I've had some success of my own with lucid dreaming. Relatively speaking.

The problem I have is that I dream so rarely that it is almost impossible to develop habits. I still manage to go lucid about half the time I do dream, and manage to go lucid without inadvertently waking myself up about half again of those times.

I don't know if lucid dreaming has improved my rationality, but I do think that my rationality helps with the "oh, this is silly and must be a dream" reflex. There is correlation, but it is not obvious in which direction there is causation, if there is at all.

The hardest part in my experience is actually staying asleep once I go lucid. I have to very deliberately pay attention to the physicality of myself and my immediate surroundings in the dream, while ignoring any signals from my real body, or the dream will evaporate in seconds.

For me, the key to manipulating a dream was figuring out that dreams, even lucid dreams, don't seem to run on willpower. I can will something to happen with all my might, and nothing will happen. Rather than wielding willpower, I have to wield expectation. If I expect to see something, I will. There is an exception to this that I don't have an explanation for, though: I'm telekinetic in my dreams. All my dreams, no matter what they're about, whether they're lucid or not. You'd think this would make it easy to check if I'm dreaming, but I'm just so used to it that half the time it doesn't register as strange.

Does anyone know possible causes for rarely-dreaming-at-all?

There are many many more submissive/masochistic men in the world than there are dominant/sadistic women, so if you are a woman who feels a strong temptation to command men and inflict pain on them, and you want a large harem of men serving your every need, it will suffice to state this fact anywhere on the Internet and you will have fifty applications by the next morning.

More like, twenty sincere applications, ten trolls, five misogynists who think they can tame you, five socially inept introverts who aren't into being a sub but will put up with it in exchange for sex because they can't safely and legally employ a prostitute, and ten confused responses from guys who are either submissive or masochistic but not both.

Most of the personal-finance-advice industry is parasitic and/or self-deluded, and it's generally agreed on by economic theory and experimental measurement that an index fund will deliver the best returns you can get without huge amounts of effort.

This is sorely lacking in leads to information on how to actually choose and acquire an index fund.

(In my own case, I wouldn't mind advice to that effect. I have a large sum in savings (about $12,000), but no income or employment prospects due to an undocumented disability. What sort of index fund should I pursue?)

If you are smart and underemployed, you can very quickly check to see if you are a natural computer programmer by pulling up a page of Python source code and seeing whether it looks like it makes natural sense, and if this is the case you can teach yourself to program very quickly and get a much higher-paying job even without formal credentials.

Where are all of these alleged jobs that pay well for competence in Python?

I think a decent strategy for a tall person, say, would be to accede to requests for help if the request doesn't require you to go significantly out of your way or put you at risk of significant harm. The same strategy would work for the strong person and the smart person. But it most emphatically would not be good advice for how a woman should deal with sexual propositions.

But having sex with unattractive people does usually “require you to go significantly out of your way or put you at risk of significant harm”, so you don't need a special case for that.

It's a continuum: the fraction of times it's reasonable to pick stuff off shelves for people as a favour is close to 1, the fraction of times it's reasonable to write Web pages for people as a favour is close to 0.5, and the fraction of times it's reasonable to have sex with for people as a favour is close to 0.

(And anyway, if I understand correctly what type of people OW is talking about, they feel obligated to reach stuff for shorter people even when they need to go out of their way or risk harm to do so.)

I'm surprised this never got answered! Well, better late than never, I suppose.

The SuperHappies misread the saying "Be fruitful and multiply.".

In this case, it turns out, science can rule out a notion of personal identity that depends on your being composed of the same atoms - because modern physics has taken the concept of "same atom" and thrown it out the window. There are no tiny billiard balls with individual identities. It's experimentally ruled out.

Science does not rule out a notion of personal identity that requires the location of an individual to be a continuous function, which would imply that the copy of me on Mars isn't me, assuming I started on Earth.

My point isn't that I advocate such a notion of personal identity. My point is that the boundaries of the "self" are a choice that can't be justified rationally.

Q: I was wondering what the dumbest or funniest argument you've heard against the defeat of aging?

Aubrey de Grey: Um, It's been a very very long time since I've heard a question or concern I haven't heard before, so nothing's dumb or funny anymore, it's just... tedium.

From this recent talk

The first time I read this, a few things came to mind as possible ugh fields in my own mind, such as "borrowing/lending" or "making conversation", but on reflection my behavior isn't consistently ugh on these subjects.

A powerful ugh field I do seem to have, based on observations of my own past behavior, is one of imposition. Courses of action which involve imposing on another person are slow to even occur to me as options, which to my intuition seems more like what an Ugh Field would feel like from the inside, rather than a mere conscious reluctance. Even deliberately contemplating such courses of action seems to trip something in my brain that labels them "hypothetical-only" as if my brain has impose on another filed in the same category as teleport across the country or turn invisible.

I've been aware of various special cases of this Ugh Field in myself in a vague way for a while, but I'm now sure the general thing has been with me as far back as the single-digits even If I can't remember its cause(s). I don't know how to even begin to get rid of this one--my self-hacking skills have proven inadequate. The best I've managed is bending what my brain registers as imposition since I know my filter is set way to high, but have made only small progress. I still find it impossibly difficult to speak to a person who's attention is not already on me, and often catch myself going to ridiculous lengths to avoid making trivial requests. Why does my brain register intentionally drawing a person's attention as imposing on them?

I'm not convinced I'm keeping my levels of reference straight, but if I can knowingly consistently accurately talk about epiphenomena, doesn't the structure or contents of the uncausing stuff cause me to think in this way rather than that way? I'm not sure how to formalize this intuition to tell if it's useful or trivial.