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Conformed in The Luck Factor by Dr. Richard Wiseman from 2004. Here is an authorized four page free summary...
http://richardwiseman.files.wordpress.com/2011/09/the_luck_factor.pdf
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Systematic Lucky Breaks
Agree that this is similar. Wiseman focuses on the idea that keeping an open mind and noticing good opportunities is a major part of what people see as luck. I'd like to take that one step further and get people to actually systematize these good opportunities, so they can experience them repeatedly.
In response to
Systematic Lucky Breaks
Okay, let's try it. One event that improved my life in a positive way was learning to dance. It allowed me to have fun and impress girls by my skills in various social situations. So I guess I should dance more, or learn other forms of dance (square dance?), or more meta... are there other skills similar to dancing that I should learn? Not sure what exactly those skills would be: playing a musical instrument? singing?
Other positive improvements in my life were caused by having specific people as my friends. So I guess I should make more friends, and perhaps more friends of the kind that is most helpful to me now. (Because some friends only provide an opportunity to pleasantly waste time.) The helpful friends are those who have the "tsuyoku naritai" trait. Good places to find them would be some NGOs (although there are also tons of mindkilling sometimes), competitions, or hobby clubs.
Some more ideas:
One great way to meet more awesome people is to explicitly mention this goal to your existing awesome friends and ask them to introduce you to other growth-oriented people.
Figure out what situations led you to the good friendships you have, and recreate those. In my case I found that nearly all my great friendships started with interactions/events of two hours or more. There are several reasons why this might be true (familiarity, more time to find common interests, people engaged in long conversations will have more time to socialize), but the application was to structure my socializing more around a few longer events (e.g. game nights) and less around short social events.
Do you feel like you're dancing enough to get the fun & social benefits? If not, it's probably worth setting up a system that lets you dance more, e.g. by going to dance events.
It sounds like the criterion for useful skills is "impress people in social situations". There are a wide class of skills that could address this, such as juggling, martial arts, public speaking, improv, hosting events, and telling jokes/comedy. Since you've already shown facility with kinesthetic skills, juggling or martial arts may be a good way to proceed.
Systematic Lucky Breaks
Many people can point to significant events that improved their lives in a positive way. They often refer to these as "lucky breaks", and take it for granted that such events are rare. But most of the time "lucky breaks" don't need to be uncommon-you can often reverse engineer the reasons behind them and cause them to happen more frequently. So when a one-off event ends up contributing a lot of value, you should systematically make it part of your life.
Example 1: in June the Less Wrong - Cambridge community held a mega-meetup with several people arriving from out of state. Since several of us had to stay up until 2AM+ in order to meet with people, we decided to have a game night that evening, which I held at my place. The game night was excellent-plenty of people showed up, we all had a lot of fun, and it was a great way to socialize with several people. Since it went so well, I started hosting game nights regularly, eventually converging on one game night every two weeks. This was a phenomenal move in many ways-it let me meet a lot of interesting people, deepen my connections with my friends, quickly integrate with the Less Wrong community, and just in general have a lot of fun, simply by taking one thing that worked well and making it systematic.
Example 2: a while back I was given an assignment to set up a scalable analytic architecture to allow data scientists to iterate faster-a project where I had no idea what to do or how to start. In desperation, I reached out to several people on LinkedIn who had experience with similar projects. Some of them responded, and the advice I got was incredibly valuable, easily shaving months off of my learning curve. But there is no reason for me to only do this when I am completely desperate. Thus I’ve continued to reach out to experts when I have new projects, and this has allowed me to avoid mistakes and solve new problems much more quickly. This has significantly improved my learning speed and made a qualitative difference in how I work. I no longer dismiss potential ideas simply because I have no idea how to implement them-instead, I now talk to experts and figure out roughly how difficult those ideas are, which has allowed me to solve several problems I would have dismissed as unfeasibly difficult before.
Example 3: a few years back some of my friends in the tech industry mentioned that Machine Learning was becoming a trend, so I took two weeks to learn the basics. A few months later the "Big Data" boom exploded, and I was able to get a job as a Data Scientist at a significantly higher salary doing more interesting work. Even though my Machine Learning knowledge was pretty rudimentary, I was able to get the job because demand completely exceeded supply at that point. In short, this was a lucky break that greatly advanced my career. To systematize this I simply continued to keep an eye out on big trends in technology. I've read Hacker News (which is generally half a year or more ahead of the mainstream), kept in touch with my friends on the applied side of academia (which feeds useful techniques into the industry), and just generally kept talking to a lot of people in order to keep up-to-date. This has been useful again and again, allowing me to focus my learning on the most valuable skills right as there was market demand.
In short, one of the fastest ways to improve your life is to look at things that already made a big difference before, and cause more of them to happen.
In response to
Thought experiment: The transhuman pedophile
I don't think there's anything irrational about modifying myself in a way that I find broccoli to taste good instead of tasting bad. Various smokers would profit from stopping to enjoy smoking and then quitting it.
I don't think you don't need a fictional thought experiment to talk about this issue. I know a few people who don't think that one should change something like this about oneselves but I would be suprised that many of those people are on lesswrong.
I actively modify what I enjoy and don't enjoy when it's useful. For example, I use visualization & reinforcement to get myself to enjoy cleaning up my house more, which is useful because then I have a cleaner house. I've used similar techniques to get myself to not enjoy sugary drinks.
In response to
Rationality Quotes September 2013
I discovered as a child that the user interface for reprogramming my own brain is my imagination. For example, if I want to reprogram myself to be in a happy mood, I imagine succeeding at a difficult challenge, or flying under my own power, or perhaps being able to levitate objects with my mind. If I want to perform better at a specific task, such as tennis, I imagine the perfect strokes before going on court. If I want to fall asleep, I imagine myself in pleasant situations that are unrelated to whatever is going on with my real life.
My most useful mental trick involves imagining myself to be far more capable than I am. I do this to reduce the risk that I turn down an opportunity just because I am clearly unqualified[...] As my career with Dilbert took off, reporters asked me if I ever imagined I would reach this level of success. The question embarrasses me because the truth is that I imagined a far greater level of success. That's my process. I imagine big.
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on
What should a college student do to maximize future earnings for effective altruism?
Cool! Can you give us details?
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on
What should a college student do to maximize future earnings for effective altruism?
Sure. The gist of it is that I worked in fields like marketing and analytics which were high-impact, but where people spent a lot of time doing things manually (this was ~5 years ago-there's a lot more automation in these sections of companies today.) I wasn't the best marketer or the best programmer, but I realized a lot of things that people did every week could be automated. So I automated those tasks, saving a lot of man-hours for a lot of very expensive people. Lather, rinse, repeat. It's very easy to make the case for an 80% salary increase when you've just completely automated 4 jobs.
Today there is a term for this role-"growth hacker." But in general, if you work in an environment where not much automation has already been done, then automation is massively valuable. I've saved/earned companies millions of dollars with awful code that happened to solve the business problem.
I've written this up in a bit more detail on Quora and on Hacker News
If you have independent software development experience, and curiosity/discipline to acquire more software development skills, you might consider trying to become an "X who programs". This thread has some info. Basically, get official credentials in some fairly lucrative & difficult field that has a need for software developers, and do independent study in software development (and maybe statistics/data science type stuff). More links: 1, 2. This could also be a good way to come up with an idea for a software company in some fairly technical industry (meaning relatively high barriers to entry, and possibly corporate customers that will be willing to pay good money for the product you offer). Going in to traditional software development will be a solid fallback plan, since software company employers care more about your skills than your degree, and computer science knowledge isn't actually all that useful for practical software development.
This data suggests that combining software development with stats/machine learning/big data skills can be relatively lucrative, at least in the current job market. My understanding is that data scientist employers are also fairly lax about official credentials.
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on
What should a college student do to maximize future earnings for effective altruism?
I highly recommend the "X who programs" path-it helped me increase my earnings by about 150% over the course of 2 years. It was substantially more useful than concentrating solely on my programming skills or marketing/risk/statistics skills.
I am a math major who has had relatively fast career growth. Here is the generalized process that has worked for me and a few of my friends (note that this is primarily based on personal experience and anecdotes):
The critical skill for creating large amounts of value and quickly growing your earnings is understanding what people value. Most people, especially STEM majors, are really bad at this. They are not able to effectively model the business and the people they work with, so they end up spending a lot of time and effort on elegant solutions that seem useful but aren't what the business values most. So how do you learn what people value? Spend a lot of time improving your communication skills. Write a lot. Talk to people a lot. Gain a general sense of business by reading books like The Personal MBA. Check out sources like Ramit Sethi's I Will Teach You To Be Rich, which is absolutely phenomenal despite the sketchy name. And of course, consistently ask yourself/your boss/your customers if what you're working on is what other people value, or if it's just what seems to be urgent.
Social skills are certainly important. There are two major branches of social skills, the first lets you work better with others, and the second ensures that a large number of people know that you are competent. Develop both. The classes you mentioned (improv, public speaking, etc.) are definitely helpful. You may also want to read books like The Charisma Myth by Olivia Fox Cabane, I and several friends have found it extremely useful.
Most advice regarding majors is targeted towards median outcomes. The strategies for maximizing your mean earnings over a 40-year career are quite different. For example, more specific technical majors (e.g. petroleum engineering vs. CS) tend to have higher median earnings but less opportunity to shift fields, which in turn means lower mean earnings assuming you're already above a certain baseline level of competence. Technical majors are definitely highly valued and well-respected, so do a STEM major, but try to make it something relatively general like CS, Math, or Physics.
You should definitely come out of college knowing how to write code-even if you don't intend to be a programmer, a strong understanding of what can and cannot be automated is helpful for almost everyone.
Another next critical skill is learning to negotiate your salary-most people do not negotiate at all, despite the fact that a 15 minute negotiation is often worth thousands of dollars. Again, I recommend Ramit Sethi's book as well as several of the writings on Patrick McKenzie's website.
Finally, try to work in industries with a lot of change, such as technology. You may end up earning less at the beginning of your career, but it offers much greater opportunities for advancement than relatively sticky industries such as oil. If you're ambitious then over 10 years you'll probably earn more in a rapidly changing industry than a slowly growing one.
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Post ridiculous munchkin ideas!
If you're a fast reader, you can return an ebook from Amazon within 7 days of purchase really frickin easily. You can buy and return most popular books with a few clicks, without getting off your butt. Sure, libraries are great, but you have to wait if they don't have your book, you have to transport yourself there and back, and many of them are closed when inspiration strikes at midnight and you realize you want to stay up all night reading some book you literally just heard about but suddenly must have RIGHT NOW (or maybe that's just me). It's way better to have a bigger library on your computer. You can try books out and if they're stupid, at least you only lose the time it took to read it. If you use the kindle cloud reader, you can read on your computer. Then when you're done, you refund it, and you don't have to go through the annoying process of shipping anything anywhere, or worry about packaging or it being in the same condition.
Plus if you travel with your laptop, you can then have an unlimited supply of books that weigh nothing, as long as you have internet access, that are effectively free and in a convenient format.
If you're a slow reader, just buy it, read for a week, return it, then buy it again (and return it again after a week). Repeat until finished.
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I'm working on helping effective altruists make more money and be more successful in their careers. 80,000 hours has done a great job helping people make high-level strategic decisions such as "should I work in Law or Finance?" My focus is on helping people who've chosen a career path be more effective and make more money. For example, I've helped several of my friends negotiate an increase in their salaries and hope to spread these skills amongst the EA community at large.
One example of this has been individual conversations regarding career advice. I've also been talking to people who have thought about this issue, such as Alexei or the folks at CFAR. By working with several people, I'm hoping to get a set of coherent career advice and turn this into a course that EAs could benefit from.
One candidate so far seems to be a course on negotiating your salary and promotions. Other common questions have included: