D_Malik comments on Insufficiently Awesome - Less Wrong Discussion
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Oh MAN, I had a big long list here somewhere...
That said, learn to not care what other people think when it's not for your long-term benefit. Much of social interaction is mental masturbation, it feels nice and conforming so you do it. From HP and the MOR:
Learn to pick locks. If you want to seem awesome, bring padlocks with you and practise this in public :P
So anyway, that's my idea-dump. Tsuyoku naritai.
This list is itself a small feat of awesome. Well done.
Not so useless. I've gotten a surprising amount of mileage out of a Boy Scout-level knowledge of ropework; it's one of those skills that doesn't come up very often but makes your life vastly easier when it does. Tying a tent down in high winds, for example, is made much simpler if you're familiar with the bowline or one of its variations.
Tying objects on top of or in cars for transport is a pretty practical skill.
This is great. It should be a top-level post itself.
My "possible unacknowledged major risk" detector triggered on this paragraph. In particular, "you will literally feel like some weird heat is being generated" pattern matches against how I've seen hypothermia described. While I don't know enough about it to say for sure if this is necessarily bad, I will say that the required due diligence for this is substantial, and the potential upside doesn't seem very compelling.
The rest of the list looks like mostly good ideas, though.
Two or three minutes under cold (or at least colder) is an awesome morning wakeup IME. You can run hot afterwards if you like.
Seriously, you[1] are not going to induce hypothermia in five or ten minutes of cold water. That's just silly. Hypothermia is not a significant risk of ten minutes' swimming in a non-heated pool, for example.
(If you're doing the New Year's Day Alcatraz Swim, of course, you may care to make sure you're warmed properly afterwards.)
[1] in the general case
The effect is probably mostly Mammalian diving reflex, which is triggered by colder-than-21°C water contacting the face, with other factors (such as showering your whole body) much less relevant.
Seems to have a lot more effect when it's a shower, not just cold water on my face.
No, I buy it. This is basically just reinventing the fire or tummo meditation. Like biofeedback in general, it's not easy to learn to control your temperature (and what OP and I do may just be a kind of vasodilation and not genuinely generating extra heat like the studied monks), but it does seem doable.
Just curious what the benefit is.
I was thinking it might generally help you to suppress your emotions, which I think is the key to success in many areas. Watching a horror movie is a conflict between your caveman-brain screaming at you to run and your rational brain telling you not to. If you can listen to reason rather than instinct on this, perhaps you will be better able to do so when faced with other situations. For example, if you are in a religious community your instinct tells you to conform, whereas your reason (hopefully) tells you the religion is false.
I also think it might help with general rationality - it's not good to have massive holes in your mental map where there are things you're too scared to think about.
Ironically, ever since I've started watching horror movies, I haven't had a single nightmare, whereas I used to have them rather often.
I'm not sure that this is the best way to do this. Feeling revulsion about things seems like a useful survival trait.
Controlling your emotions is probably better-taught by participating in an adult-literacy program, or voice-only technical support
Edit - please disregard this post
It may be a useful survival trait in some sense, but it's not useful in others. Often I run into situations where people lose their heads over something that is not a real issue.
"EEWW!" "Oh, the bucket is full of maggots? OK, let's go dump it in the woods." "Oh, I couldn't possibly do that! EEWW!"
Or people will freak out over some feces or urine, and stand around discussing how disgusting it is rather than just cleaning it up.
I imagine doctors have similar opinions about normal people and blood (not a reflex I've had much luck with controlling consciously).
More importantly, this is a kind of mindfulness meditation, which generalizes - if you can step back from maggots or feces and ask yourself 'is this really something to be perturbed by?', then surely you can do the same for many other issues. (I have read that sometimes Buddhists or Hindus would meditate in front of rotting corpses, but that's probably taking it a bit too far.)
I'm not planning to lose my sense of revulsion any time soon, only to become able to ignore/suppress emotions when they're not useful, like when deciding on a charity to sponsor or whether to eat revolting celery or non-revolting cupcakes.
Horror movies are entertaining, and if you have cardio equipment you can easily do 2 hours of exercise painlessly while watching one. If you already use spaced repetition, it might take at most 10 hours total over the course of your lifetime to get a hundred shock pictures and rate the due ones daily for how much you flinched when you saw them.
The first option in particular seems orders of magnitude more efficient than spending hours answering boring tech-support calls for low pay.
Oh, nono. I didn't mean for low pay, I meant for free. Sorry about that. A senior citizen computer program would also work well for the same reasons (immediate feedback about communication)
Working or volunteering at a rest home might be even better. Controlling revulsion might be useful, but controlling frustration and helplessness may be even more useful.
Edit - please disregard this post
Just the image of the OP doing situps while watching ISIS propaganda is so very Patrick Bateman in American Psycho...
Seth Roberts found some negative results from taking cold showers, including weight gain and slower brain function.
I started taking showers ending in a few minutes of cold water in December. Haven't stopped doing them, the full body stimulation kick I get from them is great fun. Haven't noticed much changes otherwise, but getting acclimatized to cold water after a week or so is a neat trick.
I'm doing it every time I take a shower now. There might be something wrong with my brain.
And Tim Ferriss does well from it. YMMV. It's definitely one on the list of hacks to try.
(I turn my shower cold occasionally. I often get the results D_Malik describes. That said, sometimes I'm just really not in the mood to turn my shower cold. Therefore, it may be something I should train myself to do even when I don't feel like it.)
Does anyone know of a place to just buy one of those belts that tells you which way north is? I've looked and can't find such a thing.
Am therefore probably going to just make one, are there other things that it'd be useful to sense in a similar way? The first thing I think of is just the time, but maybe there's something better?
You mean the North Paw?
I'd be interested to hear from other LessWrongians if anyone has bought this and if it lives up to the description (and also if this model produces a faint noise constantly audible to others nearby, like the test belt); I'm the sort of person who measures everything in dead African children so $149... I'm a bit reserved about even if it is exactly as awesome as the article implied.
On the other hand, the "glasses that turn everything upside" interest me somewhat; my perspective on that is rather odd- I'm wondering how that would interact with my mental maps of places. Specifically because I'm a massive geography buff and have an absurdly detailed mental map of the whole world, which I've noticed has a specific north=up direction. Obviously those glasses probably won't help shake the built-in direction (if I just get used to them), but I'd still be interested to see what they do.