: http://gettingstronger.org/2010/07/improve-eyesight-and-throw-away-your-glasses/
Make a list of all the projects you could undertake, then use Fermi calculations to estimate the costs and benefits of each on various axes (time, money, status...), with time discounting. Combine the axes into one measure of how much you'd profit from doing each project. Then actually use the numbers to decide what to work on next.
You might also intuitively guess the profit from each task and take a weighted average of that and the more analytical calculations, because system I often outperforms system II.
I'm currently in the middle of this; so far the top items match my intuitions (e.g. go do more CoZE), so I'm not benefitting much from the analysis. Part of my reason for creating this thread is to gather more ideas for things to do and to get other people to help me research how worthwhile possible projects are.
What is CoZE?
Comfort Zone Expansion. Presumably a CFAR created generalization of Rejection Therapy and related exercises that are intended to do what the name suggests.
Wear a rubber band around your wrist and snap it to decondition behaviors. I originally used this to stop myself cracking my knuckles or biting my lip, but it didn't have any apparent effect.
I then tried using it to destroy my sense of humour (partly because I thought this might boost productivity, by generally making actions' dopamine rewards match their actual usefulness). This seemed to actually work well; I now experience humour-type amusement 20%-50% as often as I did two months ago.
I would recommend other people think carefully before trying this; many people have told me this could lead to bad places.
Relatedly, you could get an electroshock collar (used to train dogs, or for BDSM), which would let you automate the deconditioning.
If you want to increase your pulling strength without much effort, get a pullup bar and put it in a doorway in your home. Then just make a habit of doing pullups every time you walk by. This is remarkably effective. I've been doing this for two weeks and have seen significant improvement.
It's important to actually have it on a doorway at all times. Ours was sitting in a closet for several months, and during that time, I used it maybe twice. In the past two weeks, with it actually on a doorway and requiring no effort for me to set up and start using it, I've been doing ~5 chinups every day. (The number has been going up as I've gotten better at it; I'm looking forward to when I can actually do dead-hang pullups.)
$20 on Amazon.
I think a general policy of decreasing the startup cost of doing things you want to do is a useful one. Rewarding yourself helps too, but sometimes you just need to lower the activation energy.
I recall doing exactly that in junior high, and increasing my chin-up count from 0 to 12 or so within 3-4 months, without consciously worrying about it. My P.E. teacher was impressed. In retrospect, going through puberty must have helped, too.
I've done, recommended, and been recommended this before and am in wholehearted agreement. I would be remiss however if I did not share a word of caution: that model of pull up bar leaves black marks, and after extended use, will probably dent a wooden door frame. I do not know of a model of that type that does not share this design flaw.
you can get rings to hang from the pullup bar and be able to do dips. Or just do dips between two chairs if you have sturdy chairs. Between the two you have a pretty good upper body workout if you can't get to a gym.
Use a tool like f.lux to change the color temperature of your screen depending on time of day.
Your eyes will be much happier when it matches the surrounding room, and/or lowering the temperature when it's close to bed-time will help you fall asleep.
Relatedly, for sources of light that aren't your screen, get orange-tinted glasses. Also, of course, melatonin.
Have been using f.lux for years. Highly recommended.
I've used it for ages but stopped using it recently because in fact my eyes are not happier when I use it - they are about the same. On the other hand it can get annoying when everything on your screen is more orangey than it is supposed to be.
Not ridiculous enough!
If you are new to a scientific topic, note that the first half of a paper often tends to summarize common knowledge within the field that is necessary to understand the conclusion. Often this is more readable/interesting than the rest of the paper, suggesting that you can spend more time reading scientific papers by skipping the denser and more original parts.
Full details here, but in summary: Take 2mg of melatonin 20 minutes before bed, and train yourself to think only of boring things and/or nothing after you lie down. Falling asleep becomes MUCH easier and more predictable.
When I was having a lot of trouble getting out of bed reasonably promptly in the mornings: practice getting out of bed - but not after just having woken up, that's what I was having trouble with in the first place. No, during the day, having been up for a while, go lie in bed for a couple of minutes with the alarm set, then get up when it goes off. Also, make this a pleasant routine with stretching, smiling and deep breathing.
I found this idea on the net here, which may have more details: http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2006/04/how-to-get-up-right-away-when-your-alarm-goes-off/
I tried it and it seemed to help a lot for a while, and I feel more in control of my weekend mornings.
An alternative, courtesy of Anders Sandberg (via Kaj Sotala), is to set your alarm to ring two hours before your desired wake-up time, take one or two 50mg caffeine pills when it rings, and go back to sleep immediately thereafter. When you wake two hours later, getting out of bed shouldn't be a problem. Details here.
Practice getting off the Internet and going to bed:
Starting while not absorbed in browsing the web, find some not-too-compelling website, browse for a few minutes (not enough to get really into it) and then go and lie in bed for a few minutes (which shouldn't feel as difficult as it's not committing to a full night's sleep). While in bed, let your mind wander away from the internet. This practice can lead into practice for getting out of bed.
I tried this a bit - I'm not sure it was worthwhile, as I did sometimes get absorbed in browsing when trying this exercise.
Autogenics is a biofeedback technique that induces a state of intense relaxation. It's supposed to be able to help change compulsive behaviors, though I haven't tried that myself. I have found it very helpful for getting to sleep, though, and pleasant as well. I used this guide for what I have done so far.
Fun anecdote: Once, while I was cuddling with my boyfriend, he said, "I can hear your heartbeat!" A few moments later he jerked and looked at me in shock. "It just slowed down!" :-) I felt like a wizard. Biofeedback is cool.
It's probably worth trying if you have problems sleeping. Interestingly, it's found to be useful in treating a several mild mental and physical problems, like headaches, anxiety, mild depression, and sleep disorders. It's also used for pain relief for natural childbirth. (Meaning, for women who don't want to have an epidural.)
I just got this galvanic skin response biofeedback device in the mail a few days ago. Rest your fingers on it and there's a tone goes up as you get more stressed out and down as you get more relaxed. I haven't been experimenting with it very long, but using the device and trying to make the tone go down does seem to be quite an effective way to relax. Housemates have found the tone annoying, but wearing ear-encompassing headphones on top of the supplied earbuds seems to deal with that.
Oh, those are super cool. I tried using one at the Toronto Science Museum and started doing my autogenics exercises, and got it to go down to minimum pretty quickly. You might be able to train that even faster having one to play with all the time.
You should have tried sending the morse code SOS message using it!
Cold Thermogenesis
Taking very cold showers or baths. You gradually decrease the temperature of your shower over several weeks. I can now take a shower or bath with the water on just cold. Other people use ice to lower the temperature of their baths even further.
Some claim that it has significant health benefits, but I haven't noticed any although I haven't been doing it for very long. Still, it's neat to be able to modify your body to tolerate something that would have previously caused unbearable pain.
Here is some discussion of cold thermogenesis on a paleo website.
There's kind of a growing movement around Rob Rhinehart's Soylent thing, dunno if you folks have heard of this.
Basically, he got tired of making food all the time and tried to figure out the absolute minimum required chemical compounds required for a healthy diet, and then posted the overall list, and has now been roughly food free for three months, along with a bunch of other people.
It seems awesome to me and I'm hoping this sort of idea becomes more prevalent. My favorite quote from him I can't now find, but it's something along the lines of "I enjoy going to the movie theater, but I don't particularly feel the need to go three times a day."
There's small reddit community/discourse groups around getting your own mixture.
A well-known trick for memorizing things verbatim is to make them rhyme and put them in a song. Most people reading this know the alphabet song, for instance, and you can use this to learn US states and capitals or chemical elements.
Maybe it would be possible to do this without the rhyming, by using text-to-speech software to convert the information into audio and then playing that over vocals-free music. Instead of text-to-speech software, you could buy/get an audiobook with the information, if one exists. It might be possible to use this, for instance, to memorize multiplication tables up to 100 easily. I haven't yet tried any of this.
I also intend to research whether hearing something repetitively while sleeping helps you to memorize it verbatim, and whether that would harm sleep.
Relatedly, I noticed recently that I knew the words in a 14-minute ASMR video almost verbatim because I had listened to it so often. So one idea is to pay someone skilled at producing ASMR to read you things you want to memorize.