This is based on a concept we developed at the Vancouver Rationalists meetup.

Different experiences level a person up at different rates. You could work some boring job all your life and be 60 and not be much more awesome than your average teenager. On the other hand, some people have such varied and so much life experience that by 30 they are as awesome as a 1000 year old vampire.

This reminds me that it's possible to conduct your life with more or less efficiency, sometimes by orders of magnitude. Further, while we don't have actual life extension, it's content we care about, not run time. If you can change your habits such that you get 3 times as much done, that's like tripling your effective lifespan.

So how might one get a 100x speedup and become like a 1000 year old vampire in 10 years? This is absurdly ambitious, but we can try:

Do Hard Things

Some experiences catapult you forward in personal development. You can probably systematically collect these to build formidability as fast as possible.

Paul Graham says that many of the founders he sees (as head of YC) become much more awesome very quickly as need forces them to. This seems plausible and it seems back up by other sources as well. Basically "learn to swim by jumping in the deep end"; people have a tendency to take the easy way that results in less development when given the chance, so the chance to slack off being removed can be beneficial.

That has definitely been my personal experience as well. At work, the head engineer got brain cancer and I got de-facto promoted to head of two of the projects, which I then leveled up to be able to do. It felt pretty scary at first, but now I'm bored and wishing something further would challenge me. (addendum: not bored right now at all; crazy crunch time for the other team, which which I am helping) It seems really hard to just do better without such forcing; as far as I can tell I could work much harder than now, but willpower basically doesn't exist so I don't.

On that note, a friend of mine got big results from joining the Army and getting tear gassed in a trench while wet, cold, exhausted, sleep deprived, and hungry, which pushed him through stuff he wouldn't have thought he could deal with. Apparently it sortof re-calibrated his feelings about how well he should be doing and how hard things are such that he is now a millionaire and awesome.

So the mechanism behind a lot of this seems to be recalibrating what seems hard or scary or beyond your normal sphere. I used to be afraid of phone calls and doing weird stuff like climbing trees in front of strangers, but not so much anymore; it feels like I just forget that they were scary. In the case of the phone there were a few times where I didn't have time to be scared, I needed to just get things done. In the case of climbing trees, I did it on my own enough for it to become normalized so that it didn't even come up that people would see me, because it didn't seem weird.

So tying that back in, there are experiences that you can put yourself into to force that normalization and acclimatization to hard stuff. For example, some people do this thing called "Rejection Therapy" or "Comfort Zone Expansion", basically going out and doing embarrassing or scary things deliberately to recalibrate your intuitions and teach your brain that they are not so scary.

On the failure end, self-improvement projects tend to fail when they require constant application of willpower. It's just a fact that you will fall off the wagon on those things. So you have to make it impossible to fall off the wagon. You have to make it scarier to fall off the wagon than it is to level up and just do it. This is the idea behind Beeminder, which takes your money if you don't do what your last-week self said you would.

I guess the thesis behind all this is that these level-ups are permanent, in that they make you more like a 1000 year old vampire, and you don't just go back to being your boring old mortal self. If this is true, the implication that you should seek out hard stuff seems pretty interesting and important.

Broadness of Experience

Think of a 1000 year old vampire; they would have done everything. Fought in battles, led armies, built great works, been in love, been everywhere, observed most aspects of the human experience, and generally seen it all.

Things you can do have sharply diminishing returns; the first few times you watch great movies is most of the benefit thereof, likewise with video games, 4chan, most jobs, and most experiences in general. Thus it's really important to switch around the things you do a lot so that you stay in that sharp initially growing part of the learning curve. You can get 90% of the vampire's experience with 10% of his time investment if you focus on those most enlightening parts of each experience.

So besides doing hard things that level you up, you can get big gains by doing many things and switching as soon as you get bored (which is hopefully calibrated to how challenged you are).

You may remember early in the Arabian revolutions in Libya, an American student took the summer off college to fight in the revolution. I bet he learned a lot. If you could do enough things like that, you'd be well on your way to matching the vampire.

This actually goes hand in hand with doing hard things; when you're not feeling challenged (you're on the flat part of that experience curve), its probably best to throw yourself face first into some new project, both because it's new, and because it's hard.

Switching often has the additional benefit of normalizing strategic changes and practicing "what should I be doing"-type thoughts, which can't hurt if you intend to actually do useful stuff with your life.

There are probably many cases where full on switching is not best. For example, you don't become an expert in X by switching out of X as soon as you know the basics. It might be that you want to switch often on side-things but go deep on X. Alternatively, you probably want to do some kind of switch every now and then in X, maybe look at things from a different perspective, tackle a different problem, or something like that. This is the Deliberate Practice theory of expertise.

So don't forget the shape of that experience curve. As soon as you start to feel that leveling off, find a way to make it fresh again.

Do Things Quickly

Another big angle on this idea is that every hour is an opportunity, and you want to make the best of them. This seems totally obvious but I definitely "get it" a lot more having thought about it in terms of becoming a 1000 year old vampire.

A big example is procrastination. I have a lot of things that have been hanging around on my todo list for a long time, basically oppressing me by their presence. I can't relax and look to new things to do while there's still that one stupid thing on my todo list. The key insight is that if you process the stuff on your todo list now instead of slacking now and doing it later, you get it out of the way and then you can do something else later, and thereby become a 1000 year old vampire faster.

So a friend and I have internalized this a bit more and started really noticing those opportunity costs, and actually started knocking things off faster. I'm sure there's more where that came from; we are nowhere near optimal in Doing It Now, so it's probably good to meditate on this more.

As a concrete example, I'm writing tonight because I realized that I need to just get all my writing ideas out of the way to make room for more awesomeness.

The flipside of this idea is that a lot of things are complete wastes of time, in the sense that they just burn up lifespan and don't get you anything, or even weaken you.

Bad habits like reading crap on the Internet, watching TV, watching porn, playing video games, sleeping in, and so on are obvious losses. It's really hard to internalize that, but this 1000-year-old-vampire concept has been helpful for me by making the magnitude of the cost more salient. Do you want to wake up when you're 30 and realize you wasted your youth on meaningless crap, or do you want to get off your ass and write that thing you've been meaning to right now, and be a fscking vampire in 10 years?

It's not just bad habits, though; a lot of it is your broader position in life that wastes time or doesn't. For example, repetitive wage work that doesn't challenge you is really just trading a huge chunk of your life for not even much money. Obviously sometimes you have to, but you have to realize that trading away half your life is a pretty raw deal that is to be avoided. You don't even really get anything for commuting and housework. Maybe I really should quit my job soon...

I have 168 hours a week, of which only 110 are feasible to use (sleep), and by the time we include all the chores, wage-work, bad habits, and procrastination, I probably only live 30 hours a week. That's bullshit; three quarters of my life pissed away. I could live four times as much if I could cut out that stuff.

So this is just the concept of time opportunity costs dressed up to be more salient. Basic economics concepts seem really quite valuable in this way.

Do it now so you can do something else later. Avoid crap work.

Social Environment and Stimulation

I notice that I'm most alive and do my best intellectual work when talking to other people who are smart and interested in having deep technical conversations. Other things like certain patterns of time pressure create this effect where I work many times harder and more effectively than otherwise. A great example is technical exams; I can blast out answers to hundreds of technical questions at quite a rate.

It seems like a good idea to induce this state where you are more alive (is it the "flow" state?) if you want to live more life. It also seems totally possible to do so more often by hanging out with the right people and exposing yourself to the right working conditions and whatnot.

One thing that will come up is that it's quite draining, in that I sometimes feel exhausted and can't get much done after a day of more intense work. Is this a real thing? Probably. Still, I'm nowhere near the limit even given the need to rest, in general.

I ought to do some research to learn more about this. If it's connected to "flow", there's been a lot of research, AFAIK.

I also ought to just hurry up and move to California where there is a proper intellectual community that will stimulate me much better than the meager group of brains I could scrape together in Vancouver.

The other benefit of a good intellectual community is that they can incentivize doing cooler things. When all your friends are starting companies or otherwise doing great work, sitting around on the couch feels like a really bad idea.

So if we want to live more life, finding more ways to enter that stimulated flow state seems like a prudent thing to do, whether that means just making way for it in your work habits, putting yourself in more challenging social and intellectual environments, or whatever.

Adding It Up

So how fast can we go overall if we do all of this?

By seeking many new experiences to keep learning, I think we can plausibly get 10x speedup over what you might do by default. Obviously this can be more or less, based on circumstances and things I'm not thinking of.

On top of that, it seems like I could do 4x as much by maintaining a habit of doing it now and avoiding crap work. How to do this, I don't know, but it's possible.

I don't know how to estimate the actual gains from a stimulating environment. It seems like it could be really really high, or just another incremental gain in efficiency, depending how it goes down. Let's say that on top of the other things, we can realistically push ourselves 2x or 3x harder by social and environmental effects.

Doing hard things seems huge, but also quite related to the doing new things angle that we already accounted for. So explicitly remembering to do hard things on top of that? Maybe 5x? This again will vary a lot based on what opportunities you are able to find, and unknown factors, but 5x seems safe enough given mortal levels of ingenuity and willpower.

So all together, someone who:

• Often thinks about where they are on the experience curve for everything they do, and takes action on that when appropriate,

• Maintains a habit of doing stuff now and visualizing those opportunity costs,

• Puts themselves in a stimulating environment like the bay area intellectual community and surrounds themselves with stimulating people and events,

• Seeks out the hardest character-building experiences like getting tear gassed in a trench or building a company from scratch,

Can plausibly get 500x speedup and live 1000 normal years in 2. That seems pretty wild, but none of these things are particularly out there, and people like Elon Musk or Eliezer Yudkowsky do seem to do around that magnitude more than the average joe.

Perhaps they don't multiply quite that conveniently, or there's some other gotcha, but the target seems reachable, and these things will help. On the other hand, they almost certainly self-reinforce; a 1000 year old vampire would have mastered the art of living life life at ever higher efficiencies.

This does seem to be congruent with all this stuff being power-law distributed, which of course makes it difficult to summarize by a single number like 500.

The final question of course is what real speedup we can expect you or I to gain from writing or reading this. Getting more than 2 or 3 times by having a low-level insight or reading a blog post seems stretching of the imagination, never mind 500 times. But still, power laws happen. There's probably massive payoff to taking this idea seriously.

Crocker's rules apply to this post, and to everything I post.

Also, after writing this post and googling LW for links I came up with this post, which presents the same ideas. #!@$%

When I was younger, I often played real-time strategy (RTS) computer games. These usually involve running an empire successfully enough to conquer all the other empires. To win, you would have to gather resources like food, stone, wood and gold for use in research, construction and recruitment. Gathering resources is done by worker units. To construct worker units you need food. Do you see the hack?

 

I know, the title gives it away. You can construct a bunch of workers and tell them all to gather food. Use the food they gather to make more workers, and put those on food as well. You set up a positive feedback loop and quickly have vast numbers of workers. When you have crazy amounts of food, then you can get to the business of putting lots of workers on each other resource, and using all your resources to take over the world.

 

Of course, among RTS players this isn't a new idea, and various forces have arisen to counterbalance it. For instance, players build up small soldier squads and attack right at the start of the game, destroying any player who has only defenceless worker units. Marginal costs of worker recruitment increase with the number of workers you have. There are population limits. But the initial development boom still plays an important role, and the key to winning is often to balance those actions which help directly (building an army) with those actions which help with actions which help directly (making more workers).

 

Now consider this. If you want to, say, ensure we're not all dead in 100 years, what do you do? You could become a fireman and save a few lives. Or you could donate to some worthy organization. Or you could get other people to donate to said organization. Or convince people to convince people to donate to the organization. And so on. That's one orbit under the meta function, but it's not the one I want to talk about.

 

Say you decide to throw money at a worthy organization. To do that you need to get money, and to get money you need time.  How much buck-for-the-time you get depends on how efficient you are at converting time into money. But time isn't just useful for conversion into money. It can also be used to increase your efficiency of converting time into money. Or it can be used to increase your efficiency at converting time into [efficiency of converting time into money]. And so on. Do you see the hack?

 

Use the time you have to get better at using the time you have. You set up a positive feedback loop and end up crazy awesome. Human go FOOM. You might spend some time learning to efficiently manage your time, giving you more free time to work at your goals. You might spend some time thinking about how to manage akrasia and thereby create more quality work-time. You might research how best to learn, and chance upon SRSs. You might learn about nootropics. You might even stumble upon this very site, where you might pick up pointers to things you can do to get better at using your time. Now, of course, you can't just spend your time becoming more and more awesome. At some point you need to actually use that awesomeness to do what you originally wanted to. As in the RTSs, you need to balance actions which accomplish stuff directly against those which accomplish stuff indirectly.

 

In other words, you need to balance the various levels of action. To summarize, level 0 actions are those which directly accomplish your goals. Level k+1 actions are those which help make level k actions easier or more effective. As the linked post observes, lower levels tend to be additive while higher levels are often multiplicative or better. Level 0 is useful. Level 1,2 and 3 are much more useful. Level 123 is pretty useless. Sure, travelling by horse gets you places, but having one person invent a plane which a billion people use will cut travel times significantly. Observe that this very site is about going meta, about thinking about thinking, and often about thinking about thinking about thinking, or even more. Also, work can be on many levels at once, and it's not always easy to figure out the level of an action. For instance, what's the level of you reading this paragraph?

 

So we want awesomeness explosions, and to help bring about awesomeness explosions we need to know a bit about them. How can we act to make ourselves explode? What determines the speed of an awesomeness explosion? Is awesomeness capped, and, if so, what's capping it?

 

To start, what limits awesomeness? We might ask whether we can extend the analogy with worker recruitment in RTS games, and indeed we can. In RTS games, worker explosions can't go on forever because:

•          Marginal worker costs increase with the number of workers built.

•         There are population limits.

•         Sooner or later, other players will rudely just up and attack you, and your defenceless workers will die.

 

In a serendipitous confluence of circumstance, these three limitations on RTS fooms map nicely to human fooms. Respectively:

•         Different fruit hangs at different heights, so picking low-hanging fruit makes the average fruit higher. In addition, as you become saner you become less neurotypical (Not every change is an improvement, but every improvement is a change.), so it's harder to use established human knowledge about self-improvement to improve yourself.

•         There are limits to human knowledge. There are built-in limits on brain hardware. Note that both these can be overcome by the sufficiently awesome. They're also both special cases of the above bullet-point. Just as population limits are a special case of increasing marginal worker costs, in yet another serendipitous confluence of circumstance.

•         Your levels of work must be grounded. If you work on level k+1, make sure you do enough work on level k to justify it. (There's an analogy with Truly Part Of You.)

With all these factors limiting human fooms, there's no guarantee human fooms will be, well, FOOMs. They might fizzle out too quickly, due to increasing marginal costs of awesomeness. But my mental intuitive estimation machinery says that, while taking over the world might be pushing it a bit, a lot more is possible than we've achieved so far.

 

Now for some ideas on making yourself go FOOM.

•         Do useful stuff! People aren't automatically strategic. I think this is the second-most important reason we haven't all foomed yet (after akrasia). Remember that compound interest isn't magic – just improving yourself isn't enough. You have to actually assign higher priority to things which are more important. This is a really important point, and all the rest of these bullet-points are special cases of it. I think those in the LW mindspacecluster are particularly prone to seek knowledge without first applying some ruthless pragmatism. I know I am.

•         Do stuff which helps you do stuff. In other words: work on higher levels, as long as you're still grounded. Go meta, like this sentence (whose metaness is too great for even the ordinals). Trying to learn from that physiology book isn't very useful when you haven't learnt how to learn. Again, this is a really important point and all the rest of these bullet-points are special cases of it.

•         Write down your thoughts (Darwin), and preferably ensure you remember them with an SRS. Record your time use every now and then. This is an important.

•         Explore new mindstates. Trying to come up with ideas seems like mining for diamonds, and often you can get more, bigger diamonds by mining in different places. One reason this is a good idea (and a reason why you should write down your thoughts) is that people (or me, at least) often seem to retread the same thoughtpatterns over and over, day after day. It's like you have a 'reset' button that gets pushed every evening when you go to sleep. I have directly observed this, when I wrote down my thoughts for a few weeks without memorizing them with an SRS. When I write down my thoughts, I've taken to calling this Every Day The Same Dream (EDTSD) syndrome.

•         Look at what other really smart people do, then consider doing that. Look at really smart people and ask yourself why they haven't taken over the world yet. (David Bennett: If you want to beat the market, you have to do something different from what everyone else is doing, and you have to be right.)

•         Think a lot, and think in efficient ways. Most people seem to just hope good ideas will tap them on t he shoulder. I've been like that for most of my life. Ideas often do tap you on the shoulder, but I get better results by sitting down with a piece of paper and a pen and thinking really hard, vomiting anything that comes to me out onto the page. I call this the Thinking Really Hard (TRH) technique, and I Think it was inspired by Eliezer's exhortation to sit down and Think for 5 minutes before concluding a problem is unsolvable.

•         Related to the previous bullet-point: Ensure you focus mental energy wisely. If you really spent all your mental energy where it's optimal, how much more would get done? Perhaps actively stop yourself thinking about things you don't care about. Go meta: think about how to improve your thought-focussing abilities.

•         As a special case of the previous bullet-point: Think long and hard about how to get more time. I really mean that. Perhaps you should add a reminder to regularly do that to your SRS, if you're awesome enough to use one. Remember the Pareto principle.

•         As a summary of all these bullet-points: Figure out ways to work faster and smarter and harder. I have lots of ideas about overcoming akrasia which are pretty weird and which I've never seen described anywhere else, but which work spectacularly for me. Of course, that doesn't mean they'll work for everyone else, but they're bound to work for some of you. I might write a post.

•         A few links, which most LWers are probably already familiar with:

•         The Science of Winning at Life

•         SRSs: Gwern Branwen, Piotr Wozniak

•         Nootropics: ImmInst 1, 2

•         Humans Aren't Automatically Strategic

•         All the posts about akrasia

•         more?

 

What determines the speed of human recursive self-improvement? The main factor, I think, is how much new awesome you get from a given amount of awesome – the rate of compound interest on awesome. If being awesome causes you to become much more awesome, you will foom quickly, whereas if you get only a bit more awesome for each unit of awesome you have, you will foom slowly. If there's a set-point of awesomeness towards which you are attached like a spring, it will be very hard to foom. Each of these three situations often occurs in real life, for different types of awesome.

 

I'm pretty sure that several people here on LW have had these human fooms, since, well, they've found LW. I've had a miniature human foom, and it's still ongoing. But it seems to me that this is nothing compared to what's out there.

As with those of fooming AIs, the actions of fooming humans are hard to predict, and for the same reason: if you could predict what they'd do, you could probably do it yourself. Nevertheless, here are some ideas of what people far on in the fooming process might do:

•         They would practise extremely fine-tuned control of their own thought-processes; they would waste no thought-time. They could just sit and go into a thought trance, coming up with a brilliant new insight in seconds. When most people think, they're just executing adaptations, not optimizing utility.

•         They would be free of cognitive bias.

•         They would have the ability to flat-out ignore pain. They would do everything the way cold, hard logic says is most efficient. They wouldn't ever sit, they would stand or run. They would run on a treadmill on one leg while listening to a French audiobook (despite not knowing French) while juggling 5 tennis balls with one hand while doing SRS reviews.

•         To restate the previous bullet-point, they would have no akrasia. They would find those little voices at the backs of their heads that keep whispering for them to fail. They would drag out those little voices and kill them.

 

Now, these things look unrealistic. But I think they' d all be achievable by any average LWer who committed themselves to this, and only this, for a year. I really mean that. And I have a feeling that more, much more, is possible.

 

The whole universe sat there, open to the man who could make the right decisions.
Frank Herbert, Dune, as quoted by Nick_Roy