Most of my time is focused on finishing a dissertation in mathematics education (read: psychology with a focus on mathematical cognition). I have my data collected and large chunks of it analyzed, and my results are pretty clear right now. My next step is to put together a presentation on this material for an informal dissertation committee meeting so I can get their feedback on my methodology and progress. I started working on this dissertation in part because I wanted to fix the way math is taught, although in retrospect this was probably not the most efficient way to do it. That said, at this stage it's definitely worth my time to finish it, and with it I'll have some resources (both the Ph.D. and a professorship) with which to work on fixing education in general, not just math.
I'm digging into locations for regular LW meetups in San Diego, CA. I don't know if there's enough interest this far south; there might just be two of us. But I know a number of people down here who would be quite interested in rationality training, I'm sure. Right now I have a few promising places available and just need to follow up on a few emails to get the ball rolling. (One of those is to Anna, so I'm posting this in part to undermine my inclination to get to this in the vague land of "later".)
I'm training my intuitions for physics with the book Thinking Physics. After this I intent to read Feynman's Lectures on Physics, and from there I might start looking through junior-level textbooks. This emerged due to it being pointed out at a recent LW meetup that my understanding for why certain Aikido moves work is actually utter balderdash, which means that I've been terribly overconfident in my intuitions about physics for many years. Also, I've always loved physics, so it's just a pleasure to work on this. Finally, Epstein's book is helping me to work on developing the habit of sticking with a difficult problem until I come up with a good answer and have beaten on that answer against all the weak points I can find; this is making me go through the book pretty slowly, but I'm gaining much more from doing this than I would by zipping through. (As an aside, if someone knows of a book that's comparable to Epstein's but for chemistry, please let me know! And if there's one for math, I'd like to take a look at it to see how they do it.)
I'm working on mastering lucid dreaming. There are a wide number of reasons for this and I'd rather not dig into all of them at the moment. The short version is that dreams seem to be a major gateway for accessing parts of the mind that are very difficult to safely access otherwise. Furthermore, the process of developing lucid dreaming skills helps with day-to-day skills like concentration. Finally, lucid dreaming is just a tremendous amount of fun!
I'm working my way through the Sequences. I'm somewhere past the halfway point, I think. I've read the four core ones and am around halfway through the quantum physics sequence.
I've a question, by the way. You mention:
Focus on projects that you have recently made progress on, not projects that you're thinking about doing but haven't started, those are for a different thread.
Which thread is that?
probably not the most efficient way to do it.
It sounds like you have a more efficient way in mind. If so, could you summarize it?
lucid dreaming
Fun stuff. I started doing this sometime between 8 and 12 years old after reading about it in a book. On two or three occasions I've remained conscious all the way through a nap.
This is the third What Are You Working On? thread. Click on the 'waywo' tag to see previous threads. I'm going to do these every two months instead of every month from now on. So here's the question:
What are you working on?
Here are some guidelines