1) You haven't learned from a mistake until your behavior actually changes in a measurable way. For too long I would think rationally about my life but was missing the important next step: action. (Meta: after this realization a while back I've been tracking 'mistakes' I make and the conclusions I can make from them and have found the exercise very useful).

2) Something more directly LW related: For most of my life I had thought we were beyond the reach of God, but not until I read Eliezer's thoughts on the matter did it really 'click' with me how far reaching and terrifying of an idea it really is. I guess what really clicked was how much the idea that 'everything will work out eventually' is leftover in my thinking from childhood religion and movies where the virtuous prevail.

3) That even the most scientific and rational practices can very easily become empty rituals.

Have you thought about big bucks in Si-valley or finance? I kind of envy physicists because I feel like they have the kind of math skills that lets them figure out anything from first principles.

First of all, don't neglect your university's resources. Network like hell. Find out where other recent graduates ended up. Ask all professors who will give you the time of day if they have industry connections they would refer you to. Go to the career center. Go to career fairs. Print out tons and tons of resumes.

Speaking of resumes, what are your skills other than theoretical physics? And how wedded to doing physics in your job are you? If you can reasonably put R or MATLAB or even SQL on your resume, let alone proper programming languages or projects, you'll be opening up worlds of opportunities as an analyst or data scientist. Learn about how to use LinkedIn. Optimize your resume for visibility to keyword-based recruiters.

I strongly recommend a job search approach where you try to get as many responses as you can, THEN prune down. You'll get interviewing experience and you'll get to see some options you might not have considered.

There's problems getting a physics job around the Washington area? I'd think with NASA, NSA, DoD, several large research universities (including the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab), and all the large government contractors (Lockheed Martin in Bethesda MD, etc.) it would be relatively easy to find something.

I'm going to be graduating with my PhD in physics (theory) this coming spring and am beginning to look for jobs.

Any tips? Any mistakes you made when looking for jobs that you can tell me about? For those already with jobs in the technology industry: if you could go back in time what would you change about the way you searched for jobs?

Less likely but still worth asking: if you happen to know of a job in either the Baltimore/Washington/Virginia area or in the Bay area that I might be qualified for don't hesitate to tell me about it.

In an old article by Eliezer we're asked what we would tell Archimedes through a chronophone. I've found this idea to actually be pretty instructive if I instead ask what I would tell myself through a chronophone if I could call back only a few years.

The reason the chronophone idea is useful is because it forces you to speak in terms of 'cognitive policies' since if you use anything relevant to your own time period it will be translated into something relevant to the time period you're calling. In this way if I think about what I would tell my former self I think: 1) what mistakes did I make when I was younger? 2) what sort or cognitive policies or strategies would have allowed me to avoid those mistakes, and finally 3) am I applying the analogue of those strategies in my life today?

Thanks for this - it's a very interesting topic. You might want to look into Pinker's Sense of Style, which has been well-received, on this topic (I just started reading it).

I've read a few introductory-level books on subjects like written composition and rhetorical technique. It's given me a broader vocabulary to describe what's going on, and a selection of tips, tricks and patterns.

It would be great if you could give us an overview of what you've learnt, as a starting-point of further discussion.

Also, I think it's important to know what sort of quality writing you're aspiring at. Good scientific writing is very different from good literary writing, for instance.

Probably not too interesting, but after studying physics at university I was pretty sure that the Many-Worlds interpretation of QM was crazy-talk (nobody even really mentioned it at uni). Of course I didn't read Eliezer's sequence on QM (although I read the others). I mean I had a degree in physics and Eliezer didn't.

Then after seeing it over and over again on LW, I actually read this paper to see what it was all about. And I was enlightened. Well, I had a short crisis of faith first, then I was enlightened.

This all could have been avoided if I had read that paper earlier. The lesson is that I can't even trust my fellow physicists :(

Awhile ago on my blog I broke the process down into three steps that seem to work for me:

1. Empty your head -Write down distracting thoughts, make important decisions, etc.

2. Focus your thoughts -Minimize distractions, relaxation techniques, etc.

3. Engage Your Action Mind -Use triggers, exercise, or a shock to your system.

Seems to work well for me but YMMV.

On an unrelated note it se,ems flow is actually the great state for peak performance, but it turns out to be a poor ideal for learning because it's antithetical to interleaved practice.

I take notes in text files that I have named by topic and all in one big folder. This allows me to search all of the files easily at once and gives me ease of mind that text files will never become obsolete and I should still be able to read them in 30 years. I've been doing this for quite sometime and have files going back at least 10 years.

An important step however is that I occasionally copy the entire directory as a backup into a new folder and name it by the date of the backup. I then never alter that archived version. The purpose of this is that I now feel free in my working directory to be liberal with edits and deletes so that I can keep the amount of notes down to a relatively small amount only including important topics at any one time, but have the ability to search through old iterations at the same time.

I never scan notes I take by hand, and only take notes by hand if I'm somewhere that it's socially unacceptable to have a computer/phone. If I do this I just go through later and type important parts into a text file.

As far as capture goes, I either write a quick sentence or two and email it to myself to later transfer to a text file or I place the note in my phones note feature. Usually once a week or so I go through and clear my inbox and my phones note feature and transfer everything to text files.

I've gone through several attempts to build tagging systems but in reality grep (or spotlight search on a mac) are so good at searching text files that it's never useful and I end up canning the tagging system.

I don't use evernote, but my notes are very private, I sometimes write in a very journal like fashion, and so I would not let anyone read them.