Thank you for your article, I really liked the optimism I felt conveyed from the paragraph about beating the superstar.

(I have my own caveat here, it does not pertain to the level of the easiness of the necessary plans or their implementation - in my experience it's much more the coordination problems that throw a wrench into these schemes: You are going to invariably need more people on the set; and you're going to end up spending factorially more time on explaining what exactly on earth you want to do) I notice though that most superstars didn't optimise their abilities, when treated separately, their ideas are barely trivial, and the stuff that is heard a decade, hundred years later probably was not made by a superstar of that time. (Know Giacinto Scelsi? He invented the stuff that people today use in music that the superstars of tomorrow will make. ~10% confident about that, considering x-risk and everything)

On another note, do I read you well enough to say that you wish to optimise on the teaching side? What if you could get more mileage out of optimising on the learning side, for instance propagating the urge of really wanting to learn stuff?

I'd also be interested how you'd set your plan in motion. Given infinite resources, what particular thing you know about would you change first. (Describe it to my system 1, pretty please)

I am so sorry for this comment: but Patañjali does immediately spring to my mind. I think he had prettily answered the question with: "not much; nothing special". I wonder why it kept being found useful after being answered that clearly. (I still sometimes catch myself using it when dating; its usefulness there does not increase though) Maybe it's perceived worth lies beyond its meaning and the hope of getting an answer there is connected to the hope of getting an answer for "What is the awesomest version of future me? Which traits, virtues and potentials (Hidden and known) did it focus on?" (oh wait I'm going to steal that question from myself and put it to real use)

About a year and a half ago, I lost my fun-but-low-skill receptionist job. Deciding I was tired of being poor and having no marketable skills, I began to teach myself to program, which involved a bunch of Coursera courses, an internship, and a TAship at an intensive code school. Tomorrow will mark a month at my first Real Job as a programmer (indeed, the first Real Job of my life.)

The process has involved the acquisition of non-computer skills, too. In particular, I've gotten better at estimating my own competence, accounting for the planning fallacy, asking for help, doing distasteful tasks, and calmly articulating differences of opinion (and corrections of fact).

I have learnt to love myself. (For those cringing at the wording: Everything I ever will do will be informed by my total acceptance of all my faculties.)

That's awesome you are working on this!! I really would love to play it, with little regard to the outcome ( I pit it somewhere between quite interesting and totally super helpful) I wondered though whether you could make the player tally the probabilities himself and keep the scorings hidden yet allow taking notes ("hard mode"? and "hell" with no prior info on time limits? haha I can totally see being hit by the planning fallacy when trying to figure that one out for the first few times) I also imagine leaving the graphics away for now seems like the sane thing to do, even if you might want to think about it again after it is finished. Because of spreading the art.

Any analysis might be wrong, of course, but if so, it deserves critique rather than just a caution that it might be incorrect, no?

The thing is, the analysis you're speaking of is not testable. There is no way to establish whether it's true or not (and the meaning of the word "true" in this context is a complicated debate of its own).

Besides, you're at the mercy of the authors of your sources. If an author was biased, or wanted to push a particular agenda, or was mistaken, or just deliberately lied -- and you cannot reliably cross-check him -- your conclusions will be bunk and you won't know it.

Everyone agrees doesn't imply that something is true. Just take a look at any decent science to see how hard it is to detect causality.

It's quite easy to tell a story of how Giuliani implemented the broken windows doctrine and then crime rates fall. Then it might be that it's all just effects of lead on children brain development. It might be some other random reason. Freakonomics did suggest that it was abortions.

Your history analysis that focuses on governments as actors completely ignores effects such as the environmental effects of lead. There quite a lot that happened in the 19th century as far as the industrial revolution goes.

You are ignoring the meta-level. In the 19th century we got schools with compulsory education and children where taught that nation states are really important. History was told as a bunch of actions of state actors. Things happened because of ministers, princes and kings. If your goal is getting people to believe in nation states that's useful. But that goal is different from the goal of truth.

Niall Ferguson for example manages to tell a quite different history. There's money. The importing of good math notation, allows calculation of new forms of debt. The French Revolution happened because the French state sunk in debt. Bankers amassed a lot of money and picked winners and losers in wars. Many times corruption wasn't even illegal in the early 19th century. Some politicians didn't get a salary because they made more than enough money via bribes.

it risks being one of those serious-sounding cautions that doesn't actually throw much light on situations.

Sometimes the keys just don't lie under the street light.

Thank You for this write-up; I really like the structure of it actually managing to present the evolution of an idea. Agreeing with more or less of the content, I often find myself posing the question whether I - and seven billion others - could save the world with my, our own hands. (I am beginning to see utilons even in my work as an artist, but that belongs into a wholly different post) This is a question for the ones like me, not earning much, and - without further and serious reclusion, reinvention and reorientation - not going to earn much, ever: Do I a) maximise and donate the small amounts I receive now, b) maximise my future income while minimising donations for now to spend on self-improvement and donate some highly uncertain, possibly huge sum in the future or c) use my resources to directly change something now? Let's not make it an overly complex discussion, so feel free to message me instead of commenting.

Concerning mother Theresa and other saints, I think we all know somebody who was an especially vociferous denier of her sanctity. I think it helps if I model myself as an instinctly selfish creature, and then go on and use my selfish instincts to push myself in a good direction. (I did this - on a small scale - with my smoking problem and told myself: Ok, so you wanna smoke, hm?? So go on and smoke - when you have won the next competition. So here's what I do whenever I feel the urge: Oh, I wanna smoke; Oh I can't, so how do I optimise my chance of smoking? Oh, I should go and work on my project) I think this technique - how darksided and dangerous it ever may be - can be used to propel myself towards even bigger goals.

us being evolutionarily primed to explore up to a certain point, then exploit

Well, primed to explore until drives more powerful than curiosity 'get traction' (which might have amounted to the same thing in 99% of individuals in the EEA). The difference (which is relevant now that we are no longer in the EEA and have the option of living lives that would have been completely impossible in the EEA) is that in my model, when the more powerful drives (sex, status, sometimes love of one's children) are frustrated, the individual is capable of staying motivated by curiosity many hours a day even in late adulthood.

Evidence for my model of curiosity is the observation that those adults whose curiosity is strong enough to motivate them to make significant scientific discoveries tend to have been adolescents whose drives for sex, popularity, friendships and athletic accomplishments were frustrated more and longer than those who did not go on to become successful scientists. This is evidence when you add to the model the hypothesis, which I assign high probability, that spending an unusually large amount of one's time and energy satisfying one's curiosity during adolescence increases one's ability to stay motivated by curiosity as adult. (The other human drives probably work the same way.)

I once read a book by an academic which I cannot find again about the personal histories of successful scientists that reported that an unusually high fraction of them suffered some illness or injury during childhood that kept them housebound or took them out of social circulation for at least a year. The same book reported that almost all of the successful scientists studied spent time during childhood or young adulthood in an urban environment, which tend to support the model I am advancing here since living in the big city helps one to realize that it is possible to live without strong personal friendships and without membership in informal or formal status-improvement or status-preservation coalitions, which would tend to give one the courage to ignore the usually very strong human drives for friendship membership in formal and informal coalitions (clubs, associations, organizations, communities, subcultures, etc).

There will be a meetup taking place this wednesday the 21st of may at 19:30; at the Kronenhalle-Bar (only place I know which is silent enough to allow for conversations not held at the top of one's lungs) I will distribute this as PM for everyone I can recognise as Zurich-based as I don't have Karma enough for even the smallest sigh in the discussion section :)