The biggest problem here seems to be that a lot of these things would be pretty annoying even if you had well beyond the skills necessary to accomplish them.
Self-control and Social seem like the worst offenders here, especially insofar as it's harder to dismiss them as something you already know you can do (I already know I can run a mile or what passages I have memorized, but I don't count how many times per month I meet with friends, or how many times per month I work two hours straight).
It also threatens to conflate how skilled you are at things with how much you're willing to do something just to tick off a box on a worksheet. Imagine someone arranging four meetups, then calling back and saying "Actually, I'm not interested in meeting up at all, I just asked you to meet up to prove I could do it, for this online worksheet thing. Anyway, I'll talk to you next time I have some real plans, and sorry about the inconvenience."
(if you don't believe anyone could possibly be that pathetic, consider that it was the first thought that came into my mind when I saw that requirement.)
This is even more true of self-control. Anyone could work two hours straight to save their own life, most people could work two hours straight if there's a big project due the next day, but I don't know how many people could work two hours straight because a leveling worksheet told them to.
It also threatens to conflate how skilled you are at things with how much you're willing to do something just to tick off a box on a worksheet.
For the skill of self control, is there a difference between these two things? :-)
You're right, I did a terrible job of trying to verbalize the reasons behind my intuition that the self-control requirement is too vague. Let me try again, starting by talking about the difference between requirements where you have to estimate something, versus requirements where you have to perform something.
For example, I have no problem with the "run a mile" requirement. I don't care enough about "leveling" to go out and run a mile right now just to prove I can, but I don't have to - I ran several miles yesterday for non-leveling related reasons, so I know I could do it if I wanted to. The same is true of most of the others: from past experience, I already have probabilities > 80% I could do memory, finance, and creativity; I have a similarly high probability that I couldn't bake pancakes without gaining new knowledge, and I'm not sure about the strength and programming ones but it would be very easy to find out.
The self-control requirement is different. Could I do it if my life were at stake? I'm near-100% sure I could. Would I do it for the sake of this leveling game? Empirically, no. But that only puts it in the same category as running, which I also w...
This is more practical sounding than I was expecting it to be. I think it'd be best to have seperate skill tracks (i.e. level 1 Strength, level 1 Social, etc). So people who don't feel the need to memorize a passage don't need to.
At the same time, you DO want to encourage diversity, so maybe "To become a level 1 Human, bring four separate skills up to rank 1 in the space of a month."
What mostly concerns me, though, is this. Relevant line:
"I begin to feel like I've accomplished my goals. It's like I think that adulthood is something that can be earned like a trophy in one monumental burst of effort and then admired and coveted for the rest of one's life. "
These are ALL too high for level 1 (as a rough estimation they seem to me more like level 3).
Level 1 ought have been something that most people would have few gaps in, so that it would motivate them to fill in those few gaps. And once they'd filled those gaps, and taken pride in completing Level 1, and have little "Level 1 human" merit badges to show off, then they'd find encouragement in proceeding to Level 2.
Creativity Level 1 should be writing a short 100 word story -- there are a number of 100-word ficlet communities, so then these people would extra reward by posting those stories to such comunities. Or they're small enough that we could post such stories to a dedicated thread. Memory Level 1 should have that same 100-word barrier. Or perhaps just "memorize 10 phone-numbers". Cooking should be as easy a cooking task as you can make it: the boiling of an egg, perhaps.
I like the idea of levels for particular skills, but the idea of general levels doesn't appeal to me. One comment:
Memory: memorize and recite a passage of your choosing, at least 250 words long, without making any mistakes.
I use Anki a lot. I enjoy memorizing useful things. Memorizing a passage is of really little use to me and sounds mind-numbing.
http://www.purplemath.com/modules/ordering.htm - this is probably a useful reference for math problems. Although Level 1 might start with Arithmetic.
I'd also point out that your choice for physical basically requires access to a gym and knowledge of how to safely handle weights, which makes it (IMO) a really bad metric - I'd suggest something like "Hundred Pushups" and it's parent programs, or possibly a set of alternate tracks there. (My concern is primarily "requires a gym", which, no, seriously, not everyone has access to one of those, and even fewer people consider it worthwhile to spend money on)
"Running" a mile ought also properly be defined. Does a 16 minute mile count? I've generally seen a 10 minute mile as the slowest that's considered properly running, rather than just jogging, but that's "person who has been practising routinely for a few weeks."
It might also be a good idea to have a rough metric of how difficult a thing ought to be - is Level 1 "an average person could do this without practice"?
Last, I'll throw in my two cents that the memory requirement struck me as rather steep until I realised I have memorised "Still Alive", at ~275 words, without even trying. So there's an easy cheat mode for most people, I'd guess :) (I suck at memorising lyrics, but my friends break in to it often enough that it's worthwhile.)
This sounds a lot like the Scouting merit system, in a good way. I learned more life skills from Scouts then I ever did from public education.
For the math omission, why not use the practice lessons from Khan Academy? Something like, be able to do everything up to exponents.
I think it should be a "do a certain number of the below" style thing, to account for different skill sets in people. For example, I have close to no programming experience, and there are others who have no abilities in writing or memorization.
For chess, there are programs online that have computers of various difficulty levels, that would be an easy way to judge chess ability. But, this would be another example of specialized skill sets; I know some people who are extremely intelligent but have no chess ability whatsoever, and they shouldn't be held down to a low level solely due to lack of ability in this one area.
Negotiation: ask a minor favor of somebody, and obtain it. (Examples: borrow a friend's Kindle for a day, get someone to drive you somewhere, etc.)
The list has some glaring omissions, like math or chess, because I don't yet know of a crisp enough way to test those skills. Ideas are welcome!
Go is a much better game than chess and lends itself much better to measure progress since it already has a grading scale. Gnugo: http://www.gnu.org/s/gnugo/gnugo.html is said to play around 7-5kyu on a 9x9 board so on level 1 you should be able to always beat it with a 6 stone handycap.
I fear that the level requirements look kind of random.
I agree that we need to start from something, and sooner rather than later. But i strongly feel the need to have requirements based on science and rationality. For example the ExRx tables are a good start, but passing a scale there means different things to different people, i'd rather have a unified scale based on bodyweight and sex. A possible solution might be to take the world records (which appear to average out at around 3,5x bodyweight regardless of sex) and have that value be the highest level....
One other thought: It would probably be useful to provide resources for people who are interested but don't know how. For instance, I'd recommend "Learn Python The Hard Way" for anyone who has never done programming before, as I've had three friends with zero experience manage to get decently in to it without issue :)
I'm finally level one! ...though I had to fake the buy vs. rent calculation, because a real one didn't come up.
I'm concerned that people with no training might hurt themselves attempting to squat, deadlift, or power clean on their own.
Maybe we can just call it "fitness" instead of strength & endurance, and give people tracks or classes they can choose to pursue?
See http://nerdfitness.com/blog/2010/05/10/real-life-role-playing-what-is-your-profession/ for more on this suggestion.
Unlike levelling up in a game, where once you accumulate the xp or whatever, you've got that level and magically gain enhanced abilities, in real life levels are those abilities. To be at level 1 as described in the OP has to mean not just passing all those tests once, but to be able to call on all of those abilities at any time -- the ability being proven by actually calling on them from time to time.
The requirements seem partially too high and the third rule is simply silly. Why is strength so much more unimportant than memorising 250 words? 250 words is too much. Strength is very well defined in your link as "minimum strength required to live a comfortable life". Endurance seems a bit high and what is defined as "running"? It would be better to define a certain time to complete a certain distance to be more precise. 1 mile seems a bit much though. Finance is a bit too high. Creativity is way too much, start by writing limericks or...
A few years ago I went through a phase of buying and reading "Man Skills" books. There are an awful lot of these floating around, on the premise that all sorts of traditionally male-domain skills (putting up shelves, bleeding radiators, carrying out fireman's lifts, etc.) are conspcuously absent in an army of foppish errant manchildren milling around society in their twenties and early thirties.
Gender politics aside (most of the skills in question seem pretty unisex in their usefulness), I do wonder if there's some sort of common "completen...
I think this a good idea in general, but I see some problems in the specific.
First, the list seems sort of arbitrary. For example, why "write 500 words of fiction" rather than "paint a simple picture" (I'm not much of an artist, but I'm sure someone else could make that more specific -- "use four watercolor colors to paint a picture of an x" or something) or "create a simple song"?. Similarly, why cooking rather than, say "learn how to fold a fitted sheet" for household skills? I think it would be bett...
Memory: memorize and recite a passage of your choosing, at least 250 words long, without making any mistakes.
That seems overly high. I could probably do it, but it would be way more difficult than I would expect from Level 1. Why not start by memorizing a haiku or a 4 line poem?
Cooking: make pancakes.
Why not start with something even simpler? Boil rice. Boil an egg. Make a hot-pocket.
Advice: It's easier to memorize poetry or song lyrics than prose.
The difficulty level of the "memory" test strikes me as somewhat harder than the others. 250 words is this long - I think that's a more substantial effort than the others, relative to my current "level". (Consider this feedback not critique - this is how it comes across to one particular LWer, not necessarily typical.)
"A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects." -- Robert A. Heinlein, Time Enough for Love
This post is a followup to Leveling IRL. Thanks to SarahC, taryneast, Benquo, AdeleneDawner and MixedNuts, we have an outline of level 1. At this point I feel it's more productive to post it as-is than discuss it further:
The list has some glaring omissions, like math or chess, because I don't yet know of a crisp enough way to test those skills. Ideas are welcome! Also it seems very likely that some items on the list are wildly miscalibrated, some of them will turn out to be too hard for a beginner, and others will be too easy for anyone with a pulse. I'll be happy to hear about such miscalibrated requirements from the people who achieved them or at least tried :-)
And here's what I think the rules should look like:
Personally, I'm going to try to make the level, but already know that some tasks will be difficult. I hope it's the same way for you.