A Munchkin is the sort of person who, faced with a role-playing game, reads through the rulebooks over and over until he finds a way to combine three innocuous-seeming magical items into a cycle of infinite wish spells. Or who, in real life, composes a surprisingly effective diet out of drinking a quarter-cup of extra-light olive oil at least one hour before and after tasting anything else. Or combines liquid nitrogen and antifreeze and life-insurance policies into a ridiculously cheap method of defeating the invincible specter of unavoidable Death. Or figures out how to build the real-life version of the cycle of infinite wish spells.
It seems that many here might have outlandish ideas for ways of improving our lives. For instance, a recent post advocated installing really bright lights as a way to boost alertness and productivity. We should not adopt such hacks into our dogma until we're pretty sure they work; however, one way of knowing whether a crazy idea works is to try implementing it, and you may have more ideas than you're planning to implement.
So: please post all such lifehack ideas! Even if you haven't tried them, even if they seem unlikely to work. Post them separately, unless some other way would be more appropriate. If you've tried some idea and it hasn't worked, it would be useful to post that too.
Upvoted. This is a quite interesting thought experiment, and maybe even worth a post of its own. I encourage you to write more on this subject.
This. I've been known to say that if I were a billionaire, my third priority would be building a ridiculous castle and living out my days as an eccentric headmaster.
This belies the more down-to-Earth intention that if, after looking into it in more detail, FAI and life extension both seem like they'll be insufficient in my lifetime to prevent biological death (even if not information theoretic death), investing in injecting sanity (even if concentrated in a few world-beaters) into the world would be a likely next priority. (Cf. MIRI, CFAR.) So I'm definite... (read more)