Well, take a look at one of the concrete proposals that have been made, say memorizing the Gettysburg address. Is this a good or a bad idea? I don't know. Personally I have an explicit policy of delegating that kind of long-term memory to machines; if I were going to try any kind of memory exercise, I'd go for something like dual N-back that tries to train working memory. Does that mean memorizing the Gettysburg address is a bad suggestion? Well, I don't know. It wasn't presented with any accompanying rationale. For all I know, maybe there's actually a very good reason why at least some people might want to thus train long-term memory, that the person who suggested it is seeing and I'm not. It would be easier to assess proposals if they were accompanied by discussion of how they are intended to meet some objective.
Using N-Back is a good measure, actually. What do you think that would come under? Memory? What do you think would be level 1? Dual 1-back? and level 2 would be dual 2-back?
I just got this random idea that people who want to become better at life could benefit from a common scale of "leveling". No, I don't mean vague Lesswrongey things like "changing your mind". I mean a set of concrete criteria like "you qualify for level 2 if you can do 5 pull-ups, have solved 30 Project Euler problems, and did 10 cold approaches". Obviously there would be separate ladders for different character classes, but not too many. Also obviously, my example was a bit too high for level 2. So I guess I really want to ask some meta questions here:
1) Do you think agreeing on a common leveling scale would be a good thing for a substantial subset of LW users? Would you feel good about leveling up and telling other people about it on LW?
2) Is there some good way to determine leveling criteria that are neither too high nor too low? Maybe make an intermediate scale of "experience points"?