This was originally a comment to VipulNaik's recent indagations about the academic lifestyle versus the job lifestyle. Instead of calling it lifestyle he called them career options, but I'm taking a different emphasis here on purpose.

Due to information hazards risks, I recommend that Effective Altruists who are still wavering back and forth do not read this. Spoiler EA alert. 

I'd just like to provide a cultural difference information that I have consistently noted between Americans and Brazilians which seems relevant here. 

To have a job and work in the US is taken as a *de facto* biological need. It is as abnormal for an American, in my experience, to consider not working, as it is to consider not breathing, or not eating.  It just doesn't cross people's minds. 

If anyone has insight above and beyond "Protestant ethics and the spirit of capitalism" let me know about it, I've been waiting for the "why?" for years. 

So yeah, let me remind people that you can spend years and years not working. that not getting a job isn't going to kill you or make you less healthy, that ultravagabonding is possible and feasible and many do it for over six months a year, that I have a friend who lives as the boyfriend of his sponsor's wife in a triad and somehow never worked a day in his life (the husband of the triad pays it all, both men are straight). That I've hosted an Argentinian who left graduate economics for two years to randomly travel the world, ended up in Rome and passed by here in his way back, through couchsurfing.  That Puneet Sahani has been well over two years travelling the world with no money and an Indian passport now. I've also hosted a lovely estonian gentleman who works on computers 4 months a year in London to earn pounds, and spends eight months a year getting to know countries while learning their culture etc... Brazil was his third country. 

Oh, and never forget the Uruguay couple I just met at a dance festival who have been travelling as hippies around and around South America for 5 years now, and showed no sign of owning more than 500 dollars worth of stuff. 

Also in case you'd like to live in a paradise valley taking Santo Daime (a religious ritual with DMT) about twice a week, you can do it with a salary of aproximatelly 500 dollars per month in Vale do Gamarra, where I just spent carnival, that is what the guy who drove us back did.  Given Brazilian or Turkish returns on investment, that would cost you 50 000 bucks in case you refused to work within the land itself for the 500. 

Oh, I forgot to mention that though it certainly makes you unable to do expensive stuff, thus removing the paradox of choice and part of your existential angst from you (uhuu less choices!), there is nearly no detraction in status from not having a job. In fact, during these years in which I was either being an EA and directing an NGO, or studying on my own, or doing a Masters (which, let's agree is not very time consuming) my status has increased steadily, and many opportunities would have been lost if I had a job that wouldn't let me move freely. Things like being invited as Visiting Scholar to Singularity Institute, like giving a TED talk, like directing IERFH, and like spending a month working at FHI with Bostrom, Sandberg, and the classic Lesswrong poster Stuart Armstrong. 

So when thinking about what to do with you future my dear fellow Americans, please, at least consider not getting a job. At least admit what everyone knows from the bottom of their hearts, that jobs are abundant for high IQ people (specially you my programmer lurker readers.... I know you are there...and you native English speakers, I can see you there, unnecessarily worrying about your earning potential). 

A job is truly an instrumental goal, and your terminal goals certainly do have chains of causation leading to them that do not contain a job for 330 days a year.  Unless you are a workaholic who experiences flow in virtue of pursuing instrumental goals. Then please, work all day long, donate as much as you can, and may your life be awesome! 

This article critically examines previous studies that showed a link between working memory training (specifically via n-back training) and fluid intelligence, finding that the results may not have been as positive as reported owing to a number of factors including the use of a no-contact rather than active control group, and difficulty selecting tests that isolate the impact of working memory on fluid intelligence. The authors also present findings from a new study that show no improvement in fluid intelligence from dual n-back training, visual search training (active placebo) and no training (no contact placebo).

PubMed

Journal Challenged

So this year I've stopped working out, and my grades have improved drastically, but at the cost of losing muscle mass and gaining fat, and becoming physically slower and lazier just as I became faster and more active intellectually. One effect I especially noticed was the disappearance of that perpetual state of happiness/satisfaction that comes from frequent physical exertion, which I think had a tendency to get in the way of a feeling of urgency regarding studies; why bother with tiresome and frustrating intellectual exercise when physical exercise yielded results and pleasure/satisfaction much more easily and reliably?

Anyway, this got me thinking: "I need to figure out a training that is optimized for intellectual performance. Aspects that might be interesting to work on would be:

• getting as much blood (oxygen, nutrients) as possible to the brain, whenever needed.
• minimizing the amount of other tissue (including muscle in excess of what is strictly needed for a comfortable daily life, and digestive organs in excess of what is needed to get the nutrients from the food).
• optimizing the diet in order to feed the brain according to its needs while avoiding dietetical imbalances that would result in damage of some sort or another (too much sugar can damage the pancreas, too much protein and the kidneys can suffer, etc.)
• something that is easy and quick to implement and follow, relatively inexpensive and straightforward; the idea is to save as much time, resources and energy as possible for the needs of studying/working.

These ideas I'm throwing around from a position of extreme ignorance. I've tried hiring nutritionists, but their diets were optimized for bodybuilding, not for intellectual efficacy, and were incredibly troublesome to follow. These involved about five to eight meals a day, large amounts of meat or meat substitutes, which is expensive to sustain, and me in a perpetual state of either hunger or digestive lethargy, plus permanent muscular soreness from the training regime that goes with it... and then there's the supplements.

So, yeah, I'm no gwern, but I'd love to figure out a diet that allows me to work at maximum efficacy. Other concerns, such as feeling strong or looking attractive or even dancing well, are quite far behind in priority. How should I go about this? How about you lads and ladies? What's your experience with dieting/working-out? More importantly, what does the research say?

P.S. I tried to read "Good Calories Bad Calories", but I never managed to finish it: it spent so much time attacking the current paradygm that I grew tired of waiting for it to actually list and summarize its recommendations. If anyone here finished reading that and drew out the conclusions, I'd love to hear them.

P.P.S. The main post will update as the discussion advances; once enough proper information is gathered, a top level post might emerge.

I've seen some discussion on "working memory" and "spaced repetition"

I just read this pop-science article in which a new hypothesis is presented that seems to provide better predictions and test conditions for measuring working memory. Maybe this can also be used for the SRS contest.

http://medicalxpress.com/news/2011-07-brain-track.html

Not a working memory of four, it's really two plus two.

Tl, dr: It's easier to remember four things if you've got two on one side of your visual field and two on the other. Three or four on one side can cause overload errors.

Working memory for other senses hasn't been explored yet on this level.