Douglas_Reay comments on How to Become a 1000 Year Old Vampire - Less Wrong

55 [deleted] 02 October 2013 05:07AM

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Comment author: Douglas_Reay 09 October 2013 10:45:20AM *  2 points [-]
  • Often thinks about where they are on the experience curve for everything they do, and takes action on that when appropriate,
  • Maintains a habit of doing stuff now and visualizing those opportunity costs,
  • Puts themselves in a stimulating environment like the bay area intellectual community and surrounds themselves with stimulating people and events,
  • Seeks out the hardest character-building experiences like getting tear gassed in a trench or building a company from scratch,

This is a subset of the more general:

.1. Think carefully about the general issue of how you want to spend your time.

(By, for example, making a plan to move the way you currently live your life closer towards the way you want it to be, including ways of changing things about yourself, such as your habits or values, that will be needed in order to ensure that you actually carry the plan out.)

.2. Decide what importance level making those changes has for you, and then track your progress to see that you are actually spending an effort upon carrying out the plan that is proportionate to that importance (ie compensate for distortion caused by immediacy, and other cognitive biases)

That has been made specific to the goal of wanting to spend much of your time accruing personal experience in an efficient manner.

I'm not sure the goal is a well stated one. When you think of a 1000 year old vampire, are you envying the amount of varied information he knows, the skill set he has acquired, the things he has achieved or the self-knowledge and 'wisdom' he has acquired? All these things may be linked to "experience", but if you only want experience in order to gain some of those things, setting the goal in more precise terms might lead to slightly different tactics of acquiring it being indicated.