Can LessWrong provide me with something I find obviously highly useful to my own practical life?
34RomanHauksson
3agrippa
6Yoav Ravid
1agrippa
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You can browse the "Practical" tag to find posts which are directly useful. Here are some of my favorites:
- Lukeprog's The Science of Winning at Life sequence summarizes scientifically-backed advice for "winning" at everyday life: in productivity, relationships, emotions, etc. Not exaggerating, it is close to the most useful piece of media I have ever consumed. I especially recommend the first post Scientific Self Help: The State of our Knowledge, which transformed my perception of where I should look to learn how to improve my life.
- After reading Scientific Self Help, my suspicion that popular self-help books were epistemically garbage was confirmed, and I learned that many of my questions for how to improve my life could be answered by textbooks. This gave me a strong intrinsic motivation for self-learning, which was made more effective by another of Lukeprog's posts, Scholarship: How to Do It Efficiently, combined with his thread The Best Textbooks on Every Subject.
- Romeo Steven's no-bullshit recommendations on how to increase your longevity and exercise routines, with a ten-year update and reflection.
- Many posts that are Repositories of advice.
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You can also use the frontpage filters to make only post tagged practical appear, or to make them highly prioritized.
When I meet new people, I often like to figure out how I can be useful in a really short amount of time, just by talking.
Example:
Often this will involve evangelizing some items from a short list of technologies that have impacted my life a lot, such as erotic hypnosis (you can use this to have really good sex over any distance or even asynchronously, those 2 facts alone have a lot of lifechanging implications imo).
Telling people about the (very large and real) efficacy of erotic hypnosis is useful because most people go from not imagining this is possible to imagining its possible and having a clear path to test it out in a very short amount of time. If it works, the benefit is obvious, and I give a lot of update about whether it works + info about how to see for themselves quickly and easily.
Another example:
In 2021, Sapphire gave me really good intel about founding crypto companies and really good generic arguments about why the EMH is false and therefore I should in fact act upon the good intel.
Another example:
A post about how candles are bad for you
Non-example:
When I try to extract useful conversations from others, a common reply is "if you meditate a lot its really good". That's not useless to hear, I guess (I don't meditate and wouldn't know), but it's not super useful since people say it all the time and it's not really that easy to verify for myself.
I would really like a forum where the entire point of the forum was stuff like this: Read this -> instantly or near-instantly become way smarter about things of actual practical relevance to your life. To me, this is the best possible kind of post in the world, and the space of possible posts of this kind is so big that you could just fill a forum with only that. Why bother with anything else?
As far as I can tell, LessWrong is not such a forum, but people do try to do this some of the time successfully. I really want to engage with the people who are trying to do this, but I'm lazy and I don't really know how to easily find them.
So I'm wondering if people who are more familiar with LessWrong can/would easily provide me with content that is immediately obviously highly useful to me.