I've been in the bay area for a week, and already I've heard so many tips and tricks for becoming smarter that I can barely keep track. I think this is a very good thing. If effective altruists and rationalists can become smarter, then it should improve the probability of favourable far-future outcomes. Note that:

1) cognitive enhancement fits with the ideas that you will achieve most of your impact in your middle age, and that increasing your career capital is integral to achieving impact.

2) it might be possible to reinvest returns from cognitive enhancement by doing further research into cognitive enhancement. This is not to say that an intelligence explosion could occur within a human substrate - our capacity to alter our neural structure and thinking speed is likely to run up against hard evolutionary constraints in a way that machine intelligence will not. Nonetheless, cognitively enhanced humans could have an advantage in the creation of a friendly AI team.

I suggest that we collate our mind hacks here. Then we can vote them all up and down. This will generate a list of 'top rated posts of all time', which could give hints for curriculum design to organisations like CFAR. Here are a few suggestions:

The reversal test for status quo bias
Thinking for five minutes of plans that can be executed in five minutes
Mind maps
Asana
Anki
Speed reading
Goal factoring
Caffeine
Modafinil
Nicotine
Creatine
Transcranial magnetic stimulation
and so on

Of course, if something is less plausibly obtainable than transcranial magnetic stimulation, then it won't get any votes at all and doesn't meaningfully belong on this list (e.g. deep brain stimulation, brain-computer interfaces)

luvs2learn

luvs2learn

luvs2learn

luvs2learn

luvs2learn

luvs2learn