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Post ridiculous munchkin ideas!
sagittarian00

Additionally, I think you missed the point of my objection "You have to put in work". If you successfully spend $X on reducing akrasia, then your work for the rest of your life will be more efficient; great. But you still have to work for the rest of your life. If you invest $X in income-generating capital, then you have income for the rest of your life without lifting a finger.

Yes, if your goal is specifically to do as little work as possible and don't care about either your standard of living or what your ultimate net worth is (as long as it... (read more)

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0RolfAndreassen
Sure, if you're making minimum wage, by all means prioritise getting a better job over investing what you can spare. I suspect, however, that this is rather an unusual case for LW readers who are out of their teens. If you're making a more typical 30 or 40 thousand (and especially if you already have a college degree), the returns to self-improvement drop rather drastically.
Post ridiculous munchkin ideas!
sagittarian10

I agree that this is a significantly different proposal than the original idea. It's a combination of the original idea with another idea in a munchkin-like fashion with a different result, but one that is potentially better/more powerful/has higher XP (though it's not guaranteed, of course). I wouldn't call your points problems though, just differences.

By the way, there are ways of getting yourself to put in the necessary work (i.e., overcoming akrasia), and this community is great at coming up with a lot of them. Do you think that if you had $10,000 (to ... (read more)

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1RolfAndreassen
Is it likely to be worth more than the other possible uses for $10k? Your phrase "to spend on improving yourself" already assumes that this is the best use of the money. Additionally, I think you missed the point of my objection "You have to put in work". If you successfully spend $X on reducing akrasia, then your work for the rest of your life will be more efficient; great. But you still have to work for the rest of your life. If you invest $X in income-generating capital, then you have income for the rest of your life without lifting a finger. A separate point is that traditional capital is perhaps more likely to survive the Singularity without being drastically reduced in value than is human capital, on the grounds that atoms are still going to be in finite supply while akrasia-reducing brainware patches will be downloadable from the Internet.
Post ridiculous munchkin ideas!
sagittarian00

Likewise, small amounts of alcohol (1 or at most 2 glasses) has been shown to increase creativity. As with coffee you will have to check your own personal reaction to it.

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Post ridiculous munchkin ideas!
sagittarian00

Combine this with the idea that the most worthwhile investment by far is investing in yourself. Take whatever percentage of your income and use that to help you learn skills that will increase your income. (This includes not just technical skills, but self-marketing skills, self-confidence, anything. You will probably have more and more ideas the further you progress.) Most likely, you will have a much greater return than if you simply invested the same money in more traditional investments like the stock market.

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4RolfAndreassen
There are two problems with self-investment. First, there's coupling or frictional losses, by which I mean that X amount of money invested in yourself does not directly translate to X*(1+epsilon) money next year, even probabilistically. You have to put in work. Money invested in the stock market doesn't go through a stage in which you use your new skill; it remains, as it were, money all through the period, so there's no loss from transforming from one form of capital to another. Second, the proposed purpose was to free yourself from having to work, through accumulating capital. Although we call the result of self-investment "human capital", it doesn't have the fire-and-forget property of traditional capital; you can't use it with other people's labour.