I've been experimenting with various nootropics lately, and wanted some way to have a frame of reference as to whether they work or not. So I put together this little tool:

http://2pih.com/reactiontest/

It's pretty rudimentary for the time being, but I'm definitely open to feedback on 1. Ways to improve it, 2. Different tests you'd like to see. 

Some quick background, I am putting together a non-profit whose goal is to provide objective, rational career guidance to high school/college students, with the aim to solve what I see as a pretty big problem in the American educational system: our current career guidance is more focused on how to get a job on your chosen field, rather than what field should you choose in the first place?

Mid-ranged goals involve setting up programs where students can "shadow" people who work in a field they are interested in so that they can see what those types of jobs actually entail. Short-term, the goal is to put together some informational resources that students can use to help guide their decision a little more rationally.

One of these information resources is a database that uses data pulled from the Bureau of Labor and Statistics, to tell you 

1. What range of salaries can you expect in a given career?
2. What salary you can expect at any given age in a career.
3. How many jobs are actually out there in any given career?

Note: This article underwent a significant revision on 5/28/2015. Thank you to estimator for all your feedback.

The most important meta-skill that anyone can learn is how to learn skills. With practice, you learn how to pick up new skills as they are needed, which is infinitely (quite literally) more efficient than trying to learn each skill individually in advance.

There are two basic premises that this method relies on:

1. A skill can be eventually be broken down into a series of trivial sub-skills.

2. The skill and its sub-skills follows a Pareto distribution.

The Pareto principle states that typically, 80% of a system's effects can be linked to 20% of their causes. Or in this case, learning 20% of the trivial sub-skills will make you 80% proficient at the overall skill. Empirically, many systems, both artificial and natural have been proven to follow this distribution, and skills are no exception. This guide is intended to teach you how to identify that 20%.

What lies below this is almost 1,000 words to describe something that's ultimately about condensing things and taking shortcuts. So, to be true to this attitude, I'll start with the "20% version", and those so inclined can continue to read the other 80%.

1. Break the skill you want to learn into several sub-skills.

2. For each sub-skill, ask "Is this trivial?" If so, add that to your "trivial list". If not, repeat steps 1-2 for each sub-skill. Continue to iterate until all you have left is a list of trivial sub-skills.

3. For each trivial sub-skill, ask, "How can this go wrong, and what can I do if it does?" Add this to your list of back-up plans, unless it is redundant.

4. Sort your list of sub-skills by how easy they will be to learn, then start learning and practicing them. Any time something goes wrong or you encounter a situation you did not account for, use one of your back-up plans.

5. Repeat steps 1-4 for any sub-skills you encounter that you did not account for.  

So, that was the short version. If you find you need more context, here goes. Note that the first premise uses the word "trivial", which then begs the question: "What makes a sub-skill trivial?" A convenient answer to that is: "If you personally feel sufficiently confident that you can do it." Or, in other words, "Can you look up how to do it on the internet?" Which means, if the problem itself is trivial, you don't need to bother with this. Just look up a guide online.

Most skills are too complicated for someone to sit down and analyze every possible sub-skill needed to accomplish it. Fortunately, you don't have to. Your goal isn't to learn all the sub-skills, its to learn the important 20%. The overall efficiency of a sub-skill is a function of two things: how how integral it is to the overall skill, and how easy it is to learn. You're going to let System 1 do most of the heavy lifting here.

Fortunately, our brains are pretty good at pattern-matching. Goals are high-level concepts whose meanings are derived from the combination of several patterns and archetypes that you've got stored away somewhere. When you say, "I want to learn a foreign language", your brain immediately starts filling in the patterns of what exactly that means. It starts identifying the things that are integral to your idea of the concept.  Then it combines them into one coherent concept, and that's what you're left with. The trouble is, most people don't preserve these individual patterns before combining them, and thus they're left with something that's purely conceptual, rather than actionable. "I want to learn a foreign language" or "I want to learn to code" or "I want to learn social skills".

So just let your brain go to work doing what it already does, but pay attention during the process and identify the key components before they get mushed into a concept. Make System 1 tell you "You want to be able to converse, interact, and function in a society that speaks a different language," instead of just, "You want to learn a foreign language." Remember that you don't need to identify all the components. Just the ones that are important enough for System 1 to dredge up on a moment's notice. Most likely, these will be the 20% that you're looking for. Of course, chances are the initial output is going to be a high level concept unto itself. There's no "to-do list" for "being able to converse in a society that speaks a different language". So you put System 1 to work again. What exactly do I mean by that? "Oh, what you mean is: you want to be able to ask and understand both questions and answers, and be able to express your thoughts."

Eventually you'll reach the point of triviality. You'll have a sizable list of trivial tasks such as "You want to be able to say the following twenty basic sentences: XYZ", and "You want to know the following 100 basic vocabulary words: ABC." and "You want to be able to identify the most common articles, prepositions and conjunctions." Here's where System 2 goes to work: you look at this big list and ask yourself, which of these would be easiest for me to accomplish? And then you sort the list accordingly.

Voila. There's your roadmap.

Now, all of this is fine and good, but at some point you will encounter a situation that doesn't fall under this convenient little roadmap you've followed. So you want to make a backup plan. System 2 needs to look over your roadmap and ask: "How can this go wrong, and what can I do if it does?" If you do this for each item on your list, chances are there will be a lot of duplicates and redundancies, which you can pare down. When all is said and done, you'll have a few plans of action in case things go wrong.

So, you have a roadmap to guide you through the 20%, and a generalized plan for the other 80%. What now?

Well, there's always room for improvement. If you do things right, you'll be pretty well immersed in the nitty-gritty of whatever skill you are trying to learn, which means you will be getting loads of first-hand experience as to all the different ways things can go wrong which you probably never could have anticipated. And you'll run in to scenarios that make you say, "I can't believe I didn't think about that."

Fortunately you don't need to get things perfect on the first try. If you encounter a situation you didn't account for it, then account for it. Ask yourself what happened, and let System 1 go to work on breaking it down. If something goes wrong in a way you hadn't thought about, come up with a separate plan for that. Eventually your model will become more and more robust as you start to learn many of the fundamentals that you probably skipped over when you made your roadmap.

There seem to be two different types of learning styles, the "academic" way of starting with the fundamentals and building from the ground up, and the "immersion" method of just throwing someone into the deep end of the pool and working from the top-down. This method combines both: you learn the fundamentals of the things that are necessary to immerse yourself. Instead of being "top-down" or "bottom-up", this is more like, "start at the bottom, skip to the top, then work your way back down through the middle."

This isn't a trick question, nor do I have a particular answer in mind. 

Tomorrow, all of your memories are going to be wiped. There is a crucial piece of information that you need to make sure you remember, and more specifically, you need to be very confident you were the one that sent this message and not a third party pretending to be you.

How do you go about transmitting, "signing", and verifying such a message*?

--edit: I should have clarified that one of the assumptions is that some malicious third party can/will be attempting to send you false information from "yourself" and you need to distinguish between that and what's really you.

--edit2: this may be formally impossible, I don't actually know. If anyone can demonstrate this I'd be very appreciative. 

--edit3: I don't have a particular universal definition for the term "memory wipe" in mind, mainly because I didn't want to pigeonhole the discussion. I think this pretty closely mimics reality. So I think it's totally fine to say, "If you retain this type of memory, then I'd do X." 

Information security is a pretty big passion of mine; I don't think someone needs to have "something to hide" in order to make use of digital signing, encryption, etc. Another passion of mine is making things easier for other people to do. I've written a couple of tools that I think can be useful for the LW crowd. 

Online PGP Signature: This is an online javascript-based tool which allows you to sign messages using your PGP private key. I love the idea of PGP-signed messages (I remember someone under the pseudonym "Professor Quirrell" handing out PGP-verified Quirrell points a few years back). The problem is, I had yet to find an easy way to do this that didn't involve downloading command-line based software. So I wrote this tool that uses open-sourced, javascript-based PGP libraries to let you easily sign messages in your browser.

The whole thing is client-side so your private key is never seen by me, but be smart about security. If you don't trust me, that's fine, just don't use the tool. But also remember that you could have a virus, your computer could be monitored, someone could be watching over your shoulder, etc. so please be smart about your security. But hopefully this can be helpful. 

Decoy: an iPhone App: I wrote this after "The Fappening", where I was basically appalled at the terrible security practices that pretty much everyone uses when sending pictures back and forth. Decoy uses a combination of steganography and AES encryption to let you send images back and forth without having to sign up for an account or use some outside service that can be hacked or otherwise compromised. 

You take the original picture, then you come up with a passphrase, then you take a "decoy" picture. The original picture is converted to base64 image data, which is then AES-encrypted using your passphrase. The resulting cipher text is then encoded into the pixels of the "decoy" picture, which is what gets saved on your phone and sent out. The "decoy" pictures are indistinguishable from any other picture on your or your recipients' camera rolls, and unless you have the passphrase, then the original image is thoroughly inaccessible. 

If your phone is lost, hacked, stolen, or (more benignly) someone happens to be looking through pictures on your phone, all anyone will see are the "decoy" pictures. Without the password, those pictures are worthless. Although the app is primarily branded for, *ahem*, "personal use", there are plenty of other ways to use it. For example, my wife and I use it for things like sending pictures of sensitive physical documents like credit cards, birth certificates, social security cards, etc.  

(full disclosure: although Decoy is free, it is ad-supported so I do financially benefit from people using the app. But on the bright side I'm an avowed rationalist and if I make a quajillion dollars with this app I will spend the vast majority of it on LW-friendly causes!) 

http://www.businessinsider.com/valery-spiridonov-head-transplant-2015-4

Don't really have much to add beyond this. It's pretty awesome stuff though. The fact that this is even within the realm of possibility makes the argument for cryonics that much stronger. 

Hi all, 

I put this calibration test together this morning. It pulls from a trivia API of over 150,000 questions so you should be able to take this many, many times before you start seeing repeats.

http://www.2pih.com/caltest.php

A few notes:

1. The questions are "Jeopardy" style questions so the wording may be strange, and some of them might be impossible to answer without further context. On these just assign 0% confidence.

2. As the questions are open-ended, there is no answer-checking mechanism. You have to be honest with yourself as to whether or not you got the right answer. Because what would be the point of cheating at a calibration test?

I can't think of anything else. Please let me know if there are any features you would want to see added, or if there are any bugs, issues, etc. 

**EDIT**

As per suggestion I have moved this to the main section. Here are the changes I'll be making soon:

• Label the axes and include an explanation of calibration curves.
• Make it so you can reverse your last selection in the event of a misclick.

Here are changes I'll make eventually:

• Create an account system so you can store your results online.
• Move trivia DB over to my own server to allow for flagging of bad/unanswerable questions.

Here are the changes that are done:

• Change 0% to 0.1% and 99% to 99.9%  
• Added second graph which shows the frequency of your confidence selections. 
• Color code the "right" and "wrong" buttons and make them farther apart to prevent misclicks.
• Store your results locally so that you can see your calibration over time.
• Check to see if a question is blank and skip if so.

Note: Three data points were removed from the sample due to my subjective opinion that they were fake. Any self-reported IQs of 0 were removed. Any self-reported income of 0 was removed. 

*89% of the LW population is between the age of 15 and 34.

**88% of the LW population has an IQ between 125 and 155, with an average IQ of 138. 

****Median numbers were adjusted down by a factor of 1.15 to account for the fact that the source data was calculating household median income rather than individual median income. 

[1] Internal Revenue Service, Charitable Giving by Households that Itemize Deductions (AGI and Itemized Contributions Summary by Zip, 2012), The Urban Institute, National Center for Charitable Statistics 

[2] U.S. Census Bureau, Current Population Survey, 2013 and 2014 Annual Social and Economic Supplements.

[3] Do you have to be smart to be rich? The impact of IQ on wealth, income and financial distress Intelligence, Vol. 35, No. 5. (September 2007), by Jay L. Zagorsky

Update 1: Updated chart 1&2 to account for the fact that the source data was calculating household median income rather than individual income.

Update 2: Reverted Chart 1 back to original because I realized that the purpose was to compare LWers to those in similar income brackets. So in that situation, whether it's a household or an individual is not as relevant. It does penalize households to an extent because they have less money available to donate to charity because they're splitting their money three ways. 

Update 3: Updated all charts to include data that is filtered for US only.

Edit: Removed intro because it adds no value to the post. Left in for posterity. The vast majority of all ethical and logistical problems revolve around a single inconvenient fact: human beings die unwillingly. "Should we sacrifice one person to save ten?" or "Is it ethical to steal a loaf of bread to feed your starving family?" become irrelevant questions if no one has to die unless they want to. Similarly, almost all altruistic goals have, at their core, the goal of stopping death in some way shape or form.

The question, "How can we permanently prevent death?" is of paramount importance, and not just to Rationalists. So, it should be a surprise to no one that mystics, crackpots, spiritualists and pseudo-scientists of all walks of life have co-opted this quest as their own. The loftiness of the goal, combined with the cosmic implications of its success, combined with the sheer number of irrational people also seeking to achieve the same goal may make it tempting to apply the non-central fallacy and say, "I'm not interested in stopping death; that's something crazy people do." 

But it's a fallacy for a reason: there is a rational way to approach the problem. Let's start with a pair of general statements:

• X is the cause of the perception of consciousness. (Current hypothesis: X="human brain").
• Recreation of X with >Y% fidelity results in a the perception of a consciousness functionally indistinguishable from the original to an outside observer. _{original text: "results in the continuation of the perception of consciousness".}   

The Collection Problem

This problem is most pressing, because once we solve it, it buys us time. Once that data is stored securely, you've dramatically extended your effective timeline. Even if you, personally, happen to die, you've still got a copy of yourself in backup that some future generation will hopefully be able to reconstruct. But, more importantly, this also applies to all of humanity. Once the Collection Problem is solved, everyone can be backed up. As long as you can stay alive until the problem is solved, (especially if you live in a first-world country), you have probably got a pretty good shot at living forever. 

The Collection Problem brings to mind a number of non-trivial sub-problems, but they are fairly trivial *in comparison* to the monumental task of scanning a brain (assuming the brain alone is the seat of consciousness) with sufficient fidelity. Such as logistics, data-storage and security, etc.. I don't mean to blithely dismiss the difficulties of these problems. But these are problems that humanity is already solving. Logistics, data-storage, and security are all billion dollar industries. 

The Creation Problem

Once the Collection Problem is solved, you have another problem which is how to take that data and do something useful with it. There's a pretty big gap between an architect drawing up a plan for a building and actually creating that building. But, once this problem is resolved, it's very likely that its solution will also make life itself much, much more convenient. Any method that can physically create something as complex as a human brain at-will can almost certainly be adopted to create other things. Food. Clean water. Shelter. etc.  Those likely benefits, of course, are orthogonal, but they are a nice cherry on top.

One of the potential solutions to the Creation Problem involves simulations. I won't go into a ton of detail there because that's a pretty significant discussion unto itself, whether life in a simulation is as valid or fulfilling as life in the "real world". For the purposes of this thought exercise though, it is fairly irrelevant. If you consider a simulation to be an acceptable solution, great. If you don't, that's fine too, it just means the Creation Problem will take longer to solve. Either way, it's likely you're going to be in cold storage for quite some time before the problem does get solved. 

What about the rest of us?

All this theory is fine and good. But what if you get hit by a bus tomorrow and don't live to see the resolution of the Collection Problem? What about all of us who have lost loved ones in the past? This is where this exercise dovetails with traditional ethics. Given this system, it's easy enough to argue that we have a responsibility to try to ensure that as many human beings as possible survive until the Collection Problem is resolved. 

However, for those of us unlucky enough to die before that, there's one final get-out-of-jail free card: The Recreation Problem. This problem may be thoroughly intractable. And to be sure, it is probably the most difficult problem of them all. In extremely simple (and emotionally charged) terms: "How can we bring back the dead?" Or, if you prefer to dress it up in the literary genre of science: "How can we recreate a system that occurred in the past with Y% fidelity using only knowledge of the present system?" 

This may be so improbable as to be effectively impossible. But it's not actually impossible. There's no need for perfect physical fidelity (which is all-but-proven to be impossible). We only need to achieve Y% fidelity, whatever Y% may be. Conceptually, we do this all the time. A ballistics expert can track the trajectory of a bullet with no prior knowledge of that trajectory. A two-way function can be iterated in reverse for as many steps as you have computing power. Etc. 

A complex system can be recreated. Is there an upper limit to how far in the past a system can be before it is infeasible to recreate it? Quite possibly. Let's say that upper limit is Z seconds (incidentally, the Collection Problem is actually just a special case of the Recreation Problem where Z is approximately equal to zero). The fact that Z is unknown means you can't simply abandon all your ethical pursuits and say, "It doesn't matter, we're all going to be resurrected anyway!"  Z may in fact be equal to approximately zero. 

The importance of others.

It is most likely that you, individually, will not be able to solve all three problems on your own. Which means that if you truly desire to live forever, you have to rely on other people to a certain extent. But, it does give one a certain amount of peace when contemplating the horror of death: if every human being commits themselves to solving these three problems, it does not matter if you, personally, fail. All of humanity would have to fail. 

Whether that thought actually gives any comfort depends largely on your estimation of humanity and the difficulty of these problems. But regardless of whether you derive any comfort from that, it doesn't diminish the importance of the contributions of others. 

The moral of this story...

As a rationalist, you should take a few things away from this.

1. You should try as hard as possible to stay alive until the Collection Problem is resolved. 
2. You should try as hard as possible to make sure everyone else stays alive until that point as well. 
3. When feasible, you should try to bring other people around to the ways of rationalism. 
4. Death is a tragedy, but it is conceptually reversible.
5. Don't despair if you don't make any progress towards resolving these problems in your lifetime.

Post Script:

Note: this was added on as an edit due to feedback in the comments. 

The original intent of this article was to explain that there's a rational, scientific way to approach the logistical problem of "living forever". 

• I removed the first introductory paragraph. It was inconsistent in both tone and scope with the rest of the post. 
• I've changed the title and removed references to "immortality" to try to eliminate some of the "science fiction" vibe.
• I've tried to update the language so as not to imply that it is universally agreed upon that backing up a brain is a valid method of generating consciousness.