Here's some blue-sky speculation about one way alien sapients' civilizations might develop differently from our own. Alternatively, you can consider it conworlding. Content note: torture, slavery.

Looking at human history, after we developed electronics, we painstakingly constructed machines that can perform general computation, then built software which approximates the workings of the human brain. For instance, we nowadays use in-silico reinforcement learning and neural nets to solve various "messy" problems like computer vision and robot movement. In the future, we might scan brains and then emulate them on computers. This all seems like a very circuitous course of development - those algorithms have existed all around us for thousands of years in the form of brains. Putting them on computers requires an extra layer of technology.

Suppose that some alien species's biology is a lot more robust than ours - their homeostatic systems are less failure-prone than our own, due to some difference in their environment or evolutionary history. They don't get brain-damaged just from holding their breath for a couple minutes, and open wounds don't easily get infected.

Now suppose that after they invent agriculture but before they invent electronics, they study biology and neurology. Combined with their robust biology, this leads to a world where things that are electronic in our world are instead controlled by vat-grown brains. For instance, a car-building robot could be constructed by growing a brain in a vat, hooking it up to some actuators and sensors, then dosing it with happy chemicals when it correctly builds a car, and stimulating its nociceptors when it makes mistakes. This rewarding and punishing can be done by other lab-grown "overseer" brains trained specifically for the job, which are in turn manually rewarded at the end of the day by their owner for the total number of cars successfully built. Custom-trained brains could control chemical plants, traffic lights, surveillance systems, etc. The actuators and sensors could be either biologically-based (lab-grown eyes, muscles, etc., powered with liquefied food) or powered with combustion engines or steam engines or even wound springs.

Obviously this is a pretty terrible world, because many minds will live lives with very little meaning, never grasping the big picture, at the mercy of unmerciful human or vat-brain overseers, without even the option of suicide. Brains wouldn't necessarily be designed or drugged to be happy overall - maybe a brain in pain does its job better. I don't think the owners would be very concerned about the ethical problems - look at how humans treat other animals.

You can see this technology as a sort of slavery set up so that slaves are cheap and unsympathetic and powerless. They won't run away, because: they'll want to perform their duties, for the drugs; many won't be able to survive without owners to top up their food drips; they could be developed or drugged to ensure docility; you could prevent them from even getting the idea of emancipation, by not giving them the necessary sensors; perhaps you could even set things up so the overseer brains can read the thoughts of their charges directly, and punish bad thoughts. This world has many parallels to Hanson's brain emulation world.

Is this scenario at all likely? Would these civilizations develop biological superintelligent AGI, or would they only be able to create superintelligent AGI once they develop electronic computing?

I'd like to solicit advice since I'm starting at Stanford this Fall and I'm interested in optimal philanthropy.

First off, what should I major in? I have experience in programming and math, so I'm thinking of majoring in CS, possibly with a second major or a minor in applied math. But switching costs are still extremely low at the moment, so I should consider other fields.

Some majors that could have higher lifetime earnings than straight CS:

• Petroleum engineering. Would non-oil energy sources cause pay to drop over the next 40 years?
• Actuarial math. If I understand correctly, actuaries had high pay because they were basically a cartel, artificially limiting the supply of certifications to a certain number each year. And I've heard that people that used to hire actuaries now hire cheaper equivalents, so pay could be less over the next 40 years.
• Chemical engineering, nuclear engineering, electrical and electronics engineering, mechanical engineering, aerospace engineering.
• Pre-med.
• Quantitative finance.

Thoughts?

Stanford actually has salary data for 2011-2012 graduates by major. CS has highest earnings, by quite far. The data is incomplete because few people responded and some groups were omitted for privacy, so we don't know what e.g. petroleum engineers or double majors earned.

Should I double-major? There are some earnings statistics here; to summarize, two majors in the same field doesn't help; a science major plus a humanities major has lower earnings than the science major alone; greatest returns are achieved by pairing a math/science major with an engineering major, which increases earnings "up to 30%" above the math/science major alone. I'd guess these effects are largely not causation, but correlation caused by conscientiousness/ambition causing both double majors and higher earnings.

I could also get minors. I'm planning to very carefully look over the requirements for each major and minor, since there do seem to be some cheap gains. A math minor can be done in one quarter, for instance; a math major takes only a bit more than two quarters.

I have a table with the unit requirements of each combination of majors and minors. Most students take 15 units a quarter. Here are some major/minor combinations I could do:

• If I take 18.8 units a quarter, I could double-major in CS and econ.
• If I take 15.8 units a quarter, I could major in CS and minor in math and econ.
• If I take 15.4 units a quarter, I could double-major in CS and math.

Cal Newport argues that this sort of thing a bad idea because hard schedules do not actually impress employers more.

Would employers care about double majors in undergrad if I also get a graduate degree? I will do a master's degree or a PhD, partly because those make it a lot easier to emigrate to the US. (I'm from South Africa, which doesn't have much of a software industry.)

What other things could increase earnings?

• Doing an internship every summer.
• Networking. Stanford's statistics on how 2011-2012 graduates found jobs indicates that around 29% of them got jobs through networking.
• Better social skills? I'm planning on taking some classes on public speaking, improv, etc.; what else should I do?
• Some way of signalling leadership skills? Maybe I could try to get into a leadership position at a student club or something.
• Honors programs, or doing research. Do employers care about this?
• Following the advice of Stanford's Career Development Center, for instance about how to prepare for career fairs, using their internship network, making appointments with their career counselors, etc.
• Studying abroad. I'm already studying abroad by going to Stanford, so this is probably less valuable for me than for most students, though it still seems likely to be worthwhile. Stanford has a Washington program involving internships and classes taught by policymakers, which might be worth doing. Both these would make it harder to do multiple majors and minors.

Many thanks for all advice given!

EDIT: I used a scoring rule to rank all combinations of majors and minors in CS, math, economics and MS&E (management science and engineering) according to practicality and estimated effect on earnings. Unit estimates include all breadth requirements etc., assuming I don't take stupid courses. Here's the top 20; the top 10 all look pretty good:

Another option is to major or minor in M&CS (mathematical and computational sciences) instead of math or CS separately.

EDIT 2: Here is a graph of graduates' salaries by major. Y-axis is salary of 2011-2012 Stanford graduates. X-axis is degree: 1 is BA/BS, 2 is MA/MS, 3 is PhD; intermediate values are for groups containing two degree-levels. The sample size is tiny because only 30% of students responded, and some groups were omitted for privacy.

Warning: armchair evopsych speculation follows.

Related to: Summer vs Winter Strategies

A couple months ago, I had a large amount of tedious work to do. Whenever I sat down to do it, I would be distracted by other, less mentally straining or more interesting tasks. I decided to try an experiment in disconnecting distraction: I removed everything on my laptop that wasn't that work, and travelled to a remote rural location. I had no internet access, books, or any other things to keep me occupied. I decided to take further advantage of the precommitment opportunity by not taking enough food for the full trip, so I would be fasting for 2.5 of the trip's 6 days.

I managed to get a large chunk of the work done, so I count the trip as successful and am planning to repeat it for longer time periods. The most interesting observations I got were the effects it had on my mental state. There were two clear effects.

* First, really strong cravings for various forms of distraction, together with a sort of severe, restless mental pain at not having them; I tried to sleep as long as possible because that was more entertaining than the mind-numbing boredom of hours and hours of the work. The mind seems to adjust for entertainment like it does for several things - having more entertainment than your "expected entertainment" setpoint raises the setpoint and makes you happy, and having less than the setpoint lowers the setpoint and makes you unhappy.

* Second, by the end of the six days, a weird feeling of agency, high willpower, clarity about goals and how to achieve them, and a stronger-than-baseline desire to not socialize. These effects were really strong; they lasted for two or three days after I returned from the trip. This did not feel like the hypomania that caffeine (with no tolerance) induces in me; I felt calm and conscientious.

At the time, I attributed all of the mental effects to setpoint-lowering, commitment/consistency (seeing yourself as "the type of person that does X"), and placebo. Later, I thought of another explanation: all of the conditions in the experiment, when they were present in the EEA, were symptoms of scarcity of resources. They're all signs of the environment being generally hard to survive in, or of a lowering of the environment's carrying capacity, e.g. by a drought or a heatwave.

To review the conditions:

* I had no contact with other humans.

* I was fasting for the last half of it.

* The area was dry and hot; the plants and insects were generally hostile.

* There was little animal life. This, together with the lack of music, ensured silence, except for inorganic sounds like a door banging in the wind.

* I was undergoing withdrawal from all of my various entertainment addictions - to music, to games, to movies, to porn, to reading interesting or funny or insightful things, to social interaction.

* I was doing unpleasant work for most of the day.

It seems reasonable that the mind would be adapted to function differently in resource-scarce environments than in resource-abundant environments, and I'd guess that evolution would deal with this by creating flexible adaptations activated by immediate circumstances rather than by creating unmalleable fixed adaptations, because there's gene flow or because environments change or because humans move around.

So it might be useful for us to impose conditions that would have been evidence about optimal behaviour in the EEA, in hopes of causing us to more readily execute those behaviors. I'm not sure how effective this really is; I still think the effects from my experiment were largely from setpoint-lowering and commitment/consistency.

For the scarcity-versus-abundance spectrum, some thoughts:

* In the EEA, the scarcity-versus-abundance spectrum was probably highly correlated with population density.

* In the EEA, both were probably somewhat correlated with interpersonal trust and reciprocal altruism. When there are lots of people, a reputation for backstabbing spreads more rapidly and has more consequences.

* In modern first-world countries, people are probably more in the abundance mindset than the EEA norm, because resources are abundant and there are people everywhere.

* I think it's likely that different people tend to different ends of the spectrum, because of genes, experiences or surroundings. I think some of my own abnormalities can be explained by being further towards the "scarcity" end than most people; this post might look biased to people on the other end.

* In scarcity environments, there's less incentive to engage in costly signalling games, because there are less people to signal at, they matter less because they have less resources, and the costs of signalling are more painful. This could be bad (because much of the worthwhile stuff humanity does - art, altruism, people trying to get rich, verbal intelligence - seems to be done mostly to signal) or it could be good (because people don't handicap themselves). People in scarcity environments might have more clarity because self-delusion might often be done in order to credibly signal.

* There are two ways to deal with hard problems. You could solve them. Or you could cry for help, by loudly complaining, showing off your helplessness and incompetence, perhaps even by self-sabotage. But crying for help is a good strategy only if there are friendly people all around you with resources to spare who believe you have resources (or shared genes) with which to reciprocate (or onlookers who would be signalled at, and who matter because they have resources). So people in the scarcity mindset might try harder to agently get things done, while those in abundance mindsets would rely more on other people.

* On risk-taking: Abundance environments have stronger social safety nets and more of a resource cushion, so losses won't kill you. On the other hand, scarcity environments have less to lose and less people to see you fail. If there's a "cutoff" of resources under which you won't survive, and if you expect to not survive, then risk-taking at even odds would probably increase utility. Similarly, for planning/conscientiousness: Abundance environments have more of a future to plan for. On the other hand, scarcity environments have less of a resource cushion and social safety net. Planning would be better in more predictable environments, but I don't know which environments are more predictable. r/K selection theory might also be relevant here, but I'm not sure which of scarcity/abundance is which of r/K; the more predictable one would probably be more K.

Things to think about further:

* Is this sensible, or is it confirmation bias + just-so stories + cherry-picking? What does science say? (I couldn't find very relevant things; there are some papers about using r/K selection theory to explain differences between people, and some sources saying that cultures with higher risk and mortality conform more to traditional gender roles.

* If it's sensible, which end of each spectrum should we aim for? How can we easily signal scarcity/abundance to our "savannah minds"?

* What other things can we signal to our savannah minds? What EEA changes could we simulate to cause useful changes in our behaviour?

This post is about two Anki plugins I just wrote. I've been using them for a few months as monkey patches, but I thought it might help people here (or at least the 20% that are awesome enough to use SRSs) to have them as plugins. They're ugly and you may have to fiddle for a while to get them to work.

1. Music-Fiddler

To use this, play music while doing Anki revs. (I also recommend that you try playing music only while doing Anki, as a way of making Anki more pleasant.) While you're reviewing a card, the music volume will gradually decrease. As soon as you pass or fail the card, the volume will go back up, then start gradually decreasing again. So whenever you stop paying attention and instead start thinking about all the awesome things you could do if only you were able to sit down and work, the program punishes you by stopping the music. And whenever you concentrate fully on your work and so go through cards quickly, you have a personal soundtrack!

To use this plugin:

- If you do not have Linux, you'll need to modify the code somehow.

- Ensure that the "amixer" command works on your computer. If it doesn't, you're going to need to modify the code somehow.

- Make sure you have the new Anki 2.0.

- Download the plugin.

- Change all lines (in the plugin source) marked with "CHANGEME" according to your preferences.

- You might want to disable convenient ways of increasing the volume, like keyboard shortcuts.

This plugin provides psychological reinforcement, but is not proper intermittent reinforcement, because it is predictable and regular instead of intermittent. I'm not sure whether this should be fixed; I haven't yet gotten around to trying it with only intermittent volume increases.

2. Picture-Flasher

After answering a card, this plugin selects, with some probability, a random image from a folder and flashes it onto your screen briefly. This gives intermittent reinforcement.

To use this plugin:

- I haven't tested it on non-Linux operating systems, but I can't see any obvious places it'll fail.

- Make sure you have the new Anki 2.0.

- Get pictures from someplace; see below.

- Download the plugin.

- Change all lines (in the plugin source) marked with "CHANGEME" according to your preferences. Be sure especially to put in your picture directory and the number of pictures you have.

To get pictures, I downloaded high-scoring pictures off of reddit. This script can do that automatically. You can use pictures of cute animals, funny captioned pictures of cats, or more questionable things.

The plugin could be made a lot more awesome by having it automatically pull pictures from the internet so you're not reusing them. I'm not planning on doing this anytime soon (because I have no internet on my main computer for productivity reasons), but if somebody else does that and posts it, they are awesome and they should feel awesome.

Update 4 Dec: Emanuel Rylke has created a patch for this plugin which removes the requirement to rename the pictures. It also moves the configuration options to the top of the plugin, making them easier to find. The new version is at the same download link

Update 16 June 2015: The plugins were deleted from the official list where they previously were, apparently because my AnkiWeb account was deleted due to disuse. So I've uploaded the two plugins on GitHub here: https://github.com/StephenBarnes/AnkiPlugins. I also re-uploaded the plugins to the official list. Links on this post have been updated.

Spaced repetition systems use math to determine the optimal way to study things. This post is about an idea I've been trying for a few months for improving SRS for some subjects.

SRSs usually use a pretty rigid system of asking questions and demanding answers. I think that for many subjects it's not very important to know specific answers, either because such answers can be looked up easily or because the gist of a subject is more important. So here's an idea: add an ebook to a spaced repetition system and read/skim each chapter or page when it's due for review. This can be used for ebooks, physical books, or articles from the internet or elsewhere.

For books or ebooks, there are two ways to do this: either add each page as an individual card (with an image of the page right on the card) or create a card for each section or chapter. The latter technique can be used for non-electronic books. If each page is its own card, you can review things more quickly because you don't have to open an ebook or book each time you review, but you'll need to convert the ebook to images first. You can also add annotations, either by editing page images, typing notes onto pages' cards, or adding annotations with your ebook-reading software.

One way to convert ebooks to images is to use imagemagick. On Linux,

convert -density 180x180 BOOK.pdf folder/imgname.png

Change the density if images are too small or too large. You'll have to convert ebooks to pdf format first. This command creates all the pages as imgname-1.png, imgname-2.png, etc. Move the images into a .media folder where your other anki decks are. Use a script to make a card for each page. For example, using python:

f = open("bookcards", "w")

for i in range(0,NUMPAGES): f.write(str(i+1) + ";<img src=\"imgname-" + str(i) + ".png\" />\n")

You probably want to review cards in the order they were created (so that you'll review due cards by page number). This option doesn't exist in anki, so you'll need to make each book a separate deck and use the patch command to apply this diff to /usr/share/anki/anki/deck.py, or wherever that file is on your computer:

64a65
> REV_CARDS_CREATED_FIRST = 4
389c390,391
<                 "priority desc, factId, ordinal")[self.revCardOrder]
---
>                 "priority desc, factId, ordinal",
>               "created asc")[self.revCardOrder]
3557a3560,3561
>           'createdDesc':
>           '(created desc)',
3566a3571,3572
>       if self.revCardOrder == REV_CARDS_CREATED_FIRST:
>           required.append("createdDesc")
4507a4514
>       4: _("Review in ORDER CREATED"),

Also, for each deck, go Settings->Advanced->Initial button intervals and set them so there's no randomness.

Pros of this technique:

• You can add lots of content quickly.
• You can use an SRS to learn things that you wouldn't be able to otherwise. How would you add Godel, Escher, Bach to an SRS in question-answer format?
• Reading books without memorizing them is silly unless your aims in reading do not require long-term retention of the books' contents.
• You can keep the context of facts, and you automatically preserve the original phrasing.

Cons of this technique

• The spacing is probably not optimal.
• Review is passive, not active. Active recall has been shown to improve memory. This technique trades away memory-detail for time (and other things).
• You may make irrelevant associations between things just because they're next to each other in the book.
• Reading through things takes long. If you skim through your due cards, then you might miss things. You'll also have to skim elementary explanations again (perhaps that's a good thing) or suspend them.
• It takes time to convert books to images, or to open a book or ebook each time you need to review it.

Thoughts?

Often, there are questions you want to know the answers to. You want other people's opinions, because knowing the answer isn't worth the time you'd have to spend to find it, or you're unsure whether your answer is right.

LW seems like a good place to ask these questions because the people here are pretty rational. So, in this thread: You post a top-level comment with some question. Other people reply to your comment with their answers. You upvote answers that you agree with and questions whose answers you'd like to know.

A few (mostly obvious) guidelines:

For questions:

• Your question should probably be in one of the following forms:
  • Asking for the probability some proposition is true.
  • Asking for a confidence interval.
• Be specific. Don't ask when the singularity will happen unless you define 'singularity' to reasonable precision.
• If you have several questions, post each separately, unless they're strongly related.

For answers:

• Give what the question asks for, be it a probability or a confidence interval or something else. Try to give numbers.
• Give some indication of how good your map is, i.e why is your answer that? If you want, give links.
• If you think you know the answer to your own question, you can post it.
• If you want to, give more information. For instance, if someone asks whether it's a good idea to brush their teeth, you can include info about flossing.
• If you've researched something well but don't feel like typing up a long justification of your opinions, that's fine. Rather give your opinion without detailed arguments than give nothing at all. You can always flesh your answer out later, or never.

This thread is primarily for getting the hivemind's opinions on things, not for debating probabilities of propositions. Debating is also okay, though, especially since it will help question-posters to make up their minds.

Don't be too squeamish about breaking the question-answer format.

This is a followup to my comment in the open thread.

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

For the past few years my willpower has been steadily increasing. If it lasts and I use it to accomplish something noteworthy, I might write a post about it.

Anyway, what should a rational preference utilitarian with infinite willpower do? Assume that there are no negative effects (unhappiness, stress) with using this willpower, and that they can control their emotions at will.

Clearly they should work a lot more, not spend time on recreation (movies, TV, games), stand instead of sitting, etc..

What else? Should they listen to music? Should they keep their muscles flexed 24/7 ? What should they learn, where would they have the most relative advantage? How much time would be worth spending on social interaction?

I can figure out these things on my own, but those questions are important and good ideas are very valuable.

Lately I've resolved to try harder at teaching myself math so I have a better shot at the international olympiad (IMO). These basically involve getting, say, three really hard math problems and trying your best to solve them within 5 hours.

My current state:

• I have worked through a general math problem-solving guide (Art and Craft of Problem-Solving), a general math olympiad guide (A Primer for Mathematics Competitions) and practice problems.
• I've added all problems and solutions and theorems and techniques into an Anki deck. When reviewing, I do not re-solve the problem, I only try to remember any key insights and outline the solution method.
• I am doing n-back, ~20 sessions (1 hour) daily, in an attempt to increase my general intelligence (my IQ is ~125, sd 15).
• I am working almost permanently; akrasia is not much of a problem.
• I am not _yet_ at the level of IMO medallists.

What does the intrumental-rationality skill of LWers have to say about this? What recommendations do you guys have for improving problem-solving ability, in general and specifically for olympiad-type environments? Specifically,

• How should I spread my time between n-backing, solving problems, and learning more potentially-useful math?
• Should I take any nootropics? I am currently looking to procure some fish oil (I don't consume any normally) and perhaps a racetam. I have been experimenting with cycling caffeine weekends on, weekdays off (to prevent tolerance being developed), with moderate success (Monday withdrawal really sucks, but Saturday is awesome).
• Should I add the problems to Anki? It takes time to create the cards and review them; is that time better spent doing more problems?