Thanks. Fixed for the next update of the FAQ.

Cool indeed!

Both uses of "regime" on page 3 look weird:

improving accuracy by a percentage point in the ninety-percent regime arguably makes translation software a lot more useful than improving accuracy by a point in the thirty-percent regime

"Region" seems better to me.

Cool!

"Insais" on page 26 should probably be "insei."

Do you have something to drink? Get yourself some tea, coffee, or water.

Also: Is your work area bright enough? Turn on your desk lamp.

Feels like a free concentration boost to me.

In the past eight days I have gone to the gym seven times, swimming 1km each time. I have made some irregular progress in weightlifting, which mostly means I have figured out approximately my max lift for a few different basic lifts. I have missed one day but feel slightly bless annoyed with myself on that account because I swam 2km the previous day.

I have made more of an effort to follow up romantic opportunities. More is still not a lot.

In the past month I have dramatically increased the speed at which I'm learning Mandarin by the simple expedient of removing the books from my bag and the music from my mp3 player. This has left me with two alternatives for my commute; be bored or leisten to a learn Mandarin audiobook. I am very slowly becoming less shit.

Hello, I'm Dean! I just attended the minicamp, and this is my first post.

On my flight back I started talking to the guy beside me, which is something I wouldn't usually do. I've wanted to talk to the person beside me on the flight before and it hasn't happened because I got nervous. This time I used a trigger to perform a next action. The trigger was getting to my seat and the action was saying hello to my seat mate BEFORE I sat down. It worked well because for me the hardest part of talking to a stranger is making the first move.

He was a chemical engineer and we shared amazing conversation for the whole flight.

I just lost a long response, because I was naive enough not to check if the "More Help" link in formatting was an in-tab link. It was. Hence a short answer (my self-allowed free-wheeling time is almost up)

First of all. Thank you for your more fulfilling answer.

First admission: In the bright light of hindsight I see that my reply was unnecessarily snide.

Second admission: Yes, I actually saw your first as being slightly noisy. Perhaps because the post on "Why Our Kind Can't Cooperate" was so fresh in my mind. Your post fit very well into the self-sabotaging conducted by rationalists attempting communities that I perceived Eliezer to have described in that post.

Now I see that of course the interjection is valid. I just think our opinions differ on following points:

• (1). The effectiveness of dancing and singing. Like you I've gone through quite a lot of years of mental gardening (around 7). With my current weed-out techniques, I do not think that the proposed exercises have an effect I couldn't effectively undermine with ½-1 hour worth of auto-hypnosis. Hence my cost-benefit says (potentially) low cost and probable high benefit (low transaction cost of knowledge between me and rational-striving people who have tested approaches to subjects, or gained knowledge about subjects, I'm curious about, but have yet to explore myself).

• (2). How profound the effect is. I'm obviously not a(n internet) network expert or I wouldn't just have lost my entire post, but I wouldn't liken dancing and singing together as root access. Nor as:

  a cultural process that accepts everyone, and gets everyone to believe whatever is in everyone else's heads at the beginning

More like opening a few ports perhaps (or allowing more bandwidth? - again I'm not nearly as tech-savvy as I have been, which means a lot less than most LW-members).

• (3). Teaching creates more of a power division than a community feeling. Learning/exploring a new subject together, on the other hand, can be a quite powerful bond creation mechanism. My deepest bond of friendship has grown through learning a wide array of skills together and sharing insights on the way to the attainment of said skills.

• (4). Your proposed ritual strikes me as being way more cultish than that of the post. The process mentioned strikes me as being very close to an initiation ritual. Furthermore: benevolence criteria is dubious: that means that we should agree on an ethical code (or at least points), which I'm not sure we do.

• (5a). I do not personally consider it a minus to feel connected to strangers. Quite the opposite; my ethical position actually endorses that actively. Hence:

• (5b). I'm slightly saddened by you likening a strong unity feeling to a parasitic disease.

PS. I tried reading the article on smallish groups (my best social structure for learning), but it was unfortunately a paid article and I'm not currently enjoying free access to the publication. If you have a way of enlightening me that does not require 35$ for me upfront, I'll be more than willing to check it out.

PPS. When I format to use lines, is it normal that the formatting resets every number to one? IE: "* 1" "* 2" became "* 1" and "* 1". I didn't in the sandbox, and I didn't immediately find something about it in the guide (and hence ran out of patience).

• Reflex Rational (or Rational Reflex)
• Praxis Rational
• Accurate Agency
• The Accuracy Agency
• Change Agent
• Improved Metrics
• Practical Measures
• Better Measures
• Measure Mental
• Calibration
• Making Sense
• Percept Action
• Precision Living

• (Centre for) Art of Reason
• Art of Winning
• Act Better
• Right on Target (or Target on Right)
• Evidence Based
• Mindtweak
• Mindhack
• Effective Agency
• Winning Institute
• Inspired Thought
• Achieve
• Decision Training
• Better Model
• Perfect Thought
• Motivated Action

I got a positive reception for "Waterline" in my comment here.