Saved a couple hundred dollars by not protecting myself from identity theft. Initially, I was going to go the safe route, but then I looked up identity theft risks. Turns out I only had .35% chance of having my identity stolen, and the costs would likely be under $1000.
I've started drinking a large amount of aspartame pop. From the research I have done it seems like it has doesn't any (negative) health effects. I don't normally drink enough liquid and it encourages me to do that and I normally eat and drink too many sweet things and now I tend to just do this instead. I also encourages me to take my medication and it's really cheap and fun.
- Optimized some part of a common routine or cached behavior
When introducing myself to a new field of study I would typically read Wikipedia and work through The Complete Idiot's Guide or listen to the lectures by The Teaching Company.
Lately, I have been purchasing those laminated study sheets (usually only 4-6 pages) from the bookstore (such as the ones made by Kaplan or SparkNotes) and transforming them into flash cards to enter into my SRS (in sentence sized chunks with close-delete of key words). Subjectively, they seem to give me about the same (or only slightly less) quality introduction to the topic as the aforementioned methods, but only cost about $4.
This is the public group instrumental rationality diary for the week of October 29th. It's a place to record and chat about it if you have done, or are actively doing, things like:
Or anything else interesting which you want to share, so that other people can think about it, and perhaps be inspired to take action themselves. Try to include enough details so that everyone can use each other's experiences to learn about what tends to work out, and what doesn't tend to work out.
Thanks to everyone who contributes!
Previous diary; archive of prior diaries.