I wouldn't count running as an "interesting hobby" unless you manage to be very successful, at which case anything becomes interesting. For example, most people would think it to be very cool to meet an olympic level sprinter. That said, it is possible that a hobby can provide many social benefits, as you have stated, without being "interesting".

If you're a boring person - you don't have any interesting hobbies and you haven't had very many experiences - then you'll have a much harder time socially. Of course, you can be a super interesting person and still lack the ability to present yourself as an interesting person, but many people need to make themselves more interesting first so that they at least have something to present.

I think a lot could be gained from asking the question of whether being an interesting person or having an interesting life is in and of itself a valuable thing. How much of it is a proxy for something else, and perhaps we could extract the "something else" and it'd be much easier to figure out how to get there? Or, what does one intend to gain by becoming more interesting? And is that thing valuable?

I note this article appeared in my feed; http://lifehacker.com/the-only-technique-to-learn-something-new-1709323497?utm_campaign=socialflow_lifehacker_facebook&utm_source=lifehacker_facebook&utm_medium=socialflow and has the sub-headings:

• love it
• read it
• try it. but not too hard
• get a teacher (plus the 10x rule - which is that coaching-time potentially multiplies your learning)
• study the history, study the present
• do easy projects first
• study what you did
• you are the average of five people around you
• do it a lot
• find your evil plan

Which are some similar points to the ones I covered.

I always wanted to see discussed the general opportunity cost of time lost due to extra/superior sleep, especially if given already small amounts of time left and the fact that your ineffective hours (assuming one's a night owl) may as well be spent on work while the more effective ones are the ones during which you 'should' sleep. I currently average <8 hours, meaning that I generally physically go to bed at midnight and wake up at 8, and I don't fall asleep easily so it's probably a lot less than 8 hours. If you have about 4-5 hours of free time left after work and you cut them down to 3 hours due to sleep, and then an hour of that is probably spent on exercise, I think the depressive effect may be quite strong.

Getting more sleep tends to make me just dislike my life more, which I consider a much more serious health hazard than merely feeling sleepy at times, something that I have, at this point, accepted as the fact of life for a night owl in a lark world, and an excuse to drink coffee.

I generally agree with something I read on Gwern's melatonin page: most people don't get sufficient sleep and that's going to stay pretty true for a while. I feel more could be accomplished in other avenues (work week, re-balancing of schedules) with greater effect than trying to train people into giving up a greater chunk of their life for this life-prolonging activity when the bigger issue is that a different chunk of their life is used up for a more useless activity and that they can't control their schedule.

I'm curious about the "sex" exception in "don't use your bed[room?] for anything except sleep and sex". It strikes me as unprincipled. Have they actually tested "doing this in bed is bad for sleep, doing that in bed is bad for sleep, doing the other in bed is bad for sleep... oh, but doing sex in bed is okay"? Does masturbation count?

I mean, it might be a case of anticipating "we have nowhere else to have sex, and we're not giving up sex" and making an exception so people will be more likely to follow it. But then I feel the better exception, at least for certain audiences, would be "don't use your bed for anything that you can conveniently do in other places, except sleep".