Homestuck has just joined HPMOR, Ra, Pact and TNC in the pantheon of "geek epic" stories with underwhelming endings :-(

As far as I know, only Worm and Undertale have managed to beat that curse so far.

The part of focusing your efforts on the right task is a rationality skill.

Recently one rationalist wrote on facebook how he used physical rationality to make his his shoulder heal faster after an operation and produce less pain. Having accurate models of reality is very useful in many cases.

I think it's certainly true. I suppose it depends on your definition of "habit"...

Isn't much of what we do habitual, whether it benefits us or not? In this way, you have either good habits or bad that are reciprocals of one another.

For example, people who refrain are not said to have a "habit of not biting their nails". But that is, I think, what is happening.

Does anyone know why Jesus commanded his followers to give in secret?

I don't find that there's much of a social cost to smoking e-cigarettes. Most non-smokers don't mind them as they don't smell, and where I live (the UK) you can smoke them inside in lots of places.

If you use caffeine: No. Nicotine increases your metabolism of caffeine, meaning you need higher doses of caffeine to achieve the same effect. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9022872

Personal experience suggests tolerance development is less affected than metabolism (presumably because peak caffeine levels aren't affected, although I don't have studied backing that up), which means you'll develop a tolerance to caffeine faster, as well.

Success in social interaction is not about holding more things in your head but often about holding less things in your head.

Sounds like we do need to go into the longer conversation.

I view most of these skills are something like the follows: at level 0, you have no clue what's going on; at level 1, you have a system 2 model of what's going on that's too slow / clumsy to operate successfully in real time; at level 2, you have a system 1 model of what's going on that's fast and good enough to operate successfully in real time.

Most people go directly from level 0 to level 2, with some level 1 help. Most language speakers don't have an abstract grammatical model of their language in their heads, some constructions "just look weird" or don't come to mind, and they often can't articulate rules even if they use them correctly.

For example, in English, why is something "harder" instead of "more hard"? Why is it "more difficult" instead of "difficulter"?* (This came to mind because my mother is teaching ESL classes and had been surprised that there was a simple underlying rule, which I could not successfully identify before the question was spoiled, even though for any particular word I could correctly determine whether 'more' or 'er' was appropriate.)

But there are situations where it seems better to go through level 1. If you're teaching someone a second language, for example, they're much more likely to be able to make use of abstractly stated grammatical rules than children are. If someone has already been a child and yet not developed a 'normal' level of social intelligence, then the normal approach is inadequate, and we need to consider alternatives.

When developing those alternatives, it's worth noting that the right approach for going from level 0 to level 1 (learning more grammatical rules into system 2) is different from the right approach for going from level 1 to level 2 (practicing the grammatical rules into system 1). So yes, someone who is at level 1 would not get much out of holding more things in their head, but someone who is at level 0 would.

(To elaborate even further, I think someone at level 0 probably has some feature of their personality / communication style at a fundamental enough level of their model that they won't generate hypotheses that contradict it, and thus large parts of human interactions will be fundamentally mysterious to them. The point of reading about personality styles and communication styles and so on is that it generates alternative hypotheses at that level--many 'nerds' do not realize that there are people out there who interpret statements as about relationship closeness instead of as about factual accuracy, and pointing that out to them is the fastest way to level up their interaction ability.)

* Single syllable adjectives get an "er" or "est," multi-syllable adjectives get a "more" or "most," at least most of the time.

Life advice..?

Future is uncertain, eat dessert first.

:-P

As a pedestrian or cyclist, you're not all that easy to see from a car at night, worse if you don't wear white. High-visibility vests (that thing that construction workers wear, yellow or orange with reflective stripes) fix the problem and cost around $7-$8 from Amazon including shipping, or £3 in the UK.

Two boring items of cooking interest:

On cracking eggs: There's a thin membrane on the inside of an egg's shell. When you crack an egg, you're actually aiming to break that membrane. If you crack the shell but the membrane's still intact, the egg won't split cleanly and most likely you will get shell pieces in your food. Figuring this out reduced my shell-in-food mishaps by something like 80%.

On butter: Real butter (the kind that comes in sticks) is meant to be kept at room temperature when you're going to use it. It lasts a week or more that way in a butter dish. I somehow didn't realize this until I was past thirty. I used margarine all my life, because I thought it was normal for butter to be rock-solid and completely unspreadable, as it is when taken out of the fridge.