- Become insensitive to exposure to cold water by, for example, frequently taking cold showers or ice baths. This apparently helps with weight-loss as well. I've done this with immense success, and even some real-world application (hiking to a waterfall with my parents, and being able to swim without getting cold). After you've practised this, you will literally feel like some weird heat is being generated from someplace inside you when are exposed to cold water, and not feel cold at all. See here.
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.
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.
Apologies for the wasted time spent reading and replying to this post. Please disregard it.
I've been feeling non-awesome for a long time. I don't know if anyone else here feels the same way, but I'm going to assume that at least a few people do. I want to correct this horrible deficiency.
We already have the LW meetups in a lot of places, monthly in some places and weekly in others. I've gone to a few, and they're interesting and I get to meet a lot of very smart people (and get intimidated by them)... but mostly all we've done is talk and sometimes go and eat at a restaurant. I want more than this!
We already talk, we need an action-based meetup. I want to propose another kind of meetup, the Insufficiently Awesome meetup. It should aim to make us good at baseline things like fitness, social skills, strategy, and reflexes, and to make us very good at specialized awesome things like master-level chess/go/shogi, public speaking, various sports, dancing, making music, making art.
I think this meetup should be daily, though not everyone would want to go every day. Nonetheless, we should have something happening every day that we're not spending talking. The goal shouldn't be just to be fit in different situations, but to instead become totally awesome.
Is there anyone else that feels the same? If so, what things do you think we need to learn for the baseline, and what things should we get very good at?