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Life Advice Repository

9 Gunnar_Zarncke 18 October 2015 12:08PM

Looking thru the Repository Repository I can't find a nice category for a lot of real life or self help advice that has been posted here over time. Sure some belongs to the Boring Advice Repository but the following you surely wouldn't expect there:

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Quotes Repository

1 Dorikka 10 February 2015 04:36AM

Quotes are a unique enough medium of expression that I'm interested in viewing quotes that people have found collectable, emotionally impactful, useful, memorable, or otherwise noteworthy - perhaps others are similarly interested. To clarify, these need not be even remotely related to rationality. I'm hijacking the mandates traditionally used for the Rationality Quotes thread, with a few modifications:

  • Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be upvoted or downvoted separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.)
  • Do not quote yourself.
  • Do not quote from Less Wrong itself, HPMoR, Eliezer Yudkowsky, or Robin Hanson.
  • Do not repeat quotes found in a Rationality Quotes thread.
  • If possible, try to post sufficient information (URL, title, date, page number, etc.) to enable a reader to find the place where you read the quote, or its original source if available. Note that this can be helpful, but is not mandatory - I would much prefer a quote with only a name to no quote at all.

Please post any meta discussion in the top-level comment named "Meta".

2015 Repository Reruns - Boring Advice Repository

13 TrE 08 January 2015 06:00PM

 

This is the first post of the 2015 repository rerun, which appears to be a good idea. The motivation for this rerun is that while the 12 repositories (go look them up, they're awesome!) exist and people might look them up, few new comments are posted there. In effect, there might be useful stuff that should go in those repositories, but is never posted due to low expected value and no feedback. With the rerun, attention is shifted to one topic per month. This might allow us to have a lively discussion on the topic at hand and gather new content for the repository.

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Financial Effectiveness Repository

5 Gunnar_Zarncke 18 November 2014 09:57AM

Follow-Up to: A Guide to Rational Investing Financial Planning Sequence (defunct) The Rational Investor 

What are your recommendations and ideas about financial effectiveness? 

This post is created in response to a comment on this Altruistic Effectiveness post and thus may have a slight focus on EA. But it is nonetheless meant as a general request for financial effectiveness information (effectiveness as in return on invested time mostly). I think this could accumulate a lot of advice and become part of the Repository Repository (which surprisingly has not much advice of this kind yet).

I seed this with a few posts about this found on LessWrong in the comments. What other posts and links about financial effectiveness do you know of? 

Rules:

 

  • Each comment should name a single recommendation.
  • You should give the effectiveness in percent per period or absolute if possible.
  • Advice should be backed by evidence as usual. 

General Advice (from Guide to Rational Investing):

Capital markets have created enormous amounts of wealth for the world and reward disciplined, long-term investors for their contribution to the productive capacity of the economy. Most individuals would do well to invest most of their wealth in the capital market assets, particularly equities. Most investors, however, consistently make poor investment decisions as a result of a poor theoretical understanding of financial markets as well as cognitive and emotional biases, leading to inferior investment returns and inefficient allocation of capital. Using an empirically rigorous approach, a rational investor may reasonably expect to exploit inefficiencies in the market and earn excess returns in so doing.

So what are your recommendations? You may give advanced as well as simple advice. The more the better for this to become a real repository. You may also repeat or link advice given elsewere on LessWrong.

Mistakes repository

24 Dorikka 09 September 2013 03:32AM

This is a repository for major, life-altering mistakes that you or others have made. Detailed accounts of specific mistakes are welcome, and so are mentions of general classes of mistakes that people often make. If similar repositories already exist (inside or outside of LW), links are greatly appreciated.

The purpose of this repository is to collect information about serious misjudgements and mistakes in order to help people avoid similar mistakes. (I am posting this repository because I'm trying to conduct a premortem on my life and figure out what catastrophic risks may screw me over in the near or far future.)

Useful Habits Repository

10 XFrequentist 03 September 2013 01:58AM

Repositories are awesome, and we should have more of them.

I recently completed BJ Fogg's Tiny Habits, and it's a pretty lightweight way to install new habits (recommended). However, I realized I could use a better repository of useful habits.

So, please use this thread to suggest habits that you've found useful. Bonus points for evidence/anecdata of usefulness.

Obviously, 1 habit per comment makes upvotes a clearer signal of collective approval.

Repository repository

35 pinyaka 28 July 2013 10:59PM

A few weeks ago, Adele_L suggested that the repositories were underutilized and looked for suggestions on how to improve that. In that spirit, I added the following links to the Special Threads wiki page.

Solved Problems Repository - A collection of "solved problems in instrumental rationality."
Useful Concepts Repository - A collection of concepts that Less Wrong users have "found particularly useful for understanding the world."
Boring Advice Repository - A collection of advice that is optimized for helpfulness rather than depth of insight.
Useful Questions Repository - Questions that are useful to keep in mind in various situations.
Bad Concepts Repository - A collection of useless or harmful concepts
Grad Student Advice Repository - A collection of advice for graduate students.
Textbook Repository - The Best Textbooks on Every Subject
Reference repository - List of references and resources for LessWrong
Procedural Knowledge Gaps - How to do things that are "common sense" but that you may not know.
Mistakes Repository - A list of life-course altering mistakes that LW members have made.
Good things to have learned - A collection of skills and life lessons LWers have learned
Financial Effectiveness Repository - Tips for maximizing financial returns on (not necessarily market) investments.

In a similar vein, there is also a wiki page for the LessWrong Communities How-To's and Recommendations.

If there are other repositories that I've missed or a better way to collect these things, please link to it in a top level comment so that I get a direct message. A year and a half after this was originally posted, I still get suggestions and still add them or explain why I don't add them.

Edit: Added a few more to the list.

Useful Questions Repository

23 Qiaochu_Yuan 25 July 2013 02:58AM

See also: Boring Advice Repository, Solved Problems Repository, Grad Student Advice Repository, Useful Concepts Repository, Bad Concepts Repository

I just got back from the July CFAR workshop, where I was a guest instructor. One useful piece of rationality I started paying more attention to as a result of the workshop is the idea of useful questions to ask in various situations, particularly because I had been introduced to a new one:

"What skill am I actually training?"

This is a question that can be asked whenever you're practicing something, but more generally it can also be asked whenever you're doing something you do frequently, and it can help you notice when you're practicing a skill you weren't intending to train. Some examples of when to use this question:

  • You practice a piece of music so quickly that you consistently make mistakes. What skill are you actually training? How to play with mistakes.
  • You teach students math by putting them in a classroom and having them take notes while a lecturer talks about math. What skill are you actually training? How to take notes. 
  • A personal example: at the workshop, I noticed that I was more apprehensive about the idea of singing in public than I had previously thought I was. After walking outside and actually singing in public for a little, I had a hypothesis about why: for the past several years, I've been singing in public when I don't think anyone is around but stopping when I saw people because I didn't want to bother them. What skill was I actually training by doing that? How to not sing around people. 

Many of the lessons of the sequences can also be packaged as useful questions, like "what do I believe and why do I believe it?" and "what would I expect to see if this were true?" 

I'd like to invite people to post other examples of useful questions in the comments, hopefully together with an explanation of why they're useful and some examples of when to use them. As usual, one useful question per comment for voting purposes.

Bad Concepts Repository

20 moridinamael 27 June 2013 03:16AM

We recently established a successful Useful Concepts Repository.  It got me thinking about all the useless or actively harmful concepts I had carried around for in some cases most of my life before seeing them for what they were.  Then it occurred to me that I probably still have some poisonous concepts lurking in my mind, and I thought creating this thread might be one way to discover what they are.

I'll start us off with one simple example:  The Bohr model of the atom as it is taught in school is a dangerous thing to keep in your head for too long.  I graduated from high school believing that it was basically a correct physical representation of atoms.  (And I went to a *good* high school.)  Some may say that the Bohr model serves a useful role as a lie-to-children to bridge understanding to the true physics, but if so, why do so many adults still think atoms look like concentric circular orbits of electrons around a nucleus?  

There's one hallmark of truly bad concepts: they actively work against correct induction.  Thinking in terms of the Bohr model actively prevents you from understanding molecular bonding and, really, everything about how an atom can serve as a functional piece of a real thing like a protein or a diamond.

Bad concepts don't have to be scientific.  Religion is held to be a pretty harmful concept around here.  There are certain political theories which might qualify, except I expect that one man's harmful political concept is another man's core value system, so as usual we should probably stay away from politics.  But I welcome input as fuzzy as common folk advice you receive that turned out to be really costly.

Useful Concepts Repository

32 Qiaochu_Yuan 10 June 2013 06:12AM

See also: Boring Advice Repository, Solved Problems Repository, Grad Student Advice Repository

I often find that my understanding of the world is strongly informed by a few key concepts. For example, I've repeatedly found the concept of opportunity cost to be a useful frame. My previous post on privileging the question is in some sense about the opportunity cost of paying attention to certain kinds of questions (namely that you don't get to use that attention on other kinds of questions). Efficient charity can also be thought of in terms of the opportunity cost of donating inefficiently to charity. I've also found the concept of incentive structure very useful for thinking about the behavior of groups of people in aggregate (see perverse incentive). 

I'd like people to use this thread to post examples of concepts they've found particularly useful for understanding the world. I'm personally more interested in concepts that don't come from the Sequences, but comments describing a concept from the Sequences and explaining why you've found it useful may help people new to the Sequences. ("Useful" should be interpreted broadly: a concept specific to a particular field might be useful more generally as a metaphor.) 

Grad Student Advice Repository

10 Stabilizer 14 April 2013 09:28AM

There was some support for the idea of starting an advice repository for grad students much in the same tradition as the Boring Advice Repository and the Solved Problems Repository started earlier by Qiaochu_Yuan. So here goes.

Please share any advice, boring or otherwise, for succeeding at grad school. I realize that succeeding might mean different things to different people, but I believe most people largely agree with what it means in this context. Feel free to elaborate on what you believe it should mean, if you have views on the subject.

I am a theoretical physics grad student, so I'm personally more interested in advice for mathy disciplines (i.e. physics, math, CS), and I also suspect that there are many grad students from these disciplines on LessWrong; but advice for any discipline is welcome as well. 

Advice is welcome from anyone, but please do mention your background for providing the advice so that people can weight the advice accordingly. For example, I would be more be open to listening to advice from someone who has completed a very successful PhD, than from someone who has simply interacted with a lot of grad students but has never been to grad school. 

Also, feel free to link to advice from other sources, and maybe quote the most useful parts in what you read. Remember, this is meant to be a repository, so that people can come and find the advice, so don't worry if it seems to be something most people would've already read or known.

Thanks!

Solved Problems Repository

25 Qiaochu_Yuan 27 March 2013 04:51AM

Follow-up to: Boring Advice Repository

Many practical problems in instrumental rationality appear to be wide open. Two I've been annoyed by recently are "what should I eat?" and "how should I exercise?" However, some appear to be more or less solved. For example, various mnemonic techniques like memory palaces, along with spaced repetition, seem to more or less solve the problem of memorization.

I would like people to use this thread to post other examples of solved problems in instrumental rationality. I'm pretty sure you all collectively know good examples; there's a comment I can't find from a user who said something like "taking a flattering photograph of yourself is a solved problem," and it's likely that there are other useful examples like this that aren't common knowledge. Err on the side of posting solutions which may not be universal but are still likely to be helpful to many people. 

(This thread is allowed to not be boring! Go wild!) 

Boring Advice Repository

56 Qiaochu_Yuan 07 March 2013 04:33AM

This is an extension of a comment I made that I can't find and also a request for examples. It seems plausible that, when giving advice, many people optimize for deepness or punchiness of the advice rather than for actual practical value. There may be good reasons to do this - e.g. advice that sounds deep or punchy might be more likely to be listened to - but as a corollary, there could be valuable advice that people generally don't give because it doesn't sound deep or punchy. Let's call this boring advice

An example that's been discussed on LW several times is "make checklists." Checklists are great. We should totally make checklists. But "make checklists" is not a deep or punchy thing to say. Other examples include "google things" and "exercise." 

I would like people to use this thread to post other examples of boring advice. If you can, provide evidence and/or a plausible argument that your boring advice actually is useful, but I would prefer that you err on the side of boring but not necessarily useful in the name of more thoroughly searching a plausibly under-searched part of advicespace. 

Upvotes on advice posted in this thread should be based on your estimate of the usefulness of the advice; in particular, please do not vote up advice just because it sounds deep or punchy.