I'd like to hear this from a financial expert. Do we have any who'd like to speak on this?

I'm one (PhD in economics) and yes and ordinary investors should use low fee index funds.

It depends on your use case. My "life work" consists exclusively of things I've typed. These types of files tend to be small, and lend themselves to being written in Google Documents. If I use Emacs, then the files are tiny and I back them up to Google Drive in about 2 seconds. This costs me all of $0 and is very easy.

But maybe your life work also includes a bunch of pictures documenting your experiences. These, and other large files, will quickly exceed your 15 gigs of free storage. Then you're probably looking at an external hard drive or cloud storage. The better fit will depend on things like your internet connection, which USB standard your computer has, your tech level, how much stuff you need backed up, whether you travel a lot, whether you'll lose or damage the external hard drive, etc.

And then just use Yvain's method to find the best one.

Of course, there's more elaborate solutions for power users, but by the time you're high enough level for them, you're a power user and don't need to ask.

making physical backups of data

Oh boy, is this ever a good example.

I used to work retail, selling and repairing Macs and Mac accessories. When I'd sell someone a computer, I'd tell them — no, beg them — to invest in a backup solution. "I'm not trying to sell you anything!", I'd say. "You don't have to buy your backup device from us — though we'd be glad to sell you one for a decent price — but please, get one somewhere! Set it up — heck, we'll set it up for you — and please... back up! When you come to us after your hard drive has inevitably failed — as all hard drives do eventually, sure as death or taxes — with your life's work on it, you'll be glad you backed up."

And they'd smile, and nod, and come back some time later with a failed hard drive, no backup, and full of outrage that we couldn't magic their data back into existence. And they'd pay absurd amounts of money for data recovery.

Back up your data, people. It's so easy (if you've got a Mac, anyway). The pain of losing months or years of work is really, really, really painful.

Thanks a lot for writing this! 58 new cards added to my Anki deck! I'll probably read some bits of the book once I have digested them a little (especially chapters 4, 5 and 7).

Silly question, what exactly is meant by "rubric"? Is it just highlighting part of a text in bold (or in color)?

Train your tongue to say "I don't know", lest you be brought to falsehood -Babylonian Talmud

Are you familiar with Doug Lemov's "Teach like a champion"? If so how does is compare with "How Learning Works"?

For my own part, I didn't find it too difficult to reconceptualize my understanding of what a "choice" was when dealing with the knowledge that I will predictably fail to choose certain options which nevertheless feel like choices I'm free to make.

The experience of choosing to do something is part of the experience of doing certain things, just like the experience of feeling like I could have chosen something different is. These feelings have no particular relationship to the rest of the world, any more than my feeling scared of something necessarily means that thing is frightening in any objective sense.

Another nail hit squarely on the head. Your concept of a strange playing field has helped crystallize an insight I've been grappling with for a while -- a strategy can be locally rational even if it is in some important sense globally irrational. I've had several other insights which are specific instances of this and which I only just realized are part of a more general phenomenon. I believe it can be rational to temporarily suspend judgement in the pursuit of certain kinds of mystical experiences (and have done this with some small success), and I believe that it can be rational to think of yourself as a causally efficacious agent even when you know that humans are embedded in a stream of causality which makes the concept of free will nonsensical.

nice post. However it might be better to characterize the first two classes as beliefs which are true because of the belief, instead of as false beliefs (Which is important so as not to unconsciously weaken our attachment to truth). For example in your case of believing that water will help you feel better, the reason you believe it is because it is actually true by virtue of the belief, similarly when the want to be rock star enjoys making music for its own sake the belief that making music is fun is now true.

typo: There seems to be an extra 'Y' in column 4 of the first image (it should be CYYY instead of CYYYY)