While I see the intuitive appeal of this from a status standpoint, I don't understand why one would want to be other-optimized by someone who, by definition, doesn't understand enough about one's situation to know whether the given advice matches the stated criteria for applicability or not.
I will admit that my reaction could easily be the result of an ugh field, though. Ugh, people who think they know how I should be living my life.
It really may not be for everybody.
Some people -- I'm one of them -- do want to be "other-optimized" in the sense that we want to know "how we're doing," generally, by the standards of other people, and we're willing to try meeting an external set of challenge goals. Maybe it's an age thing; I am not old enough that I think I have my life figured out and that I know what "works for me." A lot of things are still in flux, so I'd be willing to learn entirely new skills and add new identities. That seems to be common for peopl...
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"?