I'll do my best to get it up by the end of the week. If I forget, feel free to harass me.

Has the checklist been revisited or optimized in any way since its original formulation? (By CFAR or otherwise?)

As a little side project, I entertain myself with the idea of writing fiction that blends fantasy and mega-structures engineering.
The first step will be to ideate a consistent magic system, but of course, to make the story interesting, I'll have to come up with interesting characters and their conflicts. Do you know about any good story, long or short, that revolves around or has as background mega-structures, that I can be inspired from? Fantasy or extreme science-fiction would be the best.

Sounds interesting - would love a writeup of any solid conclusions.

As a little side project, I entertain myself with the idea of writing fiction that blends fantasy and mega-structures engineering.
The first step will be to ideate a consistent magic system, but of course, to make the story interesting, I'll have to come up with interesting characters and their conflicts. Do you know about any good story, long or short, that revolves around or has as background mega-structures, that I can be inspired from? Fantasy or extreme science-fiction would be the best.

Coursera's Social Psychology class is starting on monday.

I'm an EA and interested in signing up for cryonics. After cryocrastinating for a few years (ok I guess I don't get to say "after" until I actually sign up), I've realized that I should definitely sign up for life insurance, because of the ability to change the beneficiary. I place a low probability on cryonics working right now, but I can claim a charity or a Donor Advised Fund as the beneficiary until I place a sufficient probability on suspension technology working. In the future, I can change it back if I change my mind, etc.

Any issues that might come into this? If no one sees any flaws, I'm committing to sign up for life insurance with this plan in mind by or during the next open thread, and making a more prominent post about this strategy for any EA+Cryonics people.

Were your colleagues able to understand you better because of the assessment, or was it just the fact that you were discussing each others' strengths the important part and it had little to do with the assessment per se?

When I took the assessments I too found that it didn't tell me all that much about myself that I didn't already know. But it did help me in three ways:

1) I was able to express myself better and more precisely when talking about my strengths with others.

2) It turned vague notions in my head into more precise formulations that I could think about more constructively on my own.

3) Perhaps the most useful part was getting other people to take the test and then discussing their strengths with them. That was a real eye-opener. In many cases I simply could not imagine that someone else could view things so differently than me. So for me the assessment functioned as a terrific antidote to the Typical Mind Fallacy.

A while ago I read through a lot of Gallup's Strengths and Wellbeing books. They looked good to me, but I don't know enough statistics to understand their technical reports, so I couldn't even begin to assess how accurate they were. Also, I've never studied positive psychology on anything more than a popular book level, so I can't bring sophisticated domain knowledge to bear either. Could someone look over the following and comment?

StrengthsFinder 2.0 (StrengthsFinder test is available for $10 here. They also have an entrepreneurial-focused version at the same location.)

• Overview of StrengthsFinder 2.0 Assessment
• StrengthsFinder 2.0 Technical Report
• Some more resources on the Gallup strengths approach - look esp. in the bottom right corner for more reports and resources.
• A bunch more research papers specifically for the student-focused StrengthsQuest program
• And here are two articles about using the StrengthsFinder assessment with the Myers-Briggs

Wellbeing

• Wellbeing Meta-Analysis
• Some more resources - again, look especially in the bottom right corner.
• Gallup-Healthways Wellbeing Index
• Healthways wellbeing studies

There might be more, but those are the studies I was able to find.

Also, I'm curious if anybody else here has taken the StrengthsFinder assessment. What were your thoughts? Did it help you in any way? Care to share your strengths with the LW community?

I took the assessment twice (they don't really allow that - the second time I submitted a different email address), about a year apart. The first time the top 5 results were Futuristic, Learner, Ideation, Intellection, Input. The second time it was Intellection, Strategic, Futuristic, Learner, Input. I'm not sure what that says that it gave me two different results. On the one hand 4 out of 5 were the same. On the other hand they were all in a different order. But slightly different results seems to be what's expected, from what I could pick up from the research reports.

I looked into the numbers and it's a wash for people under 45. The risks are greater than often presented, likely because the marketing is targeted at people at heightened risk who really do need to be convinced to take it.