I'm going to give you some advice as a professional woman. I very deeply resent when male colleagues compete with each other to put on a display for women. This goes for social contexts (rationalists' meetups) in addition to professional contexts (work meetings). Then women are trying to talk about code or rationality or product design. Rather than thinking about her contributions, the men are preoccupied with "projecting male presence and authority". What does male presence even mean? Why does authority have anything to do with men, instead of, you know, being the most knowledgeable about the topic?

I'll tell you how it comes across. It comes across as focusing on the other men and ignoring the women's contributions. Treating the men as rivals and the women as prizes. Sucky for everyone all around. Instead of teaching boys to be "sexually attractive", why don't you teach them to include women in discussions and listen to them same as anyone else? Because we're not evaluating your sons for "sexual attractiveness". We're just trying to get our ideas heard.

The answer, as with most questions like 'why does X seem to work well for some people and not others' is going to be complex. For example, one of the recent links in my newsletter touches on this topic:

• "Genome-wide meta-analysis identifies six novel loci associated with habitual coffee consumption", The Coffee and Caffeine Genetics Consortium et al 2014 (excerpts)

Aside from finding some hits, caffeine consumption has long had meaningful heritability estimates (some are cited in that paper, others can be found in Google Scholar with the obvious query 'caffeine heritability'). So that seems to be part of it: genetics.

Let's talk about drugs!

Caffeine's an adenosine antagonist. Now, let's figure out what that means.

Neurons have proteins embedded in their membranes called receptors. Chemicals (e.g. neurotransmitters) can bind to these receptors, which causes stuff to happen. For instance, adenosine is a chemical, and it can bind to receptors in your brain cells, resulting in sleepy behavior.

(Here seems to be the place to mention that this is a vastly oversimplified explanation. Those interested in a technical explanation would do well to check out the appropriate textbook, because I literally just condensed over three chapters of my psychopharmacology textbook in as many sentences.)

Caffeine is an antagonist. Antagonists are able to bind to receptors without causing the stuff to happen. Since the receptors are already bound, the adenosine can't bind to them, meaning the stuff (in this case, sleepy behavior) happens less.

This leads nicely into tolerance. Your body reacts to not-enough-working-adenosine-receptors by adding adenosine receptors. Thus, when your not hopped up on caffeine, you have too many adenosine receptors (and therefore too much sleepy behavior), and even when you are on caffeine, the effects are muted.

Fortunately, it's pretty straightforward to reduce the number of adenosine receptors: you just stop ingesting caffeine, your body notices there's too many adenosine receptors, and removes them. This doesn't happen immediately, so you get withdrawal. Checking wikipedia, this should last 2–9 days at nuisance level. (Relative to the other drugs in my textbook, this is positively innocuous).

Also, it's worth mentioning caffeine's pharmacokinetics. The rate at which caffeine is metabolized is proportional to how much is in your system. Solving the differential equation gives you something like $A e^{-kt}$; the important thing to know is it has a half-life of about 6 hours.

Out of every course I took in college, psychopharmacology had by far the highest [actual IRL use] : [expected IRL use] ratio. Drugs are ubiquitous and having a solid understanding constantly pays small dividends.

The people I know who retired or are scheduled to retire the quickest

Cops.

These are my goals, as well.

So, this looks to be a common aspiration, but it strikes me as woefully underspecified :-) A lot of retired people spend their day extending minor tasks to take a lot of time and spend the rest of it staring into the idiot box.

Are all y'all quite sure you have enough internal motivation to do interesting, challenging things without any external stimuli? What will prevent you from vegging out and being utterly bored for the rest of your life?

Oh, and a practical question (for the US people) -- once you retire at, say, 40, what are you going to use for health insurance and does your retirement planning cover the medical costs?

1421 respondents supplied their age: 1292 (90.9%) of them were less than 40. The modal age is 25.

It looks like the median age is 27.67, but I'm curious to see the age-range breakdown as I've frequently assumed I'm "old" for the group (over 40). Oh....never mind.....just saw the link to the Excel spreadsheet and will sort it myself.

As far as I understand it, CFAR's current focus is research and developing their rationality curriculum. The workshops exist to facilitate their research, they're a good way to test which bits of rationality work and determine the best way to teach them.

In this model, broad improvements in very fundamental, schoolchild-level rationality education and the alleviation of poverty and time poverty are much stronger prospects for improving the world

In response to the question "Are you trying to make rationality part of primary and secondary school curricula?" the CFAR FAQ notes that:

We’d love to include decisionmaking training in early school curricula. It would be more high-impact than most other core pieces of the curriculum, both in terms of helping students’ own futures, and making them responsible citizens of the USA and the world.

So I'm fairly sure they agree with you on the importance of making broad improvements to education. It's also worth noting that effective altruists are among their list of clients, so you could count that as an effort toward alleviating poverty if you're feeling charitable.

However they go on to say:

At the moment, we don’t have the resources or political capital to change public school curricula, so it’s not a part of our near-term plans.

Additionally, for them to change public-school curricula they have to first develop a rationality curriculum, precisely what they're doing at the moment - building a 'minimum strategic product'. Giving "semi-advanced cognitive self-improvement workshops to the Silicon Valley elite" is just a convenient way to test this stuff.

You might argue for giving the rationality workshops to "people who have not even heard of the basics" but there's a few problems with that. Firstly the number of people CFAR can teach in the short term is tiny percentage of the population, not where near enough to have a significant impact on society (unless those people are high impact people, but then they've probably already hear of the basics). Then there's the fact that rationality just isn't viewed as useful in the eyes of the general public, so most people won't care about learning to become so. Also teaching the basics of rationality in a way that sticks is quite difficult.

Mind, if what you're really trying to do is propagandize the kind of worldview that leads to taking MIRI seriously, you rather ought to come out and say that.

I don't think CFAR is aiming to propagandize any worldview; they're about developing rationality education, not getting people to believe any particular set of beliefs (other than perhaps those directly related to understanding how the brain works). I'm curious about why you think they might be (intentionally or unintentionally) doing so.

Lera Boroditsky is one of the premier researchers on this topic. They've also done some excellent work on comparing spatial/time metaphors in English and Mandarin (?), showing that the dominant idioms in each language affect how people cognitively process motion.

But the question is more broad -- whether some form of natural language is required (natural, roughly meaning used by a group in day to day life, is key here)? Differences between major natural languages are for the most part relatively superficial and translatable because their speakers are generally dealing with a similar reality.

A different (non-technical) way to argue for their reducibility is through analysis of the role of language in human thought. The logic being that language by its very nature extends into all aspects of cognition (little human though of interest takes place outside its reach), and so one cannot do one without the other. I believe that's the rationale behind the Turing test.

It's interesting that you mention machine translation though. I wouldn't equate that with language understanding. Modern translation programs are getting very good, and may in time be "perfect" (indistinguishable from competent native speakers), but they do this through pattern recognition and leveraging a massive corpus of translation data - not through understanding it.

Ensure that you have trained enough for the next challenge, because it is the training that will see you through it, not your agenty conscious thinking.

Spent the last 5+ years of my life trying to do this, specifically for the role of Nurse (and Lifeguard before that). It's been fairly successful, and even generalizes a little–I am frequently the Person who Gets Shit Done in non-nursing contexts.

I'm not sure that the competence/learned skill routines/martial arts for rationality aspect is the same thing as "Being Responsible For This Shit." The former is something that takes years of doing hard things over and over, training the right mental motion the same way you'd train the physical motion. Almost all the things that actually make me a competent ICU nurse fall into this category.

The latter is something that can change in a day, with the right mental reframe. (Example: I usually basically never volunteer to drive places, although I've learned how–I'm not super comfortable and I don't have to. Then I was The Person In Charge of logistics for a large event, and hardly anyone else could drive, and I was responsible–so rather than spend a ton of energy convincing other people to drive places for me, I just got in the car.)

The two skills are probably related and probably correlated–for example, I suspect that many people have trouble taking on the role of "Person In Charge" because they have low confidence in their ability to actually take the right action and make things better rather than worse. (Given that in plenty of situations, taking the wrong action confidently is worse than doing nothing, that may be justified). Acquiring competence in one area, like nursing, brings confidence, and I think that's the thing that generalizes to the rest of my life, rather than any of the specific routines and skills and dealing-with-emergency templates that I've spent years training. It feels like I have a good understanding of which situations actually require very little skill, where the main thing is having the necessary confidence to speak. (Then again, I'm not sure I could distinguish this from "having ingrained a skill to the point that it doesn't even feel like a skill anymore.)