Finished and turned in.

Johnny says, "I've got no problems staying motivated. My self-image is wonderful; I am immaculately and voraciously productive... I. am. Productivity Man!"

Sally says, "I'm a slug. I think I'm getting only a small fraction of production out of my potential..."

Johnny lives in his rich parents' basement, works overnights in a laundromat & has earned several dozen trophies on his PS3.

Sally is a Nobel Prize winner. (...and owns a nationwide chain of dry cleaning stores)

...

An accurate view of your objective output can be valuable. A deluded identity can keep you from improving -- it can keep you from even recognizing you need improvement.

Firstly, this post is awesome.

Secondly though, this post brushes on the topic of intuition as a useful tool, something I think far too many Logic-Based types throw out without considering the practicality of. It's better not to think of it as being an substitute for logical thinking, but rather as a quick and dirty backup, for when you don't have all the information.

Intuition can occur in up to two seconds, operates almost completely below conscious awareness, and begins effecting your body immediately. Here are some excerpts from Blink, a book by Malcolm Gladwell, in which he researches how intuition works, what abilities and drawbacks it has, and what biases can effect it's overall usefulness.

In front of you are four decks of cards, two of them red and the other two blue. Each card in those four decks either wins you a sum of money or costs you some money, and your job is to turn over cards from any the decks, one at a time, in such a way that maximizes your winnings.*

Ah, a perfect opportunity to be a Logical Thinker, using careful observation and reasoning to find the ideal pattern. What path does intuition take though?

What you don't know at the beginning however, is that the red decks are a minefield. The rewards are high, but when you lose on the red cards, you lose a lot. Actually, you can win only by taking cards from the blue decks, which offer a nice steady diet of $50 payouts and modest penalties. The question is how long will it take you to figure this out? After about fifty cards or so, people start to develop a hunch about what's going on. We don't know why we prefer the blue decks, but we're pretty sure at that point that they are a better bet. After turning about eighty cards, most of us have figured out the game and can explain exactly why the first two decks are a bad idea.

This is all standard enough, but what is more impressive is the fact that people started generating stress responses to the red decks by the tenth card.

That's right, palms began to sweat in reaction to the red decks almost immediately, naturally pushing people towards the blue decks before they could even understand why, or even recognize what they were doing.

In those moments, our brain uses two very different strategies to make sense of the situation. The first is the one we're most familiar with. It's the conscious strategy. We think about what we've learned, and eventually we come up with an answer. This strategy is logical and definitive. But it takes us eighty cards to get there. It's slow, and it needs a lot of information. There's a second strategy, though. It operates a lot more quickly. It starts to kick in after ten cards, and it's really smart, because it picks up the problem with the red decks almost immediately.

There are better examples of applied Intuition in Blink, but I've purposefully only used one of the earlier examples in the Amazon Sampler to respect the book. I'd recommend reading the whole thing though, especially if you're interested in understanding what it does while you're thinking things through.

One who possesses a maximum-entropy prior is further from the truth than one who possesses an inductive prior riddled with many specific falsehoods and errors. Or more to the point, someone who endorses knowing nothing as a desirable state for fear of accepting falsehoods is further from the truth than somebody who believes many things, some of them false, but tries to pay attention and go on learning.

First off, take a look here and here.

There's tons of things to consider, even assuming I have a tireless work ethic and can implement this immediately.

This is the first thing that jumped out at me. I would recommend the Confidence Spiral approach, where you set small goals you can reach and use that to gradually ramp up your projects. Measure what you do in terms of improvements over default, rather than subtractions from perfect. For example, I'm going to recommend a bunch of books and blog posts in the remainder of this comment. You could read them all at once and try to apply them all at once- but it's better to read a book, attempt to apply it, then read it again in a month or year later with your new knowledge of having tried to apply it. Once your attempts to apply the first book are in place (but before you do the review), then start the second book.

what would you recommend that I do over the next year, to give me the biggest utility bonus the fastest, both in intelligence and wealth?

There are three parts here.

Utility bonus: Being happy is a skill. Read How to be Happy, Scott Adam's Happiness Engineering, and a book on cognitive behavior therapy, either feeling good or a workbook targeted at anything you want to be better at. (Effective therapy teaches people interpersonal and intrapersonal skills whose lack are generally at the root of their problems. Even if you don't have any problems at the clinical level it's useful to use the skills to make yourself better than default, to make developing those problems less likely, and to be able to give solid advice to other people who do have problems at the clinical level.)

Intelligence: Your maximum intelligence is pretty much fixed at this point. You have two options open: be at a higher fraction of your maximum intelligence more often, and skill growth. You're already here, so I won't mention rationality besides to mention that my current favorite book on decision science is Decisive.

The first is done mostly by clean living- eat well, get plenty of sleep, and minimize cognitive load by moving obligations out of your memory into external storage. If you want to do this rigorously, use Quantified Mind to track the effects of interventions, but for most interventions the problem is not knowing whether or not they're working, but putting in the effort to sustain the intervention. Your high school that starts at a terrible time- actively develop the skill of going to sleep early to get a full 9 hours of rest. Melatonin might help. Getting Things Done is the book that details how to use todo lists and external memory to reduce cognitive load, but it won't be that important for you. Use Anki to memorize things you need to know for school, as well as things that you come across that you want your system 2 to have available.

Skill growth comes not from demonstrating what you can do but learning what you can't yet do well. This means that practice needs to be deliberate to be effective, and will often be effortful. (That doesn't mean it won't be fun- but make sure you're consistently challenged, and not avoiding areas where your skills are lacking.) Here, read So Good They Can't Ignore You,

Wealth: The standard way these days for clever young people to earn extra cash is by providing basic technical services to people in their social circle or their parent's social circle that don't know where to look for professional technical services. This will be stuff like website design, computer repair, putting things on eBay, and so on. I haven't seriously investigated this in a long time, and so this could be out of date.

Long term, your wealth will in large part depend on your social skills. Read How To Win Friends and Influence People, Getting to Yes and possibly Never Eat Alone (the name is a good tip, but the book contains much more). Get to know people in positions of influence, and try to make it as pleasant for them to be around you.

He who knows nothing is closer to the truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods and errors.

-Thomas Jefferson

Keep records, so that you can later evaluate what you achieved (and write about it on LW).

What format of records? Well, if you know what you are going to do, the best would be just writing numbers (for example if your goal is to make money, then how much money you made when), because that's no-nonsense, and you can do monthly statistics and reports. But you are probably going to try many new things, so you don't know yet which variables will seem important. Something like bullet-point diary could be a good compromise. For each day write very short messages, with some numbers if possible. For example: "Read a book XY, pages 150 to 190." "Met a friend Z; discussed business plans." These data can later be processed to graphs.

Once in a week or in a month try writing predictions about what will you achieve during the week or month. At the end make notes what you did and what you didn't do. Also, why is the outcome different from prediction: was there some unexpected situation, did you change your mind, were you just too optimistic, or did your plan lack something?

Should all time be devoted to the quickest increases in utility, or should energy be set aside for starting some long term goals early? Does it make more sense to improve yourself, so you can make more money? Or to make some money, and use it to improve yourself?

This is complicated, and it depends on your specific situation: what skills do you have, how is your family financially, what are your hobbies? Some things require preparation before they pay off. Learning the first lesson of a foreign language or the first lesson of programming does not bring any benefits, so if you focus on short-term maximizing, you will never learn anything like this. On the other hand, long-term plans have less feedback, so you are more likely to delude yourself. For example, you could spend a few months learning a foreign language, only to realize that you actually have no good plan where to use it.

When you are a beginner, getting more skills is better than getting more money, because you will probably not make a lot of money anyway; but until you try using your skills in real-life situations, you may have a bad idea about how good you are, or which parts are important to master. If your parents are okay with paying all the expenses you need, you can ignore the money, but you should have some way to measure your progress. For example you could try to win a competition in what you learn. You should compete even if you don't have a chance to win, because you will get the feedback, and if you try it again later, you will see how much did you actually improve.

what would you recommend that I do over the next year, to give me the biggest utility bonus the fastest, both in skill and wealth?

Really depends on where you are now. If you were my clone, which obviously you are not, I would recommend programming and social skills. For programming, start with Python, and when you can write algorithms (participate in a competition to verify that), learn something that allow you writing mobile applications; that gives you useful skills and allows you to make money in your free time. For social skills, watch The Blueprint Decoded, learn dancing, go to places where you can meet interesting people and talk with them (for example LW meetups). Don't procrastinate online.

I think this is actually enough work for one year; programming will take a lot of time. You also need some free time to meet with friends, read good books, and relax. (Seriously, relaxation is an important skill some people lack; actually it is a part of social skills. Also, try meditation.) Read the Sequences, but don't read all the comments.

Once a month, set specific goals for that month. Make sure that it's very easy to verify that you achieved the goal ("improve at programming" is not a good goal, "solve every practice problem in the first chapter of SICP" is a good goal. "solve every practice problem in the first chapter of SICP, or spend at least 2 hours thinking about each problem before giving up and looking up a solution" is even better).

After you've decided on your goals for a given month, don't second-guess whether they're actually the best thing you could be doing or whether you're wasting your time -- it's only one month. If it turns out it wasn't the best goal to try, just take note of it and use that knowledge to pick better goals next month. It's more important that you actually follow through than that you follow the optimal path, and if you keep switching goals every week, you're not gonna follow through.

Also, start using either anki or mnemosyne.

You'll want to target anything that compounds over time.

Something I believe you should add to the list is to develop the habit of exercise. You will live longer, have more energy day-to-day, and being attractive is one of life's great cheat codes. The reddit fitness community has a great faq on how to get started.

On August 4th, I will be turning 15, and I've decided to initiate a very large project, which for lack of a better name, I will dub "The Plan".

I intend to spend the days leading up to my 15th Birthday by taking information from an enormous variety of sources on what life improvements can be made, what skills are most useful, and what areas should be studied, to reach the ultimate goal of gaining as much benefit possible, as quick as possible.

There's tons of things to consider, even assuming I have a tireless work ethic and can implement this immediately. What types of utility increases are there? Which are more important? Should all time be devoted to the quickest increases in utility, or should energy be set aside for starting some long term goals early? Does it make more sense to improve yourself, so you can make more money? Or to make some money, and use it to improve yourself?

Obviously I'm not going to find a perfect answer, and attempting to plan out my whole life is doomed to fail, but I'd at least like to have a better idea of where to go from here. (Besides, I'll still have learned a lots of useful information.)

So, I pose this question to the LessWrong Community:

If you were me, and turning 15, what would you recommend that I do over the next year, to give me the biggest utility bonus the fastest, both in skill and wealth?

Hopefully, even if it proves an impossible question, we'll see some interesting discussion.