I choose to interpret it as praise, and receive a warm fuzzy feeling.

Then in that case, you don't need anyone lecturing you - you will do it just to get a better night's sleep. And in my own case, I find 'made' beds much harder to sleep in.

If you plan to never, ever live in a non-English-speaking place, yeah, learning languages other than English is not terribly useful.

Living in the same country you were born in is the lot of something like 90% of humanity and usually has been, and English-speaking may well embrace more territory than you might guess.

For example, when I visited Belgium and the Netherlands in 2005, I was shocked at how many natives spoke English and how well.

And just today, while finishing a Wikipedia experiment, I was surprised to note that the smaller German Wikipedia was sending something like half as many visits to my (English) DNB FAQ as the larger English Wikipedia. (Although I just checked, and contrary to what I thought, the German entry wasn't specifying that my page is in English, which is likely inflating click-throughs; I've added an 'Englisch' warning, so we'll see how things change after 100 days or so. Good to know this for context in my experiment, too.)

You need to add an important caveat: it takes about 10-20 years.

Learning languages is expensive; I'm not sure it's a good idea at all for ordinary English speakers, and I see a distinct lack of calculation in this post or other comments.

Well, diminishing returns don't set in until the third or fourth or nth wipe - the first wipe removes some quite dangerous and smelly material.

And on the other hand, making one's bed has zero health or smell benefits that I can see, and won't even impress 99% of the people one runs into - since they won't be in your bedroom noting how unusual it is your bed is made and how very Conscientious you must be.

McCluskey's followup: http://www.bayesianinvestor.com/blog/index.php/2008/11/13/automated-market-maker-results/

This is something you can figure out from basic stats and your experimental design, and I strongly recommend actually running the numbers.

As it happens, I learned how to do basic power calculations not that long ago. I didn't do an explicit calculation for the melatonin trial because I didn't randomize selection, instead doing an alternating days design and not always following that, so I thought why bother doing one in retrospect?

But if we were to wave that away, the power seems fine. I have something like 141 days of data, of which around 90-100 is usable, giving me maybe <50 pairs? If I fire up R and load in the two means and the standard deviation (which I had left over from calculating the effect size), and then play with the numbers, then to get an 85% chance I could find an effect at p=0.01:

> pwr.t.test(d=(456.4783 -  407.5312) / 131.4656,power=0.85,sig.level=0.01,type="paired",alternative="greater")

 Paired t test power calculation 

          n = 84.3067
          d = 0.3723187
  sig.level = 0.01
      power = 0.85
 alternative = greater

NOTE: n is number of *pairs*

If I drop the p=0.01 for 0.05, it looks like I should have had a good shot at detecting the effect:

> pwr.t.test(d=(456.4783 -  407.5312) / 131.4656,power=0.85,sig.level=0.05,type="paired",alternative="greater")

 Paired t test power calculation 

          n = 53.24355

So, it's not great, but it's at least not terribly wrong?

EDIT: Just realized that I equivocated over days vs pairs in my existing power analyses; 1 was wrong, but I apparently avoided the error in another, phew.

Oh. I don't remember, then, besides the notes about them being obsolete.

Creating Friendly AI, Levels of Organization in General Intelligence, and Coherent Extrapolated Volition.

I think he means for the akratic person. I see plenty of implications, for example that a way to attack the root of depression would be to fake markers of status - have the person join a small club or organization which they can derive status from, for example.