I realized this about my own mood swings.

I tend to do a lot of "writing therapy" in workflowy. Thus, if I'm ever at a high, or a low, I record a lot of my thoughts into workflowy so that I can refactor/combine them later.

I like model this as "emotional retrograde amnesia". I like the movie "Memento" by Nolan because the protagonist writes lots of notes to himself because he has actual retrograde amnesia; similarly, I have emotional retrograde amnesia, so I write lots of notes to myself, so that I can piece together the "puzzle" later.

Where is your blog?

So, it seems like lots of people advise buying index funds, but how do I figure out which specific ones I should choose?

Munchkining real estate http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-10-23/this-startup-tracks-america-s-murder-houses (I'm referring to the resellers mentioned in the article, not the actual startup covered).

Umm, would anybody here have invites for torrent trackers for textbooks (e.g. BitMe, The Geeks, Bibliotik)? PM me.

I have some questions about step 1 (find a flexible program):

My understanding is that there are two sources of inflexibility for PhD programs: A. Requirements for your funding source (e.g. TA-ing) and B. Vague requirements of the program (e.g. publish X papers). I'm excluding Quals, since you just have to pass a test and then you're done.

Elsewhere in the comments, someone wrote:

"Grad school is free. At most good PhD programs in the US, if you get in then they will offer you funding which covers tuition and pays you a stipend on the order of $25K per year. In return, you may have to do some work as a TA or in a professor's lab."

So, there are two types of jobs you can have to fund your PhD (TA-ing and being a RA/Research Assistant to a professor). How time-consuming is TA-ing generally? I imagine it varies based on the school/class. How do you find a TA-ing gig that isn't time consuming? Can you generally TA during your entire PhD? I think I vaguely recall a university that only would let you TA for so many semesters.

You could also fund your PhD by getting a fellowship. Philip Guo has written about applying for the NSF, NDSEG, Hertz fellowships. I'm poorly calibrated about how hard it is to get one of these fellowships. I've also heard that certain schools will offer fellowships to some of their students. How hard are these to get relative to the fellowships mentioned above? There are ~33K science PhDs awarded each year. I wonder what distinguishes the ~4% who get fellowships from the median science PhD student.

Let's say that you were really frugal and/or financially independent already. My impression is that many schools would still require you to TA in order to have your tuition waved.

Let’s assume you have the financial aspect of your PhD taken care of (e.g. You have an easy/enjoyable TA job). What other requirements are there other than passing Quals? Could I read interesting books indefinitely until I find something interesting to publish?

I'd like to believe that achieving step 1 is possible, but as eli_sennesh pointed out, this is hard.

Agency has strong incentives due to real world advantages such as speed and capability. Automatic cars, high frequency trading algorithms, airplane autopilots, guided missiles, security systems, assisted living robots and personal enhancements like pacemakers... computers are better than humans at a sufficiently broad set of abilities that we will entrust more and more to them in the form of agency as time goes on. Tools won't remain mere tools for long.

Introduction to Connectionist Modelling of Cognitive Processes. Reviewed on LW here.

I have a question:

In your post, "A Workable Solution to the Problem of Other Minds", you talk about solving the problem by connecting and disconnecting minds (i.e. doing mind-coalescing and decolescing). I also had this idea, but I didn't really develop it much. Do you know where I could read more about this proposed solution to the problem of other minds?

So, I did a bit of googling for counter-arguments. Here's what I found:

https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/women-who-stray/201307/your-brain-porn-its-not-addictive

http://www.dailydot.com/lifestyle/porn-addiction-healthy-research/

http://www.dailydot.com/opinion/5-reasons-you-need-watch-porn/

There were a few different studies that showed that it wasn't as bad as people thought.