Post ridiculous munchkin ideas!

D_Malik

A Munchkin is the sort of person who, faced with a role-playing game, reads through the rulebooks over and over until he finds a way to combine three innocuous-seeming magical items into a cycle of infinite wish spells. Or who, in real life, composes a surprisingly effective diet out of drinking a quarter-cup of extra-light olive oil at least one hour before and after tasting anything else. Or combines liquid nitrogen and antifreeze and life-insurance policies into a ridiculously cheap method of defeating the invincible specter of unavoidable Death. Or figures out how to build the real-life version of the cycle of infinite wish spells.

It seems that many here might have outlandish ideas for ways of improving our lives. For instance, a recent post advocated installing really bright lights as a way to boost alertness and productivity. We should not adopt such hacks into our dogma until we're pretty sure they work; however, one way of knowing whether a crazy idea works is to try implementing it, and you may have more ideas than you're planning to implement.

So: please post all such lifehack ideas! Even if you haven't tried them, even if they seem unlikely to work. Post them separately, unless some other way would be more appropriate. If you've tried some idea and it hasn't worked, it would be useful to post that too.

Thus spake Eliezer:

A Munchkin is the sort of person who, faced with a role-playing game, reads through the rulebooks over and over until he finds a way to combine three innocuous-seeming magical items into a cycle of infinite wish spells. Or who, in real life, composes a surprisingly effective diet out of drinking a quarter-cup of extra-light olive oil at least one hour before and after tasting anything else. Or combines liquid nitrogen and antifreeze and life-insurance policies into a ridiculously cheap method of defeating the invincible specter of unavoidable Death. Or figures out how to build the real-life version of the cycle of infinite wish spells.

It's a waste of time at best, and inducing psychosis at worst. (Waste of time because the "tulpa" - your hallucination - has access to the same data repository you use, and doesn't run on a different frontal cortex. You can teach yourself the right habits without also teaching yourself to become mentally ill.)

You know what it's called when you hear voices giving you "advice"? Paranoid schizophrenia. Outright visual hallucinations?

What's next, using magic mushrooms to speed the process? Yes, you can probably teach yourself to become actually insane, but why would you?

(Waste of time because the "tulpa" - your hallucination - has access to the same data repository you use, and doesn't run on a different frontal cortex. You can teach yourself the right habits without also teaching yourself to become mentally ill.)

Source?

I mean, there are, as you say, obvious "right habits" analogs of this that get results - which would seem to invalidate the first quoted sentence - but I don't see why pushing it "further" couldn't possibly generate better results.

3Qiaochu_Yuan13y

This also sounds like an argument against IFS. I don't think it holds water. Accessing the same data as you do but using a different algorithm to process it seems valuable. (This is under the assumption that tulpas work at all.)

12mare-of-night13y

Sounds like the noncentral fallacy. That you are somewhat in control, and that the tulpa will leave you alone (at least temporarily) if asked, seem like relevant differences from the more central cases of mental illness.

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