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).
If you are a human, then the biggest influence on your personality is your peer group. Choose your peers.
If I decide to seek company of some people, because according to some metric M they are better than me, I am helping myself, because I am exposing myself to people better than me, but at the same time I am hurting them, because I expose them to a person that is worse than them, according to the same metric. OK, one possible way out of this problem is to say that different people use different metrics. But if we assume there is one shared metric, or at least that metrics used by smart enough people are similar, is there a way to help some people without harming others?
Possible solution would be to make the relationships between people asymetrical, so they would be stronger in the "better person to worse person" direction, but weaker in the opposite direction. -- This is not a new idea, because this is what actually happens when you read someone's book, or if you attend someone's lecture. The question is, how much is the influence reduced this way. (What is the ratio between influence I get from the books and from the people I meet in person? What strategies can I use to change this ratio? E.g. I could spend more time reading, but that would have some social costs; but perh...
If I decide to seek company of some people, because according to some metric M they are better than me, I am helping myself, because I am exposing myself to people better than me, but at the same time I am hurting them, because I expose them to a person that is worse than them, according to the same metric.
I am not convinced that being around people slightly worse than yourself is bad for you. Especially when you get into a mentor role. When you actively try to help others understand and improve, this forces you to think about what you are actually doing, which probably improves your behavior.
Disclaimer: purely anecdotal, and does not apply to all metrics.
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 credi...
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.
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.
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.
Interesting! Didn't know about that variant.
I'm assuming that the constant churn of purchases and returns costs them money. For example:
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.
...it seems much more sensible...
This is the "ridiculous munchkin ideas" thread, not the "sensible advice you've already heard" thread.
This could potentially be considered fraud.
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.
Excessive returns will possibly get you banned from Amazon for life, with no warning, as many have discovered.
Better to think of ways to not spend money than think of ways to keep on living relying on other peoples' money.
You don't get rich that way, though. Sure, you can accumulate a comfortable amount of low-grade wealth, but all the real games are played with other people's money. The only difference between B_For_Bandana's trick and the typical externalities exploited by your average high roller is the number of zeros involved in the figures.
It may no longer be fashionable to point people to "Politics is the Mind-Killer", but that was the best example of a good, solid, and avoidable dig at the other side that I've seen for quite some time. Mockery contributes nothing, especially in a thread where as far as I can tell no one's advocated the positions you're mocking. Downvoted.
So I've recently decided to change my real name from an oriental one to John Adams. I am not white.
There’s a significant amount of evidence that shows that
(1) Common names have better reception in many areas, especially publication and job interviews.
(2) White names do significantly better than non-white names
(3) Last names that begin with the early letters of the alphabet have a significant advantage over last names beginning with the latter letters of the alphabet.
Source :
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19020207 http://blog.simplejustice.us/files/66432-58232/SSQUKalistFinal.pdf http://ideas.repec.org/p/hhs/sunrpe/2006_0013.html http://www.nber.org/papers/w9873.pdf?new_window=1 http://www.nber.org/digest/sep03/w9873.html
Therefore if I were to use "John", one of the most common 'white' first names, along with Adams, a 'white' surname that also begins with the letter A, it should stand that I would be conferred a number of advantages.
Furthermore, I have very little attachment to my family heritage. Switching names doesn’t cost me anything beyond a minor inconvenience of having to do paperwork. For some people, changing your name may be extremely worthwhile, depend...
I once considered changing my name to Ben Abard but decided that the original Eliezer Yudkowsky sounded more like a scientist.
I've always been mildly annoyed that I don't have an eastern European last name. All the cool mathematicians seem to have eastern European last names.
Actually, most people will identify with a scientist's last name more than a first name - so pick a scientist's last name that sounds like a first name for your own first name, and then another last name that sounds like a last name for your last name.
I'll be Maxwell Tesla.
I have a Caribbean-American friend who's grateful his parents gave him a fairly white name for exactly this reason. I think having the same name as a famous historical figure would be bad for your google search results, though.
Being hard to Google can also be a plus.
Or he could adopt a middle name that would distinguish him when people really wanted to search for him.
Being hard to Google can also be a plus.
The biggest flaw in this idea is that almost nothing in your references applies to you! They pretty much cover only black and white names, not Oriental ones. You can't conclude that a white name benefits you because it would benefit a black person. Even in the Swedish study, a quick trip to Wikipedia shows that the number of foreign-born residents from east Asia in Sweden is a tiny percentage.
Furthermore, none of the studies you quote account for switching costs since they just compare people who already have the names, except for the Swedish one, but I would expect that the switching cost as a new immigrant is much less than for someone who has been living with his name for a while.
(2) White names do significantly better than non-white names
Not all white names are made equal. You want a name that's associated with high status in the country in which you live.
In Germany being named Kevin is a low status signal. The same is true for most US names. Lower class people in Germany are more likely to give their children the name of US celebrities than German high class people.
Definitely agree that changing your name is a good option to have on the table.
I'd note though that in some industries having a Google-unique name is king. It really depends what your "personal brand strategy" is. I remember reading an interview with a marketer who recommended people consider name changes. Her name was "Faith Popcorn". I read that single interview probably 5-10 years ago. It wasn't even a particularly interesting interview. I still remember her name, though.
I think it's probably advantageous to have one's name be subconsciously associated with high status people, but not to have it be consciously associated.
For instance, a name like "James" may have higher class associations than "Antwon," but naming a kid "Jimmy Carter Washington" is liable to raise the associations to a conscious level and provoke speculation about the motives of the parents (or other namer.)
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.
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?
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.
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).
Just tell people in such a way that only the kind of people you'd want to have higher status will pay attention.
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!
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.
I had the impression that the height/intelligence correlation was actually quite weak:
the correlation between height and intelligence is not that high. This association is probably not going to be intuitively visible to anyone, but rather only shows up in large data sets.
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2013/04/why-are-taller-people-more-intelligent/#.UZsQvIpDsqg
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.
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.
I wonder if there is a way to munchkin this cost
There sure is. As described in the blog:
... but if you're doing patents on your own, here's how to start off cheap. File a provisional patent in the US (the only country that counts) for $110, with a brief description in ordinary language. It lasts for a year, and you can file up to a year after you release your “invention” in a software product (if you even intend to do that). So, you have two years to find funding for the real patent, or just to abandon the provisional patent once your company is either stable and successful or stable and dead.
(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
You don’t care much if the patent office accepts your patent. What's important to you... is that it gets filed. You can honestly list "patent applications” on your CV ... It takes five to eight years for the patent to get finally approved [which is so long that no one much cares about the difference when reading a CV].
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.)
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'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.
I can't do a full pullup either. A couple of weeks ago I couldn't even really do a chin-up (though I used to be able to). I just did assisted / negatives, which for me means... Jump! Then lower yourself down as slowly as you can. And jump a little bit less every time until you can do it without using your legs at all.
And then once you can do it from standing level, you work up to doing it from a dead hang somehow. I'm hazy on the details there because I've never gotten that far myself.
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.
I find this incredibly fascinating. Especially the ability to save hours every day from not needing to eat. If the guy doesn't die after a year or so, I'm definitely trying this out.
It's not impressive as a medical experiment, but it's pretty impressive for actually-getting-something-done.
If it turns out that he can survive comfortably on his concoction plus highly irregular meals at restaurants, that's useful information. Just not as useful as the results of a more thorough experiment.
This is interesting. For years I've blended together various ingredients (mostly stuff like broccoli, lentils, sweet pepper, ricotta, canned tuna, olive oil, various grains and nuts such as flax, sesame, hazelnut, sunflower), balanced these for macro and micro-nutrients using cron-o-meter, further optimized along various axes such as cost, taste, ease of use, ease of preparation, packaging, cleaning up etc. Food is primarily something I do to feed myself in the end, and I dislike it when there's too much fluff.
I'd be more wary of mixing together purified/refined nutrients though. Just as licking iron bars won't provide you with your daily needs for iron (elemental iron isn't very soluble and your body wouldn't be able to assimilate it well), there's more and more evidence that whole plants and animal parts contain more than just the usual nutrients, and that this particular mix may be needed to stay in good health - and conversely that substituting multivitamins and refined macronutrients for normal food may run the risk of missing some essential, complex interactions/packaging that occurs in it and which changes the way your body assimilates it.
Now of course, many people eat junk food and still live to be 60-70 so there's some leeway. We'll only really know whether Soylent is healthy enough (like, for someone interested in life extension, and not just satisfied with a classical life span) if this experiment goes for decades, and if it's done using more people, controlled conditions, etc (in short, using Science).
Some people thrive for decades (including Stephen Hawking) tube fed with nutritionally complete enteral formulas. Semi-annual blood tests pick up any deficiencies, and supplements are added if needed. Several companies make "Soylent", the one I am familiar with is Abbott Nutrition.
If there's something there that isn't priced for sale to hospitals, or restricted in sale to hospitals, and has been formulated so as to be edible by people who are tired of real food, go ahead and post it. My understanding is that tube-feeding is not the same use-case as Soylent at all, with tube-fed material needing to be essentially predigested and correspondingly expensive or something along those lines, and no concern for edible taste for obvious reasons.
I've done some looking, but I haven't seen anything out there that looks like it's meant to be eaten, meant to replace food, and priced at an affordable level for sole consumption.
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.
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.
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 write fanfiction set in the Mass Effect universe. My work is probably "amateur" as I make no claims of being a writer. It's all just for fun for me.
I wouldn't try this technique personally, as I'm not interested in meeting people who I'm compatible with, but geographically isolated from. The odds that one of the people responding would be from the same city as me seem pretty slim.
What I can tell you about my traffic stats is that I get about a thousand unique views every time I post a new chapter. Of the people who add my story to their favorites or set an author alert for my work (so that they are emailed every time I post new content), the majority seem to be people identifying as women on their own profile pages. (My fanfiction includes a popular "ship" meaning that romance is an important focus in it.) I get anywhere from two to around six written replies to each chapter I post. The majority of people who write to me identify as men, however, while less women write to me, I would rank the average quality of correspondence higher among the women who do choose to write than the men. I've actually become very good friends with a woman who I met through fanfiction, but I've never met her in person as she lives in Germany and I in the States.
My mom has never read my story.
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.
FYI, this training is part of USAF basic training. With more yelling. I wouldn't call it a pleasant routine, but it's certainly effective when you do it for six hours straight and start to get an adrenaline surge when your alarm goes off.
That still persists 1.5 years later, so it may be a munchkin hack in itself.
I'd be interested in hearing more about your training experience; I'm sure the USAF and the like have discovered more than a few interesting behavioral hacks!
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.
That rather assumes you can live on 25% of your income.
For me 25% of my income would be far below the poverty line and the legal minimum wage. I couldn't live on that even if I moved back in with my parents.
Are most people here really so rich that they can follow this advice and take it in stride?
I disagree with your assumption that you need to be rich/making lots of money in order to save. It's not necesarily about being rich, it's also about spending less. People get very used to spending whatever it is they make. Lots of people live off $15k and manage to survive. Lots of people live of $100k and manage to wind up bankrupt. The trick is to not adjust your standard of living and expectations to be what you think you "deserve".
After getting a divorce a couple years ago, I got very used to living off of significantly less than the poverty line. After getting a "real" job, I've been making a concerted effort to not raise my standard of living TOO much. Despite making less than you (50% of my income would be below the poverty line), I still manage to only live off about half of what I make. Right now, the rest is going into paying off debts and student loans, but in about a year and a half those will be taken care of, and the rest can go into savings. (I may rebudget at that time and save less, if I feel like it would be a good idea to raise my standard of living again, then. However, I wouldn't have to.)
It's fascinating to read about people like http://earlyretirementextreme.com/ who choose frugality over work
Here is a second resource, the successor of Jacob, creator of ERE, Mr. Money Mustache. This website has the same concept, taken to the same extremes, though he has a more colloquial style. He proclaims to live a luxurious life on 8,000 a year a person (family of three). This includes taking multiple road trips with his family, eating organic foods and other such "luxuries".
What part of your current income do you need to live on?
[pollid:465]
Note: The idea about the last two options is that high-school and university students are not socially expected to live on their own income. So the last option is for those who are not expected to live on their own income, and the previous option is for those who are socially expected to live on their own income, but they can't.
By "current income" let's assume the average for a few months, not some exceptional income or a temporary loss of income that happened yesterday.
I don't mean to cut the party short, but living for years in a poor country is not as awesome as it sounds. What seems awesome instead is to go for poor countries for 6 to 8 months per year, and live with your parents or someone who loves you a lot in the other 4 months every year. I've met a Slovenian programmer who did that, knew 10 languages, worked in London for 4 months per year and seemed to have pretty much nailed the "maxing out on hedons" lifestyle.
Another historical case, Smokey Yunick, the car racer and mechanic:
As with most successful racers, Yunick was a master of the grey area straddling the rules. Perhaps his most famous exploit was his #13 1966 Chevrolet Chevelle, driven by Curtis Turner. The car was so much faster than the competition during testing that they were certain that cheating was involved; some sort of aerodynamic enhancement was strongly suspected, but the car's profile seemed to be entirely stock, as the rules required. It was eventually discovered that Yunick had lowered and modified the roof and windows and raised the floor (to lower the body) of the production car. Since then, NASCAR required each race car's roof, hood, and trunk to fit templates representing the production car's exact profile. Another Yunick improvisation was getting around the regulations specifying a maximum size for the fuel tank, by using 11-foot (3 meter) coils of 2-inch (5-centimeter) diameter tubing for the fuel line to add about 5 gallons (19 liters) to the car's fuel capacity. Once, NASCAR officials came up with a list of nine items for Yunick to fix before the car would be allowed on the track. The suspicious NASCAR officials had removed the tank for inspection. Yunick started the car with no gas tank and said "Better make it ten," and drove it back to the pits. He used a basketball in the fuel tank which could be inflated when the car's fuel capacity was checked and deflated for the race.
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 do...
This study is relevant:
Abstract: Human faces show marked sexual shape dimorphism, and this affects their attractiveness. Humans also show marked height dimorphism, which means that men typically view women’s faces from slightly above and women typically view men’s faces from slightly below. We tested the idea that this perspective difference may be the evolutionary origin of the face shape dimorphism by having males and females rate the masculinity/femininity and attractiveness of male and female faces that had been manipulated in pitch (forward or backward tilt), simulating viewing the face from slightly above or below. As predicted, tilting female faces upwards decreased their perceived femininity and attractiveness, whereas tilting them downwards increased their perceived femininity and attractiveness. Male faces tilted up were judged to be more masculine, and tilted down judged to be less masculine. This suggests that sexual selection may have embodied this viewpoint difference into the actual facial proportions of men and women.
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.
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.
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 expl...
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.
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.
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.
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?"
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.
As someone with a tulpa, I figure I should probably share my experiences. Vigil has been around since I was 11 or 12, so I can't effectively compare my abilities before and after he showed up.
He has dedicated himself to improving our rationality, and has been a substantial help in pointing out fallacies in my thinking. However, we're skeptical that this is anything a more traditional inner monologue wouldn't figure out. The biggest apparent benefit is that being a tulpa allows him a greater degree of mental flexibility than me, making it easier for him to point out and avoid motivated thinking. Unfortunately, we haven't found a way to test this.
I'm afraid he doesn't know any "tricks" like accessing subconscious thoughts or super math skills.
While Vigil has been around for over a decade, I only found out about the tulpa community very recently, so I know very little about it. I also don't know anything about creating them intentionally, he just showed up one day.
If you have any questions for me or him, we're happy to answer.
...just to be clear on this, you have a persistent hallucination who follows you around and offers you rationality advice and points out fallacies in your thinking?
If I ever go insane, I hope it's like this.
...just to be clear on this, you have a persistent hallucination who follows you around and offers you rationality advice and points out fallacies in your thinking?
This is strikingly similar to Epictetus' version of Stoic meditation whereby you imagine a sage to be following you around throughout the day and critiquing your thought patterns and motives while encouraging you towards greater virtue.
Related:
I mean, if 10 years from now, when you are doing something quick and dirty, you suddenly visualize that I am looking over your shoulders and say to yourself "Dijkstra would not have liked this", well, that would be enough immortality for me.
The hallucination doesn't have auditory or visual components, but does have a sense of presence component that varies in strength.
Tulpas, especially as construed in this subthread, remind me of daimones in Walter Jon Williams' Aristoi. I've always thought that having / being able to create such mental entities would be super-cool; but I do worry about detrimental effects on mental health of following the methods described in the tulpa community.
You are obligated by law to phrase those insights in the form "If X is Y, I don't want to be not-Y."
That's a good idea, thanks. Note that my host's posting has significant input from me, so this account is only likely to be used for disagreements and things addressed specifically to me.
I would think there should be a general warning against deliberately promoting the effects of dissociative identity disorder etc, without adequate medical supervision.
I really doubt that tulpas have much to do with DID, or with anything dangerous for that matter. Based on my admittedly anecdotal experience, a milder version of having them is at least somewhat common among writers and role-players, who say that they're able to talk to the fictional characters they've created. The people in question seem... well, as sane as you get when talking about strongly creative people. An even milder version, where the character you're writing or role-playing just takes a life of their own and acts in a completely unanticipated manner, but one that's consistent with their personality, is even more common, and I've personally experienced it many times. Once the character is well-formed enough, it just feels "wrong" to make them act in some particular manner that goes against their personality, and if you force them to do it anyway you'll feel bad and guilty afterwards.
I would presume that tulpas are nothing but our normal person-emulation circuitry acting somewhat more strongly than usual. You know those situations where you can guess what your friend would say in response to some comment, or when you feel guilty about doing something that somebody important to you would disapprove of? Same principle, quite probably.
This article seems relevant (if someone can find a less terrible pdf, I would appreciate it). Abstract:
The illusion of independent agency (IIS) occurs when a fictional character is experienced by the person who created it as having independent thoughts, words, and/or actions. Children often report this sort of independence in their descriptions of imaginary companions. This study investigated the extent to which adult writers experience IIA with the characters they create for their works of fiction. Fifty fiction writers were interviewed about the development of their characters and their memories for childhood imaginary companions. Ninety-two percent of the writers reported at least some experience of IIA. The writers who had published their work had more frequent and detailed reports of IIA, suggesting that the illusion could be related to expertise. As a group, the writers scored higher than population norms in empathy, dissociation, and memories for childhood imaginary companions.
The range of intensities reported by the writers seems to match up with the reports in r/Tulpas, so I think it's safe to say that it is the same phenomena, albeit achieved via slightly different me...
As someone who both successfully experimented with tulpa creation in his youth, and who has since developed various mental disorders (mostly neuroticisms involving power- and status-mediated social realities), I would strongly second this warning. Correlation isn't causation, of course, but at the very least I've learned to adjust my priors upwards regarding the idea that Crowley-style magickal experimentation can be psychologically damaging.
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.
I've always pretended to be in order to get whatever skill I've needed. I just call it "putting on hats". I learned to dance by pretending to be a dancer, I learned to sing by pretending to be a singer. When I teach, I pretend to be a teacher, and when I lead I pretend to be a leader (these last two actually came a lot easier to me when I was teaching hooping than now when I'm teaching rationality stuffs, and I haven't really sat down to figure out why. I probably should though, because I am significantly better at when I can pretend to be it. And I highly value being better at these specific skills right now.)
I had always thought everyone did this, but now I see I might be generalizing from one example.
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.
but I've never heard of a daemon tempting anyone.
RSS reader/other notification of new procrastination available.
Since we're talking about Tulpas, I feel obligated to mention that I have one. In case anyone wants anecdata.
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 des...
I can't believe that this is something people talk about. I've had a group of people in my head for years, complete with the mindscape the reddit FAQ talks about. I just thought I was a little bit crazy; it's nice to see that there's a name for it.
I can't imagine having to deal with just one though. I started with four, which seemed like a good idea when I was eleven, and I found that distracting enough. Having only one sounds like being locked in a small room with only one companion -- I'd rather be in solitary. I kept creating more regardless, and I finally ended up with sixteen (many of those only half-formed, to be fair), before I figured out how to get them to talk amongst themselves and leave me alone. Most are still there (a few seem to have disappeared), I just stay out of that room.
My advice would be to avoid doing this at all, but if you do, create at least two, and give them a nice room (or set of rooms) to stay in with a defined exit. You'll thank me later.
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 archetyp...
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.
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
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.
1% fees are way too high. Vanguard has some good funds with fees as low as 0.1%.
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.
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.
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!
Behaving low-status has the advantage of avoiding status fights in your tribe... by giving up. At the proper moment in the ancient environment it could save your life.
That does not necessarily mean the cost-benefit analysis would have the same outcome today.
Man, this is that thing I was talking about earlier when someone takes a colloquial phrase that sounds like a universal quantifier and interprets it as literally a universal quantifier.
Sprinkle an emetic (a vomit-inducing drug) into foods that you want to stop eating, such as chocolate. It is well-known that nausea causes a long-lasting aversion to the food preceding it. (For instance, this is a problem for chemotherapy patients - the drug therapy causes nausea, which they then associate with food.)
I haven't tried any of this, but I'd be very surprised if this wasn't an easy, long-term solution to the problem of people wanting to eat food that they don't want to want to eat.
Maybe this could even be extended to non-food addictions, such as video games or mindless internet browsing. One person I know quit smoking cold turkey this way (by throwing up after smoking a cigarette, not with an emetic).
Bulimia studies might be a good place to start when evaluating the effects of such a program!
Single anecdata point - I quit smoking by deliberately causing myself to gag and think of vomiting whenever I saw or thought about cigarettes. It was very effective.
Don't do anything like that unless you know something about how to undo it.
The theories about which foods are unhealthy keep changing, and you might find out that you personally need something which has be called unhealthy.
Don't do anything like that unless you know something about how to undo it.
Urging caution sounds wise, but I think it's exactly wrong here. One's goal in giving advice should be to alter others' behavior in beneficial ways; people will probably tend to take fewer risks with emetics than is optimal (because they're risk-averse, and vomiting is unpleasant), so your advice is in the wrong direction. Caution (higher significance criterion) is the act of increasing missed opportunities (false negatives) so that you take less wrong actions (false positives); this is a tradeoff.
This is analogous to how, for instance, the FDA kills more people by delaying medications' approval than it saves by ensuring medication is safe before approving it.
All over this thread, people keep urging caution where my judgment is that they should be urging the exact opposite.
I would personally recommend against training your body out of finding particular foods pleasurable. Instead, I would recommend exploring alternative food combinations that satiate the same craving.
I.e., expand your palette rather than restrict it.
Also, mindfulness meditation can be useful here. I have a reasonable amount of anecdotal evidence (p ~= 0.7) that a lot of overeating problems center around focussing on the oral aspects of digestion rather than the gastrointestinal.
Remember that your stomach has enough neurons to make an entire second brain - a small one, but a brain nonetheless. Like any neural network, it needs training, and focus and attention are the best way to access it.
Sometime, sit down with a healthy meal with a reasonable amount of nuanced flavors (my particular favorite would be a vegetable stir-fry). Sit down and begin eating, and pay VERY close attention to your body. Don't just pay attention to tip-of-tongue flavors; focus on the feeling of chewing the food, focus on how it feels going down your esophagus, and ESPECIALLY focus on the feeling of the food hitting your stomach. After every bite, see if you can actually detect the different neurological chang...
Tried. Don't expect my results to be generalizable.
Once again, I have no reason to believe that same would happen to anyone.
In any case: Not many good medicines induce vomit. Most people who try it, use water, specially warm water, with mustard. This has all sorts of complications because mustard has a taste and a smell etc... nevertheless, no one in the pharmacy or wikipedia or friends who read pharmapapers had any other indication that would beat mustard water.
I wanted to stop liking chocolate. I waited for a while, so the organism would be sure it was not from lunch, and at dinner time I eat a lot of chocolate, and drank some mustard water. I kept looking at, smelling and thinking about chocolate, and would taste chocolate instantaneously after quickly swallowing the mustard water with my nose held.
It was obvious something bad was going on inside me, less than 10 seconds after the mustard. But my body is not a natural regurgitator. Long story short, I failed to even regurgitate. And now I can say that the weirdest meal I have ever had was composed of 120 grams of white chocolate, 100 grams of lindt milk chocolate, 100 grams of yellow mustard, 1,5 liter of water, and 50 grams of extra strong seedy mustard.
After that I started thinking about fighting for Monsieur Mangetout Guinness title for eating metals and glasses...
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.
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.
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:
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.)
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...
(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.
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.
Excess body fat and obesity are an immune response to gram-negative gut bacteria, not a metabolic problem. Fix it by taking oral polymyxin, or a comparable antibiotic.
So they've established very firmly that gut bacteria are sufficient to cause excess body fat, but whether that's the main source in the general human population is unknown.
Quack quack goes the duck. I wouldn't use such an experimental treatment even on your pet rat.
(It does sound vaguely promising, like thousands of other candidate substances in translational medicine that didn't pan out.)
Edit: The paper is not from the journal Nature, it is instead from a different journal which is also published by the same company. The paper was published in The ISME Journal, with an impact factor of 7.4, compared to Nature's impact factor of 31! So next time, please do your research.
The paper is open access, but your link is blocked unless entered directly (they probably don't accept any non-site values for the HTTP referer field). This link should work.
Also, before you start taking antibiotics, here's the relevant part from that abstract:
...The obesity-inducing capacity of this human-derived endotoxin producer in gnotobiotic mi
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.
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
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 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 i...
You can probably get a quick but decent estimate of where you are on that "comparison-tendency" scale...
I am enjoying this sentence fragment immensely.
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...
probably unethical anyway
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.
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.
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...
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.
Of course the aliens couldn't possibly really look like that. A holo, only an overoptimized holo. That was a lesson everyone (every human?) learned before puberty, not to let reality seem diminished by fiction. As the proverb went, It's bad enough comparing yourself to Isaac Newton without comparing yourself to Kimball Kinnison.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 eve...
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.
Just wanted to say that I've always wanted to take cold showers but never managed to pull it off because my body refuses to step into the cold shower stream. Somehow, until I read your post, it never occurred to me that I could start the shower at a nice warm temperature, step in, and then turn it down over the course of a few seconds. I've been doing this successfully for a few days and feeling great. Thanks!
(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.
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...
Maybe when plenty of people have used tulpas for decades
Never happen if no-one tries. I agree that it looks dangerous, but this is the ridiculous munchkin ideas thread, not the boring advice or low-hanging fruit threads.
Yesterday, upon the stair,
I met a man who wasn’t there
He wasn’t there again today
I wish, I wish he’d go away...
This is a well known one, but I only recently got around to actually doing it, so I suspect that there are others that also haven't done it yet.
Learn to touch type. The kind of person you probably are if you are reading Less Wrong spends a remarkable fraction of the day typing at a computer. As such, even a small increase in typing speed and skill can save you huge amount of time and effort. And it is not at all hard to learn. This investment of a small amount of time and energy to learn to touch type pays back huge dividends in time saved.
One other point: If you are going to learn to touch type, there is no point whatsoever to doing so in the Qwerty keyboard layout. It is just as easy or easier to learn a better layout (like Dvorak or Colemak), which also will give you a bigger boost to your typing speed and efficiency.
The kind of person you probably are if you are reading Less Wrong spends a remarkable fraction of the day typing at a computer. As such, even a small increase in typing speed and skill can save you huge amount of time and effort.
This is a highly dubious claim. I (occupations: software engineer, student (CS major)) spend a remarkable fraction of the day at a computer... but do I spend most of that typing? I do not. I'm doing more typing right now, writing this comment, than I do in a much larger period of doing actual work. Even if you only look at the time I spend actively coding (rather than reading documentation / literature, thinking about a problem, debugging, tinkering, etc.) that's still not mostly typing.
Furthermore, citation needed on the claim that touch-typing, as opposed to the way I type now, will save a "huge amount of time and effort".
It is just as easy or easier to learn a better layout (like Dvorak or Colemak), which also will give you a bigger boost to your typing speed and efficiency.
So very citation needed on this one. (Counter-citation: http://www.utdallas.edu/~liebowit/keys1.html.)
Also not very ridiculous. Seems like it would be more at home in the boring advice repository.
The keyboard is irrelevant if you don't look at the keys, it's the keyboard layout that's relevant, and that's a software setting. I was very confused the first time I used a computer whose keyboard layout had been changed to Dvorak.
But there is something of a problem if you share a computer with someone who uses Qwerty, I guess. Switching back and forth might get annoying (although maybe you can set an AutoHotKey to do it?).
My basic sanity check for any sort of experiment purporting to show a new mechanism responsible for obesity, is "under this mechanism, does it make sense for lots of people to be obese now in America, but hardly anyone a hundred years ago in America, or today in countries like Japan where people have high access to resources but eat less?"
If a mechanism for obesity leaves you confused by the patterns of obesity that occur in the real world, then it's probably better not to afford it much likelihood.
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.
The Scientific 7-Minute Workout
In 12 exercises deploying only body weight, a chair and a wall, it fulfills the latest mandates for high-intensity effort, which essentially combines a long run and a visit to the weight room into about seven minutes of steady discomfort — all of it based on science.
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.
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.
The most basic is that as far as I can tell, I had never been hit on while wearing glasses, and that started happening regularly.
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.
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.
Tulpas are free!
created through intense prolonged visualization/practice (about an hour a day for two months).
That is not free.
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.
Right, so that implies that some of the benefits from being taller might actually be benefits from increased intelligence, and so merely increasing height might not confer those benefits. It also implies that you could make people think you're smarter by making yourself taller.
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.
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 :)
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 instinct is that this is stupid, but I have a feeling I may be mindkilled on this. Someone should test this; create sockpuppets with male and female names to see how common and critical replies are.
Would normally have downvoted, incidentally, but not going to in case I'm just siezing upon excuses to lower the status of perceived political opponents.
I think of myself as having solid medium status at LW. I'm quite pleased with it, but don't feel a drive for more status.
I think of myself as having solid medium status at LW. I'm quite pleased with it, but don't feel a drive for more status.
I think you may be underestimating a little. It is easy to neglect just how many lower status people there are... because low status people just don't seem as salient and visible.
IIRC, people used to think that the Sun was about a median-luminosity star, but actually it's more like 85th percentile; but less bright stars are harder to see. (And my parents don't think of themselves as particularly wealthy people, because they tend to compare themselves to the people you see on TV, rather than the people you see in the streets.)
I don't get that any of them identify themselves as higher status than they are. Certainly Anna, Alicorn, and Julia have very high community status.
For humans, social status is much more than just an aggregate estimate of competence/reliability/trustworthiness. It motivates us, distorts our thinking, plays a key role in our politics, etc. To take just one example, I suspect that the main reason it's so hard for most people to change their mind is because they don't know how to do it in a way that preserves their status. For many people and social groups, admitting you're wrong means losing face, and most people don't like to lose face, so they resist publicly changing their mind.
(This is another reason why status differences may be counterproductive for rational communities... they could create an incentive for high-status people to not change their mind about things, since they have something to lose. The evidence may very well justify thinking one thing one week, then something else the next week, then something else the third week. But if you're changing your mind about critical issues every week, it won't be long before typical humans take you less seriously. Which is unfortunate.)
Also, this doesn't sound like your true objection to me. It doesn't take very many more bits of information to transfer 3 estimates on ea...
You know what it's called when you hear voices giving you "advice"? Paranoid schizophrenia. Outright visual hallucinations?
Sounds like the noncentral fallacy. That you are somewhat in control, and that the tulpa will leave you alone (at least temporarily) if asked, seem like relevant differences from the more central cases of mental illness.
A most excellent suggestion! I find that a good high-quality sand from an exotic beach is just the thing. It can also be used to replace the sugar in pastry, though the resulting dental bills are quite high.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
If you're given a cookie that's hard to give up, but you're worried about calories.
You do not deserve the cookie, but can earn 1/2 of it by throwing 1/2 of it away.
Works every time.
You do not deserve the cookie, but can earn 1/2 of it by throwing 1/2 of it away.
So then you've received your 1/2 of a cookie, but since you're worried about calories, you can earn half of that (1/4 of a full cookie) by throwing half of it away ...
That's the way the cookie crumbles. (Also not that different from money being taxed repeatedly (taxed as income then VAT then taxed as income ... repeat ad paupertam.)
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.
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 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
Yes, but the operative question here isn't whether it's mental illness, it's whether it's beneficial. Similarity to harmful mental illnesses is a reason to be really careful (having a very low prior probability of anything that fits the "mental illness" category being a good thing), but it's not a knockdown argument.
If we accept psychology's rule that a mental trait is only an illness if it interferes with your life (meaning moderate to large negative effect on a person's life, as I understand it), then something being a mental illness is a knockdown argument that it is not beneficial. But in that case, you have to prove that the thing has a negative affect on the person's life before you can know that is a mental illness. (See also http://lesswrong.com/lw/nf/the_parable_of_hemlock/.)
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.
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.)
I think every generic thing in the world is available on eBay, IME at about half the price.
If this is true, there's a huge amount of money to be made buying things on eBay and selling them on Amazon.
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.
You could for example apply your argument to say "well, is the voice threatening to kill you only if you don't study for your test? If so, isn't the net effect beneficial, and as such it's not really a mental illness? If you like being motivated by your voices, you don't suffer from schizophrenia, that's only for people who dislike their voices."
If you're going to define schizophrenia as voices that are bad for the person, then that would mean that it's only for people who dislike their voices (and are not deluded about whether the voices are ...
There is a distinct absence of Eliezer Yudkowsky/Michael Vassar slashfic on the internet. Let's keep it that way.
By mentioning it, you have only made it more likely. Are you sure you want what you're saying, or do you only wish to denote it while connoting the opposite?
Get moderately good at painting. Post your work online under a pseudonym. Fake your own death, or rather the death of your pseudonymous self, in a tragic and dramatic fashion. Sell your work at an elevated price.
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, t...
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.
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 techni...
This isn't a clever way to accomplish something. This is a way of willfully misinterpreting definitions until you can claim success without changing reality.
I don't want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve immortality through not dying.
—Woody Allen
Oh, it's very munchkiny, and a very valid way to become immortal is to change yourself into something which is easy to make immortal. You just lose everything about yourself that death would have taken.
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...).
Came here to say this, after viewing parent comment -- though the point I was meaning to make was quite different.
Take it from someone who thought about this for longer: if you do it when young (and young's the best time for your body to do it), and don't start off rich, and have the sense to do it somewhere nice like Germany where the costs are 100 000 euros for 4 inches (honestly now, you're gambling your fucking legs), and your professional life could need about that sum to get a kickstart -- all of which is a rather more plausible scenario than best-ca...
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.
I just meant that paying $300/month for driveway parking would seem crazy to the large set of people used to paying $300/month or less for nice housing inside in various other parts of the world.
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.
Even if you wouldn't do them, it's no use to put unethical ideas at a place where other people might apply them.
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.
It is 100% of the RDA of all micronutrients according to the label. I'm not at all sure that the soylent guy hasn't found something similar and is just adding it to an oil/whey/oats concoction.
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.)
$2 a day is "extreme poverty".
The poverty line in 2013 for a single person (one-person household) living in the continental 48 states is $11,490 per year. (Source: http://www.familiesusa.org/resources/tools-for-advocates/guides/federal-poverty-guidelines.html)
For DanArmak's statement to be true (assuming he lives in the continental U.S.), he would have to be earning less than $47,960 per year. That's not even remotely unlikely. I earn less than that, for instance.
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.
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; ma...
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.
and I thought LW was against spock-rationality
This strikes me as an extremely bad idea. Regardless of your stance on whether or not humor is irrational (this is to some extent an open question), the social benefits of humor are so obvious and significant that this seems extremely unlikely to be +EV even assuming there aren't any undesirable side effects.
There may perhaps be benefits in deconditioning certain types of humor (being a wiseass, for instance), but even then I would be very, very careful and read up a lot before trying anything.
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.
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. ;)
I always advise people to pre-commit to not re-dosing, no matter whether the first hit feels weak or strong.
Given that people often fail at precommiting, I'm reading this post and the grandparent as "stay far away from this stuff; it's dangerous."
In my position, I should experiment with very few things that might be unsafe over the course of my total lifetime. This will probably not be one of them, unless I see very impressive results from elsewhere.
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.
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.
Yes, and the IRS would see both transactions under your tax identification number (for an individual, typically the social security number). The IRS is going to have an opinion about what that transaction means for your IRA account, and if your tax return is not consistent with that opinion, the IRS will expect an explanation.
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.
I am not a tax lawyer, but I suspect the IRS would treat the put-option sale-thingie as a deposit into your Roth IRA ("substance over form" is a recognized tax law doctrine, at least when it benefits the IRS). Likewise, reversing the process likely would be classified as withdrawing from the IRA. So, the general rules for deposits and withdraws from the IRA would likely apply. If I understand your suggestion correctly, the general rules would prohibit most of what you are trying to do.
In short, I don't think your plan does what you think it doe...
But even toning it down a little, if anything really were unreasonably effective, wouldn't almost everyone be doing it already?
Having a AGI that goes FOOM and fulfills all of your orders is comparable to having a circle of infinitive wish spells. The fact that nobody yet has such an AGI doesn't mean that it's impossible.
Money just beats barter on pretty much every axis you can imagine. It is massively better than the alternative of a no-money society.
Societies without money aren't barter societies but gift giving societies. Money doesn't beat gift giving on every axis.
It would be if I was saying we should ignore the similarity to mental illness altogether. I'm just saying it's different enough from typical cases to warrant closer examination.
Hallucinations are a highly salient symptom of schizophrenia, but are neither necessary nor sufficient. I am confident that, like a lot of religious beliefs, this kind of deliberate self-deception would be unlikely to contribute to psychosis.
Excess body fat and obesity are an immune response to gram-negative gut bacteria, not a metabolic problem.
Fascinating finding and worth exploring further, but it isn't a dichotomy. "Not" is not implied when "and" would work just as well.
Work at a desk facing your boss. It does wonders keeping you productive. My boss happens to make this possible by bringing his work into the lab for several hours a day.
Citation needed.
I would imagine it's a lot less voluntary if you ever plan on returning to the US.
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.
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.
it definitely worked in at least one happily married case
so did "find god's match for you"
if we're looking at all the successful cases, but none of the unsuccessful ones, of course we're going to get positive results. also, as positive results go, "at least one" success is hardly reassuring
There are two problems with self-investment. First, there's coupling or frictional losses, by which I mean that X amount of money invested in yourself does not directly translate to X*(1+epsilon) money next year, even probabilistically. You have to put in work. Money invested in the stock market doesn't go through a stage in which you use your new skill; it remains, as it were, money all through the period, so there's no loss from transforming from one form of capital to another. Second, the proposed purpose was to free yourself from having to work, throu...
To me a scam involves some kind of deception. I don't see anyone being deceived, exactly. It's not as if the munchkins were lying about whether their credit cards gave frequent flier miles.
(For what it's worth from what I can tell Mormons don't even formally make the sort of ontological commitments that are typical of (at-least-somewhat-reflective) mainstream Christianity (like, 'Jesus is my savior and I should have expected Him to show up in all logically possible worlds and all possible minds should be rounded-up-to-infinitely compelled by His story and the seemingly contingent features of Jesus [Jesus's teachings] are actually universal features of Logos and so it would be an obvious epistemic sin to disregard Him [them]') and so it's more plausible that it would be possible to go along with Mormonism in something like good faith, even if only jokingly or subtly-ironically or something.)
What if your posts didn't show your username, but just a post ID, and you yourself could see your karma, but no-one else could? There might be problems with PMs, but I'm sure there are programmers here who could find a solution to that.
Your suggestion would indeed eliminate most status and reputation influences from the site. And this would be a bad thing.
If people know there are methods for them to attain high status, and pursuing high status using these methods can have positive side effects (e.g. starting companies that make products people want and generate consumer surplus, or writing blog posts that lots of people benefit from reading), that can be a good thing.
Only in situations where the cost of failure is low. One of the larger failure modes I've experienced in status games is that the difference between success and failure is a narrow and often random margin, and yet the status payoffs are insa...
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...
Really? From what I've read, The folks who claim that this "tulpa" stuff is possible to do also say that you can create "servitors", which are not conscious and are basically portions of your mind that can perform mental tasks without distracting you.
I dunno...I really don't understand why no one in this community has bothered to test this sort of thing. It's fairly easy to make a test of divided attention to see if someone has successfully created a partially separate entity which can operate autonomously.
It's not fully general; it's an instance of a general argument that things are unlikely to be optimal in the absence of strong optimization pressures. Which is true.
Of course, that doesn't mean you should fine-tune humour; we'd need to look at the costs and benefits of doing that versus whatever else we could be doing.
Actually, the DSM does have an exception for "culturally accepted" or "non-bizarre" delusions. It's pretty subjective and I imagine in practice the exceptions granted are mostly religious in nature, but there's definitely a level of acceptance past which the DSM wouldn't consider having a tulpa to be a disorder at all.
Furthermore, hallucinations are neither necessary or sufficient for a diagnosis of schizophrenia. Disorganized thought, "word salad", and flat affect are just as important, and a major disruption to the patient's life must also be demonstrated.
Note: Some people find KCl to taste terrible while others find it pretty similar to normal NaCl.
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 ...
Having an idea is rather different from entertaining it, at least as I (and perhaps Luke as well) understand the connotations. I can certainly conceive of all manner of monstrous plans, but I do not share them because after assessing their morality, I decline to pursue them further. I do not look into how to implement them, because I do not want to implement them.
I suspect that Luke had a similar thought, acknowledging that while he may be able to think about a baby-powered reactor, for example, he does not want to draw up the plans for it, either for actual use or for the purpose of discussion here.
Have you seen an instance of this happening to someone who did not return multiple large purchases? I am worried about this happening, but in every instance I read about, the person who got banned had returned multiple TV's or computers, not small items. However, the ebook return policy has only been in place for around a year, so it might not show up.
With ebook returns, it seems like they only disallow you from refunding ebooks in the future, but do not ban your account
There's literally less of your brain under your volition.
Well, yeah. The primary worry among tulpa creators is that it might get pissed at you and follow you around the house making faces.
This tulpa stuff resembles mental illness.
And what, pray tell, is the salient feature of mental illness that causes us to avoid it? Because I don't think it's the fact that we refer to them with the collection of syllables "men-tal-il-nes".
...Now, you wanna show off your "rationality" according to local rules of showing off your rationality, by r
WARNING: POTENTIAL MEMETIC HAZARD
I've kinda been avoiding this due to the potential correlation between my magickal experimentation in my teens/twenties and my later-life mental health difficulties, but I feel like people are wandering all over the place already, and I'd at least like to provide a few guideposts.
Yes, there are processes. Or at least, there are various things that are roughly like processes, although very few of them are formalized (if you want formalization, look to Crowley). Rather than provide yet another anecdotal account, let me lay out some of the observations I made during my own experimentation. My explicit goal when experimenting was to attempt to map various wacky "occult" or "pseudoscientific" theories to a modern understanding of neuroscience, and thus explain away as much of the Woo as possible. My hope was that what was left would provide a reasonable guide to "hacking my wetware".
When you're doing occult procedures, what (I think, @p > 0.7) you're essentially doing is performing code injection attacks on your own brain. Note that while the brain is a neural network rather than a serial von Neumann-type (or Turing-typ
On average Niger women have 7 children and presumably raise them on 2*GDP per capita income.
AFAIK, “per capita” means ‘divided by the whole population’, not just the adult one. (Am I missing something?)
Aside: how do you make links here that include parentheses in them?
[Like this](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_%28PPP%29_per_capita) (28 and 29 being the ASCII values for ( and ) respectively in hexadecimal).
Sorry, I misinterpreted your assertion that "Tulpas don't seem to work for cognitive muchkining" as either speaking from experience or by reading about the subject. That surprised me, given that many mental techniques, direct or indirect, do indeed measurably improve "cognitive efficiency". In retrospect, I phrased my question poorly.
I'm assuming that a rationalist who made tulpas would be aware that they weren't really separate people (since a lot of people in the tulpa community say they don't think they're separate people, being able to see them probably doesn't require thinking they're separate from yourself), so it wouldn't require having false beliefs or beliefs in beliefs in the way that religion would.
If adopting a religion really is the instrumentally best course of action... why not? But for a consequentialist who values truth for its own sake, or would be hindered by being confused about their beliefs, religion actually wouldn't be a net benefit.
(There often is no need for an actual causal model to strongly believe in an effect, correlation is sufficient. Some of the most commonly used pharmaceutical substances had/still have an unknown causal mechanism for their effect. Still, I do have one in this case:)
You are teaching your brain to create false sensory inputs, and to assign agency to those false inputs where non is there.
Once you've broken down those barriers and overcome your brain's inside-outside classifier - training which may be in part innate and in part established in your earliest infancy ("If I feel this, then there is something touching my left hand") - there is no reason the "advice" / interaction cannot turn harmful or malicious, that the voices cannot become threatening.
I find it plausible that the sort of people who can train themselves to actually see imaginary people (probably a minority even in the tulpa community) already had a predisposition towards schizophrenia, and have the bad fortune to trigger it themselves. Or that late-onset schizophrenia individuals mislabel themselves and enter the tulpa community. What's the harm:
Even if beneficial at first, there is no easy treatment ...
Waste of time because the "tulpa" - your hallucination - has access to the same data repository you use, and doesn't run on a different frontal cortex.
This also sounds like an argument against IFS. I don't think it holds water. Accessing the same data as you do but using a different algorithm to process it seems valuable. (This is under the assumption that tulpas work at all.)
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.
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.
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.
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 so...
so the solution to having to wear glasses all the time is to wear different glasses all the time?
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.
You need to actually induce gagging, to the point where your eyes water a little. I accept no responsibility if someone offers you a smoke and you vomit on them.
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.
It all depends on the context. If I just finished a massive weight lifting workout after a day of eating extremely low-carb, I'm going to need something to replace my glycogen stores. Even with that said, dark chocolate is still a high-fat food. According to the label the brand I'm eating right now contains 86% of my "recommended daily intake" of fat & only 6% of carbohydrates. Further, it provides one of the best fats for you -- the saturated fat Stearic acid.
1) is the pronounciation of Gee equal to that of the letter "G", or the beggining of the word "djibouti" or "jeez"? Do you see a difference between the three sounds?
I'm not a native English speaker, but I believe the three examples you gave are pronounced the same.
2)Kalero is easier to pronounce than caleiro right?
Their about the same.
What connotations does Kalero give?
Kalero simply looks weird since unlike Caleiro it's not recognizably from any linguistic tradition. Also for names people haven't seen before C's g...
That's one interpretation, but I certainly wouldn't have used the phrasing he did if I meant to convey that meaning.
When think "A name for children," I think of variations on ordinary names which people usually grow out of, like "Timmy."
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 a...
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).
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).
Maxwell Edison's probably better known....
I expect ialdabaoth wants to be thought of as a scientist, not a sociopath.
I think the question is what we mean by mid-level. Brazil is a mid-level economy in the G20, but the G20 is the extreme tail of the distribution of country-economies. With a wider reference class, Brazil is a pretty big economy.
Hopefully to help you calibrate: I perceive you as Brazil -ish (wedrifid is more like UK, I'm more like New Zealand or Iran). And every lurker is Haiti. Because of the distribution of status on LW is probably Bell-curve shaped, there are a lot more Haitis than Brazils. (Because of lower bounds, status in a community is more like half a bell curve than the whole thing - someone who knows statistics probably could find a lot of errors in my terminology).
Is karma the same thing as status?
No.
I don't understand why you are asking that question. It does not seem to make much sense as a reply to the grandparent.
If you're interested in experimenting...
I am absolutely fascinated, although given the lack of effect that any sort of meditation, guided visualisation, or community ritual has ever had on me, I doubt I would get anywhere. On the other hand, not being engaged in saving the world and its future, I don't have quite as much at risk as Eliezer.
A MEMETIC HAZARD warning at the top might be appropriate, as is requested for basilisk discussion.
I had guessed it was the other way round, given that my 30-day karma is 379 according to the green bubbles at the top and 408 in the top contributors list, and it was higher yesterday, and I recently paid the toll to comment on a downvoted thread a couple of times.
Interesting. Are you noticeably faster on Dvorak? Do you feel learning Dvorak slowed down your Qwerty typing?
The only thing that annoys me about the Kinesis option I outlined above is that the Kinesis hardware doesn't allow you to do Programmer Dvorak type things like inverting numbers and symbols--you can only move keys around, you can't mess with their shift behavior.
Personally, I've pretty much always typed with Qwerty--I think I'm pretty fast with it and I don't want to risk losing that (hard to know 'cause I make more mistakes whenever I think about...
Yeah, that looks to me like an outdoor fitness installation, not a playground. Those aren't too hard to find, though, at least around where I live; most high schools or colleges of any size have one, and I've also seen a few near practice fields or parks popular with runners.
Back in the Seventies there was a fad for public fitness trails with a lot of the same equipment, which might do in a pinch. Those will be a lot more spread out, though, and a lot of them are in pretty bad shape four decades on.
If you don't have access to a gym, a playground may also suffice. Although I suspect steroids mays also be involved in this case (it gets particularly insane around the 3 minute mark).
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 (thi...
lol no one here said "obtain some Bitcoin"
https://www.statmuse.com/money/ask/bitcoin+price+may+15+2013
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.
You assume that Kiva pays nothing for paypal money transfer or the credit card.
It's plausible that Kiva pays that sum from the interest of the loans. It might also be that Kiva has indeed a deal with Paypal that allows them to receive money for free. If they have a deal somewhere in that deal it could be a clause that this doesn't count as a purchase.
You might trigger some fraud detection system if you try to do that with significant amounts of money. Maybe you even signed somewhere a clause that allows your bank, paypal or kiva to sue you for fraud.
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
t...
They ought to be at least somewhat concerned that they have less brain for their own walking around the house.
Ah, right. I suppose that would depend on the exact mechanisms, involved, yeah.
Are children who have imaginary friends found to have subnormal cognitive development?
...You don't know? It's loss in "utility". When you have an unknown item which, out of the items that you know of, most closely resembles a mushroom consumption of which had very huge negative utility, the expected utility of consuming the unknown toxic mushroom like item is
I don't think anyone should want to stop eating dark chocolate, but white & milk chocolate are fairly unhealthy.
It's fair game according to the definition at the beginning of the OP, but when gaming human-made real-world rules, one should be aware that if it works, and it's against the intention of the rules, the rules are likely to be changed to prevent it. There's a certain amount of anti-inductiveness in the activity. See the running battle between tax legislators and tax accountants, which has recently come to public attention in the UK with the news that the UK operations of Starbucks, Google, and Apple apparently make hardly any profit to be taxed on.
I wouldn't. A golden-mean effect where names which are too rare hurt and names which are too common also hurt is one of the first and most obvious hypotheses which come to mind, and I would be extremely surprised if no researcher had checked for this and this suggestion either debunked or embraced with qualifications.
Usually I simmer it until there's no flavor left in the feet and they're not worth eating. Occasionally I add soy sauce, ginger, and spices, shorten the cooking time, and eat a few. The texture is very interesting but all the little bones make it take a lot of effort so I may not bother again.
But it requires active, exclusive use of time to go to a library, loan out a book, and bring it back (and additional time to return it), whereas I can do whatever while the book is en route.
If you're getting $90 glasses then to spend $2500 over ten years you need to go through nearly 30 pairs. That sounds high.
I don't remember most of those details off hand, but I'll try to ask him and look for any that might be in some of our email correspondences (most of the details were in phone conversations, though). I know that his work schedule is pretty intense; I think one of the main reasons we don't communicate more is because it's hard to determine when opportunities will arise without us both knowing to look in advance. He still has time for recreation and exercise, from the sounds of it, but I can't get more specific at the moment.
I think he has an approximate tim...
One benefit that I am aware of is in one's thinking. Gods and heroes are at times still targets to aim for. Fresh new ideas spring from the dust of the old. Superstition examined is, with the right teacher, superstition avoided. The teaching of many different points of view helps understand other people's values. Illustrating a difficult problem with a myth or two assisted me in mathematics and in examining how I view right and wrong (my current obsession with diversity could be blamed on the sheer variety of myths I absorbed).
The second benefit, and one may consistently find even in the absence of good teachers and a clear goal is that it simply provides a much-needed break in between lessons useful for work.
Edit; misread this. Even regular playgrounds are good for workouts though, plenty don't have pullup bars, but monkeybars can perform the same function. I use a playground for my own workouts.
The idea is to have a moderate challenge so that you get improvement rather than strain or giving up.
Anyway, creating tulpas is presumably much cheaper than raising an actual child, for anyone.
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?).
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.
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/commen...
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-...
If you're trying to extinguish an eating habit alter your sense of taste for the period in which it's a problem. The cheap and easy way is with mouthwash. If regular mouthwash doesn't last long enough chlorhexidine mouthwash (marketed as "clinical strength") will alter taste for around an hour or two. This may be useful for intermittent fasting and reduction in caffeine consumption.
2. Use the card to lend money through Kiva.org.
I don't know if people do this in real life (or I would have chosen a different thread), but one obstacle why they would not is lack of infrastructure. Once you get a truckload of toxic waste, what to do with it?.. Also, I hope to have some numbers for one species (actually, for a fraction of its ecoforms) in a limited range of pollutants in a specific geographic area, under specific land use conditions, collaborating with chemists who will hopefully find the problem interesting enough, AND I live in Ukraine. I won't have time for it until after defending ...
I've been looking for a way to do this automatically. Whenever I start a video, I have to manually change the speed to 2x; sometimes I forget and end up wasting large amounts of time. I've been looking for a chrome extension or something, but I can't find one.
Has anyone had any luck with automating this?
Build an autonomous self-replicating robot. Not a RepRap -- those take hours of careful human labor to build. Design an assembly robot to put together parts: something that can pick up a screw, place it in a hole, and screw it in place. This is a hard problem (some current PhD students do similar projects for their research) but the required tools all exist, including ROS and existing robot arm control routines. Some challenging coding is required to execute the assembly steps in order, and some challenging systems engineering is needed to make sure the ro...
If you're a fast reader, you can return an ebook from Amazon within 7 days of purchase really frickin easily. You can buy and return most popular books with a few clicks, without getting off your butt. Sure, libraries are great, but you have to wait if they don't have your book, you have to transport yourself there and back, and many of them are closed when inspiration strikes at midnight and you realize you want to stay up all night reading some book you literally just heard about but suddenly must have RIGHT NOW (or maybe that's just me). It's way bett...
If you're a fast reader, you can return an ebook from Amazon within 7 days of purchase really frickin easily. You can buy and return most popular books with a few clicks, without getting off your butt.
(Sigh.) It's bad enough that you've chosen to defect; it's downright evil to try to popularize the notion of defecting. The more people do this sort of thing, the more likely it is that Amazon changes their policies, affecting those of us who are co-operating (i.e., not exploiting the policy).
If you must obtain ebooks by extralegal means, there are such things as torrents and ebook sites, where you will find far more books than you will ever be able to read, and where you will only be committing copyright infringement, instead of infringement, wire fraud, theft of resources, and violation of that stupid US anti-hacking law that Aaron Swartz was being prosecuted under. (Oh, and let's not forget the part where you just came pretty close to admitting that you've committed those crimes already.)
Advocating law-breaking on LW for ethical reasons might be one thing; advocating it for reasons of petty selfishness is quite another.
[Edited to add: this comment is not about protecting Amazon; it's about 1) not promoting illegal activities on LW, and 2) it not being a good idea to get into a habit of defecting on agreements (whether social/informal or legal/formal because of self-serving rationalizations like, "they can afford it" or "I can get away with it".]
Thank you for the references. Whilst switching may indeed be relatively common among people who have had their tulpas for a long while, the actual numbers are still small - 44 according to a recent census .
Ah, so merging is some sort of forming a gestalt personality? I've no evidence to offer, only stuff I've read that I find the authors somewhat questionable sources.
Also: for what it's worth, leg lengthening surgery makes you a worse athlete; your post-surgery muscles don't work quite right with your longer legs, so you can't do this to become a better basketball player.
@the other dave, those are excellent for singing and, when actively used, social situations, but there are other techniques which are more passive. The Khargyraa, Tuvan, Diaphragm Breathing, Nasal Passage Opening, and some more general speech techniques including speaking slowly, pausing often, knowing when to gesture, all of these contribute more effectively to your impression than the techniques you mention, which fade as soon as you get caught in the moment.
Capital prices are more about relative competitiveness than absolute competitiveness. If every hundred dollars makes $4 instead of $5 next year because of closed tax loopholes, and your investment now makes $400 a year instead of $500 because of those same closed tax loopholes, then your investment hasn't changed price.
Depending on the PR costs to support these tax loopholes, Google may even be better off closing them - so long as the PR costs are expensive enough, and the tax loopholes benefit everyone equally. The whole industry makes less money, the government gets more money, and Google saves on PR costs, providing a relative advantage and increasing their stock price.
Perhaps HFCS in particular encourages LPS bacteria. Or perhaps LPS bacteria particularly stimulates thirst for sweet liquids. It's impossible to know without (preferably both of) historical LPS and a controlled experiment. Also, your link does not establish a causal link between sugary drink consumption and obesity, merely that they've been correlated for a few decades.
Thus spake Eliezer:
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.