"Why Self-Educated Learners Often Come Up Short" http://www.scotthyoung.com/blog/2010/02/24/self-education-failings/
Quotation: "I have a theory that the most successful people in life aren’t the busiest people or the most relaxed people. They are the ones who have the greatest ability to commit to something nobody else forces them to do."
One Week On, One Week Off sounds like a promising idea. The idea is that once you know you'll be able to take the next week off, it's easier to work this whole week full-time and with near-total dedication, and you'll actually end up getting more done than with a traditional schedule.
It's also interesting for noting that you should take your off-week as seriously as your on-week. You're not supposed to just slack off and do nothing, but instead dedicate yourself to personal growth. Meet friends, go travel, tend your garden, attend to personal projects.
I saw somebody mention an alternating schedule of working one day and then taking one day off, but I think stretching the periods to be a week long can help you better immerse yourself in them.
After reading Kaj's pointer, I spent several hours at Steve Pavlina's site. It's fascinating for someone like me who's always in danger of falling apart at the self-discipline front if he's not very vigilant about it. As a lot of self-help authors, Pavlina is very analytic; plus he's open about his experiments in life style -- which he tackles with the same resolve as his other projects -- and Erin Pavlina is a "psychic reader" who apparently does consultations via telephone (preferably land line)!
The New Yorker recently had an article titled The Iceman. Judging from the abstract, it's anti- and not very high quality (excerpt: "The consensus appears to be that when you try to defrost a frozen corpse you get mush", a type of argument covered in your post.)
Hint: Just in case you're not within reach of this issue of The New Yorker, a little bit of Google-fu turns up a scan of said article.
I found the piece not particulary exciting. It's certainly well-written but Jill Lepore obviously wasn't interested in digging too deeply re: the scientific or non-scientific foundations of cryonics. Instead we get a lot of impressionistic descriptions of Michigan (where the Cryonics Institute is located), slightly disdainful accounts of the CI's facilities and many synopses of SF stories .The latter isn't without reason, though, because Robert Ettinger was very influenced by Science Fiction.
Mrs. Lepore does her best to let Ettinger come across as grumpy, though I suspect that this "grumpiness" has to do with him knowing all to well what will very likely come out of it when a general interest magazine visits the CI. In other words, we are witness to a small culture clash: Of course it must be strange to a historian like Lepore that Ettinger has a completely different sensibility!
Two or three weeks of continuous reading, reading, reading in awe.
Martin
I have always at least a couple of Eliezer's OB posts on my pda. Today I went through some hitherto underexplored sections of OB -- meaning I only read them once -- and I have now dozens of posts on my trusty old Acer N30.
Eliezer should write a self-help book! Blog posts like the above are very inspiring to this perennial intellectual slacker and general underachiever (meaning: me).
I certainly can relate to this part:
"It doesn't seem worthwhile any more, to go on trying to fix one thing when there are a dozen other things that will still be wrong...
There's not enough hope of triumph to inspire you to try hard..."
I'm very much looking foward to this!
Incidentally, I received my paperback of "Ending Aging" today. For those of you who have the EA's hardback edition: The paperback has an additional 40-page afterword. (This gets probably mentioned in the above interview but I thought it couldn't hurt if I give this comment at least a bit of weight.)
[EDIT in March 2010 for clarity.]
"You Only Live Twice" is a beautiful, moving post, Eliezer.
Two sentences that stand out:
"If you've been hurt enough, you can no longer imagine healing."
and
"And it [the capital "F" Future] may have a concept of sentient dignity that values your life more than you dare to value yourself."
I'd like to read/hear an interview with Eliezer where he talks mainly about SF. Sure, we have his bookshelf page but it is nearly ten years old and by far not comprehensive enough to satisfy my curiosity!
Or how about a annotated general list from Eliezer titled "The 10/20/30/... most important books I read since 1999"?
I like quoting this passage from Joyce Carol Oates' profile of H.P. Lovecraft (King of the Weird):
Readers of genre fiction, unlike readers of what we presume to call "literary fiction," assume a tacit contract between themselves and the writer: they understand that they will be manipulated, but the question is how? and when? and with what skill? and to what purpose? However plot-ridden, fantastical, or absurd, populated by whatever pseudo-characters, genre fiction is always resolved, while "literary fiction" makes no such promises; there is no contract between reader and writer for, in theory at least, each work of literary fiction is original, and, in essence, "about" its own language; anything can happen, or, upon occasion, nothing. Genre fiction is addictive, literary fiction, unfortunately, is not.
By the way, that was a wonderful post. It's nice that Overcoming Bias is trying to bring abatement to the temperamentally challenged. It could be argued, though, that falling in love with reality is preciously hard when the economic grindstone tries its best to make the life of a lot of, if not most, people depressing. Maybe for them the allure of having not to think about a "crushing mortgage" would be quite enough to easily befriend a World of Magic.
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d){kind=logo}
= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
I enjoyed this proposal for a 24-issue Superman run: http://andrewhickey.info/2010/02/09/pop-drama-superman/
There are several Less Wrongish themes in this arc: Many Worlds, ending suffering via technology, rationality:
"...a highlight of the first half of this first year will be the redemption of Lex Luthor – in a forty-page story, set in one room, with just the two of them talking, and Superman using logic to convince Luthor to turn his talents towards good..."
The effect Andrew's text had on me reminded me of how excited I was when I first had read Alan Moore's famous Twilight of the Superheroes. (I'm not sure about how well "Twilight" stands the test of time but see Google or Wikipedia for links to the complete Moore proposal.)