From my old table of contents

Goals of your lesswrong group – As a guided/workthrough exercise in deciding why the group exists and what it should do.  Help people work out what they want out of it (do people know)? setting goals, doing something particularly interesting or routine, having fun, changing your mind, being activists in the world around you.  Whatever the reasons you care about, work them out and move towards them.  Nothing particularly groundbreaking in the process here.  Sit down with the group with pens and paper, maybe run a resolve cycle, maybe talk about ideas and settle on a few, then decide how to carry them out.  Relevant links: Sydney meetup,  group resources (estimate 2hrs to write)

Goals interrogation + Goal levels – Goal interrogation is about asking <is this thing I want to do actually a goal of mine> and <is my current plan the best way to achieve that>, goal levels are something out of Sydney Lesswrong that help you have mutual long term goals and supporting short term goal.  There are 3 main levels, Dream, Year, Daily (or approximate) you want dream goals like going to the moon, you want yearly goals like getting another year further in your degree and you want daily goals like studying today that contribute to the upper level goals.  Any time you are feeling lost you can look at the guide you set out for yourself and use it to direct you. (3hrs)

How to human – A zero to human guide. A guide for basic functionality of a humanoid system. Something of a conglomeration of maslow, mental health, so you feel like shit and system thinking.  Am I conscious?Am I breathing? Am I bleeding or injured (major or minor)? Am I falling or otherwise in danger and about to cause the earlier questions to return false?  Do I know where I am?  Am I safe?  Do I need to relieve myself (or other bodily functions, i.e. itchy)?  Have I had enough water? sleep? food?  Is my mind altered (alcohol or other drugs)?  Am I stuck with sensory input I can't control (noise, smells, things touching me)?  Am I too hot or too cold?  Is my environment too hot or too cold?  Or unstable?  Am I with people or alone? Is this okay?  Am I clean (showered, teeth, other personal cleaning rituals)?  Have I had some sunlight and fresh air in the past few days?  Have I had too much sunlight or wind in the past few days?  Do I feel stressed?  Okay?  Happy?  Worried?  Suspicious?  Scared? Was I doing something?  What am I doing?  do I want to be doing something else?  Am I being watched (is that okay?)?  Have I interacted with humans in the past 24 hours?  Have I had alone time in the past 24 hours?  Do I have any existing conditions I can run a check on - i.e. depression?  Are my valuables secure?  Are the people I care about safe?  (4hrs)

List of common strategies for getting shit done – things like scheduling/allocating time, pomodoros, committing to things externally, complice, beeminder, other trackers. (4hrs)

List of superpowers and kryptonites – when asking the question “what are my superpowers?” and “what are my kryptonites?”. Knowledge is power; working with your powers and working out how to avoid your kryptonites is a method to improve yourself.  What are you really good at, and what do you absolutely suck at and would be better delegating to other people.  The more you know about yourself, the more you can do the right thing by your powers or weaknesses and save yourself troubles.

List of effective behaviours – small life-improving habits that add together to make awesomeness from nothing. And how to pick them up.  Short list: toothbrush in the shower, scales in front of the  fridge, healthy food in the most accessible position in the fridge, make the unhealthy stuff a little more inacessible, keep some clocks fast - i.e. the clock in your car (so you get there early),  prepare for expected barriers ahead of time (i.e. packing the gym bag and leaving it at the door), and more.

Stress prevention checklist – feeling off? You want to have already outsourced the hard work for “things I should check on about myself” to your past self. Make it easier for future you. Especially in the times that you might be vulnerable.  Generate a list of things that you want to check are working correctly.  i.e. did I drink today?  Did I do my regular exercise?  Did I take my medication?  Have I run late today?  Do I have my work under control?

Make it easier for future you. Especially in the times that you might be vulnerable. – as its own post in curtailing bad habits that you can expect to happen when you are compromised.  inspired by candy-bar moments and turning them into carrot-moments or other more productive things.  This applies beyond diet, and might involve turning TV-hour into book-hour (for other tasks you want to do instead of tasks you automatically do)

A p=np approach to learning – Sometimes you have to learn things the long way; but sometimes there is a short cut. Where you could say, “I wish someone had just taken me on the easy path early on”. It’s not a perfect idea; but start looking for the shortcuts where you might be saying “I wish someone had told me sooner”. Of course the answer is, “but I probably wouldn’t have listened anyway” which is something that can be worked on as well. (2hrs)

Rationalists guide to dating – Attraction. Relationships. Doing things with a known preference. Don’t like unintelligent people? Don’t try to date them. Think first; then act - and iteratively experiment; an exercise in thinking hard about things before trying trial-and-error on the world. Think about places where you might meet the kinds of people you want to meet, then use strategies that go there instead of strategies that flop in the general direction of progress.  (half written)

Training inherent powers (weights, temperatures, smells, estimation powers) – practice makes perfect right? Imagine if you knew the temperature always, the weight of things by lifting them, the composition of foods by tasting them, the distance between things without measuring. How can we train these, how can we improve.  Probably not inherently useful to life, but fun to train your system 1! (2hrs)

Strike to the heart of the question. The strongest one; not the one you want to defeat – Steelman not Strawman. Don’t ask “how do I win at the question”; ask, “am I giving the best answer to the best question I can give”.  More poetic than anything else - this post would enumerate the feelings of victory and what not to feel victorious about, as well as trying to feel what it's like to be on the other side of the discussion to yourself, frustratingly trying to get a point across while a point is being flung at yourself. (2hrs)

How to approach a new problem – similar to the “How to solve X” post.  But considerations for working backwards from a wicked problem, as well as trying “The least bad solution I know of”, Murphy-jitsu, and known solutions to similar problems.  Step 0. I notice I am approaching a problem.

Turning Stimming into a flourish – For autists, to make a presentability out of a flaw.

How to manage time – estimating the length of future tasks (and more), covered in notch system, and do tasks in a different order.  But presented on it's own.

Spices – Adventures in sensory experience land.  I ran an event of spice-smelling/guessing for a group of 30 people.  I wrote several documents in the process about spices and how to run the event.  I want to publish these.  As an exercise - it's a fun game of guess-the-spice.

Wing it VS Plan – All of the what, why, who, and what you should do of the two.  Some people seem to be the kind of person who is always just winging it.  In contrast, some people make ridiculously complicated plans that work.  Most of us are probably somewhere in the middle.  I suggest that the more of a planner you can be the better because you can always fall back on winging it, and you probably will.  But if you don't have a plan and are already winging it - you can't fall back on the other option.  This concept came to me while playing ingress, which encourages you to plan your actions before you make them.

On-stage bias – The changes we make when we go onto a stage include extra makeup to adjust for the bright lights, and speaking louder to adjust for the audience which is far away. When we consider the rest of our lives, maybe we want to appear specifically X (i.e, confident, friendly) so we should change ourselves to suit the natural skews in how we present based on the "stage" we are appearing on.  appear as the person you want to appear as, not the person you naturally appear as.

Creating a workspace – considerations when thinking about a “place” of work, including desk, screen, surrounding distractions, and basically any factors that come into it.  Similar to how the very long list of sleep maintenance suggestions covers environmental factors in your sleep environment but for a workspace.

Posts added to the list since then

Doing a cost|benefit analysis - This is something we rely on when enumerating the options and choices ahead of us, but something I have never explicitly looked into.  Some costs that can get overlooked include: Time, Money, Energy, Emotions, Space, Clutter, Distraction/Attention, Memory, Side effects, and probably more.  I'd like to see a How to X guide for CBA. (wikipedia)

Extinction learning at home - A cross between intermittent reward (the worst kind of addiction), and what we know about extinguishing it.  Then applying that to "convincing" yourself to extinguish bad habits by experiential learning.  Uses the CFAR internal Double Crux technique, precommit yourself to a challenge, for example - "If I scroll through 20 facebook posts in a row and they are all not worth my time, I will be convinced that I should spend less time on facebook because it's not worth my time"  Adjust 20 to whatever position your double crux believes to be true, then run a test and iterate.  You have to genuinely agree with the premise before running the test.  This can work for a number of committed habits which you want to extinguish.  (new idea as at the writing of this post)

or

A Starting Point for Defense against Flexible Dark Artists and Circumstances

In On Seeking a Shortening of the Way the assertion “Maybe we're not geniuses because we don't bother paying attention to ordinary things” caught my eye. Certainly! I said. Obviously if we were able to pay the appropriate amount of attention to every occurrence so as to gain enough data to update our models in an optimal way, we would rapidly increase our overall ability to model the world and increase our probability of insights at the level currently considered ‘genius.’

                And then I remembered that I can’t really do that, on account of having crappy models of what is actually important, and thinking that i can't improve those models quickly. Whoops! I, like so many others, fail to know how much attention to pay to ordinary things so as to become a genius. C’est la vie. Fortunately the lesson here was not the factuality of the statement, which is high, but a reminder that you could probably gain benefits from paying more attention and being more disciplined in your thought.

                Which is even better because it’s great advice, and eminently doable. Thanks, Yvain! So I set about paying attention to how I currently pay attention and, like usual, paid attention to the cues I get about how other people pay attention, assuming that I make the mistakes they do at least some of the time.

                And then I realized… wait a minute, whenever other people aren’t actually paying attention is when I could most easily shanghai them into doing things they normally wouldn’t do (Were I a dark artist. Hypothetically.). So learning how to pay more attention and pay attention in the correct way is probably the best reflexive method of avoiding being dutch booked by people who are highly adaptable dark artists.

                And here’s my low-hanging fruit of techniques to build the foundational reflexes for shortening the way. The goal is to avoid being inattentive in certain sorts of situations where I noted personal susceptibility to being taken advantage of by changing situations or flexible con artists.

                Summary: Act like Suspicious, Smart, Rich People Do. Assume everyone and everything is both an opportunity and an encounter with a parasite, and don’t act like it unless it’s socially convenient. How do you do this, you say. It sounds more difficult than that, you say. On the contrary, skeptical sir! I will now present an exercise which rapidly becomes reflexive, in a manner which will cause it to become reflexive, which separates the exercise from the situation so that you can learn the requisite acting skills separately! Try this!

Ask yourself for new people , situations, arguments, and facts, what is this worth to me? What risks do I run by paying attention to this? What opportunities lie in this, if my understanding of it is correct? What risks do I run, if my understanding of it is incorrect? And you can go as much deeper as you think is valuable or are mentally capable of sustaining.

                  For the step-by-steppers out there (I salute you!), here’s explicitly How To start doing this in a low-cost way.

Step 1: In your journal for daily events (If you’re not keeping one of these go buy a journal and start. Without a daily log how do you know you’re actually making progress?) use Pen and Paper (The Great Equalizer!) and write down your understanding of a couple of important topics and a few simple topics (the simple topics shouldn’t take as long… right?). This will be a lot of work! But it’s only for one day, and developing this mental habit in particular and your ability to do rational yet seemingly onerous things for a brief period each day will both be massively valuable.

Step 2: When That Gets Boring, elaborate with pros and cons, an analysis of arguments, or other techniques that professionals use when it’s important (Imagine a lawyer not analyzing their opponent’s arguments, and then imagine yourself as their client.).  Do a Fermi calculation (here's some practice) if it involves a number of things you don’t understand well.

Step 3: Avoid abusing this method to convince yourself you don't need to run the numbers by pretending someone else, someone biased,wrote the analysis. (Those darned Biased people, cropping up even in your own journal!) Think of how future versions of yourself will look at your thought processes (you'll be smarter then... wiser... with a knowledge ofcommon logical fallacies and the heuristics and biases literature)(you might even read Godel Escher Bach or something andblow your mind. Anything is possible!). Look over your previous analyses before deciding (sleep on it and wait on it). Developing a decent set of evidence for fermi calculations and calibration exercises will let you use the same thought processes to do this right when you don't have time to run the numbers.

Step 4: Profit.