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A collection of Stubs.
In light of SDR's comment yesterday, instead of writing a new post today I compiled my list of ideas I wanted to write about, partly to lay them out there and see if any stood out as better than the rest, and partly so that maybe they would be a little more out in the wild than if I hold them until I get around to them. I realise there is not a thesis in this post, but I figured it would be better to write one of these than to write each in it's own post with the potential to be good or bad.
Original post: http://bearlamp.com.au/many-draft-concepts/
I create ideas at about the rate of 3 a day, without trying to. I write at about a rate of 1.5 a day. Which leaves me always behind. Even if I write about the best ideas I can think of, some good ones might never be covered. This is an effort to draft out a good stack of them so that maybe it can help me not have to write them all out, by better defining which ones are the good ones and which ones are a bit more useless.
With that in mind, in no particular order - a list of unwritten posts:
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)
How to write a dating ad - A suggestion to include information that is easy to ask questions about (this is hard). For example; don't write, "I like camping", write "I like hiking overnight with my dog", giving away details in a way that makes them worth inquiring about. The same reason applies to why writing "I'm a great guy" is really not going to get people to believe you, as opposed to demonstrating the claim. (show, don't tell)
How to give yourself aversions - an investigation into aversive actions and potentially how to avoid collecting them when you have a better understanding of how they happen. (I have not done the research and will need to do that before publishing the post)
How to give someone else an aversion - similar to above, we know we can work differently to other people, and at the intersection of that is a misunderstanding that can leave people uncomfortable.
Lists - Creating lists is a great thing, currently in draft - some considerations about what lists are, what they do, what they are used for, what they can be used for, where they come in handy, and the suggestion that you should use lists more. (also some digital list-keeping solutions)
Choice to remember the details - this stems from choosing to remember names, a point in the conversation where people sometimes tune out. As a mindfulness concept you can choose to remember the details. (short article, not exactly sure why I wanted to write about this)
What is a problem - On the path of problem solving, understanding what a problem is will help you to understand how to attack it. Nothing more complicated than this picture to explain it. The barrier is a problem. This doesn't seem important on it's own but as a foundation for thinking about problems it's good to have sitting around somewhere.
How to/not attend a meetup - for anyone who has never been to a meetup, and anyone who wants the good tips on etiquette for being the new guy in a room of friends. First meetup: shut up and listen, try not to be too much of an impact on the existing meetup group or you might misunderstand the culture.
Noticing the world, Repercussions and taking advantage of them - There are regularly world events that I notice. Things like the olympics, Pokemon go coming out, the (recent) spaceX rocket failure. I try to notice when big events happen and try to think about how to take advantage of the event or the repercussions caused by that event. Motivated to think not only about all the olympians (and the fuss leading up to the olympics), but all the people at home who signed up to a gym because of the publicity of the competitive sport. If only I could get in on the profit of gym signups...
leastgood but only solution I know of - So you know of a solution, but it's rubbish. Or probably is. Also you have no better solutions. Treat this solution as the best solution you have (because it is) and start implementing it, as you do that - keep looking for other solutions. But at least you have a solution to work with!
Self-management thoughts - When you ask yourself, "am I making progress?", "do I want to be in this conversation?" and other self management thoughts. And an investigation into them - it's a CFAR technique but their writing on the topic is brief. (needs research)
instrumental supply-hoarding behaviour - A discussion about the benefits of hoarding supplies for future use. Covering also - what supplies are not a good idea to store, and what supplies are. Maybe this will be useful for people who store things for later days, and hopefully help to consolidate and add some purposefulness to their process.
list of sub groups that I have tried - Before running my local lesswrong group I partook in a great deal of other groups. This was meant as a list with comments on each group.
If you have nothing to do – make better tools for use when real work comes along - This was probably going to be a poetic style motivation post about exactly what the title suggests. Be Prepared.
what other people are good at (as support) - When reaching out for support, some people will be good at things that other people are not. For example - emotional support, time to spend on each other, ideas for solving your problems. Different people might be better or worse than others. Thinking about this can make your strategies towards solving your problems a bit easier to manage. Knowing what works and what does not work, or what you can reliably expect when you reach out for support from some people - is going to supercharge your fulfilment of those needs.
Focusing - An already written guide to Eugine Gendlin's focusing technique. That needs polishing before publishing. The short form: treat your system 1 as a very powerful machine that understands your problems and their solutions more than you do; use your system 2 to ask it questions and see what it returns.
Rewrite: how to become a 1000 year old vampire - I got as far as breaking down this post and got stuck at draft form before rewriting. Might take another stab at it soon.
Should you tell people your goals? - This thread in a post. In summary: It depends on the environment, the wrong environment is actually demotivational, the right environment is extra motivational.
Meta: this took around 4 hours to write up. Which is ridiculously longer than usual. I noticed a substantial number of breaks being taken - not sure if that relates to the difficulty of creating so many summaries or just me today. Still. This experiment might help my future writing focus/direction so I figured I would try it out. If you see an idea of particularly high value I will be happy to try to cover it in more detail.
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How Not to Make Money
Sarcastic Practical Advice Series: 1 How Not to Make Money
I'm calling this a series because I would like it to be a series, feel free to write your own post on "how not to do something many people want to do", especially you, future me.
I'm very good at not making money, and maybe this is a skill you have found yourself needing to perfect.
But worry not. Stop rationalizing! I'll teach you some of the craft before you can say all the palindromes in the Finnish language.
(1) Be one of those people who actually turn knowledge, general knowledge, into personally designed actions/policies. The kind of people who, upon learning that driving is more dangerous than being attacked by spiders, and experiencing the first person evolved fear of spiders, understands that he should be as afraid of driving badly as he is of spiders, or much more, and drives accordingly.
(2) Understand that there is no metaphysical Self, only a virtual center of narrative gravity (Read Dennett), whose manner of discounting time is hyperbolic (Read George Ainslie), weirdly self-representative (Read GEB), and basically a mess.
(3) Read Reasons and Persons, by Parfit, and really give up on your Naïve intuitions about personal identity over time. Using (1) act accordingly, i.e. screw future retired you.
(4) Go through a university program in the humanities, so no one tempts you by throwing money at you after you graduate - This has happened to an academically oriented friend of mine who graduated a Medical Doctor, but actually wanted to be in the lab playing with brains. - If you can make into Greek Mythology, or Iranian Literature, good for you, Philosophy is ok, as are social sciences, as long as you do theory and don't get into politics or institutional design later on. If you go to psychology, you are dangerously near Human Resources, so be sure to be doing it for the reasons Pinker would do it, because you want to understand our internal computer, not to treat people.
(5) Have some cash: This seems obvious, but it’s worth reminding if you are a machine discounting hyperbolically, you'd better be safe for the next two months.
(6) Study research on happiness and money: Money doesn't buy happiness, and when it does, it's by buying things to others, regardless of Price. Giving a bike, a Porsche, or a Starbucks coffee to your friends provides you the same amount of fuzzies. Use (1) act accordingly.
(7) Be curious: If you are the kind of person who knows by heart that the Finish language is more propense to palindromization, you are in a great route not to make money. If you get really excited about space, good for you. If you are so moved by curiosity you can't sleep before you finally figure it out, worry not, money ain't coming your way. Don’t forget all those really cool books you want to read.
(8) Avoid being Anhedonic: Anhedonia is one of the great enemies of those who don't want to make money. If all feels more or less the same to you, there is great incentive to go after the gold, it won't harm you much, and it will afford you the number one value of the Anhedonic, a false sense of security, and the illusion that happiness lies somewhere ahead of you in the future. If you can be thrilled or excited by the latest Adam Sandler movie, if a double rainbow will make you cry like a baby even in a video, and if you watch this sax video with a young, healthy, fertile female more than once because it’s a good video, rest assured, you’ll be fine.
(9) What do you care what other people think?:
Feynman nailed this aspect of the no-money making business. You may not have noticed but everyone, especially your family, thinks you should make money, Graham says
All parents tend to be more conservative for their kids than they would for themselves, simply because, as parents, they share risks more than rewards. If your eight year old son decides to climb a tall tree, or your teenage daughter decides to date the local bad boy, you won’t get a share in the excitement, but if your son falls, or your daughter gets pregnant, you’ll have to deal with the consequences. - How to do what you love.
It’s not just parents; everyone gets more shares of your money than of your excitement. If this was not the case, Effective Altruists would be advocating roller coasters and volcano lairs with cat people, not high income careers.
(10) Couchsurf and meet couchsurfers and world travelers: If you never did it, go around couchsurfing for a while. As it happens, due to many factors, travelling all the time, a dream of the majority, is cheaper than staying in one spot. Meeting world travelers like 1Mac Madison, 2Puneet Sahani, 3Frederico Balbiani, and 4Rand Hunt made me realize, respectively, that: 1 It’s possible to travel 2/3rd of the time as a CS major; 2 Indian Citizenship and zero money won’t stop you; 3 Not speaking English or wanting to work with what gave you degrees doesn’t stop you; 4 Spending 90 dollars in 100 days is possible. You’ll feel much less pressure to make money after meeting similar people and being one of them.
(11) Don’t experience Status Anxiety: The World suffers from an intense affliction. Alain de Botton named it Status Anxiety. You are not just richer than most people nowadays. You are unimaginably, unbelievably wealthy (in term of resources you can use) in comparison to everyone that ever lived. But the point is, the less time you spend comparing, regardless of who you are comparing with, the happier you feel.
(12) Be persuadable by intellectuals outside traditional science, like De Botton and Alan Watts, but not by really terrible The Secret style self-help.
(13) Consider money over-valued: In economics, the price of things is determined by the supply and demand of that particular thing. The interesting thing is that demand is not measured by how many people want something how badly, but this multiplied by each person’s wealth… If so many (wealthy) people value Rolex watches, they will be overpriced for you, especially if they are paying in luck, inheritance, or interest, and you are paying in work (though both use money as a medium).
Money is a medium of trade, how could it be over-valued?
Simple, there are many other mediums of trade (being nice, becoming more attractive, being a good listener, going to the “right place at the right time”, knowledge, enviable skills, prestige, dominance, strength, signaling, risk – i.e. stealing, Vegas, or bitcoin - , sex, time, energy). If you think these items are cheaper than money, you go for them as your medium of trade. And indeed they are cheaper than money, because everyone knows that money is valuable, and nearly no one thought consciously of the trade value of those things.
(14) Fake it till you don’t make it: My final advice would be to try out not spending money. Do it for a month (I did it for two), set a personal unbearably low barrier according to your standards. Dine before going to dinner with friends, by bike, of course. Carry water instead of buying it. Deny any social activity that would be somewhat costly and substitute it for some personal project, internet download, or analogous near-free alternative. Exercise outside, not in the gym. Take notes on how good your days were, you may find out, as did Kingsley that: “We act as though comfort and luxury were the chief requirements of life, when all that we need to make us happy is something to be enthusiastic about.” Furthermore, with Barry Schwartz, you may find out that less is more, and when you have fewer options of what to do, this gives you not only happiness, but extra capacity to use your psychological attention to actually do what you want to do, do as Obama did, save your precious share of mindspace.
There, I hope you feel more fully equipped not to make money, should you ever need this hard earned, practical life-skill. You’re welcome.
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