I suggest a move to Main.

tl;dr: Excess body fat and obesity are an immune response to gram-negative gut bacteria, not a metabolic problem. Fix it by taking oral polymyxin, or a comparable antibiotic. Further research into good antibiotics for this purpose would be appreciated.

Earlier this year, an article found that bacteria from an obese human could cause obesity in mice. They isolated the bacteria, put it in some randomly chosen mice, and after a few months the mice with the bacteria were fat and had diabetes problems while the control group was healthy. With a second experiment they found that the mechanism is the molecule lipopolysacharride (LPS aka endotoxin), found in the membrane of all gram-negative bacteria. When gram negative bacteria become established in the gut, the LPS triggers a inflammation response from the immune system which causes both fat accumulation and diabetes in the long run. So they've established very firmly that gut bacteria are sufficient to cause excess body fat, but whether that's the main source in the general human population is unknown. (source: http://www.nature.com/ismej/journal/v7/n4/pdf/ismej2012153a.pdf, apologies if it's behind an academic firewall)

So how does one get rid of gram-negative bacteria? It turns out that there is a common antiobiotic, polymyxin, which specifically targets LPS itself and kills bacteria which produce LPS. Polymyxin is among the most common topical antibiotics (along with neosporin), and can also be taken intravenously or orally. Intravenously it is a mild neurotoxin, but this is not an issue if taken orally.

Finally, it turns out that a study published back in 2006 administered polymyxin intravenously to rats. They found a 46% drop in adipose fat mass in rats given polymyxin. They had no idea what the mechanism was, hypothesized some vague connection to insulin signalling, and it just went down as one of those weird results. But now, in light of the more recent results, we can be pretty sure that gram-negative gut bacteria were the issue. The importance of this study is that it suggests gram-negative bacteria are a major cause of excess body fat in the general rat population, not just a special case of the 2013 study. So, it's reasonable to suspect that polymyxin would fix most human obesity too. (source: http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10989-005-9009-9)

If you have a reasonable ammount of money that you would like to save long-term and (potentially) remonetize 10+ years later on (for example for your retirement or whatever) then decide against playing the stock market (duh) or putting it in low interest bank accounts and buy the right stamps instead.

My dad is a passionate collector, but I have hardly any interst in collecting useless historical artefacts because I'm more interested in the future of humanity than its past. However even without any historical interest in the particular subject, stamps are an amazing thing to put your money into, because:

• Few stamps ever fall significantly in value, some remain stagnant and most rise significantly over time. So having many rather than a few really valuable ones is good and in a timeframe of decades many individual stamps can easily double or triple their value.

• They are very small, light and portable. Unlike most other art-objects you could potentially remonetize quickly. Much lighter than coins or anything else, really.

• If you remonetize them, you don't pay extra taxes which you may have to pay for gains from playing the stock market. If there will be a tax on that at some Point in the future (which is unlikely for some reasons I won't get into), it can be easily avoided - illegally and probably legally as well.

• You can remonetize them very, very quickly for a very good price by knowing the right person / auction house.

• Unlike numbers on a bank account they are inflation proof.

• No inheritance tax, your significant others will get all the dough if they remonetize it themselves.

The downsides are that you have to put some significant time into this topic to know what a good deal is, learn how the market and auction houses operate and to build a diverse or highly specialized and sought-after collection that is very likely to rise in value compared to other possible collections you could compile (which overall will almost certainly rise in value too, but maybe not as much as a collection you put some thought into).

Also you obviously need to keep them safe from theft and environmental hazards. (If you want to make the collection a one-time endeavor instead of an ongoing process, you can finish up your collection and put it in a small or medium safe deposit box in any bank.) Consider optimal storage conditions as well, since stamps are essentially made of fancy paper.

If none of this interests you, then at least take this advice: If you ever inherit a stamp collection, don't sell it on a flea market, inform yourself and sell it properly. Just recently a friend of my dad asked his advice on a collection he was about to sell for low double digits to learn that it was worth at least 20000$.

If you are single, frequent online dating sites and look for people who match your Myers-Briggs personality type.

Whether or not Myers-Briggs measures something real, it definitely worked in at least one happily married case. :-)

Use sand in your coffee instead of sugar. Not only is it free and devoid of calories, but since it doesn't dissolve, it can also be used over and over again.

If you're a fast reader, you can return an ebook from Amazon within 7 days of purchase really frickin easily. You can buy and return most popular books with a few clicks, without getting off your butt. Sure, libraries are great, but you have to wait if they don't have your book, you have to transport yourself there and back, and many of them are closed when inspiration strikes at midnight and you realize you want to stay up all night reading some book you literally just heard about but suddenly must have RIGHT NOW (or maybe that's just me). It's way better to have a bigger library on your computer. You can try books out and if they're stupid, at least you only lose the time it took to read it. If you use the kindle cloud reader, you can read on your computer. Then when you're done, you refund it, and you don't have to go through the annoying process of shipping anything anywhere, or worry about packaging or it being in the same condition.

Plus if you travel with your laptop, you can then have an unlimited supply of books that weigh nothing, as long as you have internet access, that are effectively free and in a convenient format.

If you're a slow reader, just buy it, read for a week, return it, then buy it again (and return it again after a week). Repeat until finished.

Wear a rubber band around your wrist and snap it to decondition behaviors. I originally used this to stop myself cracking my knuckles or biting my lip, but it didn't have any apparent effect.

I then tried using it to destroy my sense of humour (partly because I thought this might boost productivity, by generally making actions' dopamine rewards match their actual usefulness). This seemed to actually work well; I now experience humour-type amusement 20%-50% as often as I did two months ago.

I would recommend other people think carefully before trying this; many people have told me this could lead to bad places.

Relatedly, you could get an electroshock collar (used to train dogs, or for BDSM), which would let you automate the deconditioning.

Bitcoin hoarding for charity: Buy some amount of bitcoin, and keep it in a series of of wallets dedicated to various causes. Precommit to hoarding all of the amounts for a significant time, but spend the ones with the most warm-fuzzy results the soonest because that results in pumping up the value of bitcoin.

Eventually, at a point where the value cannot be pumped further by expending more on warm-fuzzies, spend hoarded amounts on utilitarian-optimal causes in a way that leverages economies of scale to achieve maximum impact.

There are a couple of problems with the premise. First, anything that was really as effective as a cycle of infinite wish spells would quickly violate energy conservation and the second law of thermodynamics. But even toning it down a little, if anything really were unreasonably effective, wouldn't almost everyone be doing it already? And thinking about it that way, are there ridiculously effective things that we're already doing? Well, yes, in fact there are.

The first one that comes to mind is reading and writing. Reading and writing is an incredibly effective, efficient, and cheap means of transmitting and storing knowledge. It just blows memory palaces and other techniques right out the window. The reason memory palaces haven't been much used for the last few hundred years is because we don't need them any more. Sure there are times when it may be convenient to not have to look a detail up, but it's certainly not as critical or as common a need as it was pre-literacy.

Another good example of a munchkin technique we all already use is money. Money just beats barter on pretty much every axis you can imagine. It is massively better than the alternative of a no-money society. And it's so obvious we don't even think about it. Of course for most of humanity's time on this planet, there was neither reading and writing nor money. If you think of it like that, there are many other munchkin techniques that we take for granted: electricity, the Internet, modern plumbing, word processors, the scientific method, statistics. The list goes on.

So the real question here is what's at the margin? What are the unreasonably effective life hacks that a lot of people are doing, and doing successfully, but not everyone? Furthermore, to really qualify it needs to be something that is appropriate for everyone, or at least everyone who wishes to achieve a certain goal; and a large percentage of those people must not be already doing it. For example, an exercise program that works only for people with Type O blood would not qualify if everyone with Type O blood who wanted to be fitter was already doing it. However a 20-minute a day exercise program that could reverse osteoporosis in senior citizens would qualify if only 14% of senior citizens were already doing it.

Are there such reasonably effective, not yet implemented life hacks? I.e. ones for which we have clear evidence that they work, and enough understanding to know who they work for; but that are not yet implemented by a large percentage of the applicable population? Most especially, are there such life hacks that would apply to many LessWrong readers? I can think of at least two. They aren't as weird and unusual and interesting as some of the suggestions here. Indeed they're downright boring. However they're boring because they work, and because they're well understood and well tested. In keeping with the request to "Post them separately" I'll introduce each of them in a separate comment.

It seems that nearsightedness is caused at least partly by spending lots of time looking at things that are close to you, such as books or computer screens. So maybe what we need is some way of making these things look like they're further away, without the inconvenience of actually moving them further away.

Fortunately, there exists an invention that can solve this problem: glasses. The idea is thus to use glasses that are the opposite of what optometrists would prescribe for nearsightedness (or that are just weaker than what they'd prescribe). There is some evidence to support the use of these "anticorrective" glasses, but I am incapable of telling whether they're a good idea.

More information here.

This one is the sort of thing where there are a bunch of assumption that shrouds reasonable on their own, but implasible in conjunction:

A1: you don't have to perfectly transfer your entire conectome to still be "the same person"; only things that are actually part of your current identity are needed

A2: if your identity changes gradually over time, even into something that if the change was faster it'd be considered disruptive, you're still "the same person".

A3: the human identity can be very extensively modified using behavioural techniques, hypnosis, and drugs that occur in the wild.

Then: you should be able to achieve immortality in a stone-age environment, by first modifying your own identity down to extremely small so it can be entirely transferred verbally, then modifying a victim more abruptly to a sufficiently similar state, and finally building that mind up again to be functional. Repeat for as long as you can maintain the dynasty.

EDIT: Hey! The OP specifically asked for outlandish ideas that seem like they wouldn't work! Am I just being judged relative the many ridiculously good posts here?

If you happen to be a fairly wealthy but not so famous female American socialite, you could leak a sex tape, get yourself on some reality TV shows, stage a fake wedding for the media that nets you $18 million, and spin all this into a variety of fragrance and cosmetic product lines.

You should look into (INFOGRAPHICS). Collections are floating around in the torrent sphere. I have compiled over a 1k on my FB page for public use. There are encyclopedias written just for you, but you have to seek them out.

This is a well known one, but I only recently got around to actually doing it, so I suspect that there are others that also haven't done it yet.

Learn to touch type. The kind of person you probably are if you are reading Less Wrong spends a remarkable fraction of the day typing at a computer. As such, even a small increase in typing speed and skill can save you huge amount of time and effort. And it is not at all hard to learn. This investment of a small amount of time and energy to learn to touch type pays back huge dividends in time saved.

One other point: If you are going to learn to touch type, there is no point whatsoever to doing so in the Qwerty keyboard layout. It is just as easy or easier to learn a better layout (like Dvorak or Colemak), which also will give you a bigger boost to your typing speed and efficiency.

Get moderately good at painting. Post your work online under a pseudonym. Fake your own death, or rather the death of your pseudonymous self, in a tragic and dramatic fashion. Sell your work at an elevated price.

Work at a desk facing your boss. It does wonders keeping you productive. My boss happens to make this possible by bringing his work into the lab for several hours a day.

All of the munchkin ideas I can think of aren't so much unlikely to work as hideously unethical. That fits with the classic munchkin, but it takes them off the table as far as I'm concerned. I'd rather not signal willingness to entertain immoral ideas, since there's no disclaimer I could issue that would adequately signal the truth of my being against them.

1. Get a bunch of capital.

2. Go to a poor country (specifically, a country where food and buildings are cheap).

3. Build a great big school.

4. Offer the following deal to parents of gifted children: they send their children to you, and you'll educate them for free, for ten years. At the end of ten years, the newly educated young adults either go to college, get a job, or be a bum. If at any point they do start working, you get (say) 10% of their income for 10 years.

5. Do it smartly: Skimp on "humanities"; no ancient literature for these kids. Reading, writing, math, science, programming. Get them ready for future jobs by giving them deep, versatile, malleable skills.

6. Do it cheaply: Use technology as efficiently as possible, so you don't have to pay for too many instructors. A campus wide internet connection and a $100 netbook per kid should get most of the possible value; maybe have some real computers for the programmers. Obviously you still need some instructors.

7. Do it morally (this might rule it out completely, since you are kind of creating indentured servants, and also because you are sucking cognitive resources from that area).

8. Profit!

This is feasible because the biggest resource is still human cognitive resources. I'd bet that poor countries have untapped smart brains.

It's common knowledge that taller people are more successful. This effect is also pretty strong - for instance, tall people make an average of $789 per inch per year and this has been shown repeatedly in a set of four large-scale salary survey studies.

We don't know that it's causation, but it seems very likely that people judge others' general fitness, consciously or not, by looking at their height (which makes evopsych sense, considering for instance that malnutrition decreases height).

I can think of two ways to Goodhart this (are there more?): you can improve your posture, or you can raise your feet off the ground using elevator shoes or heel lifts, giving you say 2'' (which is $1,600 per year, plus nonmonetary gains) for less than $20.

A tulpa is an "imaginary friend" (a vivid hallucination of an external consciousness) created through intense prolonged visualization/practice (about an hour a day for two months). People who claim to have created tulpas say that the hallucination looks and sounds realistic. Some claim that the tulpa can remember things they've consciously forgotten or is better than them at mental math.

Here's an FAQ, a list of guides and a subreddit.

Not sure whether this is actually possible (I'd guess it would be basically impossible for the 3% of people who are incapable of mental imagery, for instance); many people on the subreddit are unreliable, such as occult enthusiasts (who believe in magick and think that tulpas are more than just hallucinations) and 13-year-old boys.

If this is real, there's probably some way of using this to develop skills faster or become more productive.

If you're given a cookie that's hard to give up, but you're worried about calories.

You do not deserve the cookie, but can earn 1/2 of it by throwing 1/2 of it away.

Works every time.

How to find a mate when you have really specific tastes:

1. Think about the kind of fiction your ideal mate would want to read.
2. Write that kind of fiction.
3. Start a website compiling your fiction. Hire someone off DeviantArt to illustrate it.
4. Once you've got a decent fanbase, post a message on your website saying that you are looking for a mate.
5. Read emails from fans who say they want to be your mate.

Why I think this will work: A while ago I posted a romantic/erotic story to Reddit (which is 3/4 male). I hadn't seen the fantasy represented in any romance/erotica I'd ever read, so I figured I was alone in desiring it. Imagine my surprise when two women sent me unsolicited PM's asking me to role-play.

I've found that edX is a very nice way to get an elementary understanding of a number of new subjects. The downside is, I have to wait for a course I like to come around; they're not continuously available.

I'm not sure that this counts as ridiculous enough for this post, but it does seem to be working for me.

(Edit: Fixed the link.)

Full details here, but in summary: Take 2mg of melatonin 20 minutes before bed, and train yourself to think only of boring things and/or nothing after you lie down. Falling asleep becomes MUCH easier and more predictable.

Never buy anything from Amazon without checking eBay first. I think every generic thing in the world is available on eBay, IME at about half the price.

(May not be worth it for books and other media. But I just bought a pile of stuff for moving house with, down to replacement light bulbs for when we take our expensive daylight CFLs with us. And it's always fun to just casually buy six rolls of packing tape and a 100-metre roll of bubble wrap, even when you have an actual reason to.)

I have a horrible thought.

Most (legally acquired) debts are dischargeable in bankruptcy. That puts a floor on the amount of money one can lose. If your net worth is "almost nothing" and you can find suckers, er, I mean, organizations with loose standards that are willing to lend you money, then the expected utility of risky bets changes in a way that favors you - because going bankrupt while owing $10,000 isn't much different than going bankrupt while owing $500,000. Of course, going bankrupt is still pretty bad either way, but the upside of winning a risky, highly leveraged bet can also be correspondingly large...

Personally, I don't think this is a good idea and is probably unethical anyway, but it is the kind of crazy thing a certain kind of munchkin would do...

A well-known trick for memorizing things verbatim is to make them rhyme and put them in a song. Most people reading this know the alphabet song, for instance, and you can use this to learn US states and capitals or chemical elements.

Maybe it would be possible to do this without the rhyming, by using text-to-speech software to convert the information into audio and then playing that over vocals-free music. Instead of text-to-speech software, you could buy/get an audiobook with the information, if one exists. It might be possible to use this, for instance, to memorize multiplication tables up to 100 easily. I haven't yet tried any of this.

I also intend to research whether hearing something repetitively while sleeping helps you to memorize it verbatim, and whether that would harm sleep.

Relatedly, I noticed recently that I knew the words in a 14-minute ASMR video almost verbatim because I had listened to it so often. So one idea is to pay someone skilled at producing ASMR to read you things you want to memorize.

In academia, Munchkining has recently taken off.

These techniques for getting tenure have long existed, but they have been codified only in the last few years.

• Self-citation

• Multiple publication of the same materials.

• To aid in citing several of your own articles that are effectively the same article, rotate "first author" privileges among coauthors so that multiple self-citations don't occur near each other in the alphabetically ordered bibliography.

• And many more. Here is a selection.

Living in a van seems like it could decrease your cost of living a lot more than it decreases your quality of life. Getting set up in a van would cost about $12k, so it could pay for itself in a year. Here is a good guide on this.

One could also consider going completely homeless; here is an article by a math student who did that.

To encourage yourself to do some massive, granular task:

• Upon completion of each granule, give yourself a reward with some probability.

• A reward is a small piece of food or a sip of a drink, etc.

• Never eat or drink anything except as a reward for working on the task.

This really works extremely well for me; I have been doing this for about 2 months, at first only with anki reviews and more recently for several other things. The feeling is very similar to addictions like video games or entertaining websites; I often think "I should probably go do X, but let me instead do just one more anki card" and a half-hour later I realize I still haven't done X.

More things:

• Make the rewards unlikely and small so that you stay constantly hungry. Bonus: caloric restriction.

• Create a timed reminder, say half-hourly, to do just a few granules of the task. This encourages episodes of the "just one more" effect.

• Put reinforcers within arm's reach, both temporally (make granules easy and quick, so that hunger feels like an urge to do the task rather than an urge to cheat the system) and spacially (so that you are constantly reminded of your hunger and tempted to do the task).

I repeat: this works extremely well for me and I strongly encourage other people to try it. More details here.

Here is a graph showing the number of Anki reviews I've done every month for the past year, as an example of the results this method can produce.

(The below is stated with no modulation for my level of confidence, which actually isn't very high.)

MDMA is a useful way to improve social skills permanently, or help make you more emotionally available.

While under the influence of it, you're very empathic, and very socially fearless. The experiences you have talking to people in this state can then transfer to when you're sober. For instance, you might notice that your openness is well-received, which lets you see that you've been under-confident.

Many people do something similar with alcohol: they learn to socialise when drunk, and that makes it easier to socialise when not drunk. I believe MDMA is better for this purpose, because it doesn't inhibit your memory at all, and you're more "yourself" than when drunk.

To get this benefit it's important to take a well-tolerated dose, and not to drink much: you don't want to be a mangled mess, or the next day you'll just be embarrassed, especially because you'll be mildly depressed from the come-down.

I've found MDMA to be quite addictive, and most users have trouble controlling their use once they are on the drug: they'll re-dose, even if they hadn't planned to, once the first dose begins to fade. So this "hack" is far from free of danger. But I believe the cost/benefit is still better than alcohol for many situations.

LASIK surgery is now pretty cheap, and depending on how much you spend on new glasses, optometrist appointments, contact lenses etc., it might actually pay for itself eventually. It should also save you time and effort, and might make you look better.

Showering daily seems to be unhealthy; decreasing shower frequency would save time, and it might be easy to control body odor with antiperspirants. Here's an NYT article.

Relatedly, there exist forms of clothing that stay wrinkle- and odor-free for 100 days of wearing without washing, though at the moment a shirt costs $100.

It seems to be possible to create sexual fetishes through classical conditioning, and it's hypothesized that this is how most sexual fetishes are created. It might be possible to use this to increase motivation for some specific task. I have not tried this, though I have unsuccessfully tried using pornographic images as reinforcement for anki reviews, using my picture-flasher plugin.

This is for people interested in optimizing for academic fame (for a given level of talent and effort and other costs). Instead of trying to get a PhD and a job in academia (which is very costly and due to "publish or perish" forces you to work on topics that are currently popular in academia), get a job that leaves you with a lot of free time, or find a way to retire early. Use your free time to search for important problems that are being neglected by academia. When you find one, pick off some of the low-hanging fruit in that area and publish your results somewhere. Then, (A) if you're impatient for recognition, use your results to make an undeniable impact on the world (see Bitcoin for example), or (B) if you're patient, move on to another neglected topic and repeat, knowing that in a few years or decades, the neglected topic you found will likely become a hot topic and you'll be credited for being the first to investigate it.

The Scientific 7-Minute Workout

In 12 exercises deploying only body weight, a chair and a wall, it fulfills the latest mandates for high-intensity effort, which essentially combines a long run and a visit to the weight room into about seven minutes of steady discomfort — all of it based on science.

Need some dead animal flesh in your diet on a budget? Organ meats are cheap, healthy, but (ymmv) still tasty. The chicken livers I got this week were less than a dollar per serving, and they're full of vitamins and protein. Chicken hearts are ~$2 per pound at my store and have a milder flavor if you find livers unpalatable. Not sure if I should have posted this here or in the Boring Advice Repository.

Cold Thermogenesis

Taking very cold showers or baths. You gradually decrease the temperature of your shower over several weeks. I can now take a shower or bath with the water on just cold. Other people use ice to lower the temperature of their baths even further.

Some claim that it has significant health benefits, but I haven't noticed any although I haven't been doing it for very long. Still, it's neat to be able to modify your body to tolerate something that would have previously caused unbearable pain.

Here is some discussion of cold thermogenesis on a paleo website.

Use a tool like f.lux to change the color temperature of your screen depending on time of day.

Your eyes will be much happier when it matches the surrounding room, and/or lowering the temperature when it's close to bed-time will help you fall asleep.

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

Why's that? Please remember the value of information here! Bright lights cost very little either upfront (maybe like <$100?) or on an ongoing basis (higher electrical bill), while an experiment may be very costly (or so I infer from the near-absence of anyone but me doing randomized self-experiments), and the benefits cumulatively large over the X years a bright light will last before breaking or burning out; hence, the best course may be simply to try it out.

I have discovered a way to carry a credit card balance indefinitely, interest-free, without making payments, using only an Amazon Kindle.

How my card works is, any purchases made during Month N get applied to the balance due in the middle of Month N+1. So if I make a purchase now, in May 2013, it goes on the balance due June 15th. If I don't pay the full May balance by June 15th, then and only then do they start charging interest. This is pretty typical of credit cards, I think.

Now the key loophole is that refunds are counted as payments, and are applied immediately, but purchases are applied to the balance due next month. So if I buy something on June 5th, and return it on June 6th, the purchase goes toward the balance due on July 15th, but the refund is applied as a payment on the balance due on June 15th! So you can pay your entire June balance with nothing but refunds, and you won't have to worry about paying for those purchases until July, at which time you can do the whole thing again. The debt is still there, of course, because all you've done is add and then subtract say $100 from your balance, but absolutely no interest is charged. This process is limited only by your credit line (which you cannot exceed at any time) and by the ease with which you can buy and return stuff each month.

Here's where the Kindle comes in. Repeatedly buying and returning items from a brick-and-mortar store is incredibly time-consuming and risky. You have to buy stuff, keep it in good shape, and then return it, interacting with human clerks each time, without raising suspicion. Not efficient. But if you have a Kindle, you know that when you buy a book, after you hit "Purchase" a screen comes up that asks if you have bought the item by accident, and if so, would you like to cancel the purchase. If you hit the button to cancel the purchase, what happens is that the purchase is still applied to your card, but it is refunded a couple of days later. Bingo. Automatic refunds, obtained at home at no risk, with no human oversight.

But e-books on Amazon are like $10, so you'd have to sit there all day hitting "buy" and "return" to shift a significant amount of debt, right? Wrong. If you know where to look, the Amazon kindle store has lots of handbooks, technical manuals, and textbooks that cost hundreds of dollars. Start out searching for "neurology handbook" and just surf the "similar books" list from there. Buy and return a few of those, and you're set for another month.

Obviously you have to pay off the debt at some point. This is not free money. But if you're in a tight spot for a few months, it's incredibly useful. And hey, if the inflation-adjusted prime rate is 0%, why should you have to pay interest? You're good for it.

This is by far the most munchkin-like idea I've ever had, and I'm pretty happy about it. I've been using it since January, making real payments toward my card as I can, and covering the rest with Amazon buy-and-returns. I know I'll pay down the debt when I have a better job, but in the meantime it is really nice not to have to pay any interest on it.

Boring munchkin technique #1: What if I told you there was a place you could go where they would give you books? paper or ebook, whichever you prefer. And if they didn't have the book you wanted, they would order it for you? And when you were done with the book. and didn't want it cluttering up your apartment any more, you could give it back to them; and they would store it for you until needed it again? So not only does this service get you books. It effectively increases the amount of living space you have, and the general neatness of your apartment or house. How much would you pay for such a service? $50 a month? $100 a month? $5000 a year? How much do you spend on books now that you have to store and manage?

Of course, you already know there is such a service, and it doesn't cost you even $10 a month. It's the public library. If you haven't stopped into your public library lately, it's time to check it out again. Public libraries have become a lot more effective in the last decade. You can now order books online, and have them delivered to your local branch, so if you remember a time when the library rarely had what you wanted, check again. It's no longer just a place to browse to find something to read. It's a place where you can find exactly the book you want. If library fines bother you, libraries will now send you email reminders to renew, and let you renew online. If you use ebooks, you don't even have to go to the library to pick up or return the books. Most libraries are much more convenient than they were even a few years ago.

It's not perfect. Most libraries don't have a lot of the more technical books, ebooks aren't as available as they should be (blame the publishers for that since they don't license a lot of ebooks to libraries) and occasionally you may have to bring a paper book back to the library before you're done with it because someone else wants to read it. However if your reading tastes aren't too esoteric, and you have access to a good library system in a major metropolitan area, then you can get 90% or more of your books from the public library. You will still buy a few books that they don't have available, or that you really want to consult every day for a year; but you can save a lot of money, time, and space by visiting your local library before you visit amazon.

If you are new to a scientific topic, note that the first half of a paper often tends to summarize common knowledge within the field that is necessary to understand the conclusion. Often this is more readable/interesting than the rest of the paper, suggesting that you can spend more time reading scientific papers by skipping the denser and more original parts.

My neck is asymmetrical because some years back I used to often lie in bed while using a laptop, and would prop my head up on my left elbow, but not my right because there was a wall in the way. In general, using a laptop while lying in bed is an ergonomics nightmare. The ideal would be to lie on your back with the laptop suspended in the air above you, except that that would make typing inconvenient.

So a friend recently blew my mind by informing me that prism glasses are a thing. These rotate your field of vision 90 degrees downwards, so that you can lie on your back and look straight up while still seeing your laptop. I have tried these and highly recommend them.

That said: You should probably not do non-sleep/sex things in bed because that can contribute to insomnia. I recommend trying a standing desk, by putting a box or a chair on top of your desk and putting your laptop on top of that, then just standing permanently; it will be painful at first. Also currently experimenting with only allowing myself to sit down with my laptop if I'm at the same time doing the highest-value thing I could be doing (which is usually ugh-fielded and unpleasant because otherwise I'd have already done it).

Another thing: I have a crankish theory that looking downwards lowers your unconscious estimation of your own social status (which seems to be partly what is meant by "confidence"/"self-esteem"). If that's true, prism glasses and standing desks could increase confidence.

Oftentimes, when I'm not in a good mood, I simply decide to be in a good mood, and soon I am in a good mood. It's surprisingly effective. You just have to consciously tell yourself that you decide to be in a good mood and try to be in a good mood. Of course this doesn't work all the time. I'm generally a happy person, so it's perhaps easier for me.

Sprinkle an emetic (a vomit-inducing drug) into foods that you want to stop eating, such as chocolate. It is well-known that nausea causes a long-lasting aversion to the food preceding it. (For instance, this is a problem for chemotherapy patients - the drug therapy causes nausea, which they then associate with food.)

I haven't tried any of this, but I'd be very surprised if this wasn't an easy, long-term solution to the problem of people wanting to eat food that they don't want to want to eat.

Maybe this could even be extended to non-food addictions, such as video games or mindless internet browsing. One person I know quit smoking cold turkey this way (by throwing up after smoking a cigarette, not with an emetic).

Instead of hoping to find the one Super Cool Trick that'll let you become a superhuman overnight, read five or so (scientifically minded) self-help books addressing the biggest problem area in your life, make a moderate to large amount of effort to implement the knowledge in your life, and then repeat for your other problem areas, until in a year or two you become a superhuman.

This worked for me for productivity and depression, next is social skills/social anxiety.

Also, let your body occupy a lot of space in order to feel more relaxed, feel confident, and signal status.

So I've recently decided to change my real name from an oriental one to John Adams. I am not white.

There’s a significant amount of evidence that shows that

(1) Common names have better reception in many areas, especially publication and job interviews.

(2) White names do significantly better than non-white names

(3) Last names that begin with the early letters of the alphabet have a significant advantage over last names beginning with the latter letters of the alphabet.

Source :

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19020207 http://blog.simplejustice.us/files/66432-58232/SSQUKalistFinal.pdf http://ideas.repec.org/p/hhs/sunrpe/2006_0013.html http://www.nber.org/papers/w9873.pdf?new_window=1 http://www.nber.org/digest/sep03/w9873.html

Therefore if I were to use "John", one of the most common 'white' first names, along with Adams, a 'white' surname that also begins with the letter A, it should stand that I would be conferred a number of advantages.

Furthermore, I have very little attachment to my family heritage. Switching names doesn’t cost me anything beyond a minor inconvenience of having to do paperwork. For some people, changing your name may be extremely worthwhile, depending on your current name, and how attached you are to it. At least, it may be worthwhile to consider it, and depending on the person, may be a very cheap optimization with significant benefits.