Post ridiculous munchkin ideas!
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.
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If you are a human, then the biggest influence on your personality is your peer group. Choose your peers.
If you want to be better at math, surround yourself with mathematicians. If you want to be more productive, hang out with productive people. If you want to be outgoing or artistic or altruistic or polite or proactive or smart or just about anything else, find people who are better than you at that thing and become friends with them. The status-seeking conformity-loving parts of your mind will push you to become like them. (The incorrect but pithy version: “You are an average of the five people you spend the most time with.”)
I’ve had a lot of success with this technique by going to the Less Wrong meetups in Boston, and by making a habit of attending any event where I’ll be the stupidest person in the room (such as the average Less Wrong meetup).
See The Good News of Situationist Psychology.
That is exactly how I felt that day too my friend.
Now look at us, you kept surrounded by awesomeness, while I came back into trying to cause awesomeness from scratch, and pull it up. It’s not that I failed. By any metric, I have succeeded. But my energy has been drained through the process, while I expect yours to have tripled.
As far as I’ve been told, you haven’t had an existential crisis, and you didn’t have to worry about calibrating for how frequently your goals change (though from 20-24 your rate of change was much higher than mine, you stabilized much more than I did)
For these reasons I want to go to Berkeley in August, and surround once again with the MIRI, Leverage, CFAR people. This time not for recalibrating and returning. This time to find out how to stay in the Berkeley-Oxford hub.
If I decide to seek company of some people, because according to some metric M they are better than me, I am helping myself, because I am exposing myself to people better than me, but at the same time I am hurting them, because I expose them to a person that is worse than them, according to the same metric. OK, one possible way out of this problem is to say that different people use different metrics. But if we assume there is one shared metric, or at least that metrics used by smart enough people are similar, is there a way to help some people without harming others?
Possible solution would be to make the relationships between people asymetrical, so they would be stronger in the “better person to worse person” direction, but weaker in the opposite direction. -- This is not a new idea, because this is what actually happens when you read someone’s book, or if you attend someone’s lecture. The question is, how much is the influence reduced this way. (What is the ratio between influence I get from the books and from the people I meet in person? What strategies can I use to change this ratio? E.g. I could spend more time reading, but that would have some social costs; but perhaps I could make my friends read the same book and then discuss it, which would multiply the effect of the book without reducing my time spent with my friends.)
Sometimes I think internet made these things worse, because now many people expect the communication to be bi-directional. Reading smart people’s texts is not enough; we require comment sections, where those people have to spend their precious time fighting spammers and trolls. Or even without spammers and trolls, just the fact that the productive people spend more time with procrastinators like me is probably harmful for them (and indirectly even for me, because then I have less high-quality content to read). -- This could be improved somehow, by installing some filters in the way, e.g. the discussion moderator should not be the same person as the blogger.
From the other side: isolating yourself from stupid people is good for you. I am more picky about internet discussions now than I was years ago, and avoiding discussions infested with stupidity improved my mood. The problem is: if all the smart people choose to not interact with stupid people, how will it work for the society as a whole? I mean, the stupid people would benefit from being exposed to information from the smart people, so some of them get a chance to learn. But the smart person should avoid making the stupid people their peer group. Again, we need one-direction communication channels here. So despite the fact that internet makes symmetrical communication easy, we should sometimes consciously avoid that.
I am not convinced that being around people slightly worse than yourself is bad for you. Especially when you get into a mentor role. When you actively try to help others understand and improve, this forces you to think about what you are actually doing, which probably improves your behavior.
Disclaimer: purely anecdotal, and does not apply to all metrics.
I’m just spitballing here, but… blogs with the comments turned off.
I wonder, if the whole theory is true, what are loners training themselves towards? I.e. those who don’t surround themselves with people at all.
Depends on why they do that. I can imagine a person going to isolation because they care about a project they started and want to finish it as soon as possible. I can also imagine a person isolating themselves as a result of depression.
I wish I could remember where I originally saw this quote:
“If you hang out with smart people, you will get smarter. If you hang out with dumb people, you will get dumber. If you hang out with rich people, they’ll leave you with the bill and you will get poorer.”
It is probably most useful if you hang out with people who are just a little higher than you on a given metric. You get the pull upwards, and the inferential (and other) distances are still small.
It probably wouldn’t be very useful for a dumb person trying to hang out with Nobel Price winners. Most likely, the dumb person would completely misunderstand them and get overconfident. A company of average people would be more useful for the dumb person, as they could empathise more, and give better practical advice.
Similarly, hanging out with richer people will cost you more. They can also give you some good advice and contacts, but if the inferential distances are too large, you will not be able to use them.
Yes, that’s all true. The other point in the quote is that it’s not a good idea to hang out with the sort of people who prey on other people, because then you will get preyed on.
I’m going to Hacker School this summer. It has a lot of praise for making people good at programming in a very short amount of time, and it works on exactly this principle; students are selected almost exclusively for desire+ability to get better at programming, and so everyone pursues their pre-existing goal much more effectively than if they weren’t all reinforcing/teaching each other.
I think the same might work with online forums. E.g. an interesting way to motivate oneself to learn programming might be to spend a lot of time hanging out on the IRC channels for the tools you want to learn.
Anecdotally, this seems to work. I’ve become a much better writer while spending a lot of time in a writers’ irc channel.
Could you name some actual writer’s IRC channels? I’ve never seen any.
I’ve seen exactly one, and it’s a private channel for the editorial staff of a blog that curates My Little Pony fanfiction. (Yes, this is actually a thing.)
That seems to imply loners tend to be more unusual in all respects, because of regression to the mean. If they weren’t loners, they would regress to the mean of the people they associated with, which as the number of associates rises, tends towards the mean of the population.
So this theory explains the (anecdotally) observed fact that loners tend to be unusual people in other respects too.
Is the corollary to this that if you want to become an outlier, i.e. not a linear combination of your peers but a point on the convex hull, you should spend less time hanging around with other people?
Or cluster with outliers. The population is large enough that you should expect to find enough outliers to form a peer group.
Does anyone know off-hand whether this effect remains or is as strong with introverts?
I am an introvert and this effect is strong for me. But the best way to see if it works for you is to try it.
Perhaps, but don’t forget that a lot of research has shown that social interaction in general is key to health, long life, and social and mental well being. Having close social connections itself may be the most important thing, more significant then other peer effects.
I would expect they’d only influence you about how they act at the time. If you hang out with someone who is usually productive, but at this moment is hanging out with a friend, it doesn’t seem like it would help much.
Edit:
Also, this seems like a zero-sum game. You are less productive than people who are more productive than you, and they might not want that to rub off on them. Is there a good way to get around that?
I have discovered a way to carry a credit card balance indefinitely, interest-free, without making payments, using only an Amazon Kindle.
How my card works is, any purchases made during Month N get applied to the balance due in the middle of Month N+1. So if I make a purchase now, in May 2013, it goes on the balance due June 15th. If I don’t pay the full May balance by June 15th, then and only then do they start charging interest. This is pretty typical of credit cards, I think.
Now the key loophole is that refunds are counted as payments, and are applied immediately, but purchases are applied to the balance due next month. So if I buy something on June 5th, and return it on June 6th, the purchase goes toward the balance due on July 15th, but the refund is applied as a payment on the balance due on June 15th! So you can pay your entire June balance with nothing but refunds, and you won’t have to worry about paying for those purchases until July, at which time you can do the whole thing again. The debt is still there, of course, because all you’ve done is add and then subtract say $100 from your balance, but absolutely no interest is charged. This process is limited only by your credit line (which you cannot exceed at any time) and by the ease with which you can buy and return stuff each month.
Here’s where the Kindle comes in. Repeatedly buying and returning items from a brick-and-mortar store is incredibly time-consuming and risky. You have to buy stuff, keep it in good shape, and then return it, interacting with human clerks each time, without raising suspicion. Not efficient. But if you have a Kindle, you know that when you buy a book, after you hit “Purchase” a screen comes up that asks if you have bought the item by accident, and if so, would you like to cancel the purchase. If you hit the button to cancel the purchase, what happens is that the purchase is still applied to your card, but it is refunded a couple of days later. Bingo. Automatic refunds, obtained at home at no risk, with no human oversight.
But e-books on Amazon are like $10, so you’d have to sit there all day hitting “buy” and “return” to shift a significant amount of debt, right? Wrong. If you know where to look, the Amazon kindle store has lots of handbooks, technical manuals, and textbooks that cost hundreds of dollars. Start out searching for “neurology handbook” and just surf the “similar books” list from there. Buy and return a few of those, and you’re set for another month.
Obviously you have to pay off the debt at some point. This is not free money. But if you’re in a tight spot for a few months, it’s incredibly useful. And hey, if the inflation-adjusted prime rate is 0%, why should you have to pay interest? You’re good for it.
This is by far the most munchkin-like idea I’ve ever had, and I’m pretty happy about it. I’ve been using it since January, making real payments toward my card as I can, and covering the rest with Amazon buy-and-returns. I know I’ll pay down the debt when I have a better job, but in the meantime it is really nice not to have to pay any interest on it.
Upvoted for the fact that the author actually implemented the idea into practice. Too many other posts on this thread are just theorycrafting.
That was what impressed you? Not my creation of a real-life financial perpetual motion machine?
As far as I understand (and I could be wrong), your machine does not actually generate money, but merely defers payment until some future date. It does so by essentially exploiting a bug in the Kindle + Credit Card system, and it has an upper limit of whatever your max credit line is. My guess is that if this trick becomes popular, someone will patch the bug (probably Amazon, credit card companies are pretty slow).
So, don’t get me wrong, it’s a nice hack, but it’s hardly perpetual or earth-shattering. One similar trick I know of is to have several credit cards, and use them to keep transferring the balance between them before interest accumulates; but this is less efficient, since the “free balance transfer” special offers occur relatively rarely.
Okay, “perpetual motion machine” might have been hyperbolic—the comparison I had in mind was to what we might call a “weak” perpetual motion machine, which doesn’t generate energy but is exactly frictionless, so it twirls forever without energy input.
Interesting! Didn’t know about that variant.
Do it for long enough and inflation will eventually reduce the debt to a negligible amount. In twenty years, at three percent rate of inflation, your debt will only be worth 54% of what it initially was!
The hack generates money if you invest the “loan” into something that pays interests in less than a month. Not enough money to be worth your time, of course; but it’s still infinite free money for a given value of “infinite”.
The hack generates money if you invest the loan into anything that pays interest. It requires fiddling to be done monthly but the investment can be anything and can be ongoing.
We could perhaps consider it a time value generator limited by max credit. This could be reasonably analogized to a perpetual motion machine with an ongoing finite output.
What does Amazon have to gain from patching it?
I’m assuming that the constant churn of purchases and returns costs them money. For example:
Some credit cards charge vendors (not consumers) a non-refundable per-transaction fee
The returned books may mess up their analytics (including royalty calculations)
Returning a book is usually a rare event, and may thus be computationally expensive
Amount of money lent out via bug * rate of return of capital at their current margins.
I would worry the effect this may have on your credit rating if anyone catches you at it, together with possibly more serious effects. This could potentially be considered fraud. Altogether it seems much more sensible to simply live within your means and pay off your credit balance each month.
This is the “ridiculous munchkin ideas” thread, not the “sensible advice you’ve already heard” thread.
A more pertinent worry. Especially with cards that give a percentage of each purchase as “reward points” or something, I’d be worried about this.
Excessive returns will possibly get you banned from Amazon for life, with no warning, as many have discovered.
But probably not for e-books as there is no recognizable loss for Amazon controlling.
Better to think of ways to not spend money than think of ways to keep on living relying on other peoples’ money.
You don’t get rich that way, though. Sure, you can accumulate a comfortable amount of low-grade wealth, but all the real games are played with other people’s money. The only difference between B_For_Bandana’s trick and the typical externalities exploited by your average high roller is the number of zeros involved in the figures.
No way! Our noble masters got their rightful place on top of the Holy Free Market due to their hard work, brilliance, laudable ambition and—as much ressentiment as it might cause in the weak and envious—their overall innate superiority that separates them from the lower orders!
...And even if they do use tricks like that on occasion, lazy and worthless commoners like you shouldn’t dare imitate them. In the hands of the good and the great they do no harm, but just any unwashed pleb exploiting loopholes like those is dangerously subversive of the natural hierarchy.
It may no longer be fashionable to point people to “Politics is the Mind-Killer”, but that was the best example of a good, solid, and avoidable dig at the other side that I’ve seen for quite some time. Mockery contributes nothing, especially in a thread where as far as I can tell no one’s advocated the positions you’re mocking. Downvoted.
Fair enough. Yeah, I ought to at least stick to using those with some more context.
There’s even a special page on the Amazon website for the express purpose of cancelling ebook purchases within the last 7 days: http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=200144510
So I’ve recently decided to change my real name from an oriental one to John Adams. I am not white.
There’s a significant amount of evidence that shows that
(1) Common names have better reception in many areas, especially publication and job interviews.
(2) White names do significantly better than non-white names
(3) Last names that begin with the early letters of the alphabet have a significant advantage over last names beginning with the latter letters of the alphabet.
Source :
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19020207 http://blog.simplejustice.us/files/66432-58232/SSQUKalistFinal.pdf http://ideas.repec.org/p/hhs/sunrpe/2006_0013.html http://www.nber.org/papers/w9873.pdf?new_window=1 http://www.nber.org/digest/sep03/w9873.html
Therefore if I were to use “John”, one of the most common ‘white’ first names, along with Adams, a ‘white’ surname that also begins with the letter A, it should stand that I would be conferred a number of advantages.
Furthermore, I have very little attachment to my family heritage. Switching names doesn’t cost me anything beyond a minor inconvenience of having to do paperwork. For some people, changing your name may be extremely worthwhile, depending on your current name, and how attached you are to it. At least, it may be worthwhile to consider it, and depending on the person, may be a very cheap optimization with significant benefits.
I once considered changing my name to Ben Abard but decided that the original Eliezer Yudkowsky sounded more like a scientist.
I wonder how Jewish names perform relative to gentile names.
Reminds me of all the Jewish actors who’ve changed their names to make it in Hollywood, and all the executives who’ve done the exact opposite.
I’ve always been mildly annoyed that I don’t have an eastern European last name. All the cool mathematicians seem to have eastern European last names.
You mean, a lot of cool mathematicians are eastern European. But Terry Tao and Shinichi Mochizuki are not.
Man, this is that thing I was talking about earlier when someone takes a colloquial phrase that sounds like a universal quantifier and interprets it as literally a universal quantifier.
Yeah, people do that all the time.
In ordinary language, all universal quantifiers are implicitly bounded.
Actually, what’s at play here is not the implicit domain restriction of natural language quantifiers, because he obviously didn’t restrict the domain of the quantifier to just those mathematicians that have an Eastern European last name; that’d make the statement trivial. Rather, the phenomenon we see here is what’s self-explanatorily called “loose talk”, where you can say things that are strictly true when they are close enough to being true, i.e. when the exceptions don’t matter for current purposes.
A typical failure mode for computer scientists, who typically are trained to check statements against boundary cases / extreme values, to make sure an exception isn’t thrown / that the result isn’t out of bounds.
OK, there are disproportionately many Jewish scientists, but how else does “Eliezer Yudkowsky” sound like a scientist’s name?
Now, if you really want a name that sounds like a scientist, how about renaming yourself Isaac Feynmann, Galileo Crick, or Rosalind Newton?
Actually, most people will identify with a scientist’s last name more than a first name—so pick a scientist’s last name that sounds like a first name for your own first name, and then another last name that sounds like a last name for your last name.
I’ll be Maxwell Tesla.
Too funny; those are the middle names of my kids! :)
Maxwell Edison’s probably better known....
Yes, but my internal inference-checker refuses to be associated with it.
I expect ialdabaoth wants to be thought of as a scientist, not a sociopath.
It reads like a pretty good scientist name. I have no idea how it sounds ;)
Because you don’t do subvocalization when you read? Or you’re deaf? Or some other reason...
Some other reason: I just don’t know how EY pronounces “Yudkowsky” -- [jʊd’kaʊski] or [ju:d’kɔvski] or otherwise.
But there is a significant overlap between great names for scientists and words that would be worth a lot in Scrabble if proper nouns were allowed.
EY pronounces it the first way, but his father pronounces it the second(!).
Usually that kind of names are pronounced the former way in America and the latter way in Britain, so I’d guess the former.
(--> those kinds of names are / that kind of name is ;-))
I would dispute that, insofar as the real truth is that the latter is used by people trying to imitate the pronunciation in the original language (a good thing to do to the extent possible, IMO), and I don’t know the distribution of such people in America vs. Britain.
...but this guess happens to be correct in the case of EY himself.
I have a Caribbean-American friend who’s grateful his parents gave him a fairly white name for exactly this reason. I think having the same name as a famous historical figure would be bad for your google search results, though.
Being hard to Google can also be a plus.
Or he could adopt a middle name that would distinguish him when people really wanted to search for him.
“Steve Smith was known as Sarcasticidealist until June 2009. While he is still both sarcastic and idealistic, he decided that he’d rather go by his real name for privacy reasons. If this does not make sense to you, Google “sarcasticidealist” and then Google “Steve Smith”.”
Not “Quincy” then.
My father once heard a story about this. An Asian immigrant family decided to give their son an American-sounding first name, “Peter”. Unfortunately, their family name was “Pan”...
Probably an urban legend, but kind of funny...
Did he then proceed to change his last name to Bannings and become a lawyer?
The biggest flaw in this idea is that almost nothing in your references applies to you! They pretty much cover only black and white names, not Oriental ones. You can’t conclude that a white name benefits you because it would benefit a black person. Even in the Swedish study, a quick trip to Wikipedia shows that the number of foreign-born residents from east Asia in Sweden is a tiny percentage.
Furthermore, none of the studies you quote account for switching costs since they just compare people who already have the names, except for the Swedish one, but I would expect that the switching cost as a new immigrant is much less than for someone who has been living with his name for a while.
In addition, ‘John Adams’ seems common enough a name that it should be possible to verify whether that specific combination has any correlated benefits.
I would also expect that an extremely common name, like John Adams, might have negative consequences that wouldn’t be picked up by a study, if the study doesn’t distinguish somewhat common names and names that are common enough to sound like cliches.
I wouldn’t. A golden-mean effect where names which are too rare hurt and names which are too common also hurt is one of the first and most obvious hypotheses which come to mind, and I would be extremely surprised if no researcher had checked for this and this suggestion either debunked or embraced with qualifications.
Not all white names are made equal. You want a name that’s associated with high status in the country in which you live.
In Germany being named Kevin is a low status signal. The same is true for most US names. Lower class people in Germany are more likely to give their children the name of US celebrities than German high class people.
I’m German and would agree. Kevin not only sounds low Status but is also a name for kids, so it’s even handicapped in more than one respect.
I’ve thought about adopting “Aaron Alexander Grey”, the middle name being my father’s first name and Grey being an adaptation of my current last name that probably no one except Germans could really hope to pronounce correctly. Also I don’t want to stay in Germany so Aaron Alexander Grey is more of an attempt at a name that I imagine may be overall an internationally well recieved name. Thoughts?
By the way if you’re a German citizen you can’t just change your name unless you provide a good reason… like having idiot parents who decided Adolf is a proper first name for their child (way after WW2 mind you). If ever, I’ll probably change my name once I become a Swedish citizen where you can do that kind of thing. Being Swedish (at least by citizenship) is probably also a very good signal internationally speaking. Better than German for sure.
What do people named Kevin get called when they grow up then?
Names trend over time in rather smooth curves of popularity.
In the U.S., there aren’t any laws about what you can call your kids, but the Social Security Administration tracks popularity of names. For instance, the second most popular girl’s name this year is Emma, which was also the third most popular in 1880 … and the 451st most popular at its low point in 1978. The most popular name today, Sophia, tracks a similar curve with a low point in the ’40s.
The most popular girl’s name in my age cohort was Jennifer — the #1 girl’s name from 1970 to 1984! — but Jennifer has been on the way down ever since. Today’s American girls are more likely to have an Aunt Jenny than a classmate Jenny. To me, Jennifer (or Jessica, Melissa, Amy, or Heather) sounds like someone my age, not a little kid. Young girls are named Ashley, Hannah, Madison, Alexis … and baby girls are Isabella, Sophia, Emma.
Male names are stabler than female names, but mostly because some names (Michael, Matthew, Daniel, William …) are persistently popular.
Bacon. Spacey. Sorbo. Costner. Kline.
I suppose he means its a newly introduced name.
That’s one interpretation, but I certainly wouldn’t have used the phrasing he did if I meant to convey that meaning.
When think “A name for children,” I think of variations on ordinary names which people usually grow out of, like “Timmy.”
No I meant it like you interpreted it, “Timmy” and “Benny” are names that you would clearly associate with children rather than adults. And my impression is that Kevin is also in that category, though perhaps it’s not as extreme a case as those two names. I never understood why parents would call their son Benny, why not officially call him Ben and use Benny in the family as long as he’s a kid and doesn’t mind?
No one ever heard of Benny the mighty conquerer or Benny the badass CEO. Benny is a cute name, not a serious name for a grown man. Kevin may be perceived differently in America, perhaps because the name is older there while in Germany it’s indeed a rather new name...
http://www.freakonomics.com/2009/10/22/kevin-is-not-a-name-its-a-diagnosis/
...and oddly enough all the Kevins I remember from my old school years were always the class clown.
On the other hand, there is Benny the Jet.
If you go to the ex-Eastern Block, you find German usually has the signal “awesome rich industrial powerhouse, want to imitate, the kind of capitalist overlord I would want to be become, bossing over everybody” and Swedish has the signal “pretty people with funny ideas like non-gendered kindergartens, lacking courage or else they would beat the shit out of immigrant rapists”.
Basically in Eastern Europe German is the second most powerful signal after American, and since people tend to worship power it works...
Could very well be true. But it leaves open the curious question what on earth I would be looking for in the ex-eastern block ;)
Cheap talent mainly.
Same in my country. And my reason is pretty similar—I’ve had people from my own country who constantly mispronounce my name, and I don’t even want to think how badly foreign people would distort it, as I plan to emigrate. (Also I don’t find it in the least bit euphonic, but that’s not a reason I would ever admit to on a state form.)
But I gather from your comment that compatibility with foreign languages / pronunciations is not considered an acceptable reason in countries that have stricter laws concerning name change?
Also, that if you have dual citizenship and one of your countries allows you a name change, the other country is obliged to recognize the name change? Is that right?
What’s supposed to oblige the country?
In general it probably gives you a decent reason to request a name change in the other country as well. If you however search an unreasonable name you might still get denied.
I don’t know, I was asking whether I had understood the parent comment right. I don’t know much about name change legislation, and would like to find out more.
I was thinking along the lines of, well, it’s not as if any given country “owns” somebody’s name—it’s a property of the person, right? As in, you can’t have one legal name in one country and another in some other country. That’s what common sense tells me at least. But then again I’ve been surprised by law on several occasions in the past, to say the least...
http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names/
I know it’s at least possible to have variant names; I am legally registered in different countries by parallell names analogous to “Venice” and “Venezia”.
Gee. Law’s weirder than I thought. But these facts open up some promising possibilities, now that I think about it… after all it’s the munchkin ideas thread. Thanks to everybody for clearing this up for me, and thanks to whatever higher power is least astronomically unlikely to exist for not giving me the suicidal idea to pursue law as a profession.
Nope. Your relationship to your name doesn’t fit most of the bundle of rights that the word “property” implies.
Of course you can. Why not? Consider immigrants who acquired a new citizenship but did not renounce their old one—the names on their two sets of papers do not have to be identical.
That’s a bad train of thought. You have to think about the institutions involved. There are certain things that international law guarantees to you, that your country is obliged to provide to you.
Things like “Everyone has the right to recognition everywhere as a person before the law.” “Everyone is entitled in full equality to a fair and public hearing by an independent and impartial tribunal, in the determination of his rights and obligations and of any criminal charge against him.”
In this case also important: “(1) Everyone has the right to a nationality. (2) No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his nationality nor denied the right to change his nationality.”
You don’t really have an inane right for two nationalities. If a country allows you dual citizenship it’s a nice thing to do. As such I wouldn’t expect naming right to arise as a consequence.
That’s certainly not the case.
If I remember right you can’t have the same legal name in South Korea as in Germany or New York.
In South Korea your name needs to be written in Hangul and the legal documents about you are addressed to the name in Hangul. In Germany your name has to be in the standard Latin alphabet (I don’t know how much accents it allows). Quick Googling suggests that the case for China is similar. You get to choose between Simplified characters or Traditional Chinese ones.
No, there are certain things that international law says are guaranteed to you, that international law says your country is obliged to provide to you.
You need the additional premise “if international law says a country is obliged to provide something, then that country is obliged to provide it”. I see no reason to believe that premise. It doesn’t seem to be true either as a statement about how countries should behave or about how countries actually behave.
A double twist: there are German names that look like English names but are actually German names. Michael, Paul.
Just wondering: what would Germans associate with the name Helga for women? To me it sounds Viking-awesome (heiligr).
If you want to name your kids in a way that is compatible without pronounciation issues in the larger Central European area, from Denmark to Hungary or Serbia, there are unfortunately not so many choices. For boys, Robert, Norbert, Henrik and of course the ubiquitous Peter. For girls, Helga, maybe Judit, Eva, Anna, For example something like Catherine is not a very good idea because it is written different in every language, from Katalin to Yekaterina. Anna has only one mutant forms, Anne in English, otherwise quite stable. For boys the stablest name is Norbert it either doesn’t exist in a language or if it does it is written and pronounce exactly the same.
However I think people are becoming more “creative” and less compatibility-oriented with names… I know a German couple living in London who have a son called Yuriy. Reason? Gagarin. “We wanted someone who goes up”. Okay...
In general people in the creative class do so. It’s not the names the average banker, doctor or judge gives their child.
Definitely agree that changing your name is a good option to have on the table.
I’d note though that in some industries having a Google-unique name is king. It really depends what your “personal brand strategy” is. I remember reading an interview with a marketer who recommended people consider name changes. Her name was “Faith Popcorn”. I read that single interview probably 5-10 years ago. It wasn’t even a particularly interesting interview. I still remember her name, though.
A disadvantage of that particular name is that it’s the name of no fewer than two famous people).
(Or is that an advantage?)
That’s an advantage! My name will thus be subconsciously associated with high-status people.
I think it’s probably advantageous to have one’s name be subconsciously associated with high status people, but not to have it be consciously associated.
For instance, a name like “James” may have higher class associations than “Antwon,” but naming a kid “Jimmy Carter Washington” is liable to raise the associations to a conscious level and provoke speculation about the motives of the parents (or other namer.)
This sounds like an excellent idea. I’m going to take the liberty of discussing my own name and I hope to get some opinions.
My surname, ‘Armak’, is a misspeling of Ermak, sometimes written Yermak. I have no love lost for this name. Its main effect on my life is that when I introduce myself, people respond with “Daniel What?”. And people who see it written in Hebrew always pronounce it wrong (because Hebrew normally has no written vowels, it’s very bad at transliteration of foreign names). It would be an ordinary name in Russia or Ukraine, but I’m unlikely to even visit those countries.
So I want to choose a common name that is “at home” in Hebrew and English and, preferably, Russian. Something short and simple that can be pronounced by speakers of pretty much any language, in case I associate with Chinese in the future, or something similarly unexpected.
But I’m very much afraid of bureaucratic hassle. It’s easy to change a name, but records with the old name will follow me all my life. And I’m afraid that many organizations deal poorly with people who try to prove that their name changed and they should have access to their accounts or records opened under their old names.
On the other hand, most Western women and a few men change their names when they marry (and sometimes when they divorce). And this presumably doesn’t create big difficulties, because it’s socially expected. So maybe the infrastructure for name-changing already exists and my fears are unfounded.
Has this been quantified? Like surveying people who changed their legal names (other than when marrying or divorcing) after a few years.
Disclaimer: I haven’t been serious enough to invest the time to research this myself.
You don’t find that surnames in Hebrew just get mispronounced a ton, in general? Other than ones which have standard pronunciation, I encounter constant errors with people trying to figure out which vowels to put where when it comes to last names, although that may be biased because my last name, despite being very straightforward in English, is a puzzle for Israelis.
Also, from anecdotal data and a bit of personal knowledge, changing your last name here in Israel doesn’t seem like much of a hassle, other than having to do it in person.
Foreign ones do, certainly. That’s why I’d be looking for one that’s familiar to speakers of both Hebrew and English.
My dad changed his name when he became a citizen...and got sufficiently annoyed at the hassle that he changed his name back. Note—this wasn’t a major name change, he changed it from “Amarjit Singh Jolly” to “Jolly Amarjit Singh”
To give you one anecdotal account in the U.S., my mother changed her last name after my parent’s divorce (not to her maiden name) and hasn’t seemed to have any problems purchasing a house, dealing with her bank accounts, medical bills and (recently) applying for social security.
This sounds like a reasonable motivation to change one’s name, but personally, I would have picked something not already attached to a rather famous person. I think it’s probably more advantageous to have a name which is “generic” in that it doesn’t immediately call up a single immediate association.
I’ve always wanted a name like that!
But I’m worried that with such a generic English name people will expect me to speak perfect English, which means they’ll be negatively surprised when they hear my noticeable accent.
You will be impossible to google for with the name “John Adams”. Whether that matters to you is up to you, but a Google check is a good idea anyway. As it happens, the real John Adams is a very illustrious figure (in America), but you want to avoid calling yourself Charles Manson.
I’ve considered changing my name since the first day I understood that names could be relatively normal. You see my kind parents thought it would be endearing to name me Dusty. Suffice to say, I’ve had a hard time projecting a certain sort of image for myself with a name like that. The only merit I’ve ever noted in my birthname is recognition. For better or worse, no one forgets a Dusty. I try to diffuse some of the negative image by shoehorning in humor, “hello I’m Dusty, like the adjective,” but eventually I’m going to have to get it changed...
Are you sure White names do better than ALL non-White names? The papers you sourced compare US White to Black names and Swedish to “immigrant” names—both kind of hyperbolic examples. Nothing about White names vs Asian names, which I would expect to get different results. Also, in some industries or cases having a foreign/ethnic/unique name could be a positive.
FWIW, if I met an Asian guy with a WASPy name like John Adams I would think either he is adopted or changed his name/identity, which might send me negative signals such as duplicity, cunning, and cowardice.
Lots of Asian Americans are adopted, or are mixed European/Asians. European male / Asian female pairings (which would lead to a European last name) are about three times as common as European female / Asian male pairings.
In general, first name assimilation is seen positively by most Americans I know, and has been very common in the Asian American community, both for first-generation immigrants and their descendants. (Last name assimilation is less common, but I think still seen positively.)
Of the Eastern Asian grad students I know, it is common to adopt a Western first name (especially if they’re Chinese; the transliteration from Chinese to English was clearly not designed by an English-speaker, as Chowchew can attest).
Consider Jon Adams, as name length increases, average income decreases.
Names whose spelling is ambiguous are generally a bad idea.
Jay Lee?
In California changing your name costs two or three hundred dollars.
In New Jersey, it’s a bit over one hundred.
Cheaper to get married and then divorced, maybe.
When naming you children consider giving them multiple names from different cultures. You don’t have to use the names actively, just add them and use the first one. This simplifies ‘changing’ the name later much—as you already have the name.
Quick question. If I told you my name is Gee Kalero 1) is the pronounciation of Gee equal to that of the letter “G”, or the beggining of the word “djibouti” or “jeez”? Do you see a difference between the three sounds? 2)Kalero is easier to pronounce than caleiro right?
What connotations does Kalero give?
I’m not a native English speaker, but I believe the three examples you gave are pronounced the same.
Their about the same.
Kalero simply looks weird since unlike Caleiro it’s not recognizably from any linguistic tradition. Also for names people haven’t seen before C’s give off more positive connotations than K’s, this is a well known trick among fantasy authors.
Thank you
Calero > Kalero (you are the third person to tell me that. so that is decided)
When people pronounce Caleiro, it looks like they are having big troubles. Calero still feels latin, but I thought it would be easier to say.
I’m mostly concerned about academic recognizability. Some people manage to be on top while being called Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Lyubuomirsky, or Vilayanur Ramachandran. But it is very hard, and I made mistakes recalling all three. Compare with Hilary Putnam, Steve Pinker, or Daniel Craig.
Gee (G) is my nickname anyway. Calero is easier to recall.
But my friend in Law said I’d have to buy the Judge, you can only switch legally here when 18.
good idea.
Next: change your LW nick to vaguely female to get more attention, and possibly lower other members’ expectations about your rationality level.
My instinct is that this is stupid, but I have a feeling I may be mindkilled on this. Someone should test this; create sockpuppets with male and female names to see how common and critical replies are.
Would normally have downvoted, incidentally, but not going to in case I’m just siezing upon excuses to lower the status of perceived political opponents.
My prediction (based on prior expectations and observation of behaviours directed at existing lesswrong members) is that a female username will tend to be the target of less rivalry motivated aggression than a male username but can anticipate far more challenges and status attacks from female usernames that identify themselves strongly as high status.
Alicorn? AnnaSalamon, Julia_Galef and NancyLebovitz have never given the impression that they identify themselves strongly as high status.
I think of myself as having solid medium status at LW. I’m quite pleased with it, but don’t feel a drive for more status.
I think you may be underestimating a little. It is easy to neglect just how many lower status people there are… because low status people just don’t seem as salient and visible.
IIRC, people used to think that the Sun was about a median-luminosity star, but actually it’s more like 85th percentile; but less bright stars are harder to see. (And my parents don’t think of themselves as particularly wealthy people, because they tend to compare themselves to the people you see on TV, rather than the people you see in the streets.)
I’m certainly looking up more than down when I assess my status. However, I think that I’d count my status as higher if I had the same karma but got a significant amount of it from major posts rather than from comments.
Is karma the same thing as status?
No.
I don’t understand why you are asking that question. It does not seem to make much sense as a reply to the grandparent.
On LW, karma is a reasonable proxy for status on LW. They aren’t the same, but I don’t see how you think NancyLebovitz’s question is non-responsive.
It very likely is that length of active membership on LW is highly correlated with karma (even last-30-days-karma). But isn’t length of active membership a reasonable proxy for status in a community?
I may not have put the question in the best place, but I asked it because I said I thought I had mid-level status, and people disagreed by pointing out that I have high karma.
I think the question is what we mean by mid-level. Brazil is a mid-level economy in the G20, but the G20 is the extreme tail of the distribution of country-economies. With a wider reference class, Brazil is a pretty big economy.
Hopefully to help you calibrate: I perceive you as Brazil -ish (wedrifid is more like UK, I’m more like New Zealand or Iran). And every lurker is Haiti. Because of the distribution of status on LW is probably Bell-curve shaped, there are a lot more Haitis than Brazils. (Because of lower bounds, status in a community is more like half a bell curve than the whole thing—someone who knows statistics probably could find a lot of errors in my terminology).
I guess that makes me kind of like Pakistan.
There is certainly a strong correlation between karma and status. In no small part because simple time spent interacting on the site contributes to both rather significantly through raw accumulation and domain specific practice. However for my part when I questioned your mid-level status estimate your karma didn’t occur to me and I wasn’t aware you had as much as you had. I queried my intuitive impression of how the NancyLebovitz handle behaves and is received by people on the site. Your influence is not insignificant.
Natural language being what it is, “not insignificant” != “significant”. What do you think my influence is?
Significant.
No, I meant to ask you what effect(s) you think I’m having.
In general, I think that if you’re on the top all-time contributors sidebar, other people are going to see you as above medium status.
You’re the 13th all-time top contributor, and the… Hold on. There’s something wrong with the “Top Contributors, 30 Days” rankings.
That’s a time lag (rather than something more sinister, e.g. something fundamentally flawed in the LW code base’s understanding of integers); the rankings are not recomputed on a real-time basis, but the scores are.
I had guessed it was the other way round, given that my 30-day karma is 379 according to the green bubbles at the top and 408 in the top contributors list, and it was higher yesterday, and I recently paid the toll to comment on a downvoted thread a couple of times.
What do you consider the most relevant status markers on LW? You’ve mentioned karma, and making major posts rather than comments. What else?
At least one aspect is getting quoted, and that happens very rarely for me.
Not sure what Nancy thinks, but for me it’s “when this person speaks, others listen, with respect and often with deference”. I don’t think Nancy qualifies there, but I am not sure how to check that.
The question is, how would one measure this? The obvious metrics available are the number of comments and upvotes vs those for a similar comment by a regular of average status. Furthermore, if the replies are more respectful than average even in a disagreement, it is also an indication of higher status. This is hard to measure, of course. In the next order one would look at the timeline of comments and votes: higher-status posters are likely to attract more immediate reaction and an initial spike of upvotes.
There are, of course, exceptions. When Eliezer posts in favor of censorship, he gets downvoted more than average. In general, the status does not need to be the same across all topics, different regulars are considered experts in different areas. There is, of course, some halo effect spill-over between topics.
If someone here is interested in studying social dynamics on internet forums, they might shed further light on the issue or at least do some research.
You’re the 3rd highest female poster on the all-time ranking.
I don’t get that any of them identify themselves as higher status than they are. Certainly Anna, Alicorn, and Julia have very high community status.
On a related topic, see my comments on whether status differences serve useful community functions. My current guess is that status differences are counterproductive on net for achieving community goals, but I’d be interested to read counterpoint if anyone’s got any (especially you, Mr. High Status Person).
Ideally status could be replaced by domain specific estimates of competence, reliability, trustworthiness etc. But in practice nobody has the time. We have to summarize.
For humans, social status is much more than just an aggregate estimate of competence/reliability/trustworthiness. It motivates us, distorts our thinking, plays a key role in our politics, etc. To take just one example, I suspect that the main reason it’s so hard for most people to change their mind is because they don’t know how to do it in a way that preserves their status. For many people and social groups, admitting you’re wrong means losing face, and most people don’t like to lose face, so they resist publicly changing their mind.
(This is another reason why status differences may be counterproductive for rational communities… they could create an incentive for high-status people to not change their mind about things, since they have something to lose. The evidence may very well justify thinking one thing one week, then something else the next week, then something else the third week. But if you’re changing your mind about critical issues every week, it won’t be long before typical humans take you less seriously. Which is unfortunate.)
Also, this doesn’t sound like your true objection to me. It doesn’t take very many more bits of information to transfer 3 estimates on each of competence, reliability, and trustworthiness than a single aggregate number. And people communicate specific info all the time (“how good is X at Y? do you trust Z?”). It’s not obvious to me that a single aggregate quantity is frequently useful. Let’s say I introduce a friend to you and say his status is 67⁄100; was that useful information? (And in practice, peoples’ status is often determined by relatively silly things like how many friends they have, what status they’re perceived to have, how confident they act, and how confidently they talk. Another reason status sucks: it gives people an incentive to make confident predictions; see Philip Tetlock’s work on how confident experts are more likely to be wrong and more likely to be quoted in the media.)
(I don’t think I’ve got a clear idea of how best to make use of humans’ status wiring; I’m just kind of exploring different ideas at this point. But it seems like an important and neglected topic.)
Eliminating status differences has been tried and failed. If a hiring manager ever tells you “There are no office politics here”, then don’t take the job. There WILL be politics, except that it will be taboo to publicly admit it—and nobody will help you if you have a problem.
“X has been tried and faied” remains true until someone succeeds. If a thing with so many advantages has been tried and failed, then the solution is not to give up and make an equivalent utterance to “man was not meant to fly”; it is to examine why it failed, explore what the underlying rules and mechanics might be, construct a strategy based on those underlying rules and mechanics, and then try again.
Let me rephrase, then: declaring that you’ve eliminated status differences, when, in reality, you haven’t, is a relatively common mistake that tends to cause problems.
See also.
Aha, much more understandable. Thank you.
In that case: what would you surmise from a hiring manager that said “there’s office politics everywhere, of course, but we try to take an active role in minimizing their impact, and part of you being a good fit here will depend on your ability to help us with that goal.”?
(I regretfully confess that my own reaction to that statement would depend on that hiring manager’s gender, and (if male) how tall he was and how deep his voice was).
Perhaps a good way to deal with the situation in that XKCD comic would be to try to pick a culture that seemed particularly effective and then copy all of its norms, attitudes, etc.? So you’d have something that was battle-tested, if you will.
...Mormons? I don’t wanna. Even though it would probably work.
Well, Valve’s profitability per employee is supposedly higher than Google or Apple’s, and their employee handbook detailing their unconventional corporate culture is available for viewing online. shrug
Eh, it seems worth investigating to me.
(For what it’s worth from what I can tell Mormons don’t even formally make the sort of ontological commitments that are typical of (at-least-somewhat-reflective) mainstream Christianity (like, ‘Jesus is my savior and I should have expected Him to show up in all logically possible worlds and all possible minds should be rounded-up-to-infinitely compelled by His story and the seemingly contingent features of Jesus [Jesus’s teachings] are actually universal features of Logos and so it would be an obvious epistemic sin to disregard Him [them]’) and so it’s more plausible that it would be possible to go along with Mormonism in something like good faith, even if only jokingly or subtly-ironically or something.)
Will, out of curiosity; do you enclose your comments in parentheses to give them the quality of a “whispered aside”, as if the camera had cut to a couple of conversants sitting in the back stalls? Because that’s what it does in my brain.
More or less, yeah. Vladimir Nesov has a similar but distinct habit.
Hmmm, I hadn’t thought of that before.
I give a 70% chance that Mormon doctrine holds that Jesus is accidental (in the sense of not existing in all possible worlds). He has a physical body, after all. For that matter, so does God.
Mormon theology is too weird for me to fully grok, though.
(Eat some sauce.)
“so many advantages” is optimistic in my opinion; I actually think it’s an at least somewhat close call. There are also upsides to status differences, like better group coordination (as I mentioned earlier). If people know there are methods for them to attain high status, and pursuing high status using these methods can have positive side effects (e.g. starting companies that make products people want and generate consumer surplus, or writing blog posts that lots of people benefit from reading), that can be a good thing. Another thing: when you’re having a conversation, you’d probably prefer for the most knowledgeable/intelligent/rational people to talk more than those who are less knowledgeable/intelligent/rational, and status differences often seem to have the side effect of accomplishing this. (But you can also get a suits/geeks type thing where some people are smooth talkers and some people know lots of math.)
(These are just my thoughts, I’m sure there’s more stuff that hasn’t occurred to me.)
Only in situations where the cost of failure is low. One of the larger failure modes I’ve experienced in status games is that the difference between success and failure is a narrow and often random margin, and yet the status payoffs are insanely amplified and tend towards a positive feedback loop (the Matthew Effect again). So often times, you don’t actually get a proper selection pressure that leads to the more intelligent/knowledgable/rational people acquiring more status; what you get is the people who know how to leverage their current status get more status. And once you have that, you’re “locked in” to an oligarchy for good or ill.
I have an idea for eliminating status on LW, if that’s what people want. My own status is ‘glad I’m allowed in here at all’, so it wouldn’t make a difference for me personally. ;-)
What if your posts didn’t show your username, but just a post ID, and you yourself could see your karma, but no-one else could? There might be problems with PMs, but I’m sure there are programmers here who could find a solution to that.
Well, there is the LW anti-kibitzer, which can be enabled via the Preferences page.
Your suggestion would indeed eliminate most status and reputation influences from the site. And this would be a bad thing.
I prefer to know who I am reading, even if, as in the case of many usernames here, the knowledge is no more than “this is the same person who wrote these other things”. It gives context to the words: what they mean can depend very much on who is saying them. And one can hardly have a coherent conversation if there is no way to join up separate comments into a single identity.
It’s not a bad idea if that werewhatttt people wanted, but there are people I definitely want to ignore on here, and people who I think worth spending more time on than others.
Geh, got to update in favour of some behaviors being more common than I thought now.
I’m not sure that removing usernames is necessarily a good idea; they have a valid and important benefit.
Let us assume that a person says X. I suspect that X is most likely incorrect. I then look at that person’s username. If:
a) The username is one that I recognise, and belongs to a person who I have found is right far more often than wrong; then I take a closer look at X, and ask the person to explain, and generally put some effort into investigating X. It is likely that X is not as wrong as I thought, and I would learn something. b) The username is one that I recognise, and belongs to a person who often posts things that are incorrect. I don’t bother to waste time trying to research X, since I am now even more confident that X is wrong. c) The username is not one that I recognise, or it is one that I recognise but have not formed an opinion on yet. I may spend a small amount of effort thinking about X; but I am likely to nudge the username a little closer to category b.
In this way, I can optimise the amount of effort I put into trying to see which statements are correct, by putting the most effort into statements from which I am most likely to learn something new.
Sometimes you need to do things like ban a troll...
On the contrary, high-status people can countersignal by publicly changing their mind on things in light of new evidence. You just have to show the evidence as well as the changing of your mind. I mean, if someone’s right, that’s one thing—but publicly changing your mind distinguishes you from people who are merely right by demonstrating the process behind getting things correct.
Sometimes. In particular circumstances. With difficulty. Even in circumstances that are abnormally in favour of sanity the status signal is still arguable. But note that effectively gaining social power isn’t about just signalling high status a lot. It’s about navigating social interactions with whichever signals are most effective. Someone who only signals high status comes across as ‘rigid’ or ‘brittle’. I suggest that much of the signalling benefit for mind changing is actually signalling competence and increasing likeability rather than by directly signalling high status in the moment.
I agree. And there’s a trick to it, which you described pretty well. I’m just giving that as an example of how big a deal status is: if you don’t know the trick for changing your mind and staying high status, then it can be hard to change your mind, and difficulty changing one’s mind may be the #1 rationality failure mode in the general population.
Another risk of status differences is that good ideas from low status people may get ignored.
My impression is that LW is fairly good about taking people’s behavior one item at a time.
What I meant was that, among these high-status users, only Alicorn strikes me as being vain enough to launch such challenges and status attacks.
Not my impression of her. Feel free to link to these attacks.
Even if she were vain enough to launch status attacks on other members to elevate her own status, which I don’t think she is, attacking other female members to lower their relative status sounds like the opposite of her track record.
But what if I want expectations about my rationality level to be artificially high?
Then change your nick to be very similar to that of a top contributor.
I was really confused there for a moment.
I hadn’t noticed that until you pointed it out. That is genius.
Or do both!
And thus, Aliza_Ludshowski was born.
Rule 63 meets LW.
At least it wasn’t also rule 34.
There is a distinct absence of Eliezer Yudkowsky/Michael Vassar slashfic on the internet. Let’s keep it that way.
By mentioning it, you have only made it more likely. Are you sure you want what you’re saying, or do you only wish to denote it while connoting the opposite?
“Hanson/Yudkowsky AI-Foom Debate”.
How does katydee find it?
Learn some basic voice production for stage techniques. How your voice sounds is an absurdly strongly weighted component of a first impression, particularly over a phone or prior to direct introduction, and being able to project your voice in a commanding fashion has an overpowered influence on how much people listen to you and consider you a ‘natural leader.’ In particular, learn what it means to speak from the diaphragm, and learn some basic exercises for strengthening your subsidiary vocal chords like Khargyraa and basic tuvan throat singing, and you’ll be surprised at how much it makes people sit up and listen. You might coincidentally have your voice drop into a lower register after about a month of such exercises, it (anecdatally) happened to me and several people in my voice production for stage class in college. (class of 25, 6 people had their voices drop within the first 4 months, teacher said those numbers were normal.)
Most people just assume you’re born with a voice and have to deal with it, which is demonstrably untrue, and so they consider your voice to reflect your character.
That sounds like very useful advice. Do you have some suggestions for where to start learning this? E.g. particular books, classes, or Youtube videos?
Yes, I do have particular books, classes, youtube videos, lectures, exercises, and other resources. It is highly dependent on your particular vocal tendencies, so your mileage will vary for all of them.
But just as i don’t feel comfortable posting physical fitness advice due to the above issues, i don’t feel inclined to share the techniques which worked well for me or have worked for my students without providing the support to ensure you gain maximum benefit from them. So I will simply state some intriguing names of techniques and remain available to answer questions from your own journey, instead of listing techniques which will be mostly useless and are easily disproven in the majority of circumstances.
That being said, here are a couple of links.
Diaphragm Breathing/Speaking: http://www.roleplayingtips.com/readissue.php?number=3
Khargyraa Techniques: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uCom9ZCJAmE
The best tip for the Khargyraa stuff is just to watch that video and maybe this one and then wing it for a while, trying to get the sound right. If you manage it, try just saying some stuff in a normal voice and note the difference. It is immediate and surprising.
This link is nice because the guy is such an amateur! He clearly learned, like, one technique (probably from youtube) and then posted his immediate results on youtube, so it’s a good starting point. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X54KBdi5_xg
How do you guys feel about sharing hacks to increase your status, given that status can be a bit of a zero-sum game? I think I may have identified a nootropic that has the effect of making one feel and act higher status, but I’m not sure I want to just tell the entire world about it, given the positional nature of status.
Edit: see here for more.
A very small number of people read LW, and a fraction of those people are going to apply any status hacks. Only a small number of people are going to apply status hacks, and they are the people who are diligent enough to research and implement them.
Posting such hacks is not going to push everyone to universally adopt them and return everyone to the previous status quo.
And even if it did, some of the actions that would increase one’s positional status also have positive-sum effects (though in this specific case of voice training, they don’t seem to be overwhelmingly large to me).
Just tell people in such a way that only the kind of people you’d want to have higher status will pay attention.
For example, by posting it on lesswrong!
Well, the more people who know about it, the greater the chance that one of them will tell someone about it who I’d prefer not to have high status. I guess there are decently big taboos against taking drugs in our culture, so it probably wouldn’t spread like wildfire. Actually, right now I have the opposite problem: I have friends who I’d like to be higher status and I’m trying to persuade them to try it but they won’t.
There no reason why we should give more status to tall people or who are otherwise physically strong. It’s much better to give status to those people who are smart enough to apply hacks.
Actually, like skin color and facial structure, height is a pretty good indicator of intelligence. (This isn’t genetic or even A->B causative; it’s simply a fact that height and IQ are both highly dependent on childhood nutrition).
I don’t say this to advocate heightism any more than I would advocate racism; I’m merely pointing out that in our current environment, they happen to correlate pretty well, and anyone under 6′2″ should pause and contemplate the implications of that.
I had the impression that the height/intelligence correlation was actually quite weak:
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2013/04/why-are-taller-people-more-intelligent/#.UZsQvIpDsqg
Um, I don’t think you’re using this correlation correctly. Because we have a model where nutritional deficiencies lead to both short height and low IQ, the amount of information we get is dependent on where we are in the height and IQ spectrum. Basically, if you’re uncharacteristically short, say −2 sigma or lower, then you should be worried; if −1 sigma or lower, a slight suspicion; 0 or higher, little information, rather than the “if you aren’t more than +1.3 sigma, contemplate.”
Except that this correlation is much less informative than, say, IQ tests.
Tesla was just under 6′2″, I’ll spot you him.
Einstein was 5′9“. Christopher Langan is 5′11”.
Wolfram Alpha couldn’t give me a height for Feynman, Hofstadter, or Darwin.
Nutrition is not the only derterminant of height.
Certainly; nor is it the only determinant of intelligence. “Highly dependent” != “solely dependent”. But someone who wanted to maximize the chance of interacting intelligent and successful people would do well to pay attention to height, for multiple reasons—not the least of which is that everyone ELSE who wants to maximize the chance of interacting with intelligent and successful people tends to pay attention to height (even if they themselves are not tall).
Also, note that your “name X highly intelligent people who were not at optimal height” strategy is primarily anecdotal, and also that 6′2“ to 6′4” is the optimal height for maximizing your height-based status gain, not the baseline height.
There probably are lots of things you could pay attention to instead that would give you more information.
(I’m 6′2″, just in case anyone suspects this is sour grapes.)
I’m very curious why someone would vote this down.
I’m not sure that someone can just feel higher status—I don’t think status is a single, persistent variable. Like my karate teacher is high-status when it comes to karate, but when it comes to the associated history I think he’s about as useful as tits on a bull.
The upshot of which is that while I think there are probably things that relate to multiple domains, confidence for instance, the questions to do with increasing those individual things seem less loaded to answer in terms of whether you should post a hack.
Being high status is difficult. Acting high status is probably easier, and likely to increase your actual status somewhat simply because people mistake you for high status and so treat you as high status and it’s all self-referential.
Disclaimer: it’s also possible you would be seen as having ideas above your station and promptly quashed.
If you have a reason to wish to favour non-munchkins over munchkins in regards to status then it would follow that censoring such things is appropriate.
Which one? There are plenty of substances that have the effect of making one feel and act higher status. I am somewhat curious which one you are referring to.
http://lesswrong.com/lw/hvu/what_are_you_working_on_july_2013/9bea
I’m curious as to how you went about identifying such a nootropic.
I didn’t deliberately set out to find it, really. I’m also not quite sure how well it works yet. The effects are supposed to be cumulative, meaning the longer you have been taking it, the more of a confident jerk you become, and you continue being a confident jerk even after coming off of it (maybe). I doubt it’s that much of a game changer really, it’s a pretty commonly used nootropic and not many people list improved confidence as one of the effects—perhaps because the effects are subtle and only come with continued usage, or perhaps because they simply aren’t very strong effects to begin with. It might be useful for people who have chronic social awkwardness though.
(if anyone reading this ever sees me act like a confident jerk, please tell me)
How do you know it works better than a placebo ?
This description doesn’t really make me want to use it. At all.
Late to your question, but the issue is IMHO that status-hacks are fairly obvious, just expensive / time-consuming / hard, and actually they are supposed to be. The whole reason they work is that they are fairly exclusive, they convey status by putting you into a club most people cannot belong to, and this cannot really work as a cheat code that is protected only by secrecy. It must be, by necessity, something hard enough to do even if you know how. One obvious example is hiring a stylist, using his advice to replace your whole wardrobe, probably with DKNY level of designers stuff and even getting them fitted by a tailor afterward. Perfectly well know except it costs about a car and thus most people won’t / can’t do it.
I feel great about it. Let the users decide for themselves.
You seem to have knowledge about how to do this effectively—please share that knowledge or the sources for it.
I’ve read some basics on this, around 2006, but it’s hard to think of more to say than “let most of the force in your breath come from lower.” I do find that sitting up straight or standing is much better for this than slouching or lying down, etc. I generally do voicework standing (I only do the minimum for my own projects; I’m not much of an actor). It’s the same breathing principals for playing a wind instrument, a lot of martial arts, meditation, etc. (The latter just focuses on breathing without the forceful projection, but the principal of controlling the breath with muscles lower than your throat and upper chest remains the same.)
@cae_jones, the technique you are referring to here is technically known as ‘Diaphragm Breathing.’ It is very effective and good both actively and passively, and used in voice training for stage, singing, and a variety of martial arts and meditative schools. It will also become second nature very quickly when practiced, and is the single best technique to know the existence of, which is why I taught it at the first rationality minicamp and the first boot camp.
Here is the technique, in brief form. YMMV.
Take a deep breath, placing one hand on your chest and one hand on your stomach. Note which hand moves. If your upper chest hand moves, you have much to gain. If your stomach hand moves, you will have an easy time making progress. If both move, you are partway along already.
To improve your diaphragm breathing, keep one hand on your stomach and fake a yawn. Your stomach hand should move, a lot. Not a little bit, but noticeably. It should feel like you just got fat :).
continue fake yawning in this fashion until you can separate the breathing from your stomach from the concept of a ‘fake yawn,’ and whenever you have a moment include either fake yawns (at the beginning), or diaphragm breathing (same thing, without the ostentatious yawn) in your quick meditations.
For voicework, I also find that “open your mouth more” and “keep your voice pitched as low as you comfortably can” are often helpful suggestions. Depending on who I’m working with, exercises to open up the chest are helpful too (that is, bring the shoulders down and back, straighten the spine, let the skull “fit” on the end of the spine, etc.). Of course, posture work is useful for actors for other reasons as well.
I have often thought that pranayama work ought to help, also, though I don’t know much of anything about it and haven’t seen much benefit from what little I do know.
@the other dave, those are excellent for singing and, when actively used, social situations, but there are other techniques which are more passive. The Khargyraa, Tuvan, Diaphragm Breathing, Nasal Passage Opening, and some more general speech techniques including speaking slowly, pausing often, knowing when to gesture, all of these contribute more effectively to your impression than the techniques you mention, which fade as soon as you get caught in the moment.
@Zaine, I considered a lesswrong post on it, but it is very difficult to give general advice on the topic due to interactions between identity and voice, the fact that many people already use many techniques and so could get bored with a list, etc etc. How would you advise structuring such a sharing post?
I would identify a representative set of specific circumstances which would benefit from ‘vocal training techniques’, then go into detailed explanation of the physiological changes that effect a benefit in each specific circumstance. Now that the generally applicable part has been covered, you can detail various techniques designed to achieve the effects. As each person will have differing degrees of success with different exercises, list many, but at the outset state the ultimate goal for the technique the set of exercises are designed to develop, exempli gratia “You will feel X once it has worked” (I don’t know if this is possible).
If you are clear that one is only learning how to use their body more effectively, I should not think considerations of identity will prove problematic—if it does, abandoning the exercises undoes the effects, correct? I would also mention that incorrect use of one’s voice over long periods of time damages it; increasing one’s ability to use it correctly will help preserve their ability to produce voice into the future.
I know how to project voice, and I do it when singing all the time, but I always forget to do that in normal conversations.
@army 1987, it is the difference between knowing how to do push ups well, and run well, and do situps, and being strong in the sense that a blacksmith is strong. One is a sort of ability to perform a bounded activity, the other comes from constant use of the muscles in question over time. When you’ve done the right exercises, you don’t have to remember, you’re just strong and you have a life which makes you stronger every day.
Makes sense to me—I’ve noticed the same difference between improving my posture by telling myself not to slouch vs improving my posture by exercising so that I won’t even feel the need to slouch in the first place.
This is cool! -- but how does being able to do it make a difference when you’re speaking normally? (Other than the voice-lowering thing you mentioned.)
While I’m asking questions: Did you or any of your classmates find it did long-term harm to the high singing voice? (I’m specifically interested in the male voice just below the break.)
‘How does being able to do it make a difference when you’re speaking normally?’ The vocal exercises drop your register immediately, particularly even a moment or two of Khargyraa will sort of… remind you that you have a lower register under your normal voice for no extra work, and sticks with you for about an hour if stressless or fifteen mins if stressed (public speaking, etc.). Also after extended use you develop the additional vocal muscles- it’s like working on your core to increase your run times, by improving a range of seldom-used muscles you gain capabilities in your mains.
‘Did you or any of your classmates find it did long-term harm to the high singing voice?’ We weren’t singing students. It was a Voice Projection for Stage class, followed by Diction and Dialects. Personally i’ve found that my high singing voice is more accurately pitched, but that may be due to an entirely different suite of exercises i’ve been pursuing simultaneously.
That would be rather surprising for me, considering that I already have a deep bass singing voice. Or are you talking about your speaking voice and not your vocal range? Because I often speak at a much higher pitch, especially when I’m trying to sound friendly.
Yes, i am referring to your normal speaking voice. Khargyraa and Tuvan techniques in particular add undertones to your normal speaking voice, making it seem deeper and more resonant when the exercises are performed regularly. It is not that your ‘normal voice’ becomes more resonant, but that the concept of ‘normal voice’ is actually based on a combination of vocal chords and you simply add to the mix, increasing the apparent depth and resonance of the timbre which the brain sums the voice into. In short, yes, I am referring to normal speaking voice, though it also allows some fun things when singing. Like metal screams without injuring vocal chords, at any register.
I learned how to crank out patents. My thinking, over the years, shifted from “Wow, I can really be an inventor,” to “Wow, I can Munchkin a ridiculously misconfigured system” and beyond that to “This is really awful.”
My blog post: “The evil engineer’s guide to patents”.
Since Munchkining means following the letter of the rules, while bypassing the unspoken rules, we should consider how often it is accompanied by moral dissonance.
Getting a patent through is far from cheap. While the filing fee is not much, the rest is prohibitively expensive if it’s not paid for by your employer, about $10k or so per simple patent, all told. Probably not worth it for a line on your resume in most cases. I wonder if there is a way to munchkin this cost.
The article is aimed mostly at salaried employees, and so the cost is not relevant, so long as the employer wants to pay it, which they generally do.
There sure is. As described in the blog:
(I did the provisional patent thing myself once.)
At worse, even if you abandon it because of cost, no problem: As mentioned in the blog post
I meant getting the actual patent, even if you are not successful at funding it.
Not that I know of. But why would you care about getting an issued patent (particularly in software) if you do not want to be a patent troll?
Considering this from the perspective of how an employer would see my CV, take a look at my list of patents.
Can you even tell the difference: Which are (1) under review at the USPTO; (2) abandoned by a bankrupt startup (two or three, but there is no public record of that, so even I don’t officially know); (3) rejected (none, that almost never happens); (4) issued and approved as patents?
But I will grant that listing the $100 provisional patent application in your CV as a “patent application” is beyond the bounds of good taste. I do not list my (long-gone) provisional patent anywhere.
Thus, patents in your resume do provide a real signal (though weaker than many people think): They show that someone (an employer) thought it was worth investing some money in filing it.
Darn it. I was just about to suggest “be a patent troll” as a Munchkin-y thing to do.
Apparently, it’s really, really easy to get patents accepted, even on things that are very broad, that have been done before, are blindingly obvious, or are even things you don’t actually know how to make! The way things stand, you could probably get a patent for a Star Trek style teleporter with a few block diagrams and some fancy-sounding bullshit, and I’m dead serious about that. You know what one guy managed to patent? “Machine vision”—connecting a camera, any camera, to a computer. He first applied for the patent in 1954, but years later enforced variations of it against people who used bar code scanners. You can’t make a submarine patent any more, so patenting a Star Trek teleporter probably won’t make you any money, but people have indeed made money patenting things that were impractical when they were patented. For example, someone patented remote online backup services, then someone else bought the patent and started suing people trying to offer those services.
In general, because defending a lawsuit in the U.S. is expensive, there are people who manage to make quite a bit of money by threatening to sue people on shaky grounds and offering to settle for less than the cost to defend the case. (Many other countries discourage this kind of extortion by forcing a losing plaintiff to pay the defendant’s court costs, but that has a chilling effect on valid lawsuits as well as bogus ones.)
Broken link and no copy on archive.org
Archive.org copy (takes a few seconds to load)
Archive.is copy
If you want to increase your pulling strength without much effort, get a pullup bar and put it in a doorway in your home. Then just make a habit of doing pullups every time you walk by. This is remarkably effective. I’ve been doing this for two weeks and have seen significant improvement.
It’s important to actually have it on a doorway at all times. Ours was sitting in a closet for several months, and during that time, I used it maybe twice. In the past two weeks, with it actually on a doorway and requiring no effort for me to set up and start using it, I’ve been doing ~5 chinups every day. (The number has been going up as I’ve gotten better at it; I’m looking forward to when I can actually do dead-hang pullups.)
$20 on Amazon.
I think a general policy of decreasing the startup cost of doing things you want to do is a useful one. Rewarding yourself helps too, but sometimes you just need to lower the activation energy.
I’ve done, recommended, and been recommended this before and am in wholehearted agreement. I would be remiss however if I did not share a word of caution: that model of pull up bar leaves black marks, and after extended use, will probably dent a wooden door frame. I do not know of a model of that type that does not share this design flaw.
I recall doing exactly that in junior high, and increasing my chin-up count from 0 to 12 or so within 3-4 months, without consciously worrying about it. My P.E. teacher was impressed. In retrospect, going through puberty must have helped, too.
What if you’re not capable of doing a pullup? (I’ve never been able to do one.)
I can’t do a full pullup either. A couple of weeks ago I couldn’t even really do a chin-up (though I used to be able to). I just did assisted / negatives, which for me means… Jump! Then lower yourself down as slowly as you can. And jump a little bit less every time until you can do it without using your legs at all.
And then once you can do it from standing level, you work up to doing it from a dead hang somehow. I’m hazy on the details there because I’ve never gotten that far myself.
Assuming you don’t have access to a gym, one thing to try is to obtain a strong theraband. Hold the band with both arms out in front of you, elbows slightly bent, and extend your arms out to your sides. You should feel this in the upper back muscles. If this gets easy, double up the band. Eventually that should provide enough upper back strength to try a pull-up. (You’ll also need to do some biceps training, which you could also do with an anchored theraband, or with household objects, if you don’t want to obtain dumbbells.)
If you have access to gym equipment, then pull-downs with a lat bar and bent over rowing train most of the muscles you will need.
If you have easy access to a gym with machines (e.g. if you are a student), one of those machines is hopefully an assisted pull-up machine which will let you add counter-weight as necessary.
I realize I got to this thread a bit late but here are two things you can do:
Pull-up negatives. Use your legs to jump up to the top of a pull-up position and then lower yourself as slowly as possible.
Banded pull-ups. This might be tricky to set up in a doorway but if you can, tie a resistance band at a height where you can kneel on it while doing pull-ups and the band will help push you up.
Wide push-ups will get you partway there, which the same tool is actually pretty good for (flip it over on the floor).
For those that don’t have a convenient place to hang a pullup bar, or as a general alternative/addon, I recommend dumbbells. I bought a nice set (2 x 20kg, 0.5, 1.25, 2, 5kg increments) for around $100 and cancelled my gym membership. They paid for themselves in 2 months time. Now I’m saving money and more fit then ever because I actually workout, instead of making excuses why not to go to the gym (it’s too cooold, it’s raaaining, I don’t have tiiiime, etc.)
Not sure if I can recommend this suggestion, because for me exactly the opposite worked out fine.
I never used fitness crap lying around my home regularly but once I started paying for a gym membership there was no way I would just stay at home and pay for nothing.
In other words I used the sunken cost fallacy for my benefit.
Once I was more advanced it wasn’t the money I spent on my membership that kept me going but knowing that I’ll actually get weaker if I started to only go 2 times a week instead of keeping up my 3 times a week routine. So every time I didn’t visit my full 3 days a week it felt like I essentially wasted a few of my last trips to the gym because I wouldn’t see any progress and at the very best just keep my performance at a plateau.
I trained quite hard for 1,5 years and missed maybe 4 training sessions, until a knee injury from squatting with too much weight coupled with moving to a new location put a stop to my training days.
What do you do with the dumbbells? I’m curious because I only know a few things to do with them, and they’re all mostly upper-body.
So far not too much; I’ve been adapting some exercise routines from The 4-Hour Body which has a strongly minimalist approach. Shoulder Press (seated), Bench Press, Kneeling Rows, and Squats. Doing just the basics seems to be working!
Hold them and do squats, hold them and jump, do either of those on one foot rather than two. Thosr are passable lower body barbell exercises.
Nick Winter used a similar scheme (albeit with a towel) & found that not only did he get better at pullups, his 1 mile time & bench press improved as well!
For someone who is overweight, and a lot of people are, losing weight is also a great way to increase your pullup quantity. (not to mention a host of other health benefits) Though, some would argue that it is easier to just gradually build your strength to do pullups than to drop 20-30 lbs.
you can get rings to hang from the pullup bar and be able to do dips. Or just do dips between two chairs if you have sturdy chairs. Between the two you have a pretty good upper body workout if you can’t get to a gym.
If you don’t have access to a gym, a playground may also suffice. Although I suspect steroids mays also be involved in this case (it gets particularly insane around the 3 minute mark).
Learning to not compare yourself to roided to the gills gentlemen for men is similar to learning to not compare yourself to pornstars for women.
I don’t know about you, Romeo, as far as I can tell comparison to pornstars are also problematic for men, even discounting the roided to the gills gentlemen of the pornstar persuasion.
Well sure, porn is problematic for both genders in that it causes weird ideas about what constitutes good sex.
I completely agree with that. I like looking at the exercises for possible inspiration; I’m not interested in comparing my body to his body. (Also, FWIW, I’ve been asked if I’m on steroids before, despite never having used them. Appearances can be deceiving, though that seems highly unlikely in his case.)
Is that a normal playground? I’ve seen pullup bars at a few, but I’ve only ever seen those walk-across-on-your-hands bars at fitness-oriented playground-type things.
Yeah, that looks to me like an outdoor fitness installation, not a playground. Those aren’t too hard to find, though, at least around where I live; most high schools or colleges of any size have one, and I’ve also seen a few near practice fields or parks popular with runners.
Back in the Seventies there was a fad for public fitness trails with a lot of the same equipment, which might do in a pinch. Those will be a lot more spread out, though, and a lot of them are in pretty bad shape four decades on.
Yeah, there is one of those trails (somewhat) near where I live! That was what I was thinking of when I saw the video.
Edit; misread this. Even regular playgrounds are good for workouts though, plenty don’t have pullup bars, but monkeybars can perform the same function. I use a playground for my own workouts.
Couldn’t say; I haven’t been there. (If you see videos more recent than that one, since H4K became sort-of-famous, he actually outfitted his playground with all sorts of interesting stuff that wasn’t originally there.)
But a pull up bar (or a swing set) and parallel bars (or any two parallel objects you can hold onto) are enough to do a variety of interesting exercises. (BTW, I assume you know that if you take the Iron Gym you already have and put it on the floor, you can actually use it to do triceps dips as well.)
There’s kind of a growing movement around Rob Rhinehart’s Soylent thing, dunno if you folks have heard of this.
Basically, he got tired of making food all the time and tried to figure out the absolute minimum required chemical compounds required for a healthy diet, and then posted the overall list, and has now been roughly food free for three months, along with a bunch of other people.
It seems awesome to me and I’m hoping this sort of idea becomes more prevalent. My favorite quote from him I can’t now find, but it’s something along the lines of “I enjoy going to the movie theater, but I don’t particularly feel the need to go three times a day.”
There’s small reddit community/discourse groups around getting your own mixture.
I find this incredibly fascinating. Especially the ability to save hours every day from not needing to eat. If the guy doesn’t die after a year or so, I’m definitely trying this out.
When I looked at his blog last, he was eating out socially (understandable). So we onlookers won’t get to enjoy his discovery of any new micro-nutrient deficiency syndromes.
I wasn’t especially impressed by his approach. Maybe he’ll get some good advice from others, but I didn’t think he was anyone to listen to.
It’s not impressive as a medical experiment, but it’s pretty impressive for actually-getting-something-done.
If it turns out that he can survive comfortably on his concoction plus highly irregular meals at restaurants, that’s useful information. Just not as useful as the results of a more thorough experiment.
He actually spent the first two months on a Soylent-only diet, and only recently added social eating. I think he said something in his three month blog post about a week he spent eating normal food, and he ended up feeling way crappier.
Sure. But 2 months is not long enough. Some unaccounted-for vitamin with a long half-life or a low requirement could give deficiency symptoms after 4 months but not 2.
Also, people on restrictive diets post all the time about how crappy they feel when they reintroduce something. For him to slide comfortably into the explanation “thus my product makes me feel better than restaurant food” is typical of such dieters’ enthusiasm.
Although bad restaurant food does exist, much of the digestive upset people experience when going out to eat is simply down to overeating, late eating, or alcohol.
That was also a week he spent travelling. Sleeping away from home, long plane/car rides, irregular schedule, and all the other attendant discomforts are quite enough to throw me off my game, even without dietary shifts.
Could also be a temporary effect. Your gut flora adjusts to what you’re eating, and a sudden shift in composition can cause digestive distress.
I would be more surprised if, by only eating when you’re socially required to, you happened to get the exact essential nutrients the diet would otherwise leave you without.
here’s what i was thinking:
“real food” has plenty of vitamins and stuff
some of that stuff might have a long half-life in the body
and be needed only in small (catalytic?) amounts.
so that
you wouldn’t know about them if you just studied basic nutrition textbooks (or perhaps nobody knows about them)
if your social eating is frequent enough, you’d never lack them.
so, ideally, people following some soylent-type practice strictly will develop some interesting symptoms, and we’ll discover some new stuff. but if they cheat, we don’t learn as much.
i admit there’s a good possibility that we already know about all the vitamin-like stuff there is. after soylenters start showing better 10-year mortality, i’ll gladly join them.
This is interesting. For years I’ve blended together various ingredients (mostly stuff like broccoli, lentils, sweet pepper, ricotta, canned tuna, olive oil, various grains and nuts such as flax, sesame, hazelnut, sunflower), balanced these for macro and micro-nutrients using cron-o-meter, further optimized along various axes such as cost, taste, ease of use, ease of preparation, packaging, cleaning up etc. Food is primarily something I do to feed myself in the end, and I dislike it when there’s too much fluff.
I’d be more wary of mixing together purified/refined nutrients though. Just as licking iron bars won’t provide you with your daily needs for iron (elemental iron isn’t very soluble and your body wouldn’t be able to assimilate it well), there’s more and more evidence that whole plants and animal parts contain more than just the usual nutrients, and that this particular mix may be needed to stay in good health—and conversely that substituting multivitamins and refined macronutrients for normal food may run the risk of missing some essential, complex interactions/packaging that occurs in it and which changes the way your body assimilates it.
Now of course, many people eat junk food and still live to be 60-70 so there’s some leeway. We’ll only really know whether Soylent is healthy enough (like, for someone interested in life extension, and not just satisfied with a classical life span) if this experiment goes for decades, and if it’s done using more people, controlled conditions, etc (in short, using Science).
Some people thrive for decades (including Stephen Hawking) tube fed with nutritionally complete enteral formulas. Semi-annual blood tests pick up any deficiencies, and supplements are added if needed. Several companies make “Soylent”, the one I am familiar with is Abbott Nutrition.
If there’s something there that isn’t priced for sale to hospitals, or restricted in sale to hospitals, and has been formulated so as to be edible by people who are tired of real food, go ahead and post it. My understanding is that tube-feeding is not the same use-case as Soylent at all, with tube-fed material needing to be essentially predigested and correspondingly expensive or something along those lines, and no concern for edible taste for obvious reasons.
I’ve done some looking, but I haven’t seen anything out there that looks like it’s meant to be eaten, meant to replace food, and priced at an affordable level for sole consumption.
Baby formula. Duh.
IIRC, the nutritional needs of adults aren’t those of babies scaled up by a constant.
I’ll let you know that I researched the matter (“Could an adult live entirely on baby food?”), and found this answer on answerbag.com:
That settles it, then. And as every doctor knows, children are just small adults … small Victoria Beckhams specifically.
In seriousness though, you’d be fine. Here’s the nutrient data for an infant formula from the USDA National Nutrient Database for Standard Reference. You can compare what you’d get from the formula with the RDA and check that you wouldn’t overshoot the tolerable upper intake levels (UL), but without having done any of those comparisons, I’d place a large bet that you’d be fine.
Your daily nutritional intake based on various Ramen, Pizza, some salad and/or Fast Food doesn’t adhere to some “perfect” mix of ingredients either. You’ll be just fine.
Good point—it possibly wouldn’t be as good as a formula designed specifically for adults, but it probably would be a vast improvement on what a sizeable fraction of the population are eating.
Well it’s not clear there is one optimal level for most nutrients. You should hit all the Recommended Dietary Allowances and stay under the Tolerable Upper Intake Levels (links to both given in the grandparent), but in between that large range (often a factor of ten), who knows, it doesn’t seem to make any difference (which is why the ULs are so high).
Given most usual Western diets, the problem isn’t malnourishment (although it does exist, Vitamin D deficiencies in general, and problems with low SES populations subsisting on soda and chips come to mind). The problem is simply too many calories (and salts) consumed. Fast food is actually quite healthy … if consumed in the appropriate amounts.
In other words, as long as you stay in the range, there’s probably little difference between a formula designed specifically for adults, and a formula designed for kids which when scaled up is also in the correct ranges.
But there is a significant difference between taking a medical formula under doctors supervision and mixing up the most common nutrition ingredients and claiming it to be a cure-all-be-all food. Didn’t the guy forget to include iron in his first mixture?
Another ‘Soylent’ equivalent I know of is Sustagen Hospital Formula.
Soylent Orange (with new and improved recipe. Okay, I just added marmite, but it’s significantly more nutritionally complete than before)
This is a less radical version of the idea using store bought ingredients to achieve roughly the same ends.
I’m curious about how you make your Soylent. Do you just take all those ingredients and mix them in a blender? Do you have another page with more information?
There’s a cell with directions on the spreadsheet. But essentially yes. Part of the appeal is that it takes less than 5 minutes.
This is also a reminder for me that I should really turn it into an infographic or at least make a more complete blogpost.
Oh I see the directions now. Yes, it would help if you included all of this into a detailed blogpost and explained what other meals you consume (and how often) to get a complete picture of how to adopt the diet oneself. I would like to experiment.
Does anyone know what the time-line is on vitamin deficiencies? I mean might this be like cigarettes—increases your risk of something going wrong massively but only becomes apparent years down the line when you’re already screwed.
That wouldn’t be consistent with studies showing very strong and consistent effects on children. Source: the section in this blog post from Yvain, the section on Multivitamins.
Direct link to study.
Not sure you can take repair time as damage time. Study was 3 months. Onset of vit c def I believe to be > 60 & < 90 days. Upper bound isn’t necessarily consistent with study.
Definitely true, but if the vitamin deficiencies hadn’t shown up yet in children the repair couldn’t have an affect. So it caps the onset time at the age of the children involved, and shows that repairs can occur after some significant effect of deficiency occurs.
Also, vitamins deficiency might set in at different times for adults and children. Children grow a lot, so their nutritional needs are probably different from adults.
No source, just speculation.
I’m also trying making a total food replacement this summer. Recommendation for people trying to make their own: start by buying just the macronutrients (oil / carbs / protein), and finding a blend you’ll be okay with consuming. It’s unlikely that the micronutrients will make it appreciably tastier, so if you can’t find one you like without putting the micronutrients in it then you should abort. (The micronutrients represent a far more significant capital outlay, if you buy the ingredients separately rather than going with a multivitamin.)
Further discussion: http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/hht/link_soylent_crowdfunding/
That sounds particularly appealing to someone like me who outright forgets to be hungry. It seems I shall now be looking into this.
Is there more to the Soylent thing than mixing off-the-shelf protein shake powder, olive oil, multivitamin pills, and mineral supplement pills and then eating it?
Not really. In fact I’m beginning to think that the Soylent guy is obfuscating his source of supplies in order to obfuscate how simple it is. I found a powder that is 100% of everything for $1 a scoop at costco.
… you sure that stuff actually contains everything you need?
EDIT: sorry, not sure if I understood you correctly; you’re claiming that a similar, cheaper product exists, right?
It is 100% of the RDA of all micronutrients according to the label. I’m not at all sure that the soylent guy hasn’t found something similar and is just adding it to an oil/whey/oats concoction.
Well, there’s a thing. These people need better PR.
They sell themselves short as just an anti-aging formula.
This looks like it might solve several food problems I’ve been having. (Not wanting to interrupt work to get food, being hungry but not wanting any particular food, and needing to eat every 2-3 hours to keep my blood sugar under control. That last one is mainly a problem because eating in the middle of class or a meeting looks weird, and I could probably get away with a drink more easily.) I might try something like it this summer, probably while eating normal food once or twice a day to reduce the risk.
Intermittent fasting solves a number of these issues...
I’ve thought about it, but I feel sick enough just from waiting too long between meals that I’m sort of scared to.
It’ll take time to adapt, and is generally much easier if you are eating a low carb diet.
This makes me want to ask if any of the people on the soylent diet are diabetic and how that’s going.
Yes! There will be a Kickstarter soon and I can’t wait.
Kickstarter actually rejected them. :(
More here
As a vegetarian, I’m also excited at this.
And as, y’know, a LW-type-person, obviously.
How to find a mate when you have really specific tastes:
Think about the kind of fiction your ideal mate would want to read.
Write that kind of fiction.
Start a website compiling your fiction. Hire someone off DeviantArt to illustrate it.
Once you’ve got a decent fanbase, post a message on your website saying that you are looking for a mate.
Read emails from fans who say they want to be your mate.
Why I think this will work: A while ago I posted a romantic/erotic story to Reddit (which is 3⁄4 male). I hadn’t seen the fantasy represented in any romance/erotica I’d ever read, so I figured I was alone in desiring it. Imagine my surprise when two women sent me unsolicited PM’s asking me to role-play.
This works better when some of the MOTAS who read the fiction have also met you in the flesh (N=2). Also, having at least one protagonist who shares some of the more prominent features of your personality (i.e., your warped sense of humor if you’re liable to inflict that on your mate) might be more effective at selecting on the audience (if they like the protagonist, they may be able to tolerate your own twisted humor) but here I haven’t tried it your way for comparison.
But on the other hand, writers are routinely surprised by the audiences their material finds—and don’t find. So you need some way of evaluating your current audience to see if your ideal mate is actually likely to be in it, or if your cute pony show turned out to have many nerdy male fans instead...
I think most MLP fans are in the intended demographic. Teenage male fans are simply more salient than grade-school female fans.
If nothing else, the ‘unexpected’ fans are reducing your yield and may be driving out potential matches.
(If you were into little girls, would you be happy or unhappy about bronies? If you wanted money, maybe happy, if chicks maybe unhappy because on the margin, little girls may be skeeved out by bronies and not become regular readers. You know what, I should’ve chosen a better example for this topic than MLP.)
What is the fanbase of a median fiction or fanfiction? Probably somewhere between 0 and 1, including the author and their mother?
Any fiction writers want to chime in? The fact that I accidentally successfully used this strategy is one data point. And then you look at amateur fiction websites, and see a lot of poorly written work that nonetheless has fans is another.
I write fanfiction set in the Mass Effect universe. My work is probably “amateur” as I make no claims of being a writer. It’s all just for fun for me.
I wouldn’t try this technique personally, as I’m not interested in meeting people who I’m compatible with, but geographically isolated from. The odds that one of the people responding would be from the same city as me seem pretty slim.
What I can tell you about my traffic stats is that I get about a thousand unique views every time I post a new chapter. Of the people who add my story to their favorites or set an author alert for my work (so that they are emailed every time I post new content), the majority seem to be people identifying as women on their own profile pages. (My fanfiction includes a popular “ship” meaning that romance is an important focus in it.) I get anywhere from two to around six written replies to each chapter I post. The majority of people who write to me identify as men, however, while less women write to me, I would rank the average quality of correspondence higher among the women who do choose to write than the men. I’ve actually become very good friends with a woman who I met through fanfiction, but I’ve never met her in person as she lives in Germany and I in the States.
My mom has never read my story.
Thanks for your input! It’s interesting that most of the people who favorite your work are women, but most of the people who write to you are men.
I think Yudkowsky has said that HPMoR was a factor in getting together with most of his girlfriends, though he did not actually meet them because of it.
Beware of these.
They’ve sent me photos, their comment history checks out and one of them showed me her Facebook page. I’m pretty sure they’re legit.
Well, that’s good. Back in the day, I followed a USENET newsgroup that was trolled by a guy pretending to be a girl...
Yes, and the chance that any of the two live near you?
My ideal mate would hardly read any fiction at all; and I don’t write fiction. So I’m already two steps ahead! ;-)
When I was having a lot of trouble getting out of bed reasonably promptly in the mornings: practice getting out of bed—but not after just having woken up, that’s what I was having trouble with in the first place. No, during the day, having been up for a while, go lie in bed for a couple of minutes with the alarm set, then get up when it goes off. Also, make this a pleasant routine with stretching, smiling and deep breathing.
I found this idea on the net here, which may have more details: http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2006/04/how-to-get-up-right-away-when-your-alarm-goes-off/
I tried it and it seemed to help a lot for a while, and I feel more in control of my weekend mornings.
An alternative, courtesy of Anders Sandberg (via Kaj Sotala), is to set your alarm to ring two hours before your desired wake-up time, take one or two 50mg caffeine pills when it rings, and go back to sleep immediately thereafter. When you wake two hours later, getting out of bed shouldn’t be a problem. Details here.
Coffeine doesn’t work for ~10% of the population (like me).
ADDED:
I don’t know exactly what’s different and to what extent the effect exists but caffein doesn’t have significant waking or alerting effects on me. At least not a 200mg pill (corresp. 2 liter coke or 2-5 cups of coffee). These I take to treat migraine where the caffeine does have a very notable effect on me.
And the opposite:
From Health: Does Coffee Make You Sleepy? Researchers now understand how caffeine works on the nervous system. For some, it may cause the opposite of its intended effect. By Roger Downey
See also http://flipper.diff.org/app/items/5455 for migraine and caffeine.
What do you mean with “doesn’t work”. Your A1 receptors are formed in a way where caffeine doesn’t connect to them?
Answered above
Does that work for you?
I tried it only a few times and didn’t notice any clear effects. So as far as I can tell, no, it doesn’t work for me.
Have you tested this intervention on yourself more systematically?
I’m currently trying it out on a loose alternating-day basis; if it seems to be working, I may upgrade to blinding & randomization.
EDIT: it does correlate with earlier wake up, so I’ve upgraded to randomization; the blinding didn’t work out because the caffeine pills have too detectible a flavor.
I set my alarm 5 minutes before I actually want to wake up. When it rings the first time, I consume a large glass of fake lemonade (the kind with lots and lots of sugar). Perhaps not healthy, but it works—among other things, the presence of sugar in the mouth immediately releases dopamine. On the few occasions the energy isn’t enough, the urge to use the bathroom is ;)
I tried the coffee thing, for me, sugar works more reliably.
FYI, this training is part of USAF basic training. With more yelling. I wouldn’t call it a pleasant routine, but it’s certainly effective when you do it for six hours straight and start to get an adrenaline surge when your alarm goes off.
That still persists 1.5 years later, so it may be a munchkin hack in itself.
I’d be interested in hearing more about your training experience; I’m sure the USAF and the like have discovered more than a few interesting behavioral hacks!
I agree absolutely—however the effect wanes. I found the behavior would go extinct maybe a week or so after a 20 minute session of doing this. Reading this has inspired me to do the straightforward thing and just practice weekly.
I have found that I wake much more effectively when the alarm is very quiet; rather than waking suddenly and having my brain rebel, I wake over the course of 30 second to 2 minutes. This works much better than it has any reason to.
The downside is that a very quiet alarm is easy to miss, and if there is environmental noise at the same time as the alarm goes off (from the air coming on to trash pickup), it’s much too easy to sleep through. The solution that worked best for me was to run a white noise generator (actually an air filter) all night; this raised the noise threshold so that a louder alarm was needed to still be a quiet-but-audible alarm; the louder alarm is loud enough to be heard over the white noise, and thus loud enough to be heard over any environmental noise that is not also loud enough to wake me.
Another useful trick, albeit slightly more painful, is to get up at the same time every morning. This means also on weekends. It really does help, but requires that you are willing to actually wake up enough to get out of bed. Once you are ‘up’, you may decide to just read Facebook for 5 minutes before going back to bed (I usually just went to the bathroom and then read in bed for 15 minutes before falling back to sleep). I only use this when I have a significant change in schedule, and only for a couple of weeks.
Obvious idea is obvious: Save and invest a very large percentage of your income—I’m at 25%, but I’m not very ambitious. At 75% you can retire for three years for every year you work, even without assuming any gains from investment income or any other sources of income. If you are 30 and reasonably established in your career, this means you can work for ten years and then retire.
That rather assumes you can live on 25% of your income.
For me 25% of my income would be far below the poverty line and the legal minimum wage. I couldn’t live on that even if I moved back in with my parents.
Are most people here really so rich that they can follow this advice and take it in stride?
I disagree with your assumption that you need to be rich/making lots of money in order to save. It’s not necesarily about being rich, it’s also about spending less. People get very used to spending whatever it is they make. Lots of people live off $15k and manage to survive. Lots of people live of $100k and manage to wind up bankrupt. The trick is to not adjust your standard of living and expectations to be what you think you “deserve”.
After getting a divorce a couple years ago, I got very used to living off of significantly less than the poverty line. After getting a “real” job, I’ve been making a concerted effort to not raise my standard of living TOO much. Despite making less than you (50% of my income would be below the poverty line), I still manage to only live off about half of what I make. Right now, the rest is going into paying off debts and student loans, but in about a year and a half those will be taken care of, and the rest can go into savings. (I may rebudget at that time and save less, if I feel like it would be a good idea to raise my standard of living again, then. However, I wouldn’t have to.)
It’s fascinating to read about people like http://earlyretirementextreme.com/ who choose frugality over work
Here is a second resource, the successor of Jacob, creator of ERE, Mr. Money Mustache. This website has the same concept, taken to the same extremes, though he has a more colloquial style. He proclaims to live a luxurious life on 8,000 a year a person (family of three). This includes taking multiple road trips with his family, eating organic foods and other such “luxuries”.
Wow, I think that link is the most useful thing I’ve gotten from this thread; thanks. I’ve had similar ideas for a while but never knew there was this much info online about it. Their techniques look like they could be very useful for people interested in hardcore professional philanthropy.
Thanks for posting this! Looks quite interesting.
What part of your current income do you need to live on?
[pollid:465]
Note: The idea about the last two options is that high-school and university students are not socially expected to live on their own income. So the last option is for those who are not expected to live on their own income, and the previous option is for those who are socially expected to live on their own income, but they can’t.
By “current income” let’s assume the average for a few months, not some exceptional income or a temporary loss of income that happened yesterday.
It’s worth noting that the results of this poll could be skewed by the fact that it’s much easier to for students to give an answer.
I am a PhD student, and I live on about 60% or 70% of my scholarship (though my parents do still pay for e.g. my car insurance; if I also counted all the money my parents spend on me, it’d be higher, but probably still not close to 100% unless I’m forgetting lots of stuff). I picked “about 75%”.
(EDIT: Just noticed that the poll said “need to”—well, I could in principle reduce my expenditures, but it wouldn’t be anywhere near trivially easy for me to do so by a substantial amount.)
I voted 50%, which is correct +/- 10%.
I should note that I could save money by moving back in with my parents and not paying rent, municipal taxes, food, etc., but it’s socially expected that I won’t do this.
Probably most of us could spend less or earn more, if we did some changes in our lives.
after tax pay of 75k a year isn’t crazy unusual for software devs living in major cities. Living on 15k in these places is very doable, though some might consider it crazy depending on their habits.
After 6 years one could then live fairly well in a relatively poor country on 15k.
I don’t mean to cut the party short, but living for years in a poor country is not as awesome as it sounds. What seems awesome instead is to go for poor countries for 6 to 8 months per year, and live with your parents or someone who loves you a lot in the other 4 months every year. I’ve met a Slovenian programmer who did that, knew 10 languages, worked in London for 4 months per year and seemed to have pretty much nailed the “maxing out on hedons” lifestyle.
I moved out of my parent’s house as soon as I was able, finding the cost in raw hedons and effects on my disposition and behavior to be way too high to justify the money saved. And I have a fine family, not abusive or otherwise terrible—just not a place where I was ever able to be happy or productive.
What went wrong when you were with your family?
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I’d guess it was more likely to be emotional stuff relating to living with people who once had such control over you. I can’t stand living at my parents’ for very long either… it’s just stressful and emotionally draining.
Additionally, there are ways to get people to pay for your living costs in very poor countries. If you live in the US and are looking for a fun but not too easy early retirement, spending two years in the Peace Corps is not a bad way to go—if you do want to spend a few extra thousand on living expenses it will go a lot further than it would in America, and if you just want to let your retirement funds gather a few years of additional interest you can do that. The PC does take married couples and loves people with college degrees and work experience. No kids, though.
Less than half of that isn’t crazy unusual everywhere else. Of course, anybody can just move there, and is qualified and lucky enough to find such a job.
Still doesn’t change the OPs point, though; living on 15k/year is still a very convenient life.
75% is only an example. Adjust according to what you can actually manage to save. If you are paid $100k, as is by no means impossible for this demographic (and in fact is rather easy if you’re a two-income household)m then 75% is easily doable. At $25k, which is also by no means impossible for our demographic, then yes, the 75% savings rate becomes difficult.
I am not, but apparently there is at least one person who could.
The absolute poverty line is US$2/day, purchasing power parity adjusted. You don’t earn less than $8/day.
$2 a day is “extreme poverty”.
The poverty line in 2013 for a single person (one-person household) living in the continental 48 states is $11,490 per year. (Source: http://www.familiesusa.org/resources/tools-for-advocates/guides/federal-poverty-guidelines.html)
For DanArmak’s statement to be true (assuming he lives in the continental U.S.), he would have to be earning less than $47,960 per year. That’s not even remotely unlikely. I earn less than that, for instance.
That’s about the world GDP (PPP) per capita!
Relative poverty is not having enough money to maintain the standard of living that is customary in that society.
The absolute poverty line is found by finding the total cost of all the essential resources that an average human adult consumes in one year. Determined by the world bank. This is adjusted for purchasing power parity. In other words, it applies internationally. The absolute american poverty line is just the international absolute poverty. And there’s no need for a relative poverty line, it’s rather a nonsense concept.
According to his profile, he lives in Kfar Saba, Israel.
Not necessarily. There is inflation.
Please read “without assuming any real gains from...”
invest in inflation-indexed bonds.
Even at 55-60%, which is what I did, it still builds up REALLY fast. Realistically though, you’ll have to work more than ten years unless you’re getting pretty good return on your investments.
Following the rule of thumb that one can spend about 4% of investment a year for it to remain sustainable, it’s sufficient to accumulate about 25 times more than you spend in a year, which at 80% saving rate can be achieved in 6 years (more to reduce risk and/or accommodate possible future increase in spending (above inflation)).
There happens to be an article in the New York Times today about the 4% rule, based on a new paper titled The 4 Percent Rule is Not Safe in a Low-Yield World. It also seems worth noting that the 4% rule assumes a payout period of 30 years, so it’s not entirely applicable for the purposes of this thread.
I wasn’t suggesting that it was safe (“more to reduce risk”). For example in Russia, there is additionally the issue of high inflation (in USD) while the prices catch up with US/UK levels, so even a 3% rule should only apply to cost of living that’s about 2 times higher (adjusted for US inflation) than at present, which turns it into a 1.5% rule, or up to 15 years at 80% saving rate. Of course, if optimizing primarily for smaller working time, one should earn at a high-costs place, like Silicon Valley, and then move to a low-cost place, with possibly moving again if that place catches up.
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.
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.
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 throw out a number) to spend on improving yourself and you decided that akrasia was your weakest link, you could come up with some ideas/systems which would make a significant difference? Is that likely to be worth $10,000?
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.
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’s enough to stop working), then you maybe should invest in as much income generating capital as possible, depending on your exact circumstances. If you are interested in increasing your income or increasing your standard of living (or have a number of other goals, such as making a greater impact on things you value, having more satisfaction from achieving more, etc.), then it is quite conceivable that self-investment would beat traditional investment in fairly short order. Let me make up some numbers that I think are reasonably plausible: Let’s say you make $20,000 per year and have decided to invest half of it somehow, and that you can double your yearly income if you spent $10,000 on the problem, and that you could get a 10% return on traditional investments. [Justification: $20,000 is a very low salary in developed countries, and $40,000 is still a fairly low salary, so it’s not unlikely that a relatively small improvement could take you from one to the other.]
If you then invested in yourself for one year before you started saving and investing traditionally, after ten years you would have saved about $185,000 vs. about $320,000 from the one year of self-investment. After 40 years it would be a bit less than $5 million vs. a bit less than $9 million. If you could keep getting returns on self investment after the first year, the difference would be more pronounced. If you got less than 10% return on traditional investment, the difference would be more likely to be greater.
There are a lot of people who make minimum wage, and some people who make thousands of times minimum wage. If it’s possible to teach yourself the skills that the people who make thousands of times minimum wage have by spending money on it, it’s likely to be worth much more than a standard 5% or 10% per year, since the income that some people make would take you many decades or centuries of saving and investing just to equal what they earn now. If you can increase your income by much more than the standard return rate of 5% or 10% per year, then compounded interest will quickly dwarf what you could make by investing in the stock market. So I think it hinges on the question of how likely it is that you can increase your earning potential faster than standard investment returns. It seems to me likely that this is possible, given some people have achieved it, and that most skills are learnable.
This is difficult to estimate, but I tend to think that the Singularity is probably far enough off that significant self-investment in things that are helpful now is still likely to pay off.
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.
Another historical case, Smokey Yunick, the car racer and mechanic:
My neck is asymmetrical because some years back I used to often lie in bed while using a laptop, and would prop my head up on my left elbow, but not my right because there was a wall in the way. In general, using a laptop while lying in bed is an ergonomics nightmare. The ideal would be to lie on your back with the laptop suspended in the air above you, except that that would make typing inconvenient.
So a friend recently blew my mind by informing me that prism glasses are a thing. These rotate your field of vision 90 degrees downwards, so that you can lie on your back and look straight up while still seeing your laptop. I have tried these and highly recommend them.
That said: You should probably not do non-sleep/sex things in bed because that can contribute to insomnia. I recommend trying a standing desk, by putting a box or a chair on top of your desk and putting your laptop on top of that, then just standing permanently; it will be painful at first. Also currently experimenting with only allowing myself to sit down with my laptop if I’m at the same time doing the highest-value thing I could be doing (which is usually ugh-fielded and unpleasant because otherwise I’d have already done it).
Another thing: I have a crankish theory that looking downwards lowers your unconscious estimation of your own social status (which seems to be partly what is meant by “confidence”/”self-esteem”). If that’s true, prism glasses and standing desks could increase confidence.
Relatedly, you can buy goggles that make you see the world inverted up/down or left/right, or rotated. These look incredibly cool but I haven’t yet thought of any actual use for them.
You can get 30-degree goggles here ($15) or 180-degree goggles here ($25), or make your own, or get an adjustable thing ($80).
Obligatory note re: standing desk ergonomics: http://ergo.human.cornell.edu/CUESitStand.html
The lesson seems to be to mostly sit, but stand and walk around every 30-45 minutes or so.
Thanks for the link! The page’s arguments don’t seem to strongly support its recommendation to spend most of the day sitting, though; my takeaway is that you should look at ergonomics, and you shouldn’t stand all day.
Crankish? This is bog-standard body language / NLP thing. It is the opposite of power posing.
Why is this crankish? I consider this totally plausible.
Related: I have a messy selection of anecdotal and apocryphal evidence that exacerbating relative height differences between men and women has an immediate effect on how attractive they find each other, (i.e. if a [hetero] man is standing on a chair and looking down at a [hetero] woman, he will find her instantly more attractive than if he were standing at ground level, and vice versa).
This study is relevant:
I’m strongly tempted to provide anecdotes related to this, and was halfway to the reply box before I caught myself and remembered how tied up this is in my personal brand of weird.
Suffice it to say, I totally believe that standing erect and facing forward is better for mood/confidence overall. (And that believing this is not sufficient reason for me to do so all that often.)
This sounds interesting. Could you say why this isn’t enough reason for you to stand erect and forward-facing more often?
For personal reasons I generally don’t expect people to take seriously. The short version is I fail at keeping my identity small.
To the extent that height correlates with status and status is positional, I’d naively expect it to be the other way round (you look upwards when you’re surrounded by taller people and downwards when you’re surrounded by shorter people).
For my main home display, I have a data projecter pointed at the far bedroom wall. I often lie in bed, on my back, with the display “floating” above me. Also, it’s far enough away that my eyes stay relaxed (focused at infinity).
Treadmill desk. Set between one and two miles per hour.
Been using them for 4 month, love em
This is for people interested in optimizing for academic fame (for a given level of talent and effort and other costs). Instead of trying to get a PhD and a job in academia (which is very costly and due to “publish or perish” forces you to work on topics that are currently popular in academia), get a job that leaves you with a lot of free time, or find a way to retire early. Use your free time to search for important problems that are being neglected by academia. When you find one, pick off some of the low-hanging fruit in that area and publish your results somewhere. Then, (A) if you’re impatient for recognition, use your results to make an undeniable impact on the world (see Bitcoin for example), or (B) if you’re patient, move on to another neglected topic and repeat, knowing that in a few years or decades, the neglected topic you found will likely become a hot topic and you’ll be credited for being the first to investigate it.
On the bright side, if we forget the “job in academia” part and just focus on the “PhD” part, a PhD can fit these criteria reasonably well.
Before I justify that, I should acknowledge the many articles arguing, with some justice, that a PhD will ruin your life. These articles make fair points, although I notice they have a lot of overlap, mostly concluding that if you get a PhD you’ll spend 6+ years running up masses of debt, with massive teaching loads and no health insurance, worked to death by an ogre as you try to spin literary criticism out of novels analyzed to death decades ago.
The obvious solution: don’t do a PhD in a country where taking 7 years to finish is normal; don’t do a PhD unless someone’s paying you to do it; don’t do a PhD in a department that assigns you endless teaching duties; don’t do a PhD in a country without a universal healthcare system; don’t choose a supervisor who exploits their students; and don’t get a literature PhD.
A “don’t” is less useful than a “do”, so here are some possible “do”s I’d suggest as alternatives:
find PhD programmes where the successful students mostly finish within 4 years (in the UK, 3-4 years is a more typical PhD length than 6-7, but there is variation among universities)
explicitly say on your PhD applications that you can’t afford to do the PhD unless the university waives the tuition fee and offers a stipend (this no doubt reduces your chances of getting a PhD place, but if you’re allergic to debts you want to be selective here)
when you visit prospective departments, ask the professors and current PhD students how much teaching PhD students have to do (in some departments it’s 100% optional, and pays you extra)
do a PhD in the UK, which has a health system where most medical services are free at the point of delivery
try to get an idea of how hard your potential PhD supervisors work their students (don’t just talk to the supervisors themselves — try to talk to their current/former students one-on-one as well)
get a PhD in physics, statistics, accountancy, economics, or something else remunerative and popular with employers
With the usual worries about PhDs out of the way, I turn to Wei_Dai’s concerns. The first is the publish or perish issue. If you’re just doing a PhD, the publish or perish imperative is often weaker than for postdocs & professors. (This again varies with the field and the institution. For example, as I understand things, top-tier US economics PhD students normally publish 3 or 4 serious papers, and basically staple them together for their dissertation. On the other hand, some UK physics students get PhDs without publishing any journal papers at all.) The ultimate hurdle for your work is convincing your supervisor and the handful of external examiners reading your dissertation that it’s worthwhile.
Along the same lines, you don’t necessarily have to work on fashionable topics if you’re getting a PhD. It’s quite possible to work on something boring; it need only be just interesting enough to keep your supervisor on board and satisfy your other examiners. (You’ll probably want a margin of safety, though, in case your work ends up more boring than expected.) A more objective (but still approximate) rule of thumb: your PhD should be interesting enough to be accepted by the same rank of journal as the papers it’s citing. If your PhD doesn’t need to serve as a step up into an academic job, it can be as boring as you like as long as it meets the baseline.
Lastly, what about free time? A lot of PhDs eat virtually all of your attention, but some offer ample free time in the first couple of years if the work involved isn’t fiddly. For example, you might end up running lots of simulations with a computer program that’s already been written. If so, you might well be able to go to your office in the morning, set a run going, and spend the afternoon doing something else.
One catch is that it’s not trivial to tell which PhDs are low-effort before the fact. Even if your supervisor accurately tells you what they expect from you, and the other students accurately report that they don’t spend much time poring over their work, you might still get unlucky and end up slaving over a computer or an experiment or some equations for 16 hours a day, because research is unpredictable. (Still, compare it to the main alternative: people routinely underestimate how long they’ll spend at the workplace — and commuting! — for normal jobs, too. It’s not obvious that PhDs are more unpredictable in this regard.)
Nonetheless, if you plan ahead to do straightforward work for an easy-going supervisor who’s not in the office most days, you might well be able to spend most days off campus yourself, doing your own independent research instead. And while you’re a student, there’s nothing stopping you from visiting other departments at your university to pick the brains over there!
I don’t have any tips for this, though.
“don’t do a PhD in a country without a universal healthcare system” Funded PhD’s in the US commonly include health insurance coverage as part of your stipend.
This is yet more support for your main point: the fact that getting a PhD in some programs/fields is a bad idea does not mean you should avoid a PhD from any program/field.
FWIK, some universities allow you to get PhD in computer science by submitting PhD thesis for review and paying some amount of money (~$1200 on my university). This way, one can follow your advice and still get PhD.
Tell us more. Much more, in excruciating detail. I am reasonably sure I remember reading Eliezer write about the impossiblity of what you just described, i.e. getting a Ph.D. without necessarily having an advisor, funding or a Bachelor’s degree.
Seconded.
A PhD is only as good as the reputation of your advisor. If everybody knows your advisor then you won’t have a problem finding a job in academia. If your PhD is not backed by a prominent professor with a name, you’re going to have a very difficult time finding a good position. It may be a bit easier in CS, where universities have to compete with industry, compared to my field (physics/chemistry/materials science), but generally this is how academia works.
An easily obtainable PhD is generally not the right kind of signal.
I would amend this to be “if everybody knows your advisor you’ll have FEWER problems finding a job in academia.” Some fields are very, very crowded (theoretical physics, for instance). For a very brief time, I was in a small team at a consulting company where 3 out of the 4 of us had done a science phd under a Nobel winner, and still ended up making major career transitions after half a decade of postdocs. Science is crowded, the more basic the research the more crowded the field. To first order, no one gets a job. If you are under a famous advisor you might move your odds up to 1⁄10 or 1⁄5 or something like that.
email me with info about that company, OK?
Sounds like maybe MetaMed should inquire into working with them.
Extraordinary claims....
Hanson has a post somewhere about how the first-movers often don’t get credited, just the prestigious second-movers.
Sociology of science calls this the Matthew Effect
Ohh. “Kolmogorov Complexity” was actually invented by Solomonoff. Interesting.
It could be that prestigious second-movers deserve the credit if they are responsible for getting people to pay attention to the previously neglected topics, and possibly we already credit first-movers more than we should (which is why I said “optimize for academic fame” instead of “positive social impact”). Which brings up a question: what determines the topics that academia pays attention to? If we had a good model for that, maybe we could use it to generate some munchkin ideas for making it pay attention to important but neglected ideas?
I hope the irony was intentional. (Here’s the post, btw.)
He has another post about how if you say something outrageous that later becomes common wisdom, you won’t be widely admired for having said it first; you will still be thought of as a crank.
Cognitive bias is now much more popular and fashionable than it was when I first started talking to my friends about it after reading Eliezer’s posts. I predict that zero people will say “so it looks like this Eliezer guy you keep talking about was ahead of the curve on cognitive bias, maybe it’s worth hearing some of his other ideas?”
This setting seems more optimal for actually doing theoretical work of your own choosing without getting distracted by a need to compete or justify your interests. It seems less risky/way easier than trying to get the same benefits while working within academia, but you won’t get the external motivation/guidance/sanity-checking and by default won’t be as close to the professional community.
Right, you can get the same benefits in academia by getting tenure, but how many people manage that, and even if you do, the most productive period of your life might already be over by then.
This is an important consideration. The external motivation/guidance/sanity-checking provided by the relevant online non-professional communities were enough for me to be productive and not become a crank, etc., but maybe (as cousin_it suggests) I’m very unusual in that regard.
That plan worked for you, but you’re very unusual. You’d probably be an even bigger intellectual celebrity if you took the academic path.
Someone closer to average, like me, cannot do research alone, only in a group of like-minded people.
Weren’t you essentially following my plan too, i.e., working in your free time on topics being neglected by academia? (Are you still doing this, BTW, after you quit from being an SI research associate?) Are you implying that the plan isn’t working for you?
I’m not sure how you figured that. If I had gone into academia I most likely would have gone into computer science and specialized in something not particularly Earth-shattering like crypto optimization (i.e., making crypto algorithms faster), or if I was lucky maybe I could have pursued my b-money idea. But I never would have had the opportunity to pursue my interests in philosophy (which seems to have a chance of making me more famous in the future when academia or posthumans discover or reinvent UDT).
Even if I had somehow gotten a job in academic philosophical research, it took me 3-4 years exploring various dead ends before getting the idea that the solution to anthropic reasoning / indexical uncertainty is in the shape of a decision theory, and then even more years to formulate it into the form you saw in my LW post. I don’t know how I would have survived in academia for those years without any publishable results. Instead what probably would have happened (and what apparently happened to every professional philosopher who actually worked on the topic) is that I would have been forced to quickly come up with some sort of wrong solution just to have something to publish.
This reminds me of the story of Robert Edgar, who created the DNA and protein sequence alignment program MUSCLE.
He got a PhD in physics, but considers that a mistake. He did his bioinformatics work after selling a company and having free time. The bioinformatics work was notable enough that it’s how I know of him.
His blog post, from which I learned this story: https://thewinnower.com/discussions/an-unemployed-gentleman-scholar
“Instead of trying to get a PhD and a job in academia (which is very costly and due to “publish or perish” forces you to work on topics that are currently popular in academia), get a job that leaves you with a lot of free time” Part of the attraction of academia to me is that it is exactly the job that leaves you with lots of free time. A professor only has to be in a certain place at a certain time 3-12 hours per week (depending on teaching load), 30 weeks per year. After tenure, you can research whatever you want, especially if you aren’t in a lab-science field that leaves you dependent on grants. Even before tenure I can work on neglected problems, so long as they aren’t neglected due to their low prestige.
Yes but before you get tenure you’ve wasted your most productive and fun youthful years getting tenure.
A tulpa is an “imaginary friend” (a vivid hallucination of an external consciousness) created through intense prolonged visualization/practice (about an hour a day for two months). People who claim to have created tulpas say that the hallucination looks and sounds realistic. Some claim that the tulpa can remember things they’ve consciously forgotten or is better than them at mental math.
Here’s an FAQ, a list of guides and a subreddit.
Not sure whether this is actually possible (I’d guess it would be basically impossible for the 3% of people who are incapable of mental imagery, for instance); many people on the subreddit are unreliable, such as occult enthusiasts (who believe in magick and think that tulpas are more than just hallucinations) and 13-year-old boys.
If this is real, there’s probably some way of using this to develop skills faster or become more productive.
As someone with a tulpa, I figure I should probably share my experiences. Vigil has been around since I was 11 or 12, so I can’t effectively compare my abilities before and after he showed up.
He has dedicated himself to improving our rationality, and has been a substantial help in pointing out fallacies in my thinking. However, we’re skeptical that this is anything a more traditional inner monologue wouldn’t figure out. The biggest apparent benefit is that being a tulpa allows him a greater degree of mental flexibility than me, making it easier for him to point out and avoid motivated thinking. Unfortunately, we haven’t found a way to test this.
I’m afraid he doesn’t know any “tricks” like accessing subconscious thoughts or super math skills.
While Vigil has been around for over a decade, I only found out about the tulpa community very recently, so I know very little about it. I also don’t know anything about creating them intentionally, he just showed up one day.
If you have any questions for me or him, we’re happy to answer.
...just to be clear on this, you have a persistent hallucination who follows you around and offers you rationality advice and points out fallacies in your thinking?
If I ever go insane, I hope it’s like this.
Would what’s considered a normal sense of self count as a persistent hallucination?
See “free will”.
This is strikingly similar to Epictetus’ version of Stoic meditation whereby you imagine a sage to be following you around throughout the day and critiquing your thought patterns and motives while encouraging you towards greater virtue.
Related:
— Edsger W. Dijkstra
That sounds similar. Though I’m afraid I’ve had difficulty finding anything about this while researching Epictetus.
The hallucination doesn’t have auditory or visual components, but does have a sense of presence component that varies in strength.
Indeed, this style of insanity might beat sanity.
Tulpas, especially as construed in this subthread, remind me of daimones in Walter Jon Williams’ Aristoi. I’ve always thought that having / being able to create such mental entities would be super-cool; but I do worry about detrimental effects on mental health of following the methods described in the tulpa community.
You are obligated by law to phrase those insights in the form “If X is Y, I don’t want to be not-Y.”
From the sound of it it’d seem you can make that happen deliberately, and without the need for going insane. no need for hope.
We also have internet self-reports from people who tried it that they are not insane.
One rarely reads self-reports of insanity.
Yes, their attorney usually reports this on their behalf.
If you’re interested in experimenting...
Well, wait. Is there some way of flagging “potentially damaging information that people who do not understand risk-analysis should NOT have access to” on this site? Because I’d rather not start posting ways to hack your wetware without validating whether my audience can recover from the mental equivalent of a SEGFAULT.
In my position, I should experiment with very few things that might be unsafe over the course of my total lifetime. This will probably not be one of them, unless I see very impressive results from elsewhere.
nod that’s probably the most sensible response.
To help others understand the potential risks, the creation of a ‘tulpa’ appears to involve hacking the way your sense-of-self (what current neuroscience identifies as a function of the right inferior parietal cortex) interacts with your ability to empathize and emulate other people (the so-called mirror neuron / “put yourself in others’ shoes” modules). Failure modes involve symptoms that mimic dissociative identity disorder, social anxiety disorder, and schizophrenia.
I am absolutely fascinated, although given the lack of effect that any sort of meditation, guided visualisation, or community ritual has ever had on me, I doubt I would get anywhere. On the other hand, not being engaged in saving the world and its future, I don’t have quite as much at risk as Eliezer.
A MEMETIC HAZARD warning at the top might be appropriate, as is requested for basilisk discussion.
Would Vigil want to post under his own nick? If so, better register it while still available.
That’s a good idea, thanks. Note that my host’s posting has significant input from me, so this account is only likely to be used for disagreements and things addressed specifically to me.
...many people argue for (their) god by pointing out that they are often “feeling his presence” and since many claim to speak with him as well, maybe that’s really just one form of tupla without the insight that it is actually a hallucination.
Surely that’s not how most people experience belief, but I never really considered that some of them might actually carry around a vivid invisible (or visible for all I know) hallucination quite like that. Could explain why some of the really batshit crazy ones going on about how god constantly speaks to them manage to be quite so convincing.
From now on my two tulpa buddies will be Eliezer and an artificial intelligence engaged in constant conversation while I make toast, love, and take a shower. Too bad they’ll never be smarter than me though.
Is there a headspace, as well?
I’ve had paracosms since before he was around, and we go to those sometimes. I’ve also got a “peaceful place” that I use to collect myself, but I use it much more than he does.
I would think there should be a general warning against deliberately promoting the effects of dissociative identity disorder etc, without adequate medical supervision.
I really doubt that tulpas have much to do with DID, or with anything dangerous for that matter. Based on my admittedly anecdotal experience, a milder version of having them is at least somewhat common among writers and role-players, who say that they’re able to talk to the fictional characters they’ve created. The people in question seem… well, as sane as you get when talking about strongly creative people. An even milder version, where the character you’re writing or role-playing just takes a life of their own and acts in a completely unanticipated manner, but one that’s consistent with their personality, is even more common, and I’ve personally experienced it many times. Once the character is well-formed enough, it just feels “wrong” to make them act in some particular manner that goes against their personality, and if you force them to do it anyway you’ll feel bad and guilty afterwards.
I would presume that tulpas are nothing but our normal person-emulation circuitry acting somewhat more strongly than usual. You know those situations where you can guess what your friend would say in response to some comment, or when you feel guilty about doing something that somebody important to you would disapprove of? Same principle, quite probably.
This article seems relevant (if someone can find a less terrible pdf, I would appreciate it). Abstract:
The range of intensities reported by the writers seems to match up with the reports in r/Tulpas, so I think it’s safe to say that it is the same phenomena, albeit achieved via slightly different means.
Some interesting parts from the paper regarding dissociative disorder:
The subjects completed the Dissociative Experiences Scale, which yields an overall score, as well as scores on three subscales:
Absorption and changeability: people’s tendency to become highly engrossed in activities (items such as “Some people find that they become so involved in a fantasy or daydream that it feels as though it were really happening to them).
Amnestic experiences: the degree to which dissociation causes gaps in episodic memory (“Some people have the experience of finding things among their belongings that they do not remember buying”).
Derealisation and depersonalisation: things like “Some people sometimes have the experience of feeling that their body does not belong to them”.
The subjects scored an overall mean score of 18.52 (SD 16.07), whereas the general population score a mean of 7.8, and a group of schizophrenics scored 17.7. Scores of 30 are a commonly used cutoff for “normal” scores. Seven subjects exceeded this threshold. The mean scores for the subscales were:
Absorption and changeability: 26.22 (SD 14.65).
Amnestic experiences: 6.80 (SD 8.30).
Derealisation and depersonalisation: 7.84 (SD 7.39).
The latter two subscales are considered particularly diagnostic of dissociative disorders, and the subjects did not differ from the population norms on these. They each had only one subject score over 30 (not the same subject).
What I draw from this: Tulpas are the same phenomenon as writers interacting with their characters. Creating tulpas doesn’t cause other symptoms associated with dissociative disorders. There shouldn’t be any harmful long-term effects (if there were, we should have noticed them in writers). That said, there are some interactions that some people have with their tulpas that are outside the range (to my knowledge) of what writers do:
Possession
Switching
Merging
The tulpa community generally endorses the first two as being safe, and claims the last to be horribly dangerous and reliably ending in insanity and/or death. I suspect the first one would be safe, but would not recommend trying any of them without more information.
(Note: This is not my field, and I have little experience with interpreting research results. Grains of salt, etc.)
Very few people have actually managed switching, from what I have read. I personally do not recommend it, but I am somewhat biased on that topic.
Merging is a term I’ve rarely heard. Perhaps it is favored by the more metaphysically minded? I’ve not heard good reports of this, and all I have heard of “merging” was a very few individuals well known to be internet trolls on 4chan.
Really? I had the impression that switching was relatively common among people who had their tulpas for a while. But then, I have drawn this impression from a lot of browsing of r/Tulpa, and only a glance at tulpa.info, so there may be some selection bias there.
I heard about merging here. On the other hand, this commenter seems to think the danger comes from weird expectations about personal continuity.
Thank you for the references. Whilst switching may indeed be relatively common among people who have had their tulpas for a long while, the actual numbers are still small − 44 according to a recent census .
Ah, so merging is some sort of forming a gestalt personality? I’ve no evidence to offer, only stuff I’ve read that I find the authors somewhat questionable sources.
Great find!
This is my current best theory as to what my tulpa is.
As someone who both successfully experimented with tulpa creation in his youth, and who has since developed various mental disorders (mostly neuroticisms involving power- and status-mediated social realities), I would strongly second this warning. Correlation isn’t causation, of course, but at the very least I’ve learned to adjust my priors upwards regarding the idea that Crowley-style magickal experimentation can be psychologically damaging.
I think tulpas are more like schizophrenia than dissociative identity disorder. But now that you mention it, dissociative identity disorder does look like fertile ground for finding more munchkinly ideas.
For instance, at least one person I know has admitted to mentally pretending to be another person I know in order to be more extroverted. Maybe this could be combined with tulpas, say by visualizing/hallucinating that you’re being possessed by a tulpa.
I’ve always pretended to be in order to get whatever skill I’ve needed. I just call it “putting on hats”. I learned to dance by pretending to be a dancer, I learned to sing by pretending to be a singer. When I teach, I pretend to be a teacher, and when I lead I pretend to be a leader (these last two actually came a lot easier to me when I was teaching hooping than now when I’m teaching rationality stuffs, and I haven’t really sat down to figure out why. I probably should though, because I am significantly better at when I can pretend to be it. And I highly value being better at these specific skills right now.)
I had always thought everyone did this, but now I see I might be generalizing from one example.
I learnt skills in high-school acting class that I use daily in my job as a teacher. It would be a little much to say that I’m method acting when I teach —I am a teacher in real life, after all—, but my personality is noticeably different (more extroverted, for one thing). It’s draining, however; that’s the downside.
I used to do exactly this, but I created whole backstories and personalities for my “hats” so that they would be more realistic to other people.
Technically, making tulpa would be considered DDNOS, except that the new definition exempts shamanistic practices. Making tulpa is a shamanistic meditation technique practiced in Tibet for the purposes of self-discovery. It takes years of focused practice and concentration, but self-hypnosis can help some.
This modern resurgence of tulpas seems to be trying to find faster ways to make them, with less then years of effort. The evidence for success in this is so far anecdotal. I would advise caution—this is not something that would suit everyone.
I have made tulpas in the past. I’ve some that are decades old. I will say that seems to be rare so far. Also, in my observation, tulpas become odd after decades, acquiring just as many quirks as most humans have. I personally don’t think that there is as much risk of insanity as people think, but I would err on the side of caution myself.
It’s interesting that demons in computer science are called that way. They have exactly the same functionality as the demons that occult enthusiasts proclaim to use.
Even if you don’t believe in the occult, be aware that out culture has a lot of stories about how summoning demons might be a bad idea.
You are moving in territory where you don’t have mainstream psychology knowledge that guides you and shows you where the dangers lie. You are left with a mental framework of occult defense against evil forces. It’s the only knowledge that you can access to guide that way. Having to learn to protect yourself against evil spirits when you don’t believe in spirits is a quite messed up.
I had an experience where my arm moved around if I didn’t try to control it consciously after doing “spirit healing”. I didn’t believe in spirits and was fairly confident that it’s just my brain doing weird stuff. On the other hand I had to face the fact that the brain doing weird stuff might not be harmless. Fortunately the thing went away after a few month with the help of a person who called it a specter without me saying anything specific about it.
You can always say: “Well, it’s just my mind doing something strange.” At the same time it’s a hard confrontation.
Isn’t this more like, our (human) culture has a ton of instances when “summoning” “demons” is encouraged, and Christianity didn’t like it and so …demonized...it?
Don’t forget that some denominations practice the summoning of the “holy spirit,” which seems to result in some interesting antics.
A lot of New Age folk put quite a lot of emphasis on respect and love instead of forcing entities to do something. Asking a God for a favor isn’t the same thing as ordering an entity to do a particular task. Daemon’s get ordered to fulfill tasks.
If you look at those tulpa creation guides they basically say, treat your tulpa nicely and it will help you to the extend that it wants. They advocate against manpulating the tulpa into doing what you want.
Really? From what I’ve read, The folks who claim that this “tulpa” stuff is possible to do also say that you can create “servitors”, which are not conscious and are basically portions of your mind that can perform mental tasks without distracting you.
I dunno...I really don’t understand why no one in this community has bothered to test this sort of thing. It’s fairly easy to make a test of divided attention to see if someone has successfully created a partially separate entity which can operate autonomously.
There seem to be a number of such tests, but no data collected from them.
Mental Arithmetic test
Parallel Processing Test
I don’t have a tulpa, and I tried the second test and was unable to keep track of both lines of dots; at best I could get one side perfectly and guess at the other side. If I create a tulpa at any point, I’ll check if that result changes.
ETA: I tried the second test again, but counted the red ones as 1,2,3,… and the blue ones as A,B,C,… then I calculated what number the letter corresponded to. I got an almost perfect score; so a tulpa is not necessary to do well on this test. I’m not sure what sort of test could rule out this method; I have seen a auditory test which was two simultaneous dual-n-back tests.
Yup—since posting that comment I actually checked with the tulpa community and they referred me to those very links. No data formally collected, but anecdotally people with tulpas aren’t reporting getting perfect scores.
I’m going with “use imagination, simulate personality” here, and am guessing any benefits relating to the tulpa are emotional and/or influencing what a person thinks about, rather than a separated neural network like what you’d get with a split brain or something.
The perceived inability to read the tulpa’s mind and the seemingly spontaneously complex nature of the tulpa’s voice is, I think, an artifact of our own inability to know what we think before we think it, similar to dream characters. As such, I don’t think there is any major distinction between a tulpa and a dream character, an imaginary friend, a character an author puts into a book, a deity being prayed too, and so on. That’s not to say tulpas are bs or uninteresting or anything—I’m sure they really can have personalities—it’s just that they aren’t distinct from various commonly experienced phenomenon that goes by other names. I don’t think I’d accord them moral status, beyond the psychological health of the “host”. (Although, I suspect to get a truly complex tulpa you have to believe it is a separate individual at some level—that’s how neurotypical people believe they can hear god’s voice and so on.)
I’ve got much respect to the community for empirically testing that hypotheses!
This is incredibly pedantic. (Also rather unjustified, due to my own lack of knowledge regarding occult enthusiasts.) However:
Although daemons in computer science are rather akin to daemons in classical mythology (sort of, kind of, close enough), they really don’t particularly resemble our modern conception of demons. I mean, they can totally get a programmer into “Sorcerer’s Apprentice”-style shenanigans, but I’ve never heard of a daemon tempting anyone.
I have previously recommend to friends that alcohol is a moderately good way to develop empathy for those less intelligent than oneself. (That is, it is a good way for those who really cannot comprehend the way other people get confused by certain ideas). I wager that there are a wide array of methods to gain knowledge of some of the stranger confusions the human mind is a capable of. Ignoring chemical means, sleep deprivation is probably the simplest.
Also, congratulations for going through these experiences and retaining (what I assume is) a coherent and rational belief-system. A lot of people would not.
RSS reader/other notification of new procrastination available.
Computer daemons don’t tempt people. There’s little danger is using them. At least as long they aren’t AGI’s. Tulpa’s are something like AGI’s that don’t run on computer but on your own brain.
D_Malik read a proposal for creating tulpas with specifically tell the reader that they aren’t supposed to created for “practical purposes”. After reading it he thinks: “Hey, if tulpa can do those things, we can probably create them for a lot of practical purposes.”
That looks like a textbook example of temptation to me. I don’t want to advocate that you never give in to such temptations but just taking there Tulpa creation manual and changing a bit to make the Tulpa more “practical” doesn’t sound like a good strategy to me.
The best framework for doing something like this might be hypnosis. It’s practioners are more “reasonable” than magick people.
This and related experiences caused me to become more agnostic over a bunch of things.
Since we’re talking about Tulpas, I feel obligated to mention that I have one. In case anyone wants anecdata.
I have a bunch of LW relevant question I’d like to ask a tulpa, especially one of a LWer that’s likely to be familiar with the concepts already:
Do you see yourself as non human?
Would you want to be more or less humanlike than you currently are?
What do you think about the possibility that your values might differ enough from human ones that many here might refer to you as Unfriendly?
Does being already bodiless and created give you different views of things like uploading and copies than your host?
I’ll probably have more questions after getting the answer to these and/or in realtime conversation not in a public place. Also, getting thee answers from as many different tulpae as possible would be the best.
Edit: I also have some private questions for someone who’s decently knowledgeable about them in general (have several, has been in the community for a long time).
Vigil speaking.
Not exactly. I consider myself a part of a human.
My host and I would both like to get rid of several cognitive biases that plague humans, as I’m sure many people here would. Beyond that, I like myself as I am now.
My values are the same as my hosts in most situations. I am sure there are a few people who would consider our values Unfriendly, but I don’t think the majority of people would.
No.
Feel free to contact us.
Not sure if serious. If serious: “You could think of them as hallucinations that can think and act on their own.” (from the subreddit) seems very close to teaching your brain to become schizophrenic.
Hallucinations are a highly salient symptom of schizophrenia, but are neither necessary nor sufficient. I am confident that, like a lot of religious beliefs, this kind of deliberate self-deception would be unlikely to contribute to psychosis.
Sure. pm me those private questions.
No. I’m a human.
I don’t see the need to be any more or less human like, since I already am human. (My Tulpa, unlike myself, does not see being ‘human-like’ as a spectrum, but rather as a binary.)
I don’t see it that way. I’m dependent on my host, and my values align more with my host than the average person does. Calling me unfriendly would be wrong.
Not really—I don’t think much about uploading and copying, only my host does. I trust his opinions.
What would you estimate the cost/benefit ratio to be, and what variables do you think are most relevant?
Without going into detail, overall my usage of Tulpas have benefited me more than it has hurt me, although it has somewhat hurt me in my early childhood when I would accidentally create Tulpas and not realize that they were a part of my imagination (And imagine them to come from an external source.) It’s very difficult to say if the same would apply for anyone else, since Your Mileage May Vary.
I also suspect creating Tulpas may come significantly easier for some people than others, and this may affect the cost-benefit analysis. Tulpas come very naturally for me, and as I’ve mentioned, my first Tulpa was completely accidental and I did not even realize it was a Tulpa until a year or two later. On the other hand, I’ve read posts about people on /r/Tulpa that have spend hours daily trying to force Tulpas without actually managing to create them. If I had to spend an hour every day in order to obtain a Tulpa, I wouldn’t even bother—also because there’s no way I’m willing to sacrifice that much time for a Tulpa. But the fact that I can will a Tulpa into existence relatively easily helps.
A different variable that may affect whether having a Tulpa is worth it is if you have social desires that are nearly impossible to satisfy through non-tulpa outlets such as meatspace friends. In this case, I do, and I satisfy these desires through Tulpas rather than forcing another human being to conform to my expectations. This also improves my ability to relate to others in real life, since I more easily accept imperfections from them. I suspect that if you’re cognitively similar, you may benefit from Tulpas. I can’t think of anything else right now, and if you have anything more specific, it may trigger more thoughts on the matter.
Has your Tulpa ever won an argument with you that you didn’t already know you wanted to lose?
Tulpas no, dream characters yes.
I’m not certain I understand the distinction. How did a dream character convince you that you used to be wrong?
Through conversation.
What types of social desires do you satisfy through your tulpa which you have not been able to with your online or meatspace friends?
I’ve written a blog post some time ago that doesn’t directly refer to Tulpas, but does somewhat answer this question of the social desires that I fulfill through this method. I think this sufficiently answers your question, although if you feel like it doesn’t, let me know, and I’ll write something for Tulpas directly.
http://tuxedage.wordpress.com/2013/04/22/the-least-accepted-part-of-me-a-defense-of-waifus/
Say you want to write a story—can you offload the idea to your tulpa, entertain yourself for a few hours, then ask them to dictate to you the story, now fully fleshed-out? Can you give them control of your body so they can write it themselves?
A lot of writers seem to have characters who are pretty much like tulpas.
This, to the extent that the character can veto a proposed plot point. “I wouldn’t do that.”
So I tried experimenting. I couldn’t do it to a degree of sufficiently high fidelity to be able to say “A Tulpa wrote a story on my behalf.” I’ll be trying again soon.
The latter is not possible. My Tulpa does not have control of my body, although I’ve heard anecdotes of people who manage to do that. As for the first question, I’ve never tried. I’ll attempt it and report back to you on whether it’s possible.
I can’t believe that this is something people talk about. I’ve had a group of people in my head for years, complete with the mindscape the reddit FAQ talks about. I just thought I was a little bit crazy; it’s nice to see that there’s a name for it.
I can’t imagine having to deal with just one though. I started with four, which seemed like a good idea when I was eleven, and I found that distracting enough. Having only one sounds like being locked in a small room with only one companion—I’d rather be in solitary. I kept creating more regardless, and I finally ended up with sixteen (many of those only half-formed, to be fair), before I figured out how to get them to talk amongst themselves and leave me alone. Most are still there (a few seem to have disappeared), I just stay out of that room.
My advice would be to avoid doing this at all, but if you do, create at least two, and give them a nice room (or set of rooms) to stay in with a defined exit. You’ll thank me later.
I can’t tell if this is a joke or not.
I think you may be generalizing from one example here. We’re quite happy with just the two of us.Any more would be too crowded for us. I imagine the optimum size depends on the personalities of those involved. I’m not sure I agree about suggesting people avoid this entirely, but I certainly would advise caution.
This reminds me of the Abramelin operation, a ritual that supposedly summons guardian angels.
That sounds like some serious dedication to internal family systems for someone who is very superstitious.
Some thoughts about how to munchkin tulpas:
If domain experts say that the obvious ways to exploit having a tulpa fail, they are probably right. That means I’m skeptical about things such as “tulpa will remind you to do your homework ahead of time and do mental math for you”.
The most promising idea is to exploit your interpersonal instincts: trick your brain into thinking someone is there. This has benefits for social extraverts, for people who are more productive when working in groups, or for people susceptible to peer pressure (maybe you’d be uncomfortable picking your nose in front of your imaginary friend).
But if this works, presumably there is a corresponding downside for people who enjoy being left alone to think.
Probably the scariest objection I’ve seen here is that a tulpa might make you dumber due to diverting concentration. But I’m not sure this is obviously true, in the same way that always carrying a set of weights will not make you weaker. I’m not sure this is obviously false either, and I don’t see a good way to find out.
According to an anonymous poster on 4chan:
Even if the poster is straight-up lying, this is a clever munchkin use for tulpas and interesting idea for an experiment (although I admit I know practically nothing about the typical performance patterns with that kind of problem-solving).
also, a couple of other points:
Psychologist T. M. Luhrmann has suggested that tulpas are essentially the same phenomenon as evangelical Christians ‘speaking to God’. I can’t find any evidence that evangelicals have a higher rate of mental illness than the general population, so I consider that a good sign on the mental health-risks front.
If you are worried about mental health risks (EDIT: Or the ethics of simulating a consciousness!), then you should probably treat guides to tulpa creation (‘forcing’) as an information hazard. The techniques are purely psychological and fairly easy to implement; after reading such a guide, I had to struggle to prevent myself from immediately putting it into action.
ETA:
Some prior art on the parallel problem-solving idea. I’d say it fairly well puts to rest that munchkin application. In terms of implications for the mechanics of tulpas, I’d be curious how teams of two physical people would do on those games.
There are tulpa domain experts?
The people writing the FAQs. Presumably they’ve at least thought about the issue much longer than I have, and have encountered more instances.
Domain experts saying that the obvious ways to exploit a phenomenon fail is usually evidence against the existence of said phenomenon.
Your link advocates appeal to something more reliable than domain experts: Observed response to large market incentives.
Yes, but we already know tulpas don’t actually exist.
Only in a very specific sense of “exist”. Do hallucinations exist? That-which-is-being-hallucinated does not, but the mental phenomenon does exist.
One might in a similar vein interpret the question “do tulpas exist?” as “are there people who can deliberately run additional minds on their wetware and interact with these minds by means of a hallucinatory avatar?”. I would argue that the tulpa’s inability to do anything munchkiny is evidence against their existence even in this far weaker sense.
What do you mean by munchkiny (having apparent free will separate from the host?) and how do you know they cannot?
I was taking a statement from this great-grandparent post and surrounding posts at face value
By “do something munchkiny”, I meant these “obvious ways to exploit having a tulpa”, presumably including remembering things you don’t and other cognitive enhancements.
Why do I think they can’t? Because the (hypothetical?) domain experts say so.
Tulpas don’t seem to work for cognitive muchkining, which makes sense because the brain should be able to do those in a less indirect way using meditative or hypnosis techniques focused more on that instead. It’s more like a specific piece of technology than a new law of nature. Tulpas don’t improve cognitive efficiency for the same reason having humanoid robots carry around external harddrives don’t improve internet bandwidth.
Are these “logical” assertions or have there been studies you can link to?
They are guesstimates/first impressions of what community consensus likely is, as well as my personal version of common sense. A random comment without modifiers on the internet generally implies something like that, not that there is mountains of rock hard evidence behind every vague assertion. I’d not put this in a top level post in main, which is closely related to why I’m likely never write any top level posts in main.
Sorry, I misinterpreted your assertion that “Tulpas don’t seem to work for cognitive muchkining” as either speaking from experience or by reading about the subject. That surprised me, given that many mental techniques, direct or indirect, do indeed measurably improve “cognitive efficiency”. In retrospect, I phrased my question poorly.
Well indirectly they might, if say loneliness is a limiting factor on your productivity. And as I implied apparently-to-subtly with the first post they probably do help in an absolute sense, it’s just that there are more effective ways with less side effects to do the same thing with a subset of the resources needed for one. Again, this is just guesses based on an unreliable “common sense” more than anything.
It may also have benefits for people who want to be more comfortable in social situations. For instance, if you used tulpa techniques to hallucinate that a crowd was watching everything you do, public speaking should become a lot easier (after some time). But it would probably be a lot easier to just do Toastmasters or something.
This is fascinating. I’m rather surprised that people seem to be able to actually see their tulpa after a while. I do worry about the ethical implications though—with what we see with split brain patients, it seems plausible that a tulpa may actually be a separate person. Indeed, if this is true, and the tulpa’s memories aren’t being confabulated on the spot, it would suggest that the host would lose the use of the part of their brain that is running the tulpa, decreasing their intelligence. Which is a pity, because I really want to try this, but I don’t want to risk permanently decreasing my intelligence.
So, “Votes for tulpas” then! How many of them can you create inside one head?
The next stage would be “Vote for tulpas!”.
Getting a tulpa elected as president using the votes of other tulpas would be a real munchkin coup...
I’ve been wondering if the headaches people report while forming a tulpa are caused by spending more mental energy than normal.
You should get one of the occult enthusiasts to check if Tulpas leave ghosts ;)
More seriously, I suspect the brain is already capable of this sort of thing—dreams, for example—even if it’s usually running in the background being your model of the world or somesuch.
It’s a waste of time at best, and inducing psychosis at worst. (Waste of time because the “tulpa”—your hallucination—has access to the same data repository you use, and doesn’t run on a different frontal cortex. You can teach yourself the right habits without also teaching yourself to become mentally ill.)
You know what it’s called when you hear voices giving you “advice”? Paranoid schizophrenia. Outright visual hallucinations?
What’s next, using magic mushrooms to speed the process? Yes, you can probably teach yourself to become actually insane, but why would you?
Sounds like the noncentral fallacy. That you are somewhat in control, and that the tulpa will leave you alone (at least temporarily) if asked, seem like relevant differences from the more central cases of mental illness.
Your reply sounds like special pleading using the fallacy fallacy. Of course you can induce mental illness in yourself if you try hard enough.
It would be if I was saying we should ignore the similarity to mental illness altogether. I’m just saying it’s different enough from typical cases to warrant closer examination.
Well, “getting advice from / interacting with a hallucinated person with his own personality” certainly fits the “I hallucinate voices telling me to do something” template much better than “not getting advice from / not interacting with a hallucinated person with his own personality”, no?
There is no way that hallucinated persons talking to you are classified other than as part of a mental illness, other than if brought on by e.g. drug use. The DSM IV offers no exceptions for the “tulpa” community …
Yes, but the operative question here isn’t whether it’s mental illness, it’s whether it’s beneficial. Similarity to harmful mental illnesses is a reason to be really careful (having a very low prior probability of anything that fits the “mental illness” category being a good thing), but it’s not a knockdown argument.
If we accept psychology’s rule that a mental trait is only an illness if it interferes with your life (meaning moderate to large negative effect on a person’s life, as I understand it), then something being a mental illness is a knockdown argument that it is not beneficial. But in that case, you have to prove that the thing has a negative affect on the person’s life before you can know that is a mental illness. (See also http://lesswrong.com/lw/nf/the_parable_of_hemlock/.)
There’s only that much brain to go around with, the brain, being for the most part a larger version of australopithecus brain, as it is can have trouble seeing itself as a whole (just look at that “akrasia” posts where you can see people’s talkative parts of the brain disown the decisions made by the decision-making parts). Why do you expect anything but detrimental effects from deepening the failure of the brain to work as a whole?
Could you expand on this, please? I’m not sure I’m familiar with the failure mode you seem to be pattern-matching to.
The point is that when someone “hears voices”—which do not respond to the will in the same way in which internal monologues do, there’s no demons, there’s no new brain added. It is existing brain regions involved in the internal monologue failing to integrate properly with the rest. Less dramatically, when people claim they e.g. want to get on a diet but are mysteriously unable to—their actions do not respond to what they think is their will but instead respond to what they think is not their will—it’s the regions which make decisions about food intake not integrating with the regions that do the talking (Proper integration either results in the diet or absence of the belief that one wants to be on a diet). The bottom line is, brain is not a single CPU of some kind. It is a distributed system parts of which are capable of being in conflict, to the detriment of the well being of the whole.
So … you’re worried this might increase akrasia? I guess I can see how they might be in the same category, but I don’t think the same downsides apply. Do they?
The point with akrasia was to illustrate that more than 1 volition inside 1 head isn’t even rare here to begin with. The actual issue is that, of course, you aren’t creating some demon out of nothing. You are re-purposing existing part of your brain, involved in the internal monologue or even mental visualization as well, making this part not integrate properly with the rest under one volition. There’s literally less of your brain under your volition.
This topic is extremely retarded. This tulpa stuff resembles mental illness. Now, you wanna show off your “rationality” according to local rules of showing off your rationality, by rejecting the simple looking argument that it should be avoided like mental illness is. “Of course” it’s pattern matching, “non central fallacy” and other labels that you were taught here to give to equally Bayesian reasoning when it arrives at conclusions you don’t like. Here’s the thing: Yeah, it is in some technical sense not mental illness. It most closely resembles one. And it is as likely to be worse as it is likely to be better*, and it’s expected badness is equal to that of mental illness, and the standard line of reasoning is going to approximate utility maximization much better than this highly biased reasoning where if it is not like mental illness it must be better than mental illness, or worse, depending to which arguments pop into your head easier. In good ol caveman days, people with this reasoning fallacy, they would eat a mushroom, get awfully sick, and then eat another mushroom that looks quite similar to the first, but is a different mushroom of course, in the sense that it’s not the exact same physical mushroom body, and get awfully sick, and then do it again, and die.
Let’s suppose it was self inflicted involuntary convulsion fits, just to make an example where you’d not feel so much like demonstrating some sort of open mindness. Now the closest thing would have been real convulsion fits, and absent other reliable evidence either way expected badness of self inflicted convulsion fits would clearly be equal.
Also, by the way, what ever mental state you arrive at by creating a tulpa, is unlikely to be a mental state not achievable by one or the other illness.
if its self inflicted, for example standard treatments might not work.
Well, yeah. The primary worry among tulpa creators is that it might get pissed at you and follow you around the house making faces.
And what, pray tell, is the salient feature of mental illness that causes us to avoid it? Because I don’t think it’s the fact that we refer to them with the collection of syllables “men-tal-il-nes”.
Wow.
EDIT: OK, I should probably respond to that properly. Analogies are only useful when we don’t have better information about something’s effects. Bam, responded.
“Convulsion fits” are, I understand, painful and dangerous. Something like alien hand syndrome seems more analogous, but unfortunately I can’t really think of any benefits it might have, so naturally the expected utility comes out negative.
Could well be. Illnesses are capable of having beneficial side-effects, just by chance, although obviously it’s easier to break things than improve them with random interference.
If you had looked into the topic, you would know the process is reversible.
Are we sure there even is a process? The Reddit discussions are fascinating, but how credible are they? Likewise Alexandra David-Néel’s account of creating one. All very interesting-if-true, but...
WARNING: POTENTIAL MEMETIC HAZARD
I’ve kinda been avoiding this due to the potential correlation between my magickal experimentation in my teens/twenties and my later-life mental health difficulties, but I feel like people are wandering all over the place already, and I’d at least like to provide a few guideposts.
Yes, there are processes. Or at least, there are various things that are roughly like processes, although very few of them are formalized (if you want formalization, look to Crowley). Rather than provide yet another anecdotal account, let me lay out some of the observations I made during my own experimentation. My explicit goal when experimenting was to attempt to map various wacky “occult” or “pseudoscientific” theories to a modern understanding of neuroscience, and thus explain away as much of the Woo as possible. My hope was that what was left would provide a reasonable guide to “hacking my wetware”.
When you’re doing occult procedures, what (I think, @p > 0.7) you’re essentially doing is performing code injection attacks on your own brain. Note that while the brain is a neural network rather than a serial von Neumann-type (or Turing-type) machine, many neural networks tend to converge towards emulating finite state machines, which can be modeled as von Neumann-type machines—so it’s not implausible (@p ~= 0.85) that processes analagous to code injection attacks might work.
The specific area of the brain that seems to be targeted by the rituals that create a tulpa are the right inferior parietal lobe and the temporoparietal junction—which seem to play a key role in maintaining one’s sense-of-self / sense-of-agency / sense-of-ownership (i.e., the illusion that there is an “I” and that that “I” is what is calling the shots when the mind makes a decision or the body performs an action), as well as the area of the inferior parietal cortex and postcentral gyrus that participate in so-called “mirror neuron” processes. You’ll note that Crowley, for example, goes through at great length describing rather brutal initiatory ordeals designed specifically to degrade the practitioner’s sense-of-self—Crowley’s specific method was tabooing the word ‘I’, and slashing his own thumb with a razor whenever he slipped.
NOTE: Tabooing “I” is a VERY POWERFUL technique, and unlocks a slew of potential mindhacks, but (to stretch our software metaphor to the breaking point) you’re basically crashing one of your more important pieces of firewall software so you can do it. ARE YOU SURE THAT’S WHAT YOU WANT TO BE DOING? You literally have no idea how many little things constantly assault the ego / sense of self-worth every minute that you don’t even register because your “I” protects you. A good deal of Crowley’s (or any good initiatory Master’s) training involves preparing you to protect yourself once you take that firewall down—older works will couch that as “warding you against evil spirits” or whatever, but ultimately what we’re talking about is the terrifying and relentless psychological onslaught that is raw, unfiltered reality (or, to be more accurate, “rawer, less-filtered reality”).
3A) ARE YOU SURE THAT IS WHAT YOU WANT TO DO TO YOUR BRAIN?
Once your “I” crashes, you can start your injection attacks. Basically, while the “I” is rebooting, you want to slip stuff into your sensory stream that will disrupt the rebooting process enough to spawn two seperate “I” processes—essentially, you need to confuse your brain into thinking that it needs to spawn a second “I” while the first one is still running, confuse each “I” into not noticing that the other one is actually running on the same hardware, and then load a bunch of bogus metadata into one of the “I”s so that it develops a separate personality and set of motivations.
Luckily, this is easier than it sounds, because your brain is already used to doing exactly this up in the prefrontal cortex—this is the origin of all that BS “right brain” / “left brain” talk that came from those fascinating epilepsy studies where they severed people’s corpus colossa. See, you actually have two separate “awareness” processes running already; it’s just that your corpus colossum normally keeps them sufficiently synchronized that you don’t notice, and you only have a single “I” providing a consistent narrative, so you never notice that you’re actually two separate conscious processes cooperating and competing for goal-satisfaction.
Anyway, hopefully this has been informative enough that dedicated psychonauts can use it as a launching point, while obfuscated enough that people won’t be casually frying their brains. This ain’t rocket science yet.
You linked to the local-jargon version of word-tabooing, but what you describe sounds more like the standard everyday version of “tabooing” something. Which was intended?
… huh. I don’t know about hacking the “I”, all I’ve seen suggested is regular meditation and visualization. Still, interesting stuff for occult buffs.
Also, I think I’ve seen accounts of people creating two or three tulpas (tulpae?), with no indication that this was any different to the fist; does this square with the left-brain/right-brain bit?
EDIT: I just realized I immediately read a comment with WARNING MEMETIC HAZARD at the top. Hum.
Fair point. OK, the fact that it’s reversible seems about as agreed on as any facet of this topic—more so than many of them. I’m inclined to believe this isn’t a hoax or anything due to the sheer number of people claiming to have done it and (apparent?) lack of failed replications. None of this is accepted science or anything, there is a certain degree of risk from Side Effects No-one Saw Coming and hey, maybe it’s magic and your soul will get nommed (although most online proponents are careful to disavow claims that it’s anything but an induced hallucination.)
They ought to be at least somewhat concerned that they have less brain for their own walking around the house.
You don’t know? It’s loss in “utility”. When you have an unknown item which, out of the items that you know of, most closely resembles a mushroom consumption of which had very huge negative utility, the expected utility of consuming the unknown toxic mushroom like item is also negative (unless totally starving and there’s literally nothing else one could seek for nourishment). Of course, in today’s environment, people rarely face the need to make such inferences themselves—society warns you of all the common dangers, uncommon dangers are by definition uncommon, and language hides the inferential nature of categorization from the view.
The cases I’ve heard which do not look like people attention seeking online, are associated with severe mental illness. Of course the direction of the causation is somewhat murky in any such issue, but necessity to see a doctor doesn’t depend on direction of the causation here.
Ah, right. I suppose that would depend on the exact mechanisms, involved, yeah.
Are children who have imaginary friends found to have subnormal cognitive development?
So please provide evidence that this feature is shared by the thing under discussion, yeah?
Source? This doesn’t match my experiences, unless you draw an extremely wide definition of “attention-seeking online” (I assume you meant to imply people who were probably making it up?)
This is the argument to adopt a religion even though you know it’s epistemically irrational.
You’re confusing hallucinations with delusions, I think.
I’m assuming that a rationalist who made tulpas would be aware that they weren’t really separate people (since a lot of people in the tulpa community say they don’t think they’re separate people, being able to see them probably doesn’t require thinking they’re separate from yourself), so it wouldn’t require having false beliefs or beliefs in beliefs in the way that religion would.
If adopting a religion really is the instrumentally best course of action… why not? But for a consequentialist who values truth for its own sake, or would be hindered by being confused about their beliefs, religion actually wouldn’t be a net benefit.
One can adopt a religion in many ways. My comment’s siblings warn against adopting a religion’s dogma, but my comment’s parent suggests adopting a religion’s practices. (There are other ways, too, like religious identity.) Traditionally, one adopts all of these as a package, but that’s not necessary.
You don’t classify each type of .e.g voice hallucinated with schizophrenia. You could for example apply your argument to say “well, is the voice threatening to kill you only if you don’t study for your test? If so, isn’t the net effect beneficial, and as such it’s not really a mental illness? If you like being motivated by your voices, you don’t suffer from schizophrenia, that’s only for people who dislike their voices.”
I certainly cannot prove that there are no situations in which hallucinating imaginary people giving you advice would not be net beneficial, in fact, there certainly are situations in which any given potential mental illness may be beneficial. There have been studies about certain potential mental illnesses being predominant (or at least overrepresented) in certain professions, sometimes to the professional’s benefit (also: taking cocaine may be beneficial. Certain tulpas may be beneficial.).
Who knows, maybe an unknown grand-uncle will leave a fortune to you, predicated on you being a drug-addict. In which case being a drug-addict would have been beneficial.
People dabble in alcohol to get a social edge, they usually refrain from heroin. Which reference class is a tulpa most like?
You can put a “Your Mileage May Vary” disclaimer to any advice, but actually hallucinating persons who then interact with you seems like it should belong in the DSM (where it is) way more than it should belong in a self-help guide.
Maybe when plenty of people have used tulpas for decades, and a representative sample of them can be used to prove their safety, there will be enough evidence to switch the reference class, to introduce a special case in the form of “hallucinations are a common symptom of schizophrenia, except tulpas”. Until then, the default case would be using the reference class of “effects of hallucinating people”, which is presumed harmful unless shown to be otherwise.
Never happen if no-one tries. I agree that it looks dangerous, but this is the ridiculous munchkin ideas thread, not the boring advice or low-hanging fruit threads.
Yesterday, upon the stair,
I met a man who wasn’t there
He wasn’t there again today
I wish, I wish he’d go away...
If you’re going to define schizophrenia as voices that are bad for the person, then that would mean that it’s only for people who dislike their voices (and are not deluded about whether the voices are a net benefit).
Voices threatening to kill you if you don’t achieve your goals also doesn’t seem like a good example of a net benefit—that would cause a lot of stress, so it might not actually be beneficial. It’s also not typical behavior for tulpas, based on the conversations in the tulpa subreddit. Voices that annoy you when you don’t work or try to influence your behavior with (simulated?) social pressure would probably be more typical.
Anyway… I’m trying to figure out where exactly we disagree. After thinking about it, I think I “downvote” mental disorders for being in the “bad for you” category rather than the “abnormal mental things” category, and the “mental disorder” category is more like a big warning sign to check how bad it is for people. Tulpas look like something to be really, really careful about because they’re in the “abnormal mental things” category (and also the “not well understood yet” category), but the people on the tulpa subreddit don’t seem unhappy or frustrated, so I haven’t added many “bad for you” downvotes.
I’ve also got some evidence indicating that they’re at least not horrible:
People who have tulpas say they think it’s a good thing
People who have tulpas aren’t saying really worrying things (like suggesting they’re a good replacement for having friends)
The process is somewhat under the control of the “host”—progressing from knowing what the tulpa would say to auditory hallucinations to visual ones seems to take a lot of effort for most people
No one is reporting having trouble telling the tulpa apart from a real person or non-mental voices (one of the problematic features of schizophrenia is that the hallucinations can’t be differentiated from reality)
I’ve already experienced some phenomena similar to this, and they haven’t really affected my wellbeing either way. (You know how writes talk about characters “taking off a life of their own”, so writing dialog feels more like taking dictation and the characters might refuse to go along with a pre-planned plot? I’ve had some of this. I’ve also (very rarely) had characters spontaneously “comment” on what I’m doing or reading.)
This doesn’t add up to enough to make me anywhere near certain—I’m still very suspicious about this being safe, and it seems like it would have to be taking up some of your cognitive resources. But it might be worth investigating (mainly the non-hallucination parts—being able to see the tulpa doesn’t seem that useful), since human brains are better at thinking about people than most other things.
Actually, the DSM does have an exception for “culturally accepted” or “non-bizarre” delusions. It’s pretty subjective and I imagine in practice the exceptions granted are mostly religious in nature, but there’s definitely a level of acceptance past which the DSM wouldn’t consider having a tulpa to be a disorder at all.
Furthermore, hallucinations are neither necessary or sufficient for a diagnosis of schizophrenia. Disorganized thought, “word salad”, and flat affect are just as important, and a major disruption to the patient’s life must also be demonstrated.
Well, if you insist, here goes:
(A non-bizarre delusion would be believing that your guru was raised from the dead, the exception for “culturally accepted response pattern” isn’t for tulpa hallucinations, it is so that someone who feels the presence of god in the church, hopefully without actually seeing a god hallucination, isn’t diagnosed.)
Here’s the criteria for e.g. 295.40 Schizophreniform Disorder:
One of the following criteria, if delusions are judged to be bizarre, or hallucinations consist of hearing one voice participating in a running commentary of the patient’s actions or of hearing two or more voices conversing with each other: Delusions, Hallucinations, (...)
Rule out of Schizoaffective or Mood Disorders
Disturbance not due to drugs, medication, or a general medical condition (e.g. delirium tremens)
Duration of an episode of the disorder (hallucinations) one to six months
Criteria for 298.80: Brief Psychotic Disorder
Presence of one (or more) of the following symptoms: hallucinations (...)
Duration between one day and one month
Hallucination not better accounted for by Schizoaffective Disorder, Mood Disorder With Psychotic Features, Schizophrenia
Criteria for 298.90: Psychotic Disorder NOS (Not Otherwise Specified):
Psychotic symptomatology (e.g. hallucinations) that do not meet the criteria for any specific Psychotic Disorder, Examples include persistent auditory hallucinations in the absence of any other features.
Where are the additional criteria for that? Wait, there are none!
In summary: You tell a professional about that “friend” you’re seeing and hearing, you either get 295.40 Schizophreniform Disorder or 298.80: Brief Psychotic Disorder depending on the time frame, or 298.90: Psychotic Disorder NOS (Not Otherwise Specified) in any case. Congratulations!
Fair enough, if I had an imaginary friend I wouldn’t want to report it to a shrink. I got hung up on technicalities and the point I should have been focusing on is whether entertaining one specific delusion is likely to result in other symptoms of schizophrenia that are more directly harmful.
See my take on that here.
Many people suffering from hearing voices etc. do realize those “aren’t real”, which doesn’t in itself enable them to turn them off. If I were confident that you can untrain hallucinations (and strictly speaking thus get rid of a psychotic disorder NOS just by choosing to do so), switch them off with little effort, I would find tulpas to be harmless.
Not knowing much of anything about the tulpa community, a priori I would expect that a significant fraction of “imaginary friends” are more of a vivid imagination type of phenomenon, and not an actual visual and auditory hallucination, which may be more of an embellishment for group-identification purposes.
That’s specifically the religion exemption, yes.
Isn’t this a failure mode with a catchy name?
I think implicit in that question was, ‘and how does it differ?’
A friend of mine has a joke in which he describes any arbitrary magic card (and later, things that weren’t magic cards) by explaining how it differed from an Ornithopter (Suq’Ata Lancer is just like an Ornithopter except it’s red instead of an artifact, and it has haste and flanking instead of flying, and it costs 2 and a red instead of 0, and it has 2 power instead of 0. Yup, just like an Ornithopter). The humor lay in the anti-compression—the descriptions were technically accurate, but rather harder to follow than they needed to be.
Eradicating the humor, you could alternately describe a Suq’Ata Lancer as a Gray Ogre with haste and flanking. The class of ‘cards better than Gray Ogre’ is a reference class that many magic players would be familiar with.
Trying to get a handle on the idea of the tulpa, it’s reasonable to ask where to start before you try comparing it to an ornithopter.
Why would “which reference class is x most like” be a “failure mode”? Don’t just word-match to the closest post including the phrase “reference class” which you remember.
When you’re in a dark alley, and someone pulls a gun and approaches you, would it be a “failure mode” to ask yourself what reference class most closely matches the situation, then conclude you’re probably getting mugged?
Saying “uFAI is like Terminator!”—“No, it’s like Matrix!” would be reference class tennis, “which reference class is uFAI most like?” wouldn’t be.
I think the term is “reference class tennis”.
Have you read diseased thinking: dissolving questions about disease, by any chance?
No, but skimming it the content seems common-sensical enough. It doesn’t dissolve the correlation with “generally being harmful”.
It’s not a “fits the criteria of a psychological disease, case closed” kind of thing, but pattern matching to schizophrenia certainly seems to be evidence of being potentially harmful more than not, don’t you agree?
Similar to if I sent you a “P=NP proof” titled document atrociously typeset in MS Word, you could use pattern matching to suspect there’s something other than a valid P=NP proof contained even without seeing the actual contents of that specific proof.
I agree it’s sensible to be somewhat wary of inducing hallucinations, but you’re talking with a level of confidence in the hypothesis that it will in fact harm you to induce hallucinations in this particular way that I don’t think is merited by what you know about tulpas. Do you have an actual causal model that describes how this harm might come about?
(There often is no need for an actual causal model to strongly believe in an effect, correlation is sufficient. Some of the most commonly used pharmaceutical substances had/still have an unknown causal mechanism for their effect. Still, I do have one in this case:)
You are teaching your brain to create false sensory inputs, and to assign agency to those false inputs where non is there.
Once you’ve broken down those barriers and overcome your brain’s inside-outside classifier—training which may be in part innate and in part established in your earliest infancy (“If I feel this, then there is something touching my left hand”) - there is no reason the “advice” / interaction cannot turn harmful or malicious, that the voices cannot become threatening.
I find it plausible that the sort of people who can train themselves to actually see imaginary people (probably a minority even in the tulpa community) already had a predisposition towards schizophrenia, and have the bad fortune to trigger it themselves. Or that late-onset schizophrenia individuals mislabel themselves and enter the tulpa community. What’s the harm:
Even if beneficial at first, there is no easy treatment or “reprogramming” to reestablish the mapping of what’s “inside”, part of yourself, and “outside”, part of an external world. Many schizophrenics know the voices “aren’t real”. Doesn’t help them in re-raising the walls. Indeed, there often is a progression with schizophrenics, of hearing one voice, to hearing more voices, to e.g. “others can read my thoughts”.
As a tulpa-ist, you’ve already dissociated part of yourself and assigned it to the environment. Let me iterate I am not concerned with you having an “inner Kawoomba” you model, but with actually seeing / hearing such a person. Will you suddenly find yourself with more than one hallucinated person walking around with you? Maybe someone you start to argue with? You can’t turn off?
Slippery slope arguments (even for short slopes) aren’t perfectly convincing, but I just see the potential harm weighed against the potential benefit (in my estimation low, you can teach yourself to analytically shift your perspective without hacking your sensory input) as very one sided. If tulpas conferred a doubled life-span, my conclusion would be different …
If you’re familiar with the Sorceror’s Apprentice:
Wrong I was in calling
Spirits, I avow,
For I find them galling,
Cannot rule them now.
This is a lot stronger and better of an argument than trying to argue from DSM definitions. Be cautious about imposing mental states that can affect your decision-making is a good general rule, and yet tons of people happily drink, take drugs, and meditate. You can say each and all of these things have risks but people don’t normally say you shouldn’t drink because it makes you act like you have lower IQ or someone who’s got a motor control problem in their brain.
Well, that’s why I don’t take alcohol. (But agreed, people don’t normally say that. And I also agree that Kawoomba seems to be overstating the danger of tulpas.)
This also sounds like an argument against IFS. I don’t think it holds water. Accessing the same data as you do but using a different algorithm to process it seems valuable. (This is under the assumption that tulpas work at all.)
The benefits from analytically shifting your point of view, or from using different approaches in different situations certainly don’t necessitate actually hallucinating people talking to you. (Hint: Only the latter finds its way to being a symptom for various psych disorders.)
“You need to hallucinate voices / people to get the benefit of viewing a situation from different angles” is not an accurate inference from my argument, nor a fair description of IFS, which as far as I know doesn’t include sensory hallucinations.
Source?
I mean, there are, as you say, obvious “right habits” analogs of this that get results—which would seem to invalidate the first quoted sentence—but I don’t see why pushing it “further” couldn’t possibly generate better results.
Tulpas and other such experiences seem plausible given how prone we are to hallucinating things anyway (see intense religious experiences for example), and I wouldn’t be surprised if some people would be able to create them consciously. However I doubt that most people can do this. The regulars of /r/tulpas are probably not very representative of the population at large, whether through their unusual proficiency with mental imagery or some deeper eccentricity.
Creating a tulpa in order to develop skills faster or become more productive might work, but the question is whether the gains weighted by probability of success are higher than other, more conventional (and indeed, mentally healthy) methods. I think not.
I am reminded of an occult practice I have heard of called evoking or assuming a godform, in which one temporarily assumes the role of a ‘god’ - a personification of some aspect of humanity which is conceived of as having infinite capability in some sphere of activity, often taken from an ancient pantheon to give it personality and depth. With your mind temporarily working in that framework, it ‘rubs off’ on your everyday activities and you sometimes stop limiting yourself and do things that you wouldnt do before in that sphere of endeavor.
It looks like people trying to intentionally produce personifications with similarities to all sorts of archetypes and minor deities that people have dealt with across history. People have been doing this as long as there have been people, just normally by invoking personifications and archetypes from their culture, not trying to create their own. The saner strands of modern neopagans and occultists acknowledge that these archetypes only exist in the mind but make the point that they have effects in the real world through human action, especially when they are in the minds of many people. You also don’t need to hallucinate to use an archetype as a focus for thought about a matter (example: “what would Jesus do?”), and trying to actually get one strong enough to hallucinate during normal consciousness (as opposed to say, dreaming) seems unhealthy.
I can, though, relay an interesting experience I had in unintentionally constructing some kind of similar mental archetype while dreaming that kind of stuck around in my mind for a while. I didn’t reach into any pantheon though, my mind reached to a mythology which has had its claws in my psyche since childhood—star trek. Q is always trolling the crew of the Enterprise for humanity’s benefit, in attempts to get them to meet their potential and progress in understanding or test them. He was there, and let’s just say I was thoroughly trolled in a dream, in ways that emphasized certain capabilities of mine that I was not using. And just before waking up he specifically told me that he would be watching me with my own eyes since he was actully part of me that normally didn’t speak. That sense of part of me watching and making sure I actually did what I was capable of stuck around for over a week.
Of course, of course—whatever helps you sleep at night.
On the topic of religious experiences, I found this bit from the linked tulpa FAQ very interesting:
That sounds quite strongly like some believers’ experience of being able to talk to God and hearing Him answer back would be a manifestation of the same phenomenon. A while back, gwern was pasting excerpts from a book which talked about religious communities where the ability to talk with God was considered a skill that you needed to hone with regular practice. That sounds strongly reminiscent of this: talk to God long enough, and eventually you’ll get back an answer—from an emulated mind that aligns itself with the preconceived traits you give it.
I browsed around the tulpa community some more, and found some mentions of “servitors”, which have the same mental recall abilities (and apparently better access to current information—some people there claim to have made “status bars” projected on top of their vision), but the community doesn’t consider them sentient. This forum has had several conversations about them. The people there tend to (badly) apply AI ideas to servitors, but that might just be an aesthetic choice.
This would probably be a better munchkin option, since it has most of the same usefulness as a tulpa, but much less likely to be sentient. Supposedly they have a tendency to become able to pass the turing test by accident, which is a little worrying, but that could be the human tendency to personify everything.
In general, what I’m taking away from this is that intense visualizing can have really weird results, including hallucinations, and conscious access to information that’s usually hidden from you. I don’t have a high degree of certainty about that, though, because of the source.
I asked the subreddit about possible practical uses of tulpas, and was told that
That sounds like a very practical use to me. Many people are lonely. (I remember reading one thing where wasn’t there a guy making a tulpa of MLP’s Twilight Sparkle?)
You may be thinking of this.
No, it wasn’t a video (I shun videos), but I’m reading through /r/Tulpas and apparently they acknowledge it’s a really common thing for tulpa-enthusiasts (‘tulpists’? is there a word for them yet?) to make ponies: http://www.reddit.com/r/Tulpas/comments/14zbli/the_internet_is_laughing_at_us_and_you_shouldnt/c7hy6mk So I guess it could have been any of a lot of people.
EDIT: I find the religious connection very interesting since it reminds me of the Christian practices I’ve read about before, so I’ve asked them about it: http://www.reddit.com/r/Tulpas/comments/1e33z2/comparison_with_charismatic_christian_practices/
Ask them if they’re utilitarians.
If they say yes, suggest that according to some versions of utilitarianism they may be ethically obligated to mass produce tulpas until they run out of space in their heads.
By the same logic, you should mass produce children until you can no longer feed them all.
Islam, Catholocism and others approve, though they’re vague about what happens once you run out of space or can no longer feed them. Sharp tongues may claim that has already happened.
Except the Tulpa’s apparently don’t require additional food and resources, however children are notoriously demanding of food.
I didn’t say I was a total utilitarian, though. But someone who accepts the repugnant conclusion probably should act this way.
Raising children is expensive. There are cheaper ways to increase the population.
Ok, but then it’s no longer “the same logic.” Tulpas are free!
That is not free.
This seems like a non sequitur.
Anyway, creating tulpas is presumably much cheaper than raising an actual child, for anyone. So once the low hanging fruit in donating money to a charity that increases actual population or whatever, creating tulpas will be a much more efficient way of increasing the population, assuming they ‘count’ in the utility function separately and everything.
Or even better, do sperm donation. You’re out maybe a few score hours at worst, for the chance of getting scores to hundreds (yes, really) of children. Compare that to a tulpa, where the guides on Reddit are estimating something like 100 hours to build up a reasonable tulpa, or raising a kid yourself (thousands of hours?).
But someone still has to raise the kid at some point, and besides, not everyone can make sperm.
I’m not sure that sperm banks have an oversupply; apparently England has something of a shortage due to its questionable decision to ban anonymous donation, which is why our David Gerard reports back that it was very easy to do even though he’s old enough he wouldn’t even be considered in the USA as far as I can tell.
It’s possible to donate eggs, though it’s not nearly as much fun.
Not everyone is fertile. I can’t make either, currently.
But my point is that someone still has to take the cost of raising the child. So a utilitarian might try to convince more people to make tulpas instead of making more babies.
They wouldn’t otherwise be working to increase the population, so the cost is negligible.
But someone can. Pay them to do it.
I just said there are cheaper ways to increase the population. You have to compare it to them. How does it compare to sperm donation? Saving lives?
I don’t think additional sperm donors will increase the population—I don’t think lack of donors is the bottleneck.
Saving lives probably doesn’t either, if the demographic transition model is true. At least, saving child lives probably results in lower birthrates—perhaps saving adults doesn’t affect birthrate.
Depends on the country.
I’m told there are areas where it’s illegal to get paid to “donate” sperm. I think it’s a bottleneck there.
Relevant to this topic: Keith Johnstone’s ‘Masks’. It would be better to read the relevant section in his book “Impro” for the whole story (I got it at my university library) but this collection of quotes followed by this video should give enough of an introduction.
The idea is that while the people wear these masks, they are able to become a character with a personality different from the actor’s original. The actor doesn’t feel as if they are controlling the character. That being said, it doesn’t happen immediately: It can take a few sessions for the actor to get the feel for the thing. The other thing is that the Masks usually have to learn to talk (albeit at an advanced pace) eventually taking on the vocabulary of their host. It’s very interesting reading, to say the least.
I can’t imagine that your ROI would be positive though.
Oftentimes, when I’m not in a good mood, I simply decide to be in a good mood, and soon I am in a good mood. It’s surprisingly effective. You just have to consciously tell yourself that you decide to be in a good mood and try to be in a good mood. Of course this doesn’t work all the time. I’m generally a happy person, so it’s perhaps easier for me.
I was once in a horrible mood… I felt really guilty/regretful about something I’d done earlier, and felt terrible. Then I was distracted for about half an hour by math homework, and when I was walking outside a few minutes later I caught myself whistling. I was like “Whoa, self! You’re supposed to be upset right now!” and almost descended back into the pit of despair, but then I stopped midstride and said “Wait a sec. Why would I want to be upset?” and so I didn’t. I kept whistling and had a great day.
Of note: doing this does expend willpower, but I’ve found the more often I do it, the more “in a good mood” feels like my default state, and the less willpower it takes on average to get there.
Seconded; all the above statements are true for me too.
To encourage yourself to do some massive, granular task:
Upon completion of each granule, give yourself a reward with some probability.
A reward is a small piece of food or a sip of a drink, etc.
Never eat or drink anything except as a reward for working on the task.
This really works extremely well for me; I have been doing this for about 2 months, at first only with anki reviews and more recently for several other things. The feeling is very similar to addictions like video games or entertaining websites; I often think “I should probably go do X, but let me instead do just one more anki card” and a half-hour later I realize I still haven’t done X.
More things:
Make the rewards unlikely and small so that you stay constantly hungry. Bonus: caloric restriction.
Create a timed reminder, say half-hourly, to do just a few granules of the task. This encourages episodes of the “just one more” effect.
Put reinforcers within arm’s reach, both temporally (make granules easy and quick, so that hunger feels like an urge to do the task rather than an urge to cheat the system) and spacially (so that you are constantly reminded of your hunger and tempted to do the task).
I repeat: this works extremely well for me and I strongly encourage other people to try it. More details here.
Here is a graph showing the number of Anki reviews I’ve done every month for the past year, as an example of the results this method can produce.
I have tried several variants of this process. As expected, the largest road-block has been part 3 - the self-control not to consume the reward despite lack of completion.
I will mention that on the few occasions I have gotten this to work, my excitement and enjoyment was much higher than average. The desire and excitement for food seemed to translate into the task at hand.
This seems like a recipe for letting yourself get dehydrated. Am I missing something?
Right, maybe it would be best to let yourself have unlimited amounts of plain water. Or you could e.g. let yourself have as much water as you want for the first hour you’re at work, to encourage yourself to go there earlier while still avoiding serious dehydration. Or have an optional sip of water with every non-water reward you take.
This is transformative. Thank you.
This seems very interesting, and it’s really cool that you’ve already been working on it. To clarify, you said you don’t eat or drink anything unless it’s a reward. Does this mean halting all meals?
How do you manage to eat healthily if all food has to stay within arm’s reach? I suppose some fruits could stay out, but what about cooked meats or vegetables?
What do you do for recreation times: hanging out with others, visiting relatives, or just going to the beach or something, etc?
Yes, stop all meals. You can get something a bit like a meal if you do a very high-value highly-rewarded task. Also, I let myself eat whatever I want for a few hours after doing something sufficiently awesome (such as accumulating sufficiently many CoZE points, or when I spent 3 hours coding up a system to implement another lifehack thing).
My eating habits are a lot less healthy than they used to be—chips, fruit juice, candy, chocolate-chip cookies, etc., but also healthier things like nuts, popcorn, sandwiches and meat. If you do a high-value, highly-rewarded task, you can finish things quite quickly. At the moment I feel like health isn’t as important as good reinforcement, but I’m planning to research that more.
I don’t do much social interaction (I don’t value it highly terminally, and most of it is instrumentally useless) but have broken the system twice to eat lunch with people, and put it on hold for 3 days while away at a college’s admit weekend.
You traded HP for XP.
Alternately, he abused Toughness, trained Willpower, gained a piety boost and moved his alignment a few beads towards L+.
From the comment you link to:
Any results from this part now? Also, what other things have you used this with?
Still using this for posture, and my posture is improving (though it’s confounded by the posture brace I bought a while back, which seems to actually work). Not using this for standing/sitting; instead I now stand most of the time, and only sit while doing the highest-value thing I could be doing (which is usually ugh-fielded and unpleasant). I’ve given up on regulating my sleep schedule.
Other things I currently use the food-reinforcements for:
CoZE. For those who haven’t been to workshops: this is an awesome CFAR invention; rejection therapy is a subset of it. I walk around with a bag of chocolates while doing this and reward actions. After accumulating a certain number of CoZE points, I allow myself to eat whatever I want for the next couple hours.
Reality checks for inducing lucid dreams.
I have an hourly mental ritual that involves a bunch of visualizations that feel like they should increase agency and do other things.
Coming up with useful new ideas.
Taking supplements.
Boring munchkin technique #2: invest in tax advantaged index funds with low fees. Specifically, in the following order:
Max out your employer’s matching contribution, if available. It is near impossible to beat an immediate 50% or 100% return, even if you have to borrow money in order to take advantage of this.
Pay off credit card debt. Do not keep any high interest loans. Do not keep a revolving balance on credit cards.
Depending on circumstances (e.g. if you lose your job, is moving back in with your parents an option?) have a few months of living expenses available in ready cash.
Put as much money as you can afford into tax advantaged retirement accounts. In the U.S. that means 401K, 403b, IRA, SEP, etc.
Allocate all your investments except possibly your emergency fund into low cost index funds. 1% fees are way too high. Vanguard has some good funds with fees as low as 0.1%.
I could say more, but that’s the basics. Do that and you’ll probably be in the 90th percentile or higher of successful investors. If folks are interested in hearing more, let me know; and I’ll whip up a post on rational financial planning. If there’s a lot of interest, it might even be worth a sequence.
That number is a bit out of date; they recently cut fees for many (most?) of their funds. Now I’m only paying 0.05% on my main index fund. I’m pretty cheerful about this.
I made a post replying to the retirement suggestion.
It makes me very confused. I just don’t get why people care about retirement plans so much… Elharo, if you can respond to my inquiry, that would be awesome…
Tax-deferred retirement accounts make sense if you expect your tax rate to be lower in retirement than now. I expect tax rates to increase, so would rather pay the tax now than when I take the money out. In US, Roth IRA allows that.
“Your Money or Your Life” is worth reading. Build up your savings and decrease your spending until earnings on savings equal spending. After that, you don’t have to work for money. Worthwhile work still enhances health and happiness, though.
Robert Frank’s books on economics make the point that relative income is more important than widely recognized. Two examples he may have missed: 1) it’s not just how much education you have, but how it compares to the competition. So the best-educated get the best jobs, but that doesn’t mean everyone would have a good job if everyone was better educated. 2) losing health insurance is a disaster if you are competing for health services with the insured. But if everyone loses health insurance (e.g., Medicare collapses), doctors will have to lower their fees.
I would also be interested in hearing more about your take on financial planning.
I would be interested in hearing more about rational financial planning. :)
I know someone who studied Organic Chemestry and such in college, and comes from a family of doctors and nurses, who has decided to take a quick and rough track to early retirement with at least a million dollars. His plan as he described it to me involves working in managerial positions at various places (mostly restaurants), not spending money on expensive luxuries like new vehicles, fancy houses or vacations, and investing in long-term funds (he’s looking at Vanguard as his primary investor, but is also researching others). He gets a lot of flack from his family, since working three restaurant jobs is low status compared to being a medical professional (My parents were also skeptical when I told them. Notice: my parents go to Florida every chance they get, in spite of all of their credit card debt and house/vehicle payments. And they just bought a freakin’ Hummer and new cell phones and… Are not as rich as those would imply. -_- ).
But I can’t do any of those things, and only have $1000 to work with at any given time (most of my money comes from disability benefits, which will end if I have more than $2000 in resources at the end of the month). My parents have implied that their assistance with student loans will end once I’m living on my own (Except that they know that my SSI payments are less than the total loan payments, and had better know that I’m stuck with them as gatekeepers and am not, in fact, going to learn Afghan languages to go work for the US government overseas).
All of which is to say that diverse investments and holding off on luxuries seems like a good idea, and is probably what I’d try if I actually had net positive income. Both of those require patience. Hopefully, not ten years type patience.
But this is just me and one guy I know. I’m sure there are cleverer strategies floating around here. I like that he’s using low status work cleverly rather than aiming for higher status work and amassing debt in status signalling games, at least.
Can you please elaborate on your friend’s plan? It sound interesting, and I’d like to see the details: how much he works per week, earnings, expenditures, expected net worth over time, etc.
I don’t remember most of those details off hand, but I’ll try to ask him and look for any that might be in some of our email correspondences (most of the details were in phone conversations, though). I know that his work schedule is pretty intense; I think one of the main reasons we don’t communicate more is because it’s hard to determine when opportunities will arise without us both knowing to look in advance. He still has time for recreation and exercise, from the sounds of it, but I can’t get more specific at the moment.
I think he has an approximate timeline in mind, but I don’t know off hand. I know he went with Vanguard because of the low risk and low commissions, and compared mutual funds to basic stock trading (stock being short term with high risk/pay off, mutual funds being lower risk, but longer term before a good payoff, on the order of years). I think he set a goal of having a million in about 5 years, and then did the math on the current rate of things and expects to meet or beat that, but I could be remembering wrong (that sounds absurdly high).
I know he isn’t afraid to pirate most of his entertainment, though; he’s paying relatively low rent, living with a middle-aged couple who has plenty of room in their house, and can afford food/gas/etc without difficulty. It’s worth adding that he lives near Littlerock, AR; I’m not sure how the cost of living there compares to the rest of the state, but it seems to be generally lower than in Silicon Valley or NYC. I also expect he managed to avoid amassing too much debt with college, but we haven’t discussed that in particular. The only real risk to his plan that came up in our conversations is that of car trouble (either mechanical or due to contract wackiness, since there’s some confusion there involving who’s paying what, since his primary vehicle came from his parents). I get the impression that he keeps his social circle small, but he’s still good enough at dealing with people in authority to get better-than-minimum-wage jobs with relative ease. … Come to think of it, I should probably try to harness his charisma for my own diabolical purposes at some point.
I found the original message, and I got a couple of his goals mixed up. He planned to have a stable emergency fund and financial security in 5 years, and the math works out so that he can actually have this by the end of one year. By the time he told me this, he already had 6 months worth of money in his emergency fund, no consumer debt, and was working on getting up to 5 figures in assets completely under his control. His new years resolution was to finish the emergency fund and start investing in mutual funds by the end of the year, which seems pretty well accomplished already.
He also resigned from a general manager position for a shift job when he found out about the difference in pay, something which his older brother (a successful nurse) took as a sign of failure in spite of the fact that he’s now making more than his bosses at a more satisfying job. Presumably, the advantage to staying at a lower-paying, higher-status higher-frustration job would be the opportunity for promotion (and the status benefits—except the status of the job actually interfered in him taking on another job, which he wanted to do to boost his short term earnings; considering that this would make it easier for him to make longer term investments sooner, I tend to think he made the better decision).
I don’t know when he plans on attaining millionaire status and retiring, but he did say he wants to retire with dignity, which I assume means before serious senescence. Incidentally, my father set those same goals when he was younger, and failed at them horribly, which I mostly attribute to him talking about investments all the time and never actually investing and instead dumping all his money into new vehicles/electronics/vacations/construction projects/that one time my parents tried to start a retail chain and probably have yet to recover from the ensuing debt. I’ve gotten so burned out on Disney World at this point that you’d need to pay me before I felt like going back (I started skipping Disney trips nearly ten years ago, and don’t plan on stopping soon). Well, and he aimed for higher status jobs—he worked for Delta at one point, then for an insurance company, etc—but the only job that wound up paying enough to support the lifestyle (and the ever-growing family) proved to be electrical work, and he recently took up occasional truck-driving to help pay off credit card debt. I think my dad did work in a factory and at restaurants even earlier, which I assume he left because he didn’t like them/wanted to move up. Today, he talks about stocks all the time, but doesn’t actually make any money with them (and plays the lottery and slot machines and talks about the Roulette wheel as low-status gambling). All of which is to say that I think he optimized for a high status lifestyle rather than financial success, and never quite managed to disentangle the two.
So I conclude that its difficult to optimize for both money and status. Successful software engineers might have an advantage on that front.
Missing attribution.
Instead of hoping to find the one Super Cool Trick that’ll let you become a superhuman overnight, read five or so (scientifically minded) self-help books addressing the biggest problem area in your life, make a moderate to large amount of effort to implement the knowledge in your life, and then repeat for your other problem areas, until in a year or two you become a superhuman.
This worked for me for productivity and depression, next is social skills/social anxiety.
Also, let your body occupy a lot of space in order to feel more relaxed, feel confident, and signal status.
Let your body occupy little space in order to feel less confident and signal lack of status, thus compensating for typical but unfortunate human tendencies to think much more highly of their opinions than is actually justifiable and to prop up ubiquitous and costly signaling games. Harness the power of negative thinking!
It’s not informative to send different signals than other people would send in your situation. You are proposing sending dishonest signals, which is uncooperative.
(I’ve thought about that, but the consideration that seemed more salient to me at the time was: If you send different signals than expected then those who can notice subtlety will notice a discrepancy given, say, a few hours of interaction. Yes you’ll be oft-discounted (and you will have incurred this cost yourself and I don’t deny that this is indeed a cost worth considering), but the people who falsely present themselves as more important than they are so vastly outweigh the people who falsely present themselves as less important than they are that causing someone to update their estimate of your importance upwards is more likely to make a (justifiable) positive impression than the alternative case which involves someone having to eventually update their estimate of your importance downwards. It’s like the inverse of “don’t throw pearls before swine”. (I’m drunk, I apologize if I’m stating the obvious.))
Of course, if you’ve gone through the trouble of thinking it through that far, you probably don’t want to decrease your confidence too much, or you may wind up deferring to those expansive, confident fools who didn’t think it through at all :P
Well there has to be some advantage to these behaviors people say are bad for us. Like fearing rejection, being submissive, bad body language, not being confident, etc. Otherwise why do we naturally feel such strong instincts to do those things if there is such advantage to be had in doing otherwise?
Behaving low-status has the advantage of avoiding status fights in your tribe… by giving up. At the proper moment in the ancient environment it could save your life.
That does not necessarily mean the cost-benefit analysis would have the same outcome today.
Right. This is the “evolutionary optimality challenge” of Bostrom and Sandberg, which is “If the proposed intervention would result in an enhancement, why have we not already evolved to be that way?”
Gwern’s excellent article on that lists some ways to escape the challenge; I’m not sure which are at play here, but I think dominance is generally a good idea.
Not everyone feels the need to submit, even in the same situations. I’m sceptical of the idea that the genetic component of the idea is the main thing at play here.
Can you share which books worked best for you regarding productivity and depression?
I would recommend for productivity Succeed: How We Can Reach Our Goals by Heidi Halverson and Switch: How to Change When Change is Hard by Chip and Dan Heath. The Procrastination by Piers Steel is also pretty good but lukeprog’s summary of it on this site basically contains all the useful information.
For depression, Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy by David Burns. I can’t recommend this book enough.
Sprinkle an emetic (a vomit-inducing drug) into foods that you want to stop eating, such as chocolate. It is well-known that nausea causes a long-lasting aversion to the food preceding it. (For instance, this is a problem for chemotherapy patients—the drug therapy causes nausea, which they then associate with food.)
I haven’t tried any of this, but I’d be very surprised if this wasn’t an easy, long-term solution to the problem of people wanting to eat food that they don’t want to want to eat.
Maybe this could even be extended to non-food addictions, such as video games or mindless internet browsing. One person I know quit smoking cold turkey this way (by throwing up after smoking a cigarette, not with an emetic).
Bulimia studies might be a good place to start when evaluating the effects of such a program!
Single anecdata point—I quit smoking by deliberately causing myself to gag and think of vomiting whenever I saw or thought about cigarettes. It was very effective.
That’s… kind of extreme, but also sounds very effective. I’ve tried lesser methods against bad habits that aren’t quite as harmful as cigarette smoking, but they haven’t worked. I’m going to try your trick.
You need to actually induce gagging, to the point where your eyes water a little. I accept no responsibility if someone offers you a smoke and you vomit on them.
OK, gagging in exchange for quitting smoking sounds better than most deals Omega offers. Can I have some details about this? I.e., how long did it take, how much you were smoking before, how, where, and how often did you induce gagging, any other side effects. (For instance, does instant uncontrollable vomiting actually happen to you or was that just hyperbole?)
I did this a long time before I started reading lesswrong, the idea of doing it as an organized, self experimentation type thing didn’t even occur to me.
This was about five years ago so I can’t offer you much detail. I quit flat out, cold turkey. I think the gagging thing was most helpful in the initial two weeks when intense cravings where a problem particularly at parties etc. where people were smoking around me. I remembered to induce gagging I would guess about 1⁄3 to 1⁄2 of the time I consciously experienced a craving, which would have been dozens of times per day for the first week and far less over time. I did it whenever i caught myself thinking in any real detail about cigarettes, the taste, etc etc. One of my main reasons for quitting was were the queasy feelings upon waking—I’d remind myself of those general disgusted feelings, recalling as vividly as possible the unpleasant feeling upon waking up etc.
I have no idea which of the various things i did contributed to my success. I suspect developing the habit of physical exercise has been a big help because I find it impossible to run, swim or box if I have smoked in even the last week. I did relapse for a few months about two years later.
Instant uncontrollable vomiting definitely wasn’t a problem. I have a fairly low gag reflex, so I could gag a little to the point where I felt a slight response in my eyes and stomach muscles without worrying about actually vomiting, although for all I know this might increase the effectiveness of the technique.
My biggest caveat is that I had been truly addicted for at most a year and a half. It might not work so well for someone who’s been on the death sticks for decades. Particularly if it’s been entrenched into their routines.
Ok, so you didn’t smoke-then-gag, just gagged when you thought about smoking. Thank you.
Well, you should. It’s a good thing. :-)
Don’t do anything like that unless you know something about how to undo it.
The theories about which foods are unhealthy keep changing, and you might find out that you personally need something which has be called unhealthy.
Urging caution sounds wise, but I think it’s exactly wrong here. One’s goal in giving advice should be to alter others’ behavior in beneficial ways; people will probably tend to take fewer risks with emetics than is optimal (because they’re risk-averse, and vomiting is unpleasant), so your advice is in the wrong direction. Caution (higher significance criterion) is the act of increasing missed opportunities (false negatives) so that you take less wrong actions (false positives); this is a tradeoff.
This is analogous to how, for instance, the FDA kills more people by delaying medications’ approval than it saves by ensuring medication is safe before approving it.
All over this thread, people keep urging caution where my judgment is that they should be urging the exact opposite.
I would personally recommend against training your body out of finding particular foods pleasurable. Instead, I would recommend exploring alternative food combinations that satiate the same craving.
I.e., expand your palette rather than restrict it.
Also, mindfulness meditation can be useful here. I have a reasonable amount of anecdotal evidence (p ~= 0.7) that a lot of overeating problems center around focussing on the oral aspects of digestion rather than the gastrointestinal.
Remember that your stomach has enough neurons to make an entire second brain—a small one, but a brain nonetheless. Like any neural network, it needs training, and focus and attention are the best way to access it.
Sometime, sit down with a healthy meal with a reasonable amount of nuanced flavors (my particular favorite would be a vegetable stir-fry). Sit down and begin eating, and pay VERY close attention to your body. Don’t just pay attention to tip-of-tongue flavors; focus on the feeling of chewing the food, focus on how it feels going down your esophagus, and ESPECIALLY focus on the feeling of the food hitting your stomach. After every bite, see if you can actually detect the different neurological changes occurring in your stomach nerves—see if you can actually feel the moments when your food starts making your stomach say “YES! MORE”, the moments when your stomach says “hold on, gimme a minute to digest that one”, and the moment when your stomach says “okay, that was enough”.
When you’re hungry, really EXPLORE the feeling of hunger, especially the particular churnings of your stomach and the particular bits of shakiness in your limbs, the specific WAY that your head feels light-headed. See if you can notice nuances between different kinds of ‘hunger’.
Once you can perceive nuances in your ‘hunger’ sensations, see if you can find associations between those sensations and your reactions to different kinds of food. Really, really explore this. See if the “butterflies in your stomach” are helped more by starches or by proteins. See if the “jittery distractedness” is helped more by simple sugars or complex sugars. See if the “gnawing emptiness” is helped more by rice or by potatoes.
After doing this for about a year, you’ll start noticing amazing things. You’ll stop being hungry! Instead, you’ll start noticing that you have cravings, the way a pregnant woman might. Instead of being hungry you’ll say “God, I need an orange right now.” And when you eat an orange, you’ll suddenly stop feeling the craving—because your body was never hungry, it just really needed some vitamin C, and stuffing yourself until the craving shut down was never a healthy solution.
The first time I found myself craving broccoli and spinach I nearly flipped out—I never really LIKED those foods, and yet I desperately needed some fresh broccoli to chew on. As soon as I went to the store, bought a crown, and scarfed it down, I instantly felt better—after only a few ounces of greens.
Note to self: If I ever have chemotherapy be sure to either only eat foods I already don’t like or eat foods that are unhealthy but tasty.
This fits the general pattern of using life change events (like start/end of relationship, illness, study, job) to couple and combine with positive habit changes.
This seems very valuable. Will try, and try to remember to post results.
Tried. Don’t expect my results to be generalizable.
Once again, I have no reason to believe that same would happen to anyone.
In any case: Not many good medicines induce vomit. Most people who try it, use water, specially warm water, with mustard. This has all sorts of complications because mustard has a taste and a smell etc… nevertheless, no one in the pharmacy or wikipedia or friends who read pharmapapers had any other indication that would beat mustard water.
I wanted to stop liking chocolate. I waited for a while, so the organism would be sure it was not from lunch, and at dinner time I eat a lot of chocolate, and drank some mustard water. I kept looking at, smelling and thinking about chocolate, and would taste chocolate instantaneously after quickly swallowing the mustard water with my nose held.
It was obvious something bad was going on inside me, less than 10 seconds after the mustard. But my body is not a natural regurgitator. Long story short, I failed to even regurgitate. And now I can say that the weirdest meal I have ever had was composed of 120 grams of white chocolate, 100 grams of lindt milk chocolate, 100 grams of yellow mustard, 1,5 liter of water, and 50 grams of extra strong seedy mustard.
After that I started thinking about fighting for Monsieur Mangetout Guinness title for eating metals and glasses…
Thanks for actually trying this! I tried to get hold of syrup of ipecac, which seems to reliably cause vomiting, but it’s hard to get in US pharmacies, and Amazon doesn’t sell it (except homeopathically). Did your friends say that mustard water works better than syrup of ipecac?
Does this mean you still like chocolate?
The White chocolate bar was 170 grams. the other 50 I ate the next day. Delicious, as always.
Another datapoint: I tried this a while back with mustard powder in warm water. I ate some chocolate, then downed around a cup of warm water with mustard powder (I forget how much powder it was). This was insufficient to make me vomit; I only felt slightly nauseated. I tried using my finger, wrapped in toilet paper, to agitate my uvula (the thing that hangs from the roof of the mouth behind the tongue). This made me gag, but not vomit. I tried again the next day, with the same results. I may have eaten slightly less chocolate after this, but I failed to develop any long-lasting taste aversion.
I tried to get hold of syrup of ipecac before trying the mustard powder, but nobody sells it, not even online, except homeopathically—not even on eBay, or on sketchy chemistry-supply websites. It stopped being sold around 2005 because a review said that it’s not useful for curing poisoning. (Because vomiting doesn’t always get rid of poison, and it complicates the diagnosis. So the main reason isn’t that it’s bad for you, although it’s obviously bad for you too.)
I don’t think warm water and mustard make for a very good emetic. Next time I or someone else tries this, I think we should try the finger-in-mouth technique, together with syrup of ipecac (if that can be obtained), or smelling extremely powerful bad smells, or maybe warm saltwater.
I also looked around on pro-bulimia boards online (yes, such things exist), but they didn’t seem to have any ideas beyond what’s listed above.
Bad smells wont work since the pavlovian association will be with the smell. We have to do it through transcranial magnetic stimuli to the pons and Area Postrema, like they do in rodents. In rodents it works perfectly.
Anyone know how to do that? I’d be very happy to vomit in an EEG or FMRI
Is zslastman the someone you know who quit smoking this way, or can I count yours as a second data point? And if it’s someone else, can you give some details? This sounds like the best plan I saw on this thread.
Anecdotal evidence: I drank orange juice with m&ms when I was a kid, and it made me vomit. Since then I cannot eat/drink m&ms or orange juice without thinking about that, and the smell of the two makes me nauseous.
Be careful about using this! I have a sneaking suspicion that my car-sickness resulted in an aversion to cars.
Less radically and more accessibly, adding a bitter ingredient seems to work (n = 1). Caffeine powder is cheap and bitter, but there are probably better options.
Umm.....… but caffeine is also addictive. This seems like a flaw in the plan.
I have heard of bitter nail polish for people who want to stop biting their nails.
Why would I want to stop eating chocolate?
I don’t think anyone should want to stop eating dark chocolate, but white & milk chocolate are fairly unhealthy.
Any chocolate containing sucrose is very unhealthy, and that’s almost all the chocolate you’re likely to encounter unless you specifically seek out sugar-free alternatives. Pure cocoa may be healthy. Cocoa as it’s commonly prepared and served in candy and sweets is not.
It all depends on the context. If I just finished a massive weight lifting workout after a day of eating extremely low-carb, I’m going to need something to replace my glycogen stores. Even with that said, dark chocolate is still a high-fat food. According to the label the brand I’m eating right now contains 86% of my “recommended daily intake” of fat & only 6% of carbohydrates. Further, it provides one of the best fats for you—the saturated fat Stearic acid.
Starch can be converted to glycogen just fine, it just takes longer.
The only good reason I see to eat significant amounts of sugar is if I need an energy boost right now, ideally during exercise, though preemptive bread-eating reduces even that need. Active exercise also reduces the negative effects of eating sugar.
Might want to rethink the bread. Gluten irritates the GI tract & increases gut permeability, which can lead to inflammation & autoimmune disorders.
[citation needed]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zonulin
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16635908
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1326203/
First-time poster, long time lurker. This discussion piqued my interest.
If you have your own business, a very cost effective way of promoting it is to get a part-time job, (or ‘side quest’ in D&D parlance) that involves delivering something such as catalogues, phone-books or even takeaway food or a paper-round in the location where your business operates. You can easily slip in your own flyers or business cards in along with whatever you are delivering. The wage from the part-time job will easily pay for the extra printing and mileage costs. I do this and my p/t employer hasn’t found out yet or even explicitly or implicitly forbidden me from doing this; in fact, my p/t boss is pretty wily entrepreneurial sort of chap so he would probably actually approve so long as I am still good at his job.
If you are new to a scientific topic, note that the first half of a paper often tends to summarize common knowledge within the field that is necessary to understand the conclusion. Often this is more readable/interesting than the rest of the paper, suggesting that you can spend more time reading scientific papers by skipping the denser and more original parts.
By the same principle, read the first chapter (approximately) of next term’s textbook to get a good summary of what you need to learn now. You can continue this method all the way to research monographs, as long as you can tell what books are at the next level (and if there is a next level, but that’s where the papers come in). Of course, you only get an overview, but sometimes that’s all that you need.
I do this all the time. When I can’t find reviews, I just read the introductions of related research papers.
I’ve started watching TV Shows at 2X speed. This has been incredible:
I can watch twice as much TV in the same amount of time.
Lots of TV shows which are very interesting, but are slow (e.g. Breaking Bad, Sopranos) become MUCH funner to watch.
I started doing this a few months ago. It started when I realized that I already listened to Audiobooks at 2X-3X, and that TV Shows are basically the same thing.
Some tips:
You should use the VLC player, which lets you 2X while preserving proper audio.
In VLC, you can hit the “+” button to go to 1.5X, then again to go to 2X, 3X, 4X etc.
You can start with watching things at 1.5X speed, then go to 2X when you feel confident.
At higher speeds, you should watch with subtitles, which makes things much easier to follow.
I have friends who do this with lectures and audiobooks, which seems at least more productive-sounding.
I started with audiobooks and lectures as well. Since I’m a big fan of watching TV/Movies, applying the same thing to this area has allowed me to double the amount of consumption, while not really diminishing my enjoyment of the shows that I watch (and, in some cases, enhancing it if the show is slow but otherwise good).
I’ve personally found playing anime at 1.1x to be a difference which is barely even noticeable, but further speed increases to be somewhat annoying, and 1.5x+ to be unwatchable. It’s likely low-hanging fruit for many, but YMMV.
It depends a lot on the quality of the speed-up algorithm. One cheap way of speeding up audio is to drop samples, but this significantly reduces audio quality.
Personally, I find anything above 1.2x to be annoying, but I still do it—not to save time, but to improve my japanese-understanding capability.
Here’s why I think this is something most people can do:
I am personally a “native-level” English speaker, having spent 6 years of my childhood in English-speaking countries. I am now in a non-English-speaking country though.
A friend of mine who is also doing this is not a native English speaker, and while his English is quite good, it is clearly not native-speaking level. However, he also manages to watch almost all shows at least at 1.5X speed.
Of course YMMV, but I would encourage people to at least try this out and see if it hurts their enjoyment of shows or not.
I wonder, is it possible to slow down shows for those of us trying to learn a new language who have not yet reached 1X fluency? Assuming it’s technically feasible, does it help? I’ll have to try that.
Very interesting idea, hadn’t thought of thought. You can technically slow down shows in VLC by pressing the—key, it slows to 0.67X speed I believe.
Please let us know what you find, I may try it out myself for practicing Spanish.
Yep, that works. See uncle post—usually I speed things up, but for hard-to-understand shows I’ve found that slowing them down gives me more time to correlate subs and audio—or to try comprehending the audio without subs, at that.
I highly recommend people who use cars to somehow do this in their cellphones and connect the cellphone to the car soundsystem.
I cannot stress how much Traffic is not traffic anymore as soon as it become introduction to evolutionary anthropology. Bostrom told me there is cellphone software for accelerating podcasts, but it only worked for paid ones. Does anyone know one that is free?
Actually, I would suggest not focusing your attention on evolutionary anthropology while you’re supposed to be piloting a multi-ton vehicle at high speeds.
Most people are far worse at driving than they believe themselves to be.
Now, assuming you’re not in a car at the moment, you can probably hack something up using mplayer—there’s at least one android port of that. You may need to write your own UI, though, and I suspect it’ll reduce your battery life significantly. (Android native players take advantage of decoding hardware, mplayer probably doesn’t. Also, the fourier transform required to speed up voice without affecting pitch is expensive.)
When you’re driving a daily commute your mind is going to wander unless you have extraordinary focus control / mindfulness training. It’s not obvious to me that it’s more dangerous to have it directed to evolutionary anthropology than to what you’re going to do when you get home (or wherever else it wandered).
There’s a difference between accidental mental wanderings and deliberately focusing on a sped-up textbook.
If you’re listening to a sped-up textbook without focusing on it, I’d say you won’t get much out of the experience.
(After reading that sentence, in particular the word “evolutionary”, before reading what you were replying to, I had briefly thought you were arguing against this and gone WTF.)
Interesting. I definitely do this with Coursera… but you haven’t noticed any dramatic timing being thrown off?
Not really, in the sense that everything is half the time so the timing between things is still intact.
Are there some “dramatic sequences” in which I miss part of the intention of the directors/etc.? Yes, I’m sure there are. But for at least a large portion of the shows I watch, most of the important stuff is in the dialogue anyway.
Disclaimer: I’m probably a less visual person than most, which means I don’t pay as much attention to the visual aesthetics of shows as others do. Also—some sequences even I don’t watch at 2X, mostly action sequences and the like.
I’ve switched from VLC to Daum’s PotPlayer which has fantastic support for youtube videos and playlists and allows speeding up videos like this. It also uses significantly less memory and cpu than watching youtube in firefox.
Yeah, I’ve been doing this too, but only after I’ve determined something to be too boring when I try to watch it normally. I’m glad I didn’t watch Puella Magi at 2x, for instance.
Another tip: Youtube can be watched at 1.5 and 2x, as well as slower speeds, but you have to go to testtube first and enable the experimental HTML 5 player.
(Currently it seems a little bugged: if you select a higher speed, you can’t go back to 1x, because the normal speed button doesn’t work. Reloading fixes that.)
I’ve been looking for a way to do this automatically. Whenever I start a video, I have to manually change the speed to 2x; sometimes I forget and end up wasting large amounts of time. I’ve been looking for a chrome extension or something, but I can’t find one.
Has anyone had any luck with automating this?
Boring munchkin technique #1: What if I told you there was a place you could go where they would give you books? paper or ebook, whichever you prefer. And if they didn’t have the book you wanted, they would order it for you? And when you were done with the book. and didn’t want it cluttering up your apartment any more, you could give it back to them; and they would store it for you until needed it again? So not only does this service get you books. It effectively increases the amount of living space you have, and the general neatness of your apartment or house. How much would you pay for such a service? $50 a month? $100 a month? $5000 a year? How much do you spend on books now that you have to store and manage?
Of course, you already know there is such a service, and it doesn’t cost you even $10 a month. It’s the public library. If you haven’t stopped into your public library lately, it’s time to check it out again. Public libraries have become a lot more effective in the last decade. You can now order books online, and have them delivered to your local branch, so if you remember a time when the library rarely had what you wanted, check again. It’s no longer just a place to browse to find something to read. It’s a place where you can find exactly the book you want. If library fines bother you, libraries will now send you email reminders to renew, and let you renew online. If you use ebooks, you don’t even have to go to the library to pick up or return the books. Most libraries are much more convenient than they were even a few years ago.
It’s not perfect. Most libraries don’t have a lot of the more technical books, ebooks aren’t as available as they should be (blame the publishers for that since they don’t license a lot of ebooks to libraries) and occasionally you may have to bring a paper book back to the library before you’re done with it because someone else wants to read it. However if your reading tastes aren’t too esoteric, and you have access to a good library system in a major metropolitan area, then you can get 90% or more of your books from the public library. You will still buy a few books that they don’t have available, or that you really want to consult every day for a year; but you can save a lot of money, time, and space by visiting your local library before you visit amazon.
Or you could get it even more conveniently, even faster, and even cheaper from the internet. Even if you for some reason hesitate to pirate, it’s easy to find a legally free alternative to anything.
On that note.. could anyone recommend a good tracker for literature?
Mendeley.
Time? I get the idea with most of them but it takes me a couple of hours to get down to the library and back whereas it’s like a couple of minutes to order from Amazon or somewhere.
Amazon takes a minimum of 1 calendar day to get a paper book to me, and that’s at some extra cost. I can get a paper book from my local library in under an hour if it’s on the shelves. (It helps that I live a block away from the Brooklyn Central Library.) If the book I want is not on the shelves, them amazon may be quicker; and I may order from them if I really need the book ASAP. For ebooks it’s a wash on time, though amazon does have a much better selection of ebooks.
As with all advice, adjust to fit your personal circumstances. If you live 2 hours away from the nearest library, you may be willing to trade money for time, especially if it[’s a book you’re pretty sure you’re going to want to refer to repeatedly, rather than just read once and put on a shelf, never to be looked at again. I suspect most folks live closer than that. Many people who live in an urban or suburban area walk or drive by a public library on an almost daily basis.
There are certainly reasons to buy some books rather than merely borrowing them. But my main point is that before reflexively going to amazon and clicking “buy It now”, you should take a few seconds to consider whether you might be better off searching for it at the library first. I am astonished at how many book hoarders I know who have apartments stacked with paper tomes, sometimes almost dangerously so, who somehow never consider setting foot in a public library.
Many library catalogues are searchable online. So you just have to search a different site to wether they have it or not. If they have it, it’s probably quicker to take a trip to the library than to wait for shipping.
But it requires active, exclusive use of time to go to a library, loan out a book, and bring it back (and additional time to return it), whereas I can do whatever while the book is en route.
That is true. However according to my experience you don’t need to spend much time in the library itself if you know what you’re looking for (you can always stay for the atmosphere). What takes time is going to and from the library. The value of this time obviously depends on a lot of parameters: is the library close to your route to/from some other place, are you currently very busy, do you enjoy city walks/bike-rides, etc.
(The below is stated with no modulation for my level of confidence, which actually isn’t very high.)
MDMA is a useful way to improve social skills permanently, or help make you more emotionally available.
While under the influence of it, you’re very empathic, and very socially fearless. The experiences you have talking to people in this state can then transfer to when you’re sober. For instance, you might notice that your openness is well-received, which lets you see that you’ve been under-confident.
Many people do something similar with alcohol: they learn to socialise when drunk, and that makes it easier to socialise when not drunk. I believe MDMA is better for this purpose, because it doesn’t inhibit your memory at all, and you’re more “yourself” than when drunk.
To get this benefit it’s important to take a well-tolerated dose, and not to drink much: you don’t want to be a mangled mess, or the next day you’ll just be embarrassed, especially because you’ll be mildly depressed from the come-down.
I’ve found MDMA to be quite addictive, and most users have trouble controlling their use once they are on the drug: they’ll re-dose, even if they hadn’t planned to, once the first dose begins to fade. So this “hack” is far from free of danger. But I believe the cost/benefit is still better than alcohol for many situations.
What’s your dosage schedule? Have you noticed a decreased ability to experience pleasure?
For a first time user, I recommend 60-80mg as a good dose, and I always advise people to pre-commit to not re-dosing, no matter whether the first hit feels weak or strong. I usually take 80-150mg, and I don’t always follow my own advice about re-dosing. Sometimes it depends what my friends are doing.
After a camping trip where I over-indulged quite alarmingly, I noticed that I was more “pleasure seeking”: I spent more time seeking sex, more time on buzzfeed and YouTube, etc. This faded after a week or two.
I found that regular marijuana use causes worse anhedonia in me. If I smoke two or three times a week for a few weeks in a row, my affect is fairly flat, and I’m quite unmotivated.
Given that people often fail at precommiting, I’m reading this post and the grandparent as “stay far away from this stuff; it’s dangerous.”
That’s not unreasonable, but I think that a lot of the problems people have come from not even really trying to be careful.
I think selection effects explain almost all of this phenomenon. My nerdy friends don’t really have trouble holding to their pre-commitments. The reckless 20 year olds I meet in bars don’t even really understand the idea of pre-commitments, and the whole thing is just sort of...uncool, to them.
People don’t regularly pre-commit to how much TV they’ll watch, how much internet they’ll surf, or how much chocolate they’ll eat—and when they do, I expect they fail often. When it comes to alcohol, two drinks becoming many is a total cliche.
When considering the risks of “recreational” chemicals, it helps if we distinguish between moreish and addictive. By moreish I mean the tendency to lead to compulsive redosing, and of course when I say addictive I mean in the medium to long term. These can be surprisingly independent. In the case of MDMA, the consensus among drug users, in my experience, is that it’s medium high on the moreishness scale but very low on the long term addictiveness scale. In my opinion there is pretty much 0 danger of addiction for the vast majority of less wrongers.
However, from personal experience it can be a very dangerous social lubricant, it lead to multiple social interactions that I later regretted strongly, and this seems to be pretty common.
Make a list of all the projects you could undertake, then use Fermi calculations to estimate the costs and benefits of each on various axes (time, money, status...), with time discounting. Combine the axes into one measure of how much you’d profit from doing each project. Then actually use the numbers to decide what to work on next.
You might also intuitively guess the profit from each task and take a weighted average of that and the more analytical calculations, because system I often outperforms system II.
I’m currently in the middle of this; so far the top items match my intuitions (e.g. go do more CoZE), so I’m not benefitting much from the analysis. Part of my reason for creating this thread is to gather more ideas for things to do and to get other people to help me research how worthwhile possible projects are.
What is CoZE?
Comfort Zone Expansion. Presumably a CFAR created generalization of Rejection Therapy and related exercises that are intended to do what the name suggests.
Autogenics is a biofeedback technique that induces a state of intense relaxation. It’s supposed to be able to help change compulsive behaviors, though I haven’t tried that myself. I have found it very helpful for getting to sleep, though, and pleasant as well. I used this guide for what I have done so far.
Fun anecdote: Once, while I was cuddling with my boyfriend, he said, “I can hear your heartbeat!” A few moments later he jerked and looked at me in shock. “It just slowed down!” :-) I felt like a wizard. Biofeedback is cool.
It’s probably worth trying if you have problems sleeping. Interestingly, it’s found to be useful in treating a several mild mental and physical problems, like headaches, anxiety, mild depression, and sleep disorders. It’s also used for pain relief for natural childbirth. (Meaning, for women who don’t want to have an epidural.)
I just got this galvanic skin response biofeedback device in the mail a few days ago. Rest your fingers on it and there’s a tone goes up as you get more stressed out and down as you get more relaxed. I haven’t been experimenting with it very long, but using the device and trying to make the tone go down does seem to be quite an effective way to relax. Housemates have found the tone annoying, but wearing ear-encompassing headphones on top of the supplied earbuds seems to deal with that.
How long do you think it will take for you to know whether it’s effective long term? Could you post an update then?
I’ll try to. I doubt it will stop acting as an effective way to relax at some point, if that’s what you’re wondering. I think it’s more likely that I’ll forget to use it.
I actually did have a little bit of trouble early on ’cause it’s really easy to bring yourself out of a relaxed state, which causes the tone to increase in pitch, and high-pitched tones aren’t very relaxing (for me at least). So there’s a bit of a downward spiral there, and it can get kinda frustrating if you get set back repeatedly this way. But this wasn’t an issue on my most recent usage attempt.
Oh, and another thought: Have you considered trying to use this to learn to go in the opposite direction, i.e., increase your excitement? It might be useful to be able to do both!
OK, I tried this a couple times today, with disappointing results. I was trying to use it to help me focus on a video lecture I was watching, but I found it pretty hard to maintain any sustained increase in my level of activation… even when I got it to spike temporarily, it would immediately start going down. Also, the fact that it read data from my fingers meant I couldn’t use that hand to create spaced repetition cards. Overall, it served as way more of a distraction than an asset, and I don’t think I noticed any focus benefits immediately afterwards when I stopped using it and restarted the video I was watching from the beginning.
It’s conceivable that you could make this work through a gradual increase rather than sudden spiking, or configure the dial so that it would only start to make noise once your level of activation went below some threshold. I might experiment with those ideas in the future.
If you want increased alertness, there are other hacks in the thread for that, like D_Malik’s ideas of blue-tinted glasses or spraying/splashing water on your face (and of course there’s always caffeine etc.) Supposedly yawning also improves alertness.
Hmm, okay. I was considering trying it on its own, rather than while doing something else. I know I wasn’t able to do autogenics exercises while trying to do something else before, and now I sort of can after having practiced, so I would expect it to go poorly to try to go the other direction for the first time while otherwise occupied.
After you mentioned this I realized I have all the parts on hand to make a DIY galvanic skin response sensor. I got the hardware set up, and now I’m working on getting the software set up in a nice way. Hopefully it will work out :-)
Yep, I have considered that. I’ve been kind of distracted by the possibility of being able to do focused work even while in a relaxed/parasympathetic state, which seems more optimal but also harder (maybe impossible).
Hmm, I don’t think doing work would work for me in that state. I’ve sometimes tried doing autogenics exercises and then “waking up” out of it right before doing work, and it seemed to help clear distractions.
Oh, those are super cool. I tried using one at the Toronto Science Museum and started doing my autogenics exercises, and got it to go down to minimum pretty quickly. You might be able to train that even faster having one to play with all the time.
You should have tried sending the morse code SOS message using it!
“Help, I’m trapped in an autonomic nervous system!”
People who get good at this can control the rate but not the individual beats. And definitely can’t do the long beats that morse code would require.
The recommended practice time is quite long, is that to be able to do it at will or something? See for example this Youtube video which was effective for me today, and this is the first time I’ve tried this.
Yeah, I think the goal is to be able to enter an autogenic state in under a minute (if you look at the regular practice routine at the end, it is quite short). I’ve been basically doing the first few exercises from time to time, off and on for a few years, and I’m able to get pretty relaxed in a few minutes. It’s been useful to me even without following the practice schedule strictly.
Why’s that? Please remember the value of information here! Bright lights cost very little either upfront (maybe like <$100?) or on an ongoing basis (higher electrical bill), while an experiment may be very costly (or so I infer from the near-absence of anyone but me doing randomized self-experiments), and the benefits cumulatively large over the X years a bright light will last before breaking or burning out; hence, the best course may be simply to try it out.
Agreed in particular, disagree in general: several of the plausible suggestions here could have significant downside risks. In particular, I’m not going to switch to Soylent or create a tulpa until I’ve seen good evidence that it doesn’t wreck any significant fraction of people’s lives.
I agree completely, but the voting patterns here made me think LW thought differently.
I interpret that as referring to one’s justification for making claims of more-than-base-rate-likelihood-for-weird-off-the-wall-suggestions—especially if you’re going to take up a lot of people’s time based on anecdotes, you should at least be presenting decent anecdotes.
If you dismissed or didn’t bring up anecdotes, I imagine there’d also be a positive response. For example, if one argued for using bright lights like thus, I imagine it’d go over well: ‘I found studies X Y and Z where bright lights increased alertness over a day; applying the usual meta-analytical considerations, I guesstimate there’s a 20% chance it’ll work on ordinary people for a payoff of $Z; and on Amazon these lights cost $A and to run for a year uses $B in eletricity; and turns out, 0.20 * Z > $A+$B. Also I have a rubbishy personal anecdote: after doing this calculation, I tried out the lights and it seems to be working.’
(My own opinion is that lights are stupid easy to test so there’s no excuse for not doing a self-experiment. Flip a coin each morning to turn the light on or keep it off, and write down which & how much you think you got done at the end of the day! But if you can’t do that, at least trying to get past the honeymoon period is a start.)
I recall reading that one of the best predictors of reported happiness is how much a person tends to compare herself to others. (I’m fairly sure I got that from the book “The How of Happiness” by Sonja Lyubomirsky)
You can probably get a quick but decent estimate of where you are on that “comparison-tendency” scale by recalling if you ever feel a sting of jealousy or if it otherwise negatively impacts your mood, or initiates a mental comparison when you see that someone else is up to something really amazingly cool on facebook. How do you generally tend to feel when you see people who are better looking or richer, or <insert desirable characteristic that others have and you don’t> ?
I compared myself a lot with others some years ago, but all it took for me to get rid of that nasty mind-habit was to become aware of it every time I was doing it, and realizing that its a stupid and unhealthy habit. Thinking back it probably took me somewhere between 4 and 6 months until this way of thinking became essentially extinct and ultimately even somewhat alien. And I’m happy to say that I’m much happier now, arguably in part because I kicked that habit of thought.
So if you’re suffering from this bad habit as well, the way I got rid of it was by simply realizing that it’s bad, noticing it when I was doing it and simply moving on. Over time the frequency decreased on its own. The happiest people apparently hardly even know what exactly is meant by “comparing themselves to someone else”. Seeing someone who does better than them in any desirable area simply does not trigger any kind of negative emotions, or feelings of inadequacy whatsoever. The opposite in fact, they tend to feel glad for people who are doing well, even if those people are doing better than oneself is.
I am enjoying this sentence fragment immensely.
The trick to resolve the apparent paradox, I think, is to keep a firm distinction between describing people and emotionally evaluating people and then understand that the idea is only about cutting out the latter.
:’D
Also, what he said:
I’d like to confirm that indeed Sonja’s book is your source. Less comparison correlates with higher happiness.
I try to compare my personal finances, and the quality of my job, to the human median. It helps.
I have a horrible thought.
Most (legally acquired) debts are dischargeable in bankruptcy. That puts a floor on the amount of money one can lose. If your net worth is “almost nothing” and you can find suckers, er, I mean, organizations with loose standards that are willing to lend you money, then the expected utility of risky bets changes in a way that favors you—because going bankrupt while owing $10,000 isn’t much different than going bankrupt while owing $500,000. Of course, going bankrupt is still pretty bad either way, but the upside of winning a risky, highly leveraged bet can also be correspondingly large...
Personally, I don’t think this is a good idea and is probably unethical anyway, but it is the kind of crazy thing a certain kind of munchkin would do...
Sure, but it’s a way to sell a small part of your soul for lots of money. You can then do an arbitrage operation, by using that money to buy lots of cheap soul, e.g. through efficient charity.
Whether it’s unethical would seem to me to depend on who you are raising the money from and what they perceive the rules of the game to be. From my perspective, doing the submissive, ‘morally cautious’, un-winning thing rather than the game theoretical thing is unethical.
This is called moral hazard. If the “suckers” who loaned you the money are “too big to fail” and in turn need bailing out, it is a form of negative externality.
Plenty of examples here in the recent financial crisis...
Indeed it is!
Compare strategic default.
I thought this was what 90% of the economy is made of almost everyone doing?
If you don’t have any collateral and someone loan’s you $500,000 it’s partly their problem for engaging in the loan.
Mitt Romney made the vast majority of his money doing this. He’d buy a company cheaply that has a lot of debt (in particular, pension obligations). He’d then jump the queue for getting paid out and shaft all the other debt holders (in particular, pensioners).
I knew someone who did this: bought large amounts of jewelry-making and other crafting supplies on credit, went bankrupt, and then made a living by using the supplies. It feels like theft to me.
IME the likelihood of success in risky ventures decreases faster than benefits increase.
You’ll hurt your credit rating, right? Which makes it harder to find places to rent, ’cause landlords will want to know your credit rating. And of course, harder to get credit cards, auto loans, mortgages.
Yes, of course. If your risky bet doesn’t pay off, you’re screwed—but there’s a limit to how screwed you can get.
See also: voluntary homelessness.
Where are you going to find someone stupid enough to lend you $500k without assets and income? There are door to door lenders but they charge very high fees (though not nearly as much as pay day lenders) and lend relatively small amounts partially because of the risk of someone without much to lose doing this sort of strategy.
Well you become a NINJA. Probably a bit hard to get one now, but you could always wait for the next bubble...
Scary munchkin ideas are obviously absurd, until they happen.
If you think it is unethical you shouldn’t post it.
OK, a serious one now.
If you’re looking to motivate yourself towards certain activities, use fictional characters as imaginary rivals.
For example, Stephen Amell is a ridiculously buff dude who plays the titular character in the TV show Arrow). He spends a non-negligible amount of screen-time prancing around with his shirt off. While this does not contribute to my hedonic appreciation of the show, I find myself a lot more motivated to get up and do some exercise after watching it.
I suspect this is my brain alerting me to the presence of a ridiculously buff rival who spends time prancing around with his shirt off, which results in some mechanism motivating me to compete along that axis. I also suspect this would work along different axes of rivalry. Watching lots of fictional smart people achieve lots of awesome fictionally smart things may be a good motivator for academic activities.
On the other hand, fictional worlds are not constrained by such trivial things as “plausibility”—how smart or conscientious or strong a character is is purely up to the whim of the author. Comparing yourself to these “superstimulus role models” might not be a mentally healthy thing to do—look at how many young girls (and boys!) are starving themselves in the pursuit of magazine-model beauty.
That particular analogy (cf. “thinspiration”) had occurred to me, though I suspect the general process (look at superstimulatory examples of what you aspire towards) is something most people have an intuitive grasp of, and I (and perhaps other people broadly like me, who are probably over-represented on Less Wrong) simply haven’t cottoned on to it until now.
You have to be careful with this sort of thing. It’s possible to accidentally make yourself unhappy even if you don;t actually harm yourself or something. I think different people respond to this sort of thing in different ways.
Already done this to myself—it lowers your self-esteem enormously.
I suspect that for me, this tends to turn on the “Activate low-status sympathy-seeking behaviors” module instead of the “Try to be more high status” one.
Same here. I often get intimidated rather than competitive.
http://lesswrong.com/lw/h9b/post_ridiculous_munchkin_ideas/c6ht
Researchers frequently use serum testosterone levels as a proxy of competitive drives e.g. in stereotype threat tests. Which suggests this is fixable with things like lifting weights or doing scary things like boxing, munchung almonds etc.
This matters, because it is not simply about a trick but—in my case at least—it is about everybody who seems better than me makes me feel kinda miserable, so getting more competitive is necessary for happiness / non-depression in such cases.
Somewhat relatedly, I sometimes find using fictional characters (or stereotypes) as anti-inspiration. For example, I may ask myself “what would Sheldon Cooper do?” and then make sure not to do that.
Reversed stupidity is not intelligence.
Not sure that’s what the OP is doing. It’s one thing to say “This is obviously stupid; I should do the opposite.” It’s different to say “This is obviously stupid; I shouldn’t do it.”
However, reverse Boring might be Interesting.
Sometimes I see Sheldon as a role model. If something is stupid, he’ll tell you.
I have a female friend who recently said something along the lines of “normally I think guys who go around topless are kind of dicks trying to show off, but that guy had the muscles to pull it off”. I think it was just after that that I started using my resistance bands more.
edit: to clarify, she was talking about a real person who had been wandering around topless.
This is one thing that you could use a tulpa for—make them a better version of yourself. I guess that could be psychologically unhealthy.
You could also use real people as inspiration; for example, one person who annoys me by being more awesome than me is Yi Sun Shin.
Continuing the marksmanship theme, your proposed mechanism is part of why I watch Archer.
Keep a spray bottle full of water. Set up a reminder to make you spray yourself with the water every 30 minutes. This might boost alertness through the mammalian diving reflex. I have halfheartedly tried this, and it definitely does temporarily boost alertness, but I don’t know how long the effect lasts or whether tolerance develops. I’m slightly concerned that it could damage electronics.
(the study from the wiki article)
Very interesting details. You can easily cool your face by combining the spray bottle with a small desk fan, one of which I already have. It looks pretty critical that you also hold your breath while you do it. I think I will try this.
Use a tool like f.lux to change the color temperature of your screen depending on time of day.
Your eyes will be much happier when it matches the surrounding room, and/or lowering the temperature when it’s close to bed-time will help you fall asleep.
Not ridiculous enough!
Relatedly, for sources of light that aren’t your screen, get orange-tinted glasses. Also, of course, melatonin.
Specifically, get these if you dont wear glasses or these if you do. I’ve read the wavelength charts for these, and know they block the specific wavelengths of blue light that we care about for melatonin.
I’ve now tried f.lux for the past week or so. And now I’m disabling it. I like working late at night, and being a student in a term of revising but no lectures, I’m very flexible about what times I have to wake up. So it made me tired when I didn’t want to be which was annoying. It did work very well at getting me to bed though, so I’ll definitely reenable it when I want to go to bed earlier.
If you have a late but fairly consistent bedtime, you can set your location several time zones to the west. f.lux kicks in at sunset in your reported location.
Hasn’t been very consistent lately. Might try this later.
I’ve used it for ages but stopped using it recently because in fact my eyes are not happier when I use it—they are about the same. On the other hand it can get annoying when everything on your screen is more orangey than it is supposed to be.
Does anyone know how to make this work with a multiple monitor setup? F.lux and Redshift only adjust the primary monitor.
Well.. no, but redshift is open-source, and ought to be a relatively simple application. I’d take a crack if I had multiple monitors.
Have been using f.lux for years. Highly recommended.
If you happen to be a fairly wealthy but not so famous female American socialite, you could leak a sex tape, get yourself on some reality TV shows, stage a fake wedding for the media that nets you $18 million, and spin all this into a variety of fragrance and cosmetic product lines.
The same kind of thing also tends to work if you’re famous but not wealthy.
And marry Kanye.
I knew that home film studio would be useful for something...
Spread your genes without having children:
Donate to sperm/egg banks.
Sign up for genetic studies where your beneficial genes will be targeted if humanity decides to go a Gattacca-like route.
BTW, see Gwern’s essay about that.
Encourage people who are genetically similar to you to reproduce.
My twin sister is trying to subscribe me to have a second child so that she would not have to have any, and I feel like’genetic similarities’ are just not strong enough motivation.
This brings to mind the dollar-coin-frequent-flyer-miles scam a few years ago. Where basically, the US treasury started making dollar coins and no one used them. To encourage their circulation, they would sell boxes of coins online with free shipping. Munchkins started buying them with credit cards that gave frequent flier miles, then would deposit the coins at their bank and pay off the credit card. Result: millions of frequent flier miles for free.
The US treasury no longer accepts credit cards for online dollar coin purchases.
Where’s the scam in this story?
I guess I should have said scheme.
Would you say that anything which isn’t explicitly forbidden is fair game, and cannot be a scam?
To me a scam involves some kind of deception. I don’t see anyone being deceived, exactly. It’s not as if the munchkins were lying about whether their credit cards gave frequent flier miles.
It’s fair game according to the definition at the beginning of the OP, but when gaming human-made real-world rules, one should be aware that if it works, and it’s against the intention of the rules, the rules are likely to be changed to prevent it. There’s a certain amount of anti-inductiveness in the activity. See the running battle between tax legislators and tax accountants, which has recently come to public attention in the UK with the news that the UK operations of Starbucks, Google, and Apple apparently make hardly any profit to be taxed on.
(Disclaimer: I work for Google, there’s been informal internal discussions.)
What seems like it might be going on isn’t that Google et. al are doing anything unusual, so much as they’re taking advantage of loopholes that may have been established for the benefit of other industries, without paying off the politicians. The reasonable thing to do would be to change the laws, not to target individual companies.
I can’t say I’m very familiar with the details, though.
Well, I don’t work for Google (though sometimes I wish I did), but I agree that any company which does not use all the available rules to minimize its taxes should have its CFO fired. After all, that’s what a person would do if she found out that the person doing her taxes deliberately does not maximize her return.
Of course, there is a difference between maximizing your tax return this one year and carefully milking the loopholes for decades. Google is not doing a good job of the latter, so whoever is responsible for Google PR should be replaced with someone more competent.
Capital prices are more about relative competitiveness than absolute competitiveness. If every hundred dollars makes $4 instead of $5 next year because of closed tax loopholes, and your investment now makes $400 a year instead of $500 because of those same closed tax loopholes, then your investment hasn’t changed price.
Depending on the PR costs to support these tax loopholes, Google may even be better off closing them—so long as the PR costs are expensive enough, and the tax loopholes benefit everyone equally. The whole industry makes less money, the government gets more money, and Google saves on PR costs, providing a relative advantage and increasing their stock price.
Yea, just look how fast tax loopholes have been disappearing in the US, it’s only been decades and already they are on the agenda again, sometimes. Although you could argue they are d’accord with the intent of the rules, since those exceptions weren’t written into the tax code by accident …
But even if and when changes to the rules occur, the time lag while the activity is legal is often enough to reap significant benefits anyways, or to accomplish your purposes. Especially when state actors are concerned. I’m sorry, I mean esspppeeeeccccciiiiiiaaaaaaalllllllllyyyyyyyyyy wwwwwwwwwwiiiiiiiiiiitttttttttttthhhhhhhhhhhhh sssssssssssssstttttttttttttttaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaattttttttttttttttteeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaacccccccccccccccccccctttttttttttttttttttttoooooooooooooooooooooorrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrsssssssssssssssssssssssss
One man’s loophole is another man’s legitimate exemption.
Get a bunch of capital.
Go to a poor country (specifically, a country where food and buildings are cheap).
Build a great big school.
Offer the following deal to parents of gifted children: they send their children to you, and you’ll educate them for free, for ten years. At the end of ten years, the newly educated young adults either go to college, get a job, or be a bum. If at any point they do start working, you get (say) 10% of their income for 10 years.
Do it smartly: Skimp on “humanities”; no ancient literature for these kids. Reading, writing, math, science, programming. Get them ready for future jobs by giving them deep, versatile, malleable skills.
Do it cheaply: Use technology as efficiently as possible, so you don’t have to pay for too many instructors. A campus wide internet connection and a $100 netbook per kid should get most of the possible value; maybe have some real computers for the programmers. Obviously you still need some instructors.
Do it morally (this might rule it out completely, since you are kind of creating indentured servants, and also because you are sucking cognitive resources from that area).
Profit!
This is feasible because the biggest resource is still human cognitive resources. I’d bet that poor countries have untapped smart brains.
Step 1 isn’t getting the money. Step 1 is getting trustworthy people together.
Here’s what happens to your program. You get someone to administer “gifted” tests. All their friends and family are suddenly “gifted”. They cheat or bribe their way into staying in the program. They then take the “education” they got and go work somewhere with your impressive-looking credentials.
Then your reputation tanks as employers find out that you’re yet another foreign school which churns out impressive-looking credentials that do not reliably signal ability.
Note that my second paragraph is a big big part of why some schools and countries have a much easier time getting employed in the US than others.
Very feasible but lots of work. I wouldn’t invest in someone starting such a venture unless they had demonstrated the ability to make money by working hard as an independent business owner in the past, but I’d be happy to invest in and advise such a venture if it was run by the right kind of person.
Right, let’s get started. Ten years sounds like a nice round number, but is it optimal? To answer that first we need to consider what age children to admit. We want them young enough to become fluent in English quickly; all the high paying jobs are in English speaking countries, barring Asia—should we consider teaching Chinese as well? Maybe, but let’s think about that later.
To ensure they still have a wide range of pronounceable phonemes, they should be younger than seven. The younger the better, though, and we don’t want them to learn wrong things we’ll have to reteach, so before schooling age: at the maximum, five. Should we go younger, though?
Well, what do children learn from their families? Affection might be one, assuming they’re from an affectionate family. If they live in a culture where many children are the norm, then they may learn responsibility as well. They may also learn abuse, if that’s their family culture. Perhaps they’ll gain life experience? I’m not confident about that.
Well, if we go younger, then how young? Pre-bowel control training? Certainly not pre-solid foods; breast-feeding will contribute to their IQ. Children learn from anything and everything pre-four or so—this could be an advantage for language learning but also a waste of resources if they’ll be learning in their home environments anyway. I want to move on, so let’s settle on 3~5 for now.
How long to teach them for? Assuming efficient teaching and excellent recall of learnt material, from three to thirteen may be enough, but we have puberty to consider. Should we keep them in an environment with similarly aged children? I don’t think that’s the right question, as it assumes similarly aged children are naturally nasty to each other around puberty. This gets into teaching structure, but assuming curriculum can be ability gated rather than age gated, children of different ages will all work together; I don’t imagine an age gap of greater than three years, though, considering they should all be gifted—responsibility may not be an effect.*
Oh! In the absence of parents, the younger children might need emotional support. Older children can provide that! The school structure could accommodate this by rooming older children with younger children, or just naturally bringing them together for activities. The first generation will need adult role models in order to jumpstart the cycle.
The school should have a library—humanities will be included for pleasure reading. To promote easy bonding via shared interests, publicly listed clubs will be encouraged to the exclusion of the formation of cliques. An older child rearing younger child social dynamic may contribute to this atmosphere.
A caveat: beware the ‘utopian society’ experimental villages. We should look at cultures that have the desired values already, and use them as foundations.
* That was a bit of a tangent—sorry about that. So, if they won’t tear each other apart emotionally during puberty, should we still keep them? Teens started working when in their low teens in the past, but whether they can handle a present day adult job I’m unsure. Oh, right, I’ve been presuming we’ll teach them everything they’d learn at university plus possibly more. Social experiences must be included in that, so maybe they should stay on—if only just to work on original projects.
We could use some parents of the children for security—but must not allow them access to the kids as they are unnecessary confounds. I’m thinking of a large gated complex hundreds of acres in circumference for physical activities and to diminish any feeling of being trapped. I’m thinking a country without an armed militia, militant group, or bothersome government would be ideal. Eurasia might have some candidates, but I’m not sure how fertile the land is, and Russia and China have bothersome governments. South America, perhaps? Is there a governmentally stable African country with fertile, undeveloped land? PR of Congo comes to mind, but I don’t know much about their government’s politics.
That’s enough for now—if I come back to this, I’ll write below the line.
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 definitely interested in the idea of rational!Academy.
How do you enforce the 10% salary tithe?
One obvious difficulty in educating children for free and then expecting them to pay you back after they become educated is that, most places, minors cannot enter into legally binding contracts. So the kid graduates, gets a great job (in a country that won’t recognize the contract), and says, “I never agreed to pay you 10% of my salary, so I’m keeping it.”
Depending on your country, even adults can’t under a fair number of conditions. Having very unequal bargaining positions, for instance, violates the idea of freedom of contract—which will render it unenforceable in some places. I think it’s called undue influence.
This kind of a plan sounds great, but is IMO close to untenable in the real world.
Out of what ? Sure, you can build the building itself. But you also need (among other things) electric power, a reliable food supply, clean water, medical care, computers, plus a ton of muscle to protect you from people who will want to take all of the previously mentioned stuff. Poor countries have none of that. Well, they might have some muscle, but reliable security is tough to buy.
You will be overwhelmed with offers in a matter of days. How do you decide which children are gifted ?
How will you enforce that ? Actually, before you can enforce anything, where will your graduates find work ?
Where will you get them ? Do your kids speak English ? Do your instructors ?
Trust me, this will be the least of your worries.
Generalizing about ‘poor countries’ like this annoys me.
I wonder if #4 could be (sort-of) implemented as a very long-term loan? College loans in the US can have a lot of those features, they’re just not income-adjusted.
Another way to profit from this is spreading ideas to the students—when someone spends 10 years in a boarding school, they’re going to be very influenced by what other people in the school think. It would be really dark-artsy to go all-out in indoctrinating the students into your values, but they’re bound to absorb some things from their teachers unless you intentionally try to prevent it.
I think one of the difficult things would be identifying the gifted children. You might a lot of parents applying “just in case”, and it would be a balance between that and missing a lot of gifted children because they didn’t know about the program or couldn’t pass a barrier like an application fee. And if you’re recruiting from extremely poor populations, you’ll want to take children in as young as possible so they don’t spend too long on an insufficient diet, so you might have to find an intelligence test/filter that works for children who can’t read yet.
Overall, I like this idea very much. It could make for interesting meta-charity, too.
I recommend teaching nonsense. A little bit of science fiction, mythology, and an introduction to the world’s multifaceted culture (the Internet helps, but not nearly as much as people seem to imagine) may result in more creativity and attention to lessons children in poor countries would find boring. Yes, we want useful people, but a great part of that is creating a free, strong human being, not a clever machine or a rebel.
Lol why mythology?
One benefit that I am aware of is in one’s thinking. Gods and heroes are at times still targets to aim for. Fresh new ideas spring from the dust of the old. Superstition examined is, with the right teacher, superstition avoided. The teaching of many different points of view helps understand other people’s values. Illustrating a difficult problem with a myth or two assisted me in mathematics and in examining how I view right and wrong (my current obsession with diversity could be blamed on the sheer variety of myths I absorbed).
The second benefit, and one may consistently find even in the absence of good teachers and a clear goal is that it simply provides a much-needed break in between lessons useful for work.
Quick cost analysis: Assuming they get good programming jobs, you’d be getting at most, say, 10000 USD per year per kid or $100,000 USD per kid. A country low on this list_per_capita) has a GDP of under 5000 USD. Assuming you want decent facilities and educators, you’ll need, say, 3 times the GDP per student per year. If you’re giving them 10 years of education, that’s $150,000 in cost. This doesn’t work out even assuming a 100% success rate in getting them very high-end jobs. If you go for a very, very cheap place you might be able to get that to, say, $5000 a year in expenses per kid which works out if you get good success rates.
So this gives some obvious ways to get this to work:
You need to go for really as cheap a country as you can find and take full advantage of tech to reduce costs
More than 10% for 10 years might be necessary.
Alternative sources for funding—alumni donations are the current system most places use but would be weird to have on top of mandatory payments
Don’t educate them for 10 years or only do part-time education for some of it. (Can you give them the netbooks and have them study on their own for half the year while they live with their family?)
3x GDP/student/year? That’s an absurdly high estimate.
I hope you realized I meant that GDP per capita. Assuming you did and still think it’s high, here’s a more detailed estimate:
Let’s arbitrarily pick the 10th country from bottom of the GDP per capita list by CIA Factbook: Niger. Now we can make some more concrete statements. On average Niger women have 7 children and presumably raise them on 2*GDP per capita income. This gives 0.28 of the GDP on raising a child. (Infant and childhood death rates seem to be negligible for this calculation, perhaps increasing average spending by 10% when assuming they make it to age 15.) So assuming a high quality education takes three times as much as the typical education/child raising of the time we’d get about 1 GDP per child per year.
Niger happens to also have the highest birth rate in the world. Picking the country above it on the list, Afghanistan, gives a birth rate of 5 children/woman and would give us about 1.2 GDP per child per year. In any case, my 3 GDP estimate looks rather high here, but on the other hand so was my estimate that all* the children so taught would go on to work at Google-equivalent pay scales. I might then round my guess to 1.5 GDP per child per year when including extra costs like PR or administering tests to see who to admit that are done on more children than are educated.
If you think that’s still rather high, then you probably disagree with my estimate that such a program would want to spend three times as much money on education and child raising as is standard in the given country.
Aside: how do you make links here that include parentheses in them?
LW wiki > Comment formatting > Common problems > Links
AFAIK, “per capita” means ‘divided by the whole population’, not just the adult one. (Am I missing something?)
[Like this](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_%28PPP%29_per_capita)(28and29being the ASCII values for(and)respectively in hexadecimal).Good point and thanks for the tip.
Possible problems:
Education in a poor country may be highly regulated. You may need to bribe government officials all the time just to be allowed to teach anyone there. (Corruption may be one of the reasons why the country is so poor.)
If the country is poor, your former students will get very low salaries, if they decide to stay in their country. Ten percent of their income may be just enough to cover the costs of education, not enough to make a profit.
In the worst case (most poor countries), you can expect many of your students getting killed in some civil war or dying from medical problems, and maybe even you will be accused of witchcraft and burned.
Are you planning to teach all subjects alone? In a very poor country, you might have a problem to find sufficiently smart teachers.
All fair points, to which there might be workarounds… but the title of the post is “Post Ridiculous Munchkin Ideas”.
Seth Robert’s idea of putting a noseclip on your nose while you it to lose weight is ridiculous to most people. It’s not ridiculous because there are practical problems with putting noseclips on your nose.
It ridiculous because normal people just don’t put noseclips on their noses when they eat. If there are practical problems with implementing your idea why should a munchkin do them?
I don’t think that’s supposed to literally mean to post ideas that are ridiculous, but rather to post ideas that are not the sort of thing one normally thinks about.
Would work for an apprenticeship program. Not so sure about a school; too much overhead.
What future jobs? Who needs a programmer or a physicist in the middle of nowhere?
Cold Thermogenesis
Taking very cold showers or baths. You gradually decrease the temperature of your shower over several weeks. I can now take a shower or bath with the water on just cold. Other people use ice to lower the temperature of their baths even further.
Some claim that it has significant health benefits, but I haven’t noticed any although I haven’t been doing it for very long. Still, it’s neat to be able to modify your body to tolerate something that would have previously caused unbearable pain.
Here is some discussion of cold thermogenesis on a paleo website.
Just wanted to say that I’ve always wanted to take cold showers but never managed to pull it off because my body refuses to step into the cold shower stream. Somehow, until I read your post, it never occurred to me that I could start the shower at a nice warm temperature, step in, and then turn it down over the course of a few seconds. I’ve been doing this successfully for a few days and feeling great. Thanks!
BTW, I’ve found that changing the temperature of the water over time feels much less uncomfortable if the water is pouring directly onto my head than if it’s going (say) on my feet.
What is the chance of developing rheumatism as a side effect?
Why would you suspect that rheumatism is a possible side effect?
When I was a child, very cold showers were the latest fashion in my country, doctors recomended them for everyone, especially for children, to develop tolerance to cold weather. Luckily, my parents resisted. A few years later, doctors stopped recommending it, and just pretended the whole thing never happened. -- Later I heard from a doctor that the recommendation was followed by a visible increase of rheumatism, including small children, so they realized it was not that good idea.
Apparently, the people giving health advice at internet yet have to learn.
… that anecdotal evidence is not reliable?
I googled “cold shower rheumatism” and found a study suggesting that exposure to cold water (in this case, winter swimming) actually relieves the pain associated with existing rheumatism. A plausible explanation of your doctor’s observation is that cold showers made people who already had rheumatism more likely to report it to doctors.
I would certainly be wary of making children do it, but I actually have noticed that my tolerance to cold weather has gotten slightly better after cold showers (and it’s noticeably lower on the days where I don’t take a cold shower). The effect may be mostly psychological but it’s still an effect.
A very weak study in this context, for multiple reasons: Somewhat obscure journal (impact factor of 1.06), end point was the swimmers’ mood, which may also influence pain reporting, intervention was winter swimming, which is much dfifferent from cold showers in many ways (shower != sports activity), the pool of participants was structurally non-overlapping (children versus people who go winter swimming!), the pain relief is confounded by also feeling “more energetic, active and brisk”, compared to controls who did not do that sports activity, the list goes on.
Yea.
Anecdotal evidence… compared with a discussion of cold thermogenesis on a paleo website… well, that’s a difficult choice. What exactly is the difference?
I didn’t claim that my evidence was more reliable, just that it wasn’t less reliable. Anyway, I’m not the one making a claim about how cold showers affect a large number of people, I’m only making a claim about how they affect me.
Also, I don’t contradict your experience.
I assume that some things can have positive impact on many people, and at the same time a larger negative impact on a few people. In such case, many people would recommend it based on their personal experience, and yet the experts would not recommend it. Which, I assume, could be this case. And also case of many other recommendations promoted online, or even in this thread.
After reading the other comments, I am now pretty uncertain about the rheumatism. But even so… the benefits of this therapy seem rather small, so I don’t see a reason to take even small risks.
Could be a case of post hoc ergo propter hoc. Rheuma has many variants, but generally they are all either autoimmune or degenerative. Juvenile arthritis (JA), an umbrella term used to describe the many autoimmune and inflammatory conditions that can develop in children ages 16 and younger, doesn’t include cold as a causal factor.
You can kill cartilage using cold, however I doubt the very cold showers reached the −20°C and below from the study linked. Even then, cold induced cartilage necrosis doesn’t necessarily cause degenerative joint disease. It may however cause inflammation? Somewhat dubious, I’d be suprised if so.
Ah, the experiments they did back in the seventies … unencumbered by ethics boards. Simpler times.
It’s fun to be able to actually feel your body generating heat after awhile. I also feel somewhat more alert after doing it in the morning. Haven’t noticed much other than that though.
Have you noticed an effect on your tolerance of high temperatures? I’d be happy to improve my resilience to cold, but not if it means sacrificing resilience to heat.
No, but I haven’t done cold thermogenesis during a summer. According to this
“In my experience being cold adapted makes you more tolerant to heat of the summer. This has been the experience of the patients who have implemented this in my practice as well.”
In my experience, people adapted to cold climates tend to be poorly adapted to warm ones, and vice versa.
My Russian fencing coach, for instance, would scoff at American winters, but when he came to the summer nationals in Austin Texas, he was by far the worst off, and kept complaining that he was going to die.
I haven’t read much on this, but I have been trying it, just because I’ve noticed the different ways my body reacts to warm vs cool water. The trouble is that I don’t like standing up the whole time; crouching makes me very aware of heat being lost through my knees; and then I wind up wasting a lot of time and water with the heat turned up.
The obvious solution seems to be wrapping my knees in something, which I’ve done a few times with success; it’s just hard to form into a habit.
So far, my experience points toward cooler water being beneficial, not that my anecdotes are anything resembling scientific (even as self experimentation goes).
Cold showers are much better than hot ones if you have (very) sensitive skin.
And you’ll take shorter showers, saving water and time.
(I remembered this yesterday while writing a comment about something else, but LeechBlock stopped me before I was able to write it here.)
The black keys on a piano keyboard form a pentatonic scale; that is to say, so long as you have an anywhere-near-decent sense of rhythm, nearly anything you can improvise using those keys alone will sound good. Non-musicians will be pretty unlikely to notice what you’re doing, if they aren’t very close to you.
IIRC There’s a video (TED talk?) out there of a guy using this for audience participation, to great effect.
Edit: Here.
Wow, that’s a big help to me. I can never remember the pentatonic scale, so that alone acts as an easy reference no matter what key I’m in.
Here’s a method for learning a complex subject that seems to accelerate acquiring instrumental skill and the ability to use the knowledge creatively. As a bonus, you make progress on projects you’ve deferred for want of technical skills you’re learning now.
Project Mapping: a) Make a list of projects you’re working or intend to do sometime. The more the projects excite you, the more effective this technique. b) Take a bite of your subject (a chapter or topic, smaller the better) c) Go to your project journal. Pick one or more projects from the list to connect to the material you learned. If they can’t conceivably connect … then why are you learning this? d) No matter how great the gap between the complexity and difficulty of your project and the simplicity of the elementary material you just learned, even if it’s just whole number addition, describe ways to apply the knowledge to some aspect or part of your project. This is the actual “secret sauce” of the technique. e) Return to each bite to “rehearse” it by adding even more ideas, and feel free to connect in and use more advanced material you’ve learned, too. f) If you can, set your rehearsal schedule for each bite to initially just half an hour apart, but space them out by double the previous time between rehearsals. Force even boundaries on days or weeks to help simplify the schedule. Something like: 30m, 60m, 2h, 4h, 8h, 16h, 24h, 2d, 4d, 7d, 2w, 1m, 2m, 4m, 8m, 1y
A note on the “secret sauce” (part d): You’ll often need to force your brain to believe, especially when learning the fundamentals of a subject, that you can apply it to your byzantine mega-idea. Try for five minutes. If it’s just too hard, maybe create an easier project to stand-in.
I have unintentially been implementing something like this in anki.
This is a well known one, but I only recently got around to actually doing it, so I suspect that there are others that also haven’t done it yet.
Learn to touch type. The kind of person you probably are if you are reading Less Wrong spends a remarkable fraction of the day typing at a computer. As such, even a small increase in typing speed and skill can save you huge amount of time and effort. And it is not at all hard to learn. This investment of a small amount of time and energy to learn to touch type pays back huge dividends in time saved.
One other point: If you are going to learn to touch type, there is no point whatsoever to doing so in the Qwerty keyboard layout. It is just as easy or easier to learn a better layout (like Dvorak or Colemak), which also will give you a bigger boost to your typing speed and efficiency.
This is a highly dubious claim. I (occupations: software engineer, student (CS major)) spend a remarkable fraction of the day at a computer… but do I spend most of that typing? I do not. I’m doing more typing right now, writing this comment, than I do in a much larger period of doing actual work. Even if you only look at the time I spend actively coding (rather than reading documentation / literature, thinking about a problem, debugging, tinkering, etc.) that’s still not mostly typing.
Furthermore, citation needed on the claim that touch-typing, as opposed to the way I type now, will save a “huge amount of time and effort”.
So very citation needed on this one. (Counter-citation: http://www.utdallas.edu/~liebowit/keys1.html.)
For desk work that is not typing, look into a gaming keyboard and mouse. My drafting co-workers have bound short macros to the extra keyboard keys for frequently used commands, I am weighing the benefits to use the same approach for frequently used equations during design calculations.
A reasonable suggestion, though I find that the time required to bind the macros, then remember them, then remember to use them, is too much effort for me. That, of course, is up to personal preference.
Also: do you know of a gaming keyboard that is a Mac keyboard (presence of appropriate keys and layout) and has clicky-keys (a la the Apple Extended / Matias ProTouch Edit: got the name wrong, it’s the Matias Tactile Pro)?
Update: I have recently purchased the Unicomp Spacesaver M[1], and it is everything I ever wanted from a keyboard. I can’t recommend it highly enough!
[1] Basically, it’s an IBM Model M—with buckling-spring keys—but with a Mac layout and a USB connection.
Das Keyboard now comes in a real Mac version (they used to just have exchangeable keycaps and it’s never been quite ideal). It’s clicky and nice. It doesn’t have lunatic gaming ‘features’ like enormous rubber WASD though.
Yep, I’ve seen the Das Keyboard. Layout is still somewhat incorrect (see my comment here), even on the “Mac” version, though the fact that it’s based on the Model M (or… so the imply?) is cool. Of course it also doesn’t seem to have any extra keys that might be bound to macros or whatnot, which was the motivation for the original comment.
In general, gaming peripherals for Macs are hard to come by; Razer has at least 3 keyboards that allegedly support Mac OS X; you might have to modify or get over keys (mis)labeled for windows users. In general, most gaming keyboards like to have a very tactile feel that allows one to be certain of keypresses. I’m not sure exactly what feature you are describing with ‘clicky-keys’; are you looking for a long stroke, or for keys that register a keypress before bottoming out, and have significantly less resistance for the bottom portion of the stroke?
I’m describing the feel that you get with “mechanical-switch” keys (google it for images/explanations). The Apple Extended Keyboard (and Apple Extended Keyboard II), and, more recently, the Matias Tactile Pro (not ProTouch, whoops) are two keyboards that use such technology. Most other keyboards do not.
The Razer “for Mac” keyboards seem to have obviously non-Mac layouts, which rearrangement won’t fix. That’s a deal-breaker for me. The correct layout and the feel of a good keyboard is more important to me than additional keys or whatnot. My question was mostly due to curiosity.
I’m not sure what ‘layout’ issues you are referring to, but I’m not a Mac user and I have trouble adjusting to any laptop keyboard. I’m guessing that the layout issue is that you need four bucky keys to the left of the space bar and two to the right, instead of 3/4? Or is the location of the arrows and lack of the right half also critical?
EDIT: Mechanical keyboards can be tactile, noisy, both, or neither, depending on the specific nature of the switch. Which are important to you?
EDIT 2: What feature does the Matias Tactile Pro 3 keyboard lack that a ‘gaming’ keyboard would have?
What’s a “bucky key”...? (Edit: I see you were referring to this probably. Interesting, hadn’t heard the term before) Anyway, there are several layout issues. I’m pretty picky when it comes to keyboard layout. Um, let’s see. Correct number and layout of modifier keys (Control Option Command Spacebar Command Option Control; anything else is incorrect); correct numpad layout (18 keys, not 17, with Enter and 0 being the only two large ones); presence of volume control and eject keys above the numpad; shape of Return key (one-row height, not two-row); a properly sized backslash key… that ought to mostly cover it, I think.
I’m talking about the feel of the keyboard when I say that I prefer mechanical key switches.
As for what a gaming keyboard adds, I’m not the one who brought it up; wadavis mentioned them in this comment, citing extra keys to which macros might be bound. I’ve never used such a keyboard myself, I was just curious whether such a one might exist which would also fulfill my other criteria for a keyboard.
If all you want is programmable macros, then something like the Nostromo or Orbweaver could serve you well; every button and each direction of the 8-way hat switch can be changed to any input or macro possible from a USB device, including mouse clicks, multimedia commands, launching programs, or changing its own settings.
If your typical workflow can be reduced to 15-230 macros that you can keep straight, it could replace the keyboard as a primary input device. If you would benefit from 15-20 macros that you need to take a hand away from the keyboard to execute, it could serve as a useful addition. If you just want a keystroke combination that executes a series of commands, that’s probably better done in software.
Off the top of my head, no.
I had good results with CopyPaste, a program which creates multiple clipboards you can store things in on a semipermanent basis. ctrl-shift-v-2 could be the command to paste the second stored clipboard, for instance (depending on your settings—it was very configurable). That only works for things that allow the use of the edit menu—not palette hotkey selections—but it could be a help.
While we don’t spend all our time in front of a computer typing, it does seem to represent a non negligible portion of our days. Assuming an hour a day of typing on average for the rest of your life, the time you will spend typing is tens of thousands of hours.
I’m currently learning Dvorak and it looks like it’s going to take about 30-40 hours to be able to type properly. So the gains in efficiency don’t have to be very significant to pay off.
To check how efficient the time investment is I checked my typing speed. Like you, probably, I’m not a touch typer but I felt like I was typing pretty decently before, and measured at 40 wpm on both of the two websites that I tried, with no mistakes. I’ll check my speeds with Dvorak once I’m done with the lessons, and again after a few months of practice, to settle this debate hopefully, but just from having done the first ten or so lessons I can already see that Dvorak is going to be a major improvement, if not in speed, definitely in terms of comfort.
You make an interesting point about likely spending over 10k hours typing over the course of the rest of our respective lives, although I note that even if you are right, I’d have to invest 30-40 hours now in order to learn to touch-type, whereas the gains would be spread out over a longer period. That said, please post your results when you get them, I am definitely interested in hearing about it.
I do note that you conflate two distinct issues: whether touch-typing is worth learning, and whether Dvorak is a meaningful (or any) improvement over QWERTY. I am definitely far more suspicious of the latter claim than the former (see my link in the grandparent for a thorough debunking).
Even the studies cited by the author in your link show a speed advantage of around 5% for Dvorak over Qwerty. Considering my point of the 10k hours, the payoff is more than worthwhile, before even taking RSI into consideration.
On a side note, one of the reasons I decided to learn touch-typing was because I have some free time at the moment and was looking for something else to do than read blog posts all day, so I totally agree with you that investing 30-40 hours now might not be the best for everyone… TDT probably recommends it though.
After having finished the basic course in Dvorak and touch typing for a few weeks now, here is an update on my results: I spent a total of 30 hours learning to touch type, but even once I could touch type properly, I was still really slow, at about 20 wpm immediately after finishing the lessons, half of my original speed. Ten days later, after forcing myself to avoid the QWERTY layout which resulted in some inconvenience, in particular with keyboard shortcuts, I am now typing at about 30 wpm in Dvorak, which is still significantly slower than my previous, unconventional but obviously not so bad, typing in QWERTY.
The idea that I will probably spend tens of thousands of hours typing in my life still stands, though, and the touch typing is getting more and more natural each day, I’ll try to update my results again after several months to see if there is actually a significant increase in typing speed over the long run.
On a side note, comfort is definitely better when touch typing “properly” in Dvorak than when typing “improperly” but faster in QWERTY, however this may be related to the way I positioned my hands on the keyboard rather than to the initial keyboard layout.
All of the evidence I have seen suggests that touchtyping is worth learning.
To what extent is that because you’re a slow typist? (Do you know your wpm?)
Dvorak, Colemak, or the superior QGMLWY generally will not increase typing speed for touchtypers, as typing speed for most applications is limited by thinking speed. They will increase efficiency, and one can estimate the reduced effort for any particular corpus with an effort model like carpalx’s, and so alternate layouts are primarily useful for people who want to prevent or manage repetitive stress injuries.
Links? :)
(Or, if this evidence is anecdotal or otherwise not easily linkable — please do elaborate!)
I don’t know my wpm, but your question baffles me. How would my typing speed affect the fact that at some given moment I need to read several pages of documentation, sketch out a UI layout, look through code, think, etc.?
Your yourself say in your very next paragraph that “typing speed for most applications is limited by thinking speed” (and I think that’s only an upper bound on the practical limitation).
I don’t know what an “effort model” is, but I take from your comment that if I am not concerned about RSIs, Dvorak etc. should not interest me. Confirm/deny? Also, even assuming I am concerned about RSIs, do I understand correctly that the RSI prevention/management advantages of the alternate layouts you mention are for touch typists specifically, not just anyone typing in any way?
Most of it is anecdotal. The way I learned to touchtype was participating in chatrooms when I was younger; if you took too long to write sentences, the conversation would pass you by. So I quickly learned to type more quickly than I could talk. A more efficient way to learn is a blank keyboard. Here is an expensive one, or you can buy stickers for your current keyboard for $2 on Amazon, which also lets you learn letters one by one.
The sort of activities you engage in will depend to some degree on the costs of those activities. If you can’t type quickly, you’re unlikely to participate in chatrooms or irc channels. The amount of journaling I do, say, might depend on whether I write my journal with a pen or with a keyboard, because it takes me far less time to press a key than to form a letter. If it takes fifteen minutes to jot down my record of the day rather than an hour, that might be enough to move the habit from not worthwhile to worthwhile.
Confirm. For me personally, it wasn’t worth the investment to switch from QWERTY to QGMLWY because transferring capped my typing speed at 7 wpm at a week, and the adaptation period typically runs ~2 months, suggesting I would be mostly out of commission for much longer than I thought was reasonable.
An effort model is an estimate of how much energy it takes / strain it puts on your fingers to press the key. Some fingers are stronger than others, and “home row” keys are easier to press than keys that require movement. (I move my hands around the keyboard, and so my “home row” is actually on several keyboard rows simultaneously, and moves based on what sentence I’m about to write, so the actual effort model for me is much more complicated than something like carpalx’s.)
Also not very ridiculous. Seems like it would be more at home in the boring advice repository.
True enough. Still, it is one of those “hacks” that are very useful and efficient, and anyone who seriously wants to munchkin their way to success should certainly take heed. Sometimes the simpler tricks are the most effective. But yes, true, this would probably be more at home in with the category of boring advice.
What if you spend a lot of time using keyboards purchased by someone else?
The keyboard is irrelevant if you don’t look at the keys, it’s the keyboard layout that’s relevant, and that’s a software setting. I was very confused the first time I used a computer whose keyboard layout had been changed to Dvorak.
But there is something of a problem if you share a computer with someone who uses Qwerty, I guess. Switching back and forth might get annoying (although maybe you can set an AutoHotKey to do it?).
Other people use my computer fairly often, and I just set it to shift back and forth with command+shift+1. I can change it before I give it to them, so others won’t even know if I don’t want them to.
I have to admit, I hadn’t thought of that.
No need for AHK, layout-switching shortcuts exist in every operating system I’ve used.
Keyboard covers can solve the hardware side of this problem.
What do keyboards have to do with typing system? The keyboard really just tells the system which keys have been pressed, interpreting that as QWERTY or Colemak or Dvorak input (or even stenographic cords) is entirely up to the computer receiving that data.
If you are trusted enough to make minor personalization changes to computers (installing Colemak or Dvorak), then it’s maybe 1-2 minutes to get typing at full speed at any arbitrary computer. If you aren’t, then you should spend the effort to get a better job instead.
Well, my “job” is a high school, so …
Still, I must admit it hadn’t occurred to me to simply change the software and ignore the symbols on the hardware. I had always encountered alternate keyboard layouts in the context of purchasing physical keyboards, for some reason.
Yeah, I’d find the school IT guy and ask about non-qwerty keyboard layouts. You can try get that set up on your school account. If that’s not possible because they lock down everything, then go ahead and learn to touch-type on qwerty (in addition to either Colemak or Dvorak).
The thing with being in middle school or high school is that you have a lot more ability than children, and a lot more time than adults. It’s the perfect place to spend some time learning to touch-type, or make chainmail, or practice doing return-on-investment and value-of-information calculations, or whatever.
Strictly speaking, not so (anymore?). Among other things, my USB mouse can transmit keystrokes. However, the computer can still respond in any manner to any input, including treating one letter as another. I think that macros executed in hardware could be royally borked by such a substitution, however.
Goodness yes. I favour my rant on the topic in the Procedural Knowledge Gaps post a couple of years ago.
I see you already have people replying that they are special snowflakes who don’t need this despite spending their lives attached to a computer. They are wrong.
I would say QWERTY is still a vast improvement over not bothering at all, and setting one’s keymap to Dvorak and remembering that the letters on one’s keyboard are lies would count as a trivial inconvenience, which is why I didn’t mention it. (And I’m still on QWERTY myself.)
It seems like your comment applies to me, so I hope you won’t mind if I interrogate you a bit. I just read the linked rant, and I see that you offer no citations or justifications for your claims. You talk about complaints of sore fingers; I have no such complaints. I don’t have RSI problems despite over a decade of work in the computer industry (paying attention to basic ergonomics helps).
So I am really curious (and please don’t take my question as hostile, it’s not meant to be): you make such strong, heartfelt claims that it’s absolutely necessary to touch-type and that people who don’t touch-type are NOT TYPING PROPERLY and DON’T KNOW HOW TO TYPE etc., but… can we have some backup for these claims? Citations? Any evidence at all?
(Also, what are your thoughts on the reasons I provide in my comment here for why touch-typing, even if it radically increased my typing speed per se, would not actually save me much time?)
You might want to get yourself this keyboard. It’ll decrease your chance of getting RSI, it might be a little faster to type on than a standard keyboard, and it’s possible to remap the keys in hardware so you can take your keyboard anywhere and plug it in to anything and have it be configured with your preferred layout. In theory you might be able to train yourself to use Colemak or whatever when your hands were in the contoured position and Qwerty in the flat position, for friends’ computers and library computers and such.
(For best results, combine with this keyboard tray that also converts your desk in to a sit/stand desk. I recommend sawing off part of the adjustment knob underneath the desk so it won’t poke your legs.)
Anecdotal evidence:
I’ve been typing on Dvorak for personal use for over 10 years, and I use Qwerty at work. I can touch-type on both layouts. Being able to toggle between the two seems to be affected by the system and/or keyboard tactile sensation, but is otherwise effortless. When I got a new laptop and was setting it up, my fingers were confused for a few hours, before the realization cemented in that I had set it to Dvorak. Conversely, trying to type on Dvorak as if Qwerty (I tried just now) requires conscious effort and looking at the keys. (I also tried it without looking at the keys; my typing spontaneously switched back to Dvorak mid-sentence.)
Interesting. Are you noticeably faster on Dvorak? Do you feel learning Dvorak slowed down your Qwerty typing?
The only thing that annoys me about the Kinesis option I outlined above is that the Kinesis hardware doesn’t allow you to do Programmer Dvorak type things like inverting numbers and symbols—you can only move keys around, you can’t mess with their shift behavior.
Personally, I’ve pretty much always typed with Qwerty—I think I’m pretty fast with it and I don’t want to risk losing that (hard to know ‘cause I make more mistakes whenever I think about the fact that I’m typing—I’m just assuming I must be pretty fast ’cause I type commands in to the terminal to navigate my filesystem, type to journal my thoughts, type to take notes on random stuff, etc. and I rarely get frustrated that I’m typing too slow), it’s nice to be able to use computers that aren’t my standard one, and I’m skeptical that learning a new layout would pay for itself. I had extremely bad RSI symptoms in the past, but thanks to this guide I learned how to reverse them, and nowadays they’re not a significant issue.
No to both by my estimate, but Dvorak does feel (faster, more fluid, smooth). I’m pretty sure that individual dexterity and experience affect (Edit: optimal) typing speed much more than the keyboard layout.
I taught myself Dvorak back in high school with casual practice one summer (possibly a bit longer.) I had minor recurring problems toggling between Dvorak and Qwerty in the classroom for a decent portion of the following school term. So I wouldn’t recommend switching layouts to everyone, especially if they’re already fluent on Qwerty and can’t afford the temporary drop in speed/accuracy.
In academia, Munchkining has recently taken off.
These techniques for getting tenure have long existed, but they have been codified only in the last few years.
Self-citation
Multiple publication of the same materials.
To aid in citing several of your own articles that are effectively the same article, rotate “first author” privileges among coauthors so that multiple self-citations don’t occur near each other in the alphabetically ordered bibliography.
And many more. Here is a selection.
The Scientific 7-Minute Workout
7 minutes scientific workout http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Itye1DEJTQk
Just tried it. it is tiring, but far from 8 on 0 to 10 discomfort level which was claimed somewhere in Lesswrong, though maybe it is for people who weight more than 75 kilos.
I think the idea is you should be setting a pace that gets to an 8 of 10 in discomfort, which is the tradeoff when you choose to dedicate only 7 minutes to exercise.
LASIK surgery is now pretty cheap, and depending on how much you spend on new glasses, optometrist appointments, contact lenses etc., it might actually pay for itself eventually. It should also save you time and effort, and might make you look better.
“Pretty cheap”? I looked up the prices once in the name of VoI and saw numbers in the range of $2,500. I’m pretty sure I can improve my life more than LASIK would with $2,500 worth of other improvements.
But if you would spend 2500$ over ten years of glasses- and contacts-wearing—which is very possible, especially if you’re prone to breaking them—then it pays for itself already. Or twenty years, whatever, ignoring alternative ways to invest that money. Add in more for the massive convenience of not having to deal with glasses and contacts, too.
This is why I’m going in for a LASIK pre-op next week. I’m certain it will improve my quality of life appreciably and save me money over the long term to boot.
$250 a year for glasses seems high given that my $90 glasses have been fine since 2008. I do have an extra pair ($40, not titanium framed) for backup, and should get new ones to update my prescription, but $250/year?
If you hate glasses then lasik might be worth it, but I doubt it’s cheaper for many people.
lasik is worthwhile since it’s a superior product to wearing glasses. Between peripheral vision and correction of astigmatism, you’re better off going under the laser.
Yeah, it can definitely be done for cheaper. In my case going through college and such I got new frames every year or two (between breaking them or starting to hate the style..). The bigger expense was contacts, which we either didn’t have insurance for or it didn’t cover, coming out to 100-150/year depending on how often I lost or damaged them.
It might hinge on how quickly one’s vision is worsening. A younger person who needs a new prescription every time their eyes are tested could well spend $250/year on glasses; an older person whose vision has stabilized can use a $90 pair for years.
If you’re getting $90 glasses then to spend $2500 over ten years you need to go through nearly 30 pairs. That sounds high.
Not to mention the discount rate—Lasik is $2500 now, while $90 ten years from now is less than $90 now.
Yeah, the price of glasses matters too. Even someone with continually worsening eyes who buys two pairs a year won’t spend $250/year if they only buy $90 glasses. But it’s quite easy to spend, say, £200 on a pair of glasses, and if you do that annually you’ll burn through $300 per year!
Probably more like $3500 in the Bay Area.
Lasik circa 2013 is way, way, way better than Lasik circa 2003. It’s mostly done by machine based on a precalculated map of your eye. Correcting higher order aberrations improves aspects of your vision that can’t be improved by glasses or contacts. To me, this feels like vastly improved 3d vision resolution. I can see the intricate structure of the leaves of trees much better than before.
The cost is reasonable enough when amortized over a decade. Lasik sort of wears off over time, so worst case, plan on getting your eyes lasered every decade. Or, plan on getting them lasered for a decade or two, and then get a lens replacement when they can come with high resolution heads up displays.
It depends on your particular vision issues. If you’re astigmatic, laser eye surgery is well worth the price in terms of removing clumsiness. Especially if you can finance it over the time period you’ll enjoy it in.
$2500 is pretty cheap for a surgery, or for a form of eye care that lasts for decades. I’ve spent several hundred over the last 5 years, and I don’t even have contacts.
Great. Do you just feel compelled to let everyone know when a comment does not apply specifically to you? That must be exhausting.
The implicature of the comment was that it might apply to other people, too. I think this presumption is reasonable. For example, the cost of LASIK exceeds the cost of all the other improvements suggested in this thread combined (for which prices were given).
Seconded. I had NO IDEA how much discrimination I suffered for wearing glasses until I gave them up. Contacts might be a better alternative if you expect to be wearing Google Glasses in a few years anyway though.
I’m intrigued. What was the nature of the discrimination? How did you know glasses/not-glasses was the cause? Any specific examples?
The most basic is that as far as I can tell, I had never been hit on while wearing glasses, and that started happening regularly.
Reading failure, “never been hit on” is very different to “never been hit”. It sounded wrong when I (mis)read, and I didn’t notice.
I don’t think it would substitute for optometrist appointments, just for getting new glasses of the same prescription as you already had. For people who have had LASIK, had your glasses prescriptions been changing up until then? And did you vision continue to change afterwards?
I can be corrected to better than 20⁄20 with glasses. Would LASIK allow me to achieve the same level?
yes
Would that happen automatically, or would the procedure set me at 20⁄20 unless the person doing it takes special action?
There are additional ‘add-ons’ with names like ‘clear view’. The tech changes continually, so do some research before buying it.
One of my best friends got LASIK and reported terrible results (to the point where worries about his vision problems were giving him suicidal thoughts).
I’m passing this along without endorsement: http://gettingstronger.org/2010/07/improve-eyesight-and-throw-away-your-glasses/
Another, contrary datapoint: I had LASIK myself, around a year ago. It went well. I do experience the most common side effect (starbursts/halos) but consider it more than worth it nonetheless.
Yeah, but you must take off 3 days from work sitting bored in a darkened room, then wear sunglasses for months?
Need some dead animal flesh in your diet on a budget? Organ meats are cheap, healthy, but (ymmv) still tasty. The chicken livers I got this week were less than a dollar per serving, and they’re full of vitamins and protein. Chicken hearts are ~$2 per pound at my store and have a milder flavor if you find livers unpalatable. Not sure if I should have posted this here or in the Boring Advice Repository.
A word of caution though: you could easily get too much vitamin A from eating liver. This might lead to permanent liver damage among other problems.
Related: chicken feet are also about $2/lb at my store, but yield many times more broth than a similar amount of meat or bones. It’s also much tastier than canned broth, and you can make it very strong and store it compactly in the freezer for a long time. And you get to chase your roommate around with a terrifying scaly dinosaur foot whose claws open and close as you pull on the tendons.
Some butchers will give away soup bones for free as well.
Do you eat the feet after making the broth?
Usually I simmer it until there’s no flavor left in the feet and they’re not worth eating. Occasionally I add soy sauce, ginger, and spices, shorten the cooking time, and eat a few. The texture is very interesting but all the little bones make it take a lot of effort so I may not bother again.
Must … resist … urge … to plug vegetarianism …
Oh, go on then.
Resistance is clearly futile.
It’s common knowledge that taller people are more successful. This effect is also pretty strong—for instance, tall people make an average of $789 per inch per year and this has been shown repeatedly in a set of four large-scale salary survey studies.
We don’t know that it’s causation, but it seems very likely that people judge others’ general fitness, consciously or not, by looking at their height (which makes evopsych sense, considering for instance that malnutrition decreases height).
I can think of two ways to Goodhart this (are there more?): you can improve your posture, or you can raise your feet off the ground using elevator shoes or heel lifts, giving you say 2″ (which is $1,600 per year, plus nonmonetary gains) for less than $20.
Intelligence is correlated with height.
I am climbing on my ladder to contemplate the best ways to use this information.
Standing on the shoulders of giants, indeed.
This says to me that early childhood nutrition is the common factor here.
Right, so that implies that some of the benefits from being taller might actually be benefits from increased intelligence, and so merely increasing height might not confer those benefits. It also implies that you could make people think you’re smarter by making yourself taller.
It’s a pretty weak correlation though, I don’t think that it could realistically account for an earning difference of nearly $800 per year per inch if height is just an intermediary for the causative agent of intelligence.
Even discounting for skull size?
It’s not as cheap as platform shoes, but it would be economically beneficial and very munchkiny to get limb lengthening surgery. Even a modest 2 inch procedure would easily pay itself back in 10 years.
Cost: $10,000 in India +incidentals
Benefit $800 x 2 x 10 years = $16,000.
Came here to say this, after viewing parent comment—though the point I was meaning to make was quite different.
Take it from someone who thought about this for longer: if you do it when young (and young’s the best time for your body to do it), and don’t start off rich, and have the sense to do it somewhere nice like Germany where the costs are 100 000 euros for 4 inches (honestly now, you’re gambling your fucking legs), and your professional life could need about that sum to get a kickstart—all of which is a rather more plausible scenario than best-case—LL fucks you up financially. Hello awesome new height, goodbye life savings up to that point, goodbye chance to start your own company with that money.
As well as that, goodbye normal human proportions. Your legs are long, but the rest of your body is that of a short person. Hopefully people aren’t going to notice your T-Rex arms. Tying your shoelaces is going to be fun. There’s nothing you can do about it, as there’s no torso lengthening, and forearm lengthening is too risky to be done for cosmetic purposes (affects movements of the wrist), and while there is humerus lengthening, it makes no sense to fuck up your upper arm / forearm length ratio.
Also, you better go away from everyone you know post-surgery, or prepare yourself to answer some awkward questions. The year you spend in hospital is a year you could have added to your job experience, to make yourself a more attractive asset for employers. You prepare a set of elusive answers to give people who ask you how that long trip to Europe / Asia / wherever was.
And all of that is assuming the surgery and everything goes well. (Did I mention that it is a gajillion times more painful than probably anything you’ve experienced in life up to that point?)
Not saying it’s not worth it, but only if you’re so crazy about your height that it outweighs all the other costs combined. It’s not a walk in the park, people, and most certainly not a goddamn investment.
Apparently taller people don’t live as long and once you control for height, male/female longevity differences go away. (It makes some intuitive sense to me… there are really old people and really tall people, but when’s the last time you saw a really old really tall person?)
Given that living just a bit longer could plausibly allow you to live forever, if the right technologies get invented within that extra timespan, I think this is something worth considering.
Your intuitive reasoning is flawed. People get shorter with age (vertebral disks flatten, posture gets worse as muscles weaken).
Even ignoring all possible cohort effects (e.g. people growing up in the 1930s getting worse nutrition than people growing up in the 1990s), that just sounds like Berkson’s paradox.
(I have no objection to the rest of the comment, and indeed I upvoted it.)
If the logistics of it interrupt one’s career or education, that would also be a significant cost. But this might be worth it for some people.
Risk of Complications + Stigma
It’s also supposed to be incredibly painful.
Indeed; if I recall correctly, recovery time is on the order of six months...
Also: for what it’s worth, leg lengthening surgery makes you a worse athlete; your post-surgery muscles don’t work quite right with your longer legs, so you can’t do this to become a better basketball player.
Some (but not all) humans experience the autonomic sensory meridian response, a sort of tingling sensation caused by various visual and auditory stimuli. I think it’s partly an adaptation to encourage humans to bond through social grooming (removing fleas from hair, etc.). It often causes sleepiness.
So: one thing I’ve been trying is to use ASMR to make myself go to sleep faster and sleep better, by playing ASMR-inducing sounds through sleep-suitable headphones. I don’t know whether this works (planning to measure it sometime) but it definitely feels nice.
To test whether ASMR works on you, and to get ASMR stimuli, go to http://www.reddit.com/r/asmr/top/?sort=top&t=all .
I’m planning to try combining this with periodic audio of someone saying “you are dreaming”, as a way of inducing lucid dreams.
This has a name and a WIkipedia article and a subreddit? Couldn’t be carvier at the joints of reality if it tried. Thank you! (Not sarcastic; I’ve been idly wondering about this for about four years.)
Related idea: Become good at inducing ASMR in others. Maybe start with a youtube channel. Become the ASMR equivalent of a porn star. Most people who experience ASMR probably do not know it Is A Thing, so with aggressive marketing maybe you could make some money.
An example of this might be Bob Ross. Apparently doctors, psychotherapists, hairdressers, audiobook readers, etc. also do this to some extent.
What’s the business model?
May not be as effective as you hope. I experience this and find it vaguely annoying. The only people who have a reason to talk/post about it are the people who enjoy it, but that doesn’t mean that they are in the majority.
In India, the internet service provider “Tata Docomo” provides a wireless service called “Photon Plus” that uses a Huawei dongle to connect to the internet. I use this dongle and my plan consists of unlimited internet usage with speeds of 3.2 Mbps upto 5GB and then it is reduced to 153 Kbps (yeah! Imagine that!) for the rest of the month.
I have worked out a hack that gives me the full speed even after I have exhausted the 5GB data. I don’t know if this is true about other service providers, but Tata Docomo tracks data usage every time I disconnect from the internet. So, if my earlier usage was 4GB and I have used 2GB in my current session, it won’t be added to my total until I disconnect and end the session. So, even if I cross the 5GB limit in my current session, I still get the 3.2 Mbps as the records don’t have me crossing the limit yet.
Thus, every month, I use the dongle for browsing etc until I reach close to the 5GB mark. Then I disconnect the dongle and then reconnect it, then I line up ALL the downloads that I have been saving for the month and don’t disconnect again until all of them are completed.
Using this trick, I have been able to download more than 15GB data every month for the past 4 months. Unfortunately, there is a safety mechanism that the Tata Docome people have implemented, that disconnects the dongle automatically if it has been left connected for more than 24 hours. So, now I only have 24 hours to do my thing. But that is quite enough for my needs :)
This isn’t much use now (at least not in the northern hemisphere) but in wintertime, an uninsulated attic is effectively a refrigerator your parents don’t know about. Whether you use this knowledge to store secret artisanal cheeses, or beer, is up to you.
My first thought :)
Showering daily seems to be unhealthy; decreasing shower frequency would save time, and it might be easy to control body odor with antiperspirants. Here’s an NYT article.
Relatedly, there exist forms of clothing that stay wrinkle- and odor-free for 100 days of wearing without washing, though at the moment a shirt costs $100.
A less radical version of this is to take only short, lukewarm showers. Taking a fast, 3-5 minute lukewarm shower seems to get almost all of the benefits of long, hot, soapy showers with very few of the negative side-effects. It also saves time.
I made the switch years ago, and I find that my dry skin problems are entirely solved. I still take a hot and soapy shower occasionally, but it isn’t an every day kind of thing.
Aren’t antiperspirants unhealthy?
For something widely and intuitively believed to be true, I haven’t seen the evidence.
Anecdata: My use of antiperspirants is a leading indicator of underarm pimples. In half-blind tests, others have shown to be unable to tell if I have recently applied an antiperspirant or not.
Also, other people have also demonstrated a lack of sensitivity to whether or not I have showered in the last day, provided that I have showered in about the last 72 hours (even through periods of heat, but not stress or exertion, perspiration).
Have you actually asked if they can tell a difference, or have they just not said anything? Because it’s considered socially rude to tell someone they need to take a shower.
I’ve asked, but my sample size is small precisely because of the social pressures you reference.
FWIW, I typically find that people smell more attractive after not showering for a day, although there are rare individuals who are very much exceptions, and I frequently find the same is true after two days, though exceptions aren’t rare.
But deodorants are supposed to be fine. How much difference does it make if regularly applied?
Many contain Aluminum salts which are suspected of causing cancer.
related, ex-officio briefs are awesome.
I’m hoping the second batch of those Wool and Prince shirts are cheaper. Then I just need to find socks to have a whole outfit that doesn’t need constant laundering.
Smartwool.
I have 2 pairs, they’re alright but not as awesome as I had hoped from the rave reviews.
Do you have better suggestions?
No, still looking.
Flip-flops are excellent for that reason. I have really sweaty, weird-sized feet, so they’re especially nice, and if, like me, you already have a reputation for being eccentric, people won’t mind when you show up to nicer events in a blazer, jeans and flip-flops.
Regarding the wrinkle-free claim for Wool and Prince, I found this to be true only up to a point. I took the company’s advice at face value and would just throw the shirt into my backpack and go; after a while the wrinkles became pretty much permanent. No amount of dry cleaning fixed them. One should also watch out for stains as the shirts stain very easily. I was unable to wash out a grease stain. The coloration also faded over the 3 months I wore the shirt without washing.
Wool stills seems to be the best candidate for long use, little washing. I currently own only wool t-shirts (3 of them) and they are holding up well. They are 100 weight, so two of them have developed small holes around the belt area (which are only visible if one looks very closely and stretches the fabric). They were bought in May and it is now November. In general, based on previous purchases, the life of these wool clothes is around 100-200 days of use.
Jeans are also pretty amazing when it comes to how often they need to be washed. I find that they also last about 200 days of wear and only need to be washed 4-5 times during that time.
The odor-free claims are actually rather accurate if you allow the clothes to air out. My experiment with not showering or changing clothes at all for two weeks (even when sleeping) led to a very ahem distinctive smell developing; it may be better to switch between outfits daily and allow the other outfit to air out during the day. I have yet to try this and stay consistent.
I wouldn’t do that. Whatever health benefits you get from not showering have to be weighted against the health problems caused by you banging your head against the wall after that nice girl/guy actually talks to you and you don’t even remember what you said because you can see they know that’s not wax on your hair.
No, pointing out the health benefits of not showering won’t help. Don’t mention damp cloths http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jSJQEl5vcAo
No, thinking that you are not playing the seduction game for whatever reason is not a valid excuse, it’s just not playing to win by handicapping yourself. That’s not very rational :|
Here’s some actual advice related to personal hygiene and appearance in general:
Shower every day
Use deodorant everyday after showering (or, you know, just manage to not stink by whatever means necessary)
Always dress in a way that wouldn’t disqualify you in a job interview or a date. You know that ridiculous shirt you wear when everything else is dirty? Throw it out right now and buy another one of the shirts that make you feel confident.
It seems to be possible to create sexual fetishes through classical conditioning, and it’s hypothesized that this is how most sexual fetishes are created. It might be possible to use this to increase motivation for some specific task. I have not tried this, though I have unsuccessfully tried using pornographic images as reinforcement for anki reviews, using my picture-flasher plugin.
I think there a fairly good chance that the pornographic images will put you into a mental state where you can’t effectively concentrate on Anki reviews.
When I tried this, the images failed to arouse me and just got annoying. If you successfully created a fetish for anki reviews (or mathematical symbols, or reading carefully-reasoned arguments, or destroying ugh fields...), I don’t actually think that would interfere much with the task, especially if you were able to abstain from sex/masturbation for a long time (perhaps through some sort of precommitment mechanism, such as a chastity belt with the key either given to someone else with instructions not to give it back for some time, or stored three hours’ drive from wherever you live).
For people with submissive tendencies, being rewarded and punished by a dominant to shape behaviour could be an effective way to be motivated. Doing things you should be would be a sexual pleasing-my-master type of enjoyment, and when you make mistakes or fail to meet your goals perhaps punishment could reduce giving up or being demotivated for too long.
Try to take advantage of possible Sapir Whorf effects by constructing your own language to use for thinking in. I got this idea after finding a link here to this New York Times article which has several examples of such effects.
Random brainstorming on potential things to consider including:
Grammatical evidentiality
Explicit separation between between epistemic and deontic modalities (“It should work” can mean “It is expected to work”, an ‘is’ statement, or it can mean “It had better work”, an ‘ought’ statement)
Declining words by how broadly you’re using them
It would probably be best to do this after learning at least one other language that is quite different from your native language. Also, keeping ways words can be wrong in mind is likely a good idea.
This would likely also have the same effects as thinking in any foreign language
I may or may not actually try this after I’ve learned Korean sufficiently well.
Incidentally, learning a new language isn’t required for this.
One can, for example, adopt the habit of saying “I want X to work” or “I expect X to work” or “I would be happier if X worked” or “I would be happier if I expected X to work” instead of “X should work” while continuing to speak English.
Put differently: the habit of setting trigger-points around certain words (“should,” “think”, “want”, “can”, :will”, etc.) to ensure that I actually know what I’m saying when I say them is useful.
Scott (Yvain) did this in his fictional world. For example:
Don’t go overboard with that—IIRC, extremely few people succeed in becoming fluent in Lojban. IOW, think twice before flouting a linguistic universal.
Not everyone would agree that “I want it to work” is a correct restatement of deontic modality. (The one I use when wanting to avoid the ambiguity of “should” is “it had better work”.)
That effect is due to the fact that you’re forced to use your System 2. It probably disappears after you become too fluent in the language (for example, FWIW, I don’t ‘feel’ that happening with English).
Also, +1 or ygert’s suggestion to read The Language Construction Kit, and you may want to check out the resources I mentioned in my reply.
Yes, that is a better way of phrasing it. Changed.
Unfortunately, this seems likely.
Certainly a ridiculous munchkin idea! It’s a cool idea, although I would estimate that the actual difficulty of getting it working is very high. If you do manage, that would be quite awesome though. If you are serious about actually trying this, check out The Language Construction Kit . It’s a pretty cool website giving tips and advice on language construction. Perhaps it could be useful.
More resources about language construction
I think this one is particularly useful for hylleddin’s purposes.
Thank you for the resources! I’ve been a fan of conlanging for a while, but I’ve mostly used linguistics references and The Language Construction Kit.
Around two years ago, I tried devising a language for roughly this purpose. I concluded that it wasn’t a worthwhile use of time; devising it is easy, but becoming fluent takes way too much time, especially since there’s no corpus (or a very small corpus, if you use something like Lojban).
I write down and regularly review all my ideas, experiences, etc., and I’ve found it very useful to invent my own words (interspersed in normal English) for concepts that need annoying circumlocutions in normal English. I also use the derivational morphology of Esperanto and my own conlangs.
For an interesting example of a personal language created as a psychological experiment, see gjâ-zym-byn.
How does Korean relate to this? I speak it semi-fluently and none of those three things happen in it. I have however found its folding in of adjectives into verbs one of several useful toeholds for learning Lojban, though.
It doesn’t directly relate. I’m currently learning Korean and don’t want to try learning multiple languages at the same time. Also, I want a broader experience with languages before I try to make my own.
If you’re given a cookie that’s hard to give up, but you’re worried about calories.
You do not deserve the cookie, but can earn 1⁄2 of it by throwing 1⁄2 of it away.
Works every time.
So then you’ve received your 1⁄2 of a cookie, but since you’re worried about calories, you can earn half of that (1/4 of a full cookie) by throwing half of it away …
That’s the way the cookie crumbles. (Also not that different from money being taxed repeatedly (taxed as income then VAT then taxed as income … repeat ad paupertam.)
Zeno’s Cookie?
Practice getting off the Internet and going to bed:
Starting while not absorbed in browsing the web, find some not-too-compelling website, browse for a few minutes (not enough to get really into it) and then go and lie in bed for a few minutes (which shouldn’t feel as difficult as it’s not committing to a full night’s sleep). While in bed, let your mind wander away from the internet. This practice can lead into practice for getting out of bed.
I tried this a bit—I’m not sure it was worthwhile, as I did sometimes get absorbed in browsing when trying this exercise.
In case anyone here hasn’t heard of it, I’ve started using HabitRPG recently, and have really enjoyed using it so far.
If you don’t mind sharing, what habits are you trying to instill?
Right now I don’t have any daily habits except “Do 1 Pomodoro of work.” I’m in the midst of finals, so it’s mostly been a long list of Todos. I get extra points for each additional Pomodoro, and for completing tasks. Oh, and I get points every time I do a pullup, pushup, or set of 5 situps. The latter have been very motivating because they’re easy to do and I get points every time I do them, so I’ve kept those in the blue/green basically all the time.
Thanks!
I started doing this a while ago.
There are a lot of fake memory cards going around on ebay. You can tell they are fake because they are going for a lot less (a third or less of the price, exact amount varies) than other places. They actually are just hacked to be less capacity than they claim. You can verify the exact capacity by using a program called h2testw.
I buy a few cards, wait for them to ship, dispute the transaction, and usually I get the money back without having to send back the item. (Once I had to send it back, but ebay paid for the shipping. Usually not, though.)
Viola, free memory cards. If you have paypal credit, it’s even better, as you don’t have to pay until later and you may cancel it before the payment is due. I’m ripping off scammers, so no ethical problems either.
You should not expect such cards to be reliable.
The reason this is possible is because of the way flash memory is manufactured now: the chips are produced with faults, then connected to a microprocessor that runs sophisticated proprietary algorithms to identify the faulty memory cells and reliably distribute stored files across the working memory cells, and also report to both the manufacturer and consumer the total capacity of those working cells. This way a single silicon wafer produced with imperfections can yield hundreds of sd cards ranging from megabytes to 128gb each.
The scammers you’re talking about reprogram the microprocessors on these cards to identify themselves as having a larger capacity, but this isn’t so simple as it being connected to a reliable 4GB flash memory chip and reporting itself as connected to a reliable 8GB flash memory chip, rather they’re all uniformly connected to highly unreliable 32GB or greater memory chips and correcting the reliability problem in firmware, and there’s no telling how the scammers messed with that besides the change in the reported capacity. I would expect any file saved on such a card to have pieces randomized or zeroed over time.
An 8G class 10 card can be purchased from frys.com for $3.00. You’re not likely to get many cards larger than 8G by doing this and you may end up with a smaller card that is less useful. Unless your time and effort is nearly worthless to you, or unless you’re so poor that you really would rather spend the time and effort to save such small amounts, this makes no sense. Furthermore, most people have no need for more than a few small SD cards anyway.
If it takes around 5 minutes per card (because you can order multiple cards at once), then making even 2 dollars a card is $24 an hour, for something that isn’t very complicated and doesn’t feel like work. I’ve also at times resold them myself (with the correct capacity, and as-is), and made money that way. Some people might also like to have a fake card for fun. (It’s actually quite cool the way it’s hacked.)
Besides, the title was Post ridiculous munchkin ideas.
I use classical conditioning on myself with genres of music to either help me focus or to relax. Basically I just always (and only) play a certain type of music when I’m working, and then switch to another type of music when I want to start winding down for the day.
I use these two stations because they have no words or commercials: (work): http://somafm.com/thetrip/ (relax): http://somafm.com/dronezone/
It definitely helps me. Sometimes if I forget to turn off the music I end up working way too late. Also, it’s incredible how the focus and desire to work comes on almost instantly when I put my headphones on. I use very good passive noise cancelling headphones (they reduce ~25db of sound), so literally all I hear is the music, and I have to take them off to talk to people/leave the computer, which probably strengthens the effect
I can speak for this method; it really works, at least for me.
On a sidenote, I’m looking for a good pair of passive noise-cancelling headphones. Which ones do you use?
http://www.amazon.com/Vic-Firth-Stereo-Isolation-Headphones/dp/B0002F519I/ref=pd_cp_MI_0
Only downside is sort of obvious—they’re pretty tight on your head, but I can wear them comfortably all day.
I thought that the distinguishing feature of munchkinry is that it’s an ingenious solution which cannot be effectively reused, and thus its main utility is inspirational. Like the Kobayashi Maru test hacking, or winning a Game Room battle by rushing the gate, or, in less fictional cases, using airplanes as powerful incendiary projectiles, or winning over $100k by gaming a game show.
Some people use the term that way, but at least in the pen and paper roleplaying world it is closer to how D_Malik is using the term.
Never buy anything from Amazon without checking eBay first. I think every generic thing in the world is available on eBay, IME at about half the price.
(May not be worth it for books and other media. But I just bought a pile of stuff for moving house with, down to replacement light bulbs for when we take our expensive daylight CFLs with us. And it’s always fun to just casually buy six rolls of packing tape and a 100-metre roll of bubble wrap, even when you have an actual reason to.)
If this is true, there’s a huge amount of money to be made buying things on eBay and selling them on Amazon.
Better would be to find good suppliers on eBay and drop-ship from Amazon.
Quite possibly, yes.
For books, use bigwords.com; it searches a bunch of book sellers and finds the cheapest price for the book(s) you’re looking for. I got most of my college textbooks that way.
For books, check the internet for free pirated book.
This isn’t meant to be moral. We are talking munchkin here.
If you’re looking for free and legal, but not recent, I’d suggest looking into Project Gutenberg.
For Australians, Booko provides search for book sellers including shipping costs.
A ridiculous munchkin idea which has long been floating around this community is increasingly looking less ridiculous: transcranial direct current stimulation is shown to improve mental arithmetic and rote learning of things like times tables with differences significant even 6 months after training. Original paper.
Has it been demonstrated to be safe over a long period of time?
How can somebody (without access to a lab) practically implement that technique?
The hardware is pretty cheap.
Relevant link from just yesterday: http://hackaday.com/2013/05/28/shocking-your-brain-and-making-yourself-smarter/ :).
Do you know anything about the long term safety of the method?
Get moderately good at painting. Post your work online under a pseudonym. Fake your own death, or rather the death of your pseudonymous self, in a tragic and dramatic fashion. Sell your work at an elevated price.
Identify someone else who is good at painting.
Purchase the bulk of their work.
Hey, look over there. A distraction!
Sell the work at an elevated price.
I don’t thin that faking a death in a tragic and dramatic fashion is a good idea. The police investigates deaths that are in tragic and dramtic fashion.
There are probably much better publicity stunts. The most straightforward that comes to my mind would be having sex in the MoMA. You’ll need a person to fill film it for youtube.
Afterwards I think all the art folk will talk about the issue.
How well do you expect this to work? Non-anecdotal evidence in support?
Probably not at all.
Well, it is a ridiculous munchkin idea!
Munchkin’s care about whether ideas work.
Reminds me of _why
A well-known trick for memorizing things verbatim is to make them rhyme and put them in a song. Most people reading this know the alphabet song, for instance, and you can use this to learn US states and capitals or chemical elements.
Maybe it would be possible to do this without the rhyming, by using text-to-speech software to convert the information into audio and then playing that over vocals-free music. Instead of text-to-speech software, you could buy/get an audiobook with the information, if one exists. It might be possible to use this, for instance, to memorize multiplication tables up to 100 easily. I haven’t yet tried any of this.
I also intend to research whether hearing something repetitively while sleeping helps you to memorize it verbatim, and whether that would harm sleep.
Relatedly, I noticed recently that I knew the words in a 14-minute ASMR video almost verbatim because I had listened to it so often. So one idea is to pay someone skilled at producing ASMR to read you things you want to memorize.
Spaced-repetition software is much more convenient and scalable than coming up with rhymes all the time.
For all the advice at the OP’s behest,
“ridiculous” was his request.
Sure. What I meant was that maybe you could do away with the rhymes, instead just listening to the information over and over, possibly overlayed with music or made to be ASMR-inducing. Spaced repetition is awesome, but I don’t think it would be good for training e.g. the ability to instantly solve multiplication problems. Plus SRS requires active engagement, whereas playing sound in the background doesn’t.
I have had trouble with the alphabet. Because I only ever memorized the song, and not the numbering or ordering of the letters, whenever I have to put something in alphabetical order, I have to think a little bit and play the song in my head. I memorized the sound “elemenopee” not the sequence “L, M, N, O, P”.
You can spend a weekend coming up with peg words for numbers from 0 to 99 in the mnemonic major system and memorizing them. Then you’ll have a system for easily memorizing any sequence of up to a 100 arbitrary items by associating the pegs to them, without needing to figure out how to tie the items into each other with rhyming.
Doesn’t work in the long term since the associations will fade and you’ll re-use the pegs, but long-term stuff can go into a spaced repetition system.
I think memory palaces work reasonably well long-term.
See also the digit-sound method: http://www.decisionsciencenews.com/2012/01/06/how-to-remember-numbers/
(I have the vague intention to create a handy tool based on that, which I’d call digimaphone: http://digimaphone.com )
Full details here, but in summary: Take 2mg of melatonin 20 minutes before bed, and train yourself to think only of boring things and/or nothing after you lie down. Falling asleep becomes MUCH easier and more predictable.
I tried different dosages over a year and found that 1mg worked better than 2mg (and 2mg worked better than 3mg). All worked better than nothing, but I was working nights and getting virtually no sun, so your mileage may vary.
Yes, I’ve seen that sort of reaction a lot. I originally used 3mg and went down to 1.5mg because it seemed to be working better. I recently ordered a bunch of 1mg pills which I’m going to turn into placebo capsules and capsules dosing from 0.25 to 1.5mg and try seeing what doses work best for me.
Data point: my sweet spot is around .5-.75mg
1.5 mg seems to work for me, but I can’t really tell because I stopped drinking coffee at the same time. I’ll stop the melatonin and see if I really need it.
This one is the sort of thing where there are a bunch of assumption that shrouds reasonable on their own, but implasible in conjunction:
A1: you don’t have to perfectly transfer your entire conectome to still be “the same person”; only things that are actually part of your current identity are needed
A2: if your identity changes gradually over time, even into something that if the change was faster it’d be considered disruptive, you’re still “the same person”.
A3: the human identity can be very extensively modified using behavioural techniques, hypnosis, and drugs that occur in the wild.
Then: you should be able to achieve immortality in a stone-age environment, by first modifying your own identity down to extremely small so it can be entirely transferred verbally, then modifying a victim more abruptly to a sufficiently similar state, and finally building that mind up again to be functional. Repeat for as long as you can maintain the dynasty.
EDIT: Hey! The OP specifically asked for outlandish ideas that seem like they wouldn’t work! Am I just being judged relative the many ridiculously good posts here?
This isn’t a clever way to accomplish something. This is a way of willfully misinterpreting definitions until you can claim success without changing reality.
—Woody Allen
Gaming the system is, at least, in the spirit of munchkinry!
Posibly, yes. It still does so far more subtle and harder to disprove than the naive attempt.
That which is made immortal by such a method is not me.
One could certainly argue that, and in such an extreme case I’d even agree that it’s not worth it, but nobody should be certain it doesn’t work unless the don’t believe uploads work, or they know an exact specific reason why it’s wrong other than intuition. It’s certainly very muchkiny, whether or not it works.
Oh, it’s very munchkiny, and a very valid way to become immortal is to change yourself into something which is easy to make immortal. You just lose everything about yourself that death would have taken.
Death takes more from someone who hasn’t changed themselves, at least partially, into something that can survive past it.
A vigilante is just a man lost in the scramble for his own gratification. He can be destroyed, or locked up. But if you make yourself more than just a man, if you devote yourself to an ideal, and if they can’t stop you, then you become something else entirely...A legend, Mr. Wayne.
Did you think to kill me? There’s no flesh and blood within this cloak to kill. There is only an idea. And ideas are bulletproof.
Well that’s not entirely true. His idea does destroy a lot of yourself, but many parts like your personality or ideas or even some memories maybe, may be able to be passed on. I would consider it at least partial immortality.
I would still consider an option for immortality if my personality and whatnot survived, but I had amnesia and couldn’t remember anything. Even better if I can retain all the important memories.
But this would be extremely difficult and immoral as hell. Also I’m sure, just by chance, there is someone out there who has an extremely similar personality and values to myself. That’s at least mildly comforting if I thought I was going to die, about as much as this form of immortality would be.
Ideas, and memories can be made to survive the flesh in far simpler was. Personality less clearly so.
Personality can be roughly preserved by getting someone to know you well, the permanently roleplaying as you, especially if using hypnosis to make them think they really are you.
Do you gain a lot of intrinsic value from perpetuating one’s personality (in that way)?
it makes more sense to me to be silly about “personal continuation” in this direction than in the non-uploading one that’s far more common. Which is not saying much really.
I don’t put any value to something being “the same” over time, but apparently most humans do, especially when it comes to people. If someone does care about someone’s continuity in a way that follows the assumptions listed in my post, then logically they should derive value from the procedure described.
As munchkinry, it’s pretty good, but I’m not taking this seriously enough to actually try it. It’s just a fun idea to me.
Sounds like the Buddha and his followers to me.
You know, I read a short story in which a person did exactly that: told his life story to a hypnotized subject, then convinced the subject that he had become the hypnotist. And apparently this had been going on for several “generations” now...
Oooh, link please? This sounds exactly right.
It might take some time to track down. I know that I read it on the Erotic Mind Control Stories Archive (a site that is, in general, Not Safe For Work) but I don’t remember the title or author.
Basically, you’re saying it might be possible to reduce your identity to a single stable meme-complex. Certainly, there have been people (mainly religious) who’ve tried this...
And who’s to say all of them technically failed? I mean, in practice they almost certainly hurt themselves more than they helped, but then again there was no internet or cryonics so it’s not like they had anything better to do.
I am mentally connecting this with the comment about tulpas
No need to modify the host’s identity, you can both share their brain.
ETA: and now I’m thinking of the movie Being John Malkovich—the host was treated in an abusive manner, but there was a level of cooperation between the other minds sharing his body.
Get brain-fog from eating an excessive amount of simple carbohydrates? Try donating whole blood (thereby causing new blood to be created that will be closer to default levels of blood-sugar, insulin, etc...).
This works. Donating blood seems to improve insulin sensitivity.
Living in a van seems like it could decrease your cost of living a lot more than it decreases your quality of life. Getting set up in a van would cost about $12k, so it could pay for itself in a year. Here is a good guide on this.
One could also consider going completely homeless; here is an article by a math student who did that.
Until a few years ago, students were permitted to sleep overnight on the ubiquitous couches in the university student center of my Alma Mater. There are tales of a student who eschewed paying for housing and simply slept on the couches of the student center, and used locker room showers, for an entire year.
Unfortunately this individual’s munchkinism led to the policy being revised to prevent this behavior—or so the tale goes.
When I was a grad student, I preferred to spend time in my office and go home only to shower once every two or three days (especially before TAing a class, when I would also put on shoes). This annoyed some people, and eventually they got through a policy that the building was closed for 8 hours at night, told only me, and enforced it only against me. My TA union went ballistic when the campus police got involved; in the grievance process, we eventually settled that I only had to maintain a residence outside of the office (or something like that, I don’t exactly remember, but anyway it was something that I’d been doing anyway), so a victory for labour solidarity!
There was another person around at this time, a munchkin dedicated to gaining XP in studying interesting mathematics. Actually being a grad student had too many distractions, and he quit that before I got there, but he continued to hang around and collaborate on research with one of the professors. Every few years, he would take a sabbatical for a few months to get some money by coding, but mostly he slept in my office and ate a microwaved mixture of rice, cheese, frozen mixed vegetables, and spices. He did what I was only accused of doing, and I don’t know why the authorities never went after him; I think that his existence just couldn’t be classified in their consciousness. (It’s been a few years, but I’m pretty sure that he’s still there.)
Yeah, I’m a grad student now and we get a note about once a year from the school telling people not to do this.
A friend going to the local Academy of Fine Arts did this for months at a time, having set up his living quarters in his classes’ studio. His lodgings were certainly posher than my 32sqm apartment, but he had to build his own shower from a bucket and a clothes hanger.
In my last bout of studentdom, when I found myself being a student politician at a bottom-end university, one of the others pretty much did this, camping out in the SRC offices for a month. We were seriously tempted to a blanket party for him. Don’t be that guy.
In the crazy economics of Bay Area housing, driveway parking for a van in a desirable location with electricity and shower access is $200-$300/month.
Why is this crazy? (sincere question, no sarcasm)
I just meant that paying $300/month for driveway parking would seem crazy to the large set of people used to paying $300/month or less for nice housing inside in various other parts of the world.
That’s like wonderfully low rent for the Bay Area, so proves the OP’s point.
In a related note, I was able to steal showers from a gym for several months because I would go straight to the locker room with my bag (acting as though I was going to sign in later) and shower, then leave in my street clothes. I was only called out once, while I was leaving; I just kept walking and didn’t come back for a few days.
This kind of homelessness got me down after a while; I got on a bus to return from viewing another flat that had gone, and ended up on the far side of town because I didn’t know when to get off.
All of the munchkin ideas I can think of aren’t so much unlikely to work as hideously unethical. That fits with the classic munchkin, but it takes them off the table as far as I’m concerned. I’d rather not signal willingness to entertain immoral ideas, since there’s no disclaimer I could issue that would adequately signal the truth of my being against them.
Even if you wouldn’t do them, it’s no use to put unethical ideas at a place where other people might apply them.
That too.
Use a throwaway account?
Well, it’s too late now. If a new account shows up and posts hideously unethical suggestions, kinda obvious who it is.
Worse, anyone at all can now start a new account, post whatever horrid and disgusting ideas they want and everyone will think they are Luke’s.
That’s actually better, not worse, it gives plausible deniability.
Which is why I said it. So maybe he’ll actually post.
… and at the same time, maybe he won’t!
Then something is wrong with the generator that your brain uses when trying to be unconventional. Try to figure out what and how to fix it, and tell me if you figure it out, as I have no idea how to do that.
Why do you say that? The low-hanging fruit of good ideas tends to get plucked, even the long shots - the primary exceptions are things that people refuse to do because they’re wrong.
You can assume that, but I assure you it’s just not the case. We can debate the details some time in person if you’d like.
Since “people” clearly do things like wars, torture, rape, etc. etc. I do have to wonder at what are these good ideas that are even more wrong...
How many rapes, for instance, are even an attempt to do the right thing? Not a whole lot! And if they’re not trying to be good, how likely is it to come out good by accident, given what we already know about what they did? Very unlikely!
Ah, looks like I was confused by “good” in “good ideas”. I read it as “effective”, good ideas are those which are instrumentally good and will allow you to get to your goal, whichever it may be, quickly and cheaply. But do you mean “good” as the opposite of wrong/evil?
Munchkin ideas are not about attempting to do the right thing. Munchkin ideas are about hacking the rules to gain an advantage, basically.
You just did :-D
Very weakly. Strongly to those who quote-mine so badly they can’t finish the sentence, yes. There’s nothing I can do about them.
I was primarily concerned with the much stronger case at hand—if I were to entertain specific immoral ideas, rather than talking about some of my reasons for not talking about them in general.
You did :-) Let me quote you (emphasis mine):
“All of the munchkin ideas I can think of aren’t so much unlikely to work as hideously unethical”
Basically you already confessed that hideously unethical ideas came into your mind and they were in sufficiently specific form for you to recognize their unethicalness. The fact that you didn’t publish them on the ’net is secondary.
Note that this is not a call to raise a torches-and-pitchforks mob, but rather a reminder that you can’t think about something without thinking about it :-)
Having an idea is rather different from entertaining it, at least as I (and perhaps Luke as well) understand the connotations. I can certainly conceive of all manner of monstrous plans, but I do not share them because after assessing their morality, I decline to pursue them further. I do not look into how to implement them, because I do not want to implement them.
I suspect that Luke had a similar thought, acknowledging that while he may be able to think about a baby-powered reactor, for example, he does not want to draw up the plans for it, either for actual use or for the purpose of discussion here.
Yes.
I actually have a fun hobby of dreaming about unethical-but-legal startup ideas. Then again, whether something is unethical depends on how you define your own ethics, or alternatively, invent some self-justifications.
Munchkin ideas are often unethical but legal. This is because a Munchkin is by definition a way of following the letter of the rules while violating unspoken convention. In some cases, ethics, in contrast to law, means precisely that one follows uncodified rules of behavior.
I’ve found that edX is a very nice way to get an elementary understanding of a number of new subjects. The downside is, I have to wait for a course I like to come around; they’re not continuously available.
I’m not sure that this counts as ridiculous enough for this post, but it does seem to be working for me.
(Edit: Fixed the link.)
I suspect link misconfiguration ate a link to coursera, udacity or similar. Consider editing your post.
Thanks; I’d left out the http:// and hadn’t proofread.
I thought it was reasonably obvious enough from context.
Wear a rubber band around your wrist and snap it to decondition behaviors. I originally used this to stop myself cracking my knuckles or biting my lip, but it didn’t have any apparent effect.
I then tried using it to destroy my sense of humour (partly because I thought this might boost productivity, by generally making actions’ dopamine rewards match their actual usefulness). This seemed to actually work well; I now experience humour-type amusement 20%-50% as often as I did two months ago.
I would recommend other people think carefully before trying this; many people have told me this could lead to bad places.
Relatedly, you could get an electroshock collar (used to train dogs, or for BDSM), which would let you automate the deconditioning.
and I thought LW was against spock-rationality
I’m against Spock too, but reversed stupidity is not intelligence. It seems unlikely that your level of humour is exactly what you want. People try to strengthen or weaken their own emotions all the time, by becoming more confident, less anxious, less depressed, more motivated. The grandparent is evidence that you can do such self-modification easily through punishment or reinforcement.
Isn’t humour it’s own reward? What extra reinforcement system could you use to increase it?
This seems close to a fully general argument. That said, I’m not sure it’s wrong—but tread carefully.
It’s not fully general; it’s an instance of a general argument that things are unlikely to be optimal in the absence of strong optimization pressures. Which is true.
Of course, that doesn’t mean you should fine-tune humour; we’d need to look at the costs and benefits of doing that versus whatever else we could be doing.
In theory. In practice, it would be Spock Rational to be against Spock Rationality, so we give it lip service.
I’m not quite sure I follow.
Yes, I upvoted it as an interesting idea, but wouldn’t endorse actually putting it into practice.
This strikes me as an extremely bad idea. Regardless of your stance on whether or not humor is irrational (this is to some extent an open question), the social benefits of humor are so obvious and significant that this seems extremely unlikely to be +EV even assuming there aren’t any undesirable side effects.
There may perhaps be benefits in deconditioning certain types of humor (being a wiseass, for instance), but even then I would be very, very careful and read up a lot before trying anything.
I read that someone once ended up just conditioning themselves not to wear the collar by doing this. (I wish I could remember where—pretty sure it was an offhand mention in a post on this site.)
You might be able to solve that problem easily. For instance, you could reward yourself for putting the collar on, and punish yourself for taking it off (even when you had to take it off, eg to take a shower), or even for thinking about taking it off. You could try visualizing that the pain was caused by whatever you did wrong, rather than by the collar.
Then you’ll be the person who wears dog collars and avoids bathing. Frankly, if you have something worse than that to recondition you should probably be receiving treatment from a professional anyway.
Are there any good ways to stop myself from doing the equivalent of biting my lip?
(The actual behaviors I want to stop are: anything that involves touching my face, and also making pauses when I am speaking.)
I’ve slapped myself in the face to stop paying attention to car brands, after having had to pay attention to car brand symbols for a while for other reasons. Worked.
[snaps rubber band] Ouch!
Maybe I’ll give that a try. (Not to destroy my sense of humour, of course.) 3:-)
Find a job that you can do remotely. Camming, tutoring, and hypnosis are low-barrier jobs that fit the bill, but if you have the skills you can do things like consulting or programming.
Move to a country a low cost of living and/or low income tax. Costa Rica has a flat tax of 15% on self-employed workers, and a fairly liberal visa policy for people who work via the Internet. EU citizens should consider Bulgaria, which has a 10% flat tax on self-employed residents and about 1⁄3 the cost of living as the UK.
Save money!
Obtaining a remoteable job is much like obtaining a job with any other specific benefit: the market is going to arrange things so that jobs with the benefit pay less in other ways, on the average, than jobs without it. And given the paucity of remoteable jobs, you’ve drastically cut down your options.
Living in a faraway country means that you are far away from relatives whom you might want to visit.
Living in a faraway country means either learning the local language or being at a serious disadvantage.
Living in a faraway country means living in another culture. Very basic things that we take for granted in our country might not exist in others. Do you even know the correct way to bribe public officials? What’s your social life going to be like when few people watch the same TV shows or read the same books as you? Are you sure you like the other culture’s food, and want to follow their holidays instead of your own? Is the other country going to be more tolerant of weirdos, and are you going to be perceived as even more of a weirdo than you might be in the US? If you have kids, what’s the school system like? Are people with your religion going to be as accepted as in the US? Do people in the other country resent (or even just look down on while being glad to take the money of) foreigners?
If a job is available for you in the foreign country, it’s equally available to local residents. If you could program by long distance, the company you work for could just hire a programmer from the country instead, and he wouldn’t demand American salaries.
If you do lose your job, how are you going to find another one? Fly to America for the interview, while unemployed?
Did you actually consult with a tax lawyer? (The US still taxes expatriates.)
Foreigners might get more latitude for being weird. The locals will chalk up some degree of idiosyncratic weirdness as cultural differences, and won’t expect full familiarity with the local social conventions.
legitimate concerns, but way WAY weaker than the strength of the argument they are set against.
What? No they aren’t. Telecommuting from a (formerly) foreign country where things costs much less (and everything that implies) really isn’t that great an option.
The US can only tax people who have assets or their person in the country. Everyone else is on a pure voluntary basis.
Citation needed.
I would imagine it’s a lot less voluntary if you ever plan on returning to the US.
Foreign banks are unlikely to honor a US tax lien on somebody who is not a US national.
I doubt that I would become an expatriate for tax reasons, but if I did I would certainly refuse to pay taxes.
I always figured a better idea was to live in an area with really high cost of living with salaries to match (e.g. be a software developer in Silicon Valley or a quant in New York), but maintain a middle-class standard of living, save a big chunk of your salary, and then go live in an area where the cost of living was much lower.
I’ve done this twice in my life. First, when I was in college, I took a semester to study abroad in china while continuing my old job for a SF startup remotely. I felt rich, yes. But it was a failure—first and foremost, I want to hang out with people whom I can communicate and enjoy my time with. I learned this lesson after trying this again, but this time, moving to India for 3 months. I am Indian, so I didn’t expect the cultural barrier to be as much of a problem. It was.
So the obvious thing to do is to establish some low-cost-of-living Schelling point for all the LWers who want to live cheaply abroad to converge on (and maybe get housing together). Perhaps Shanghai?
A less drastic version of this, if you are in the US, is to do remote work from a thinly-populated rural state with a low cost of living, and ideally with lower state taxes.
But the problem with that is that you have to live in rural America.
I’ve been thinking about exactly this. The town where I live is on Kiplinger’s top ten best (American) towns for cheapskates, and I’ve researched the cost of living and such, and it’d be easy to live comfortably on $2000/month (or $1000 or less, if I didn’t have student loans to pay). It helps that this town tanked the recession rather well and is constantly growing, so anyone more competent than me can probably find something to exploit for living expenses.
But the culture, the wildlife, the weather, and the logistics of traveling anywhere at all (I’m at least two miles from the nearest sidewalk that isn’t driveway-to-porch) are… a bit troubling. I’ve been seriously researching and comparing here to places like the Bay Area lately, since I really need to change something soon, and I’m still not reasonably sure of what that will be.
I’m not having much trouble living in the Bay Area on <$2000/mo, so I really doubt it’s worth living somewhere without an Exploratorium
You mean <$2000/mo?
Gevalt. Edited.
$1000/month is doable even in a relatively expensive place like Boston.
Addendum. Also, learn to code, as that’s MUCH more permanent than camming and less dependent on marketing than tutoring and hypnosis. If you can get paid for work you do yourself without marketing, you’re doing well.
Throughout history, a proven and popular method of acquiring wealth is to marry somebody rich.
How to accomplish this is left as an exercise for the reader. ;)
Besides using evolution
I would recommend moving into a country where not so many people are freakishly rich.
The more obnoxious and evil the distribution of income, higher the likelihood that there will be no income social strata at the top of the “piramid”. In other words, in the US there are so many people whose net wealth surpasses 10 million dollars, they can afford to intra-marry. This is not the case in Istambul, São Paulo, Jeddah or Lima. Some of them will be stuck with “poor” people, like you :)
This is not a guess, the toddler-infant unit of my school is in a very expensive neighborhood, and I’ve seen the mating patterns of the wealthy from a very young age.
This one just jumped into my mind, I’ve not tried it yet, but it seems reasonable: If you have a good amount of money left, use amazon mechanical turk for easily learnable but boring and time-consuming work.
Work at a desk facing your boss. It does wonders keeping you productive. My boss happens to make this possible by bringing his work into the lab for several hours a day.
I briefly worked at a desk with my back to two doors, which made me less likely to take breaks to read articles because I never knew who might be walking up behind me and looking at my screen.
Use blue-tinted glasses to boost alertness. More details and discussion here. I haven’t tried this, but I’d guess that it would boost alertness and that the boost would be beneficial.
For added effectiveness, condition this as a “productivity trigger”. Make a rule that you only put on your glasses to work, and before taking a break, you have to take your glasses off. This actually seems to work pretty well. I’ve made lots of things productivity triggers: rainymood.com, original-flavor Trident gum, specific heavy metal music, and most recently sitting on my bed.
Sounds like high color temperature HID headlights might be the safer option for long night drives, too.
Create artistic programs with a “pet” in order to educate and amuse. A friend of mine once jokingly mentioned that the Microsoft Paperclip was his childhood friend. I wonder if a far more interesting character would become popular, and provide greater incentive to buy the art program and then to learn it...
The Vocaloid phenomenon sounds like an instance of this.
One of the alternatives to the paperclip was a cat. If the cat was the default, rather than that annoying paperclip, I think the Office Assistant wouldn’t have been so reviled. ;)
I noticed that visual confusion tends to give me headaches (I often get them in stores, for example), and that blocking off my peripheral vision by wearing a hood helps. So I bought glasses with thick stems, to make my field of vision smaller all the time.
I’m nearsighted enough that all I use my peripheral vision for is seeing whether there is movement behind me (which I can still do—the glasses only cover the middle part), so the only cost was restricting my choice of frames to styles with thick stems. Anything that prevents headaches is a productivity boost for me, because I tend to procrastinate and loose focus a lot more when uncomfortable.
I’m not sure whether it actually worked—stress and changes in the weather cause so much noise that it would be hard to measure. If my stress level ever gets more consistent, I might try making something even wider that fits over the stems and experimenting with that.
Are you sure it’s a matter of “visual confusion” and not having a lot of stuff clamoring for your attention but being blurry because it’s outside the radius of your glasses? I definitely noticed things were better visually for me when I switched to contact lenses and lost the blur-circle that existed around the edges of my vision all the time.
I suspect it’s not just from bad vision, because I’ve had problems in visually busy places even as a child, before I needed glasses. I didn’t get headaches then, but I had a habit of looking at the ground all the time, which my parents taught my not to do once I got older because it looked weird. I recently tried out looking down all the time in busy places, and found it made me feel a lot calmer, and my head feel less tight. So I suspect that looking down was a way of avoiding looking at other stuff. (I decided it was too costly to use in most cases, though, because it looks really weird.)
Thanks for the suggestion, though. I guess it is possible that blur circle also contributes.
I am a sign language interpreter. The effects of coffee are condusive to my work: increase of short term memory, increase of alertness, reduction of fatigue, and effects wear off after a period of time similar to most jobs. Plus delicious.
Agreed. Also, many people seem to develop tolerance to caffeine after using it for a while, so for more benefits you should stop drinking it for a week or two and then drink it when you really need it. I did this when taking my SATs, for instance.
I’ve experimented with this before, and found that my caffeine-assisted productivity hit its highest levels when I had a cup of coffee every three days or so. More frequently and I built up too much tolerance; less frequently and the stimulant effects were too powerful when I did drink it, giving me distractibility and a tendency to fixate that weren’t made up for in alertness and mental agility.
Your body chemistry might vary, of course. Also, that’s peak, not sustained, productivity; you’re probably better off with a steady intake of caffeine if whatever you have to do will take more than a day or two.
L-theanine is synergistic with caffeine and reduces the agitation that comes from taking too much. Jump-off link
Coffee doesn’t seem to really help me aside from keeping me from falling asleep for a short time (~40-60 minutes maybe). I used it most heavily (2-4 small or medium cups a week) when I was suffering from undiagnosed sleep apnea, but even now I occasionally have some when I feel I must be extra sure not to get sleepy, and it doesn’t really seem to help me focus and wears off quickly. Does coffee not work on certain people or is there some factor I’m not aware of?
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.
It seems that nearsightedness is caused at least partly by spending lots of time looking at things that are close to you, such as books or computer screens. So maybe what we need is some way of making these things look like they’re further away, without the inconvenience of actually moving them further away.
Fortunately, there exists an invention that can solve this problem: glasses. The idea is thus to use glasses that are the opposite of what optometrists would prescribe for nearsightedness (or that are just weaker than what they’d prescribe). There is some evidence to support the use of these “anticorrective” glasses, but I am incapable of telling whether they’re a good idea.
More information here.
so the solution to having to wear glasses all the time is to wear different glasses all the time?
Wearing anticorrectives all the time also causes myopia, according to what I’ve read. The proposed solution is to wear anticorrectives only when doing doing near work. Not sure whether any of this is worth it, considering that if you don’t want to signal whatever glasses signal you could just get contact lenses.
Another theory I’ve encountered is that myopia can be caused by a lack of sunlight (caused by spending lots of time indoors).
Why use glasses weaker than prescribed when you can use no glasses at all for free?
The idea is to have a moderate challenge so that you get improvement rather than strain or giving up.
This isn’t even to the level of a hypothesis yet, but I think periodontal disease, which effects a great deal of people, may be significantly ameliorated by taking an NSAID like ibuprofen 20-40 minutes prior to brushing and flossing, due to the reduced gum inflammation decreasing periodontal pocket depth and allowing access to the pathogenic bacteria.
Bitcoin hoarding for charity: Buy some amount of bitcoin, and keep it in a series of of wallets dedicated to various causes. Precommit to hoarding all of the amounts for a significant time, but spend the ones with the most warm-fuzzy results the soonest because that results in pumping up the value of bitcoin.
Eventually, at a point where the value cannot be pumped further by expending more on warm-fuzzies, spend hoarded amounts on utilitarian-optimal causes in a way that leverages economies of scale to achieve maximum impact.
If you have a reasonable ammount of money that you would like to save long-term and (potentially) remonetize 10+ years later on (for example for your retirement or whatever) then decide against playing the stock market (duh) or putting it in low interest bank accounts and buy the right stamps instead.
My dad is a passionate collector, but I have hardly any interst in collecting useless historical artefacts because I’m more interested in the future of humanity than its past. However even without any historical interest in the particular subject, stamps are an amazing thing to put your money into, because:
Few stamps ever fall significantly in value, some remain stagnant and most rise significantly over time. So having many rather than a few really valuable ones is good and in a timeframe of decades many individual stamps can easily double or triple their value.
They are very small, light and portable. Unlike most other art-objects you could potentially remonetize quickly. Much lighter than coins or anything else, really.
If you remonetize them, you don’t pay extra taxes which you may have to pay for gains from playing the stock market. If there will be a tax on that at some Point in the future (which is unlikely for some reasons I won’t get into), it can be easily avoided—illegally and probably legally as well.
You can remonetize them very, very quickly for a very good price by knowing the right person / auction house.
Unlike numbers on a bank account they are inflation proof.
No inheritance tax, your significant others will get all the dough if they remonetize it themselves.
The downsides are that you have to put some significant time into this topic to know what a good deal is, learn how the market and auction houses operate and to build a diverse or highly specialized and sought-after collection that is very likely to rise in value compared to other possible collections you could compile (which overall will almost certainly rise in value too, but maybe not as much as a collection you put some thought into).
Also you obviously need to keep them safe from theft and environmental hazards. (If you want to make the collection a one-time endeavor instead of an ongoing process, you can finish up your collection and put it in a small or medium safe deposit box in any bank.) Consider optimal storage conditions as well, since stamps are essentially made of fancy paper.
If none of this interests you, then at least take this advice: If you ever inherit a stamp collection, don’t sell it on a flea market, inform yourself and sell it properly. Just recently a friend of my dad asked his advice on a collection he was about to sell for low double digits to learn that it was worth at least 20000$.
Those don’t seem like substantial downsides, and ones that would be incurred already by a lot of smart philatelists.
The efficient markets hypothesis asks: why can stamps be a decent investment compared to something like an index fund? Especially since there are things like hedge funds for collectibles, and stamps are a leading suspect (along with wine and art and comic books).
I strongly advise against following this plan. Collectibles are not a good longterm investment, stamps included. That is, they tend to underperform stocks, real estate, and other investments, substantially so once transaction and carrying costs are factored in. The Wall Street Journal recently polled a number of experts about this. Their opinions were essentially unanimous, differing primarily in how bluntly each was willing to say, “Don’t do this.”
Did you consult a tax attorney on this? I have no idea what you’re referring to when you claim you don’t pay “extra” taxes on selling your stamps. Selling your possessions is certainly income and would at least be subject to income tax (and the rate would be higher than a capital gains tax rate on stocks).
I’m from Germany, here they tax gains in stock trade with a higher rate and the government tried to extend this higher rate on trade with stamps and other “art” formats multiple times, but realized its unfeasible and for now gave up. Currently you pay a whopping 25% in taxes on capital gains over ~1000$ and have other substantial losses. A few years back it could even climb as high as 50% if you were unlucky. Also you don’t pay any special taxes here if you simply sell your private collection.
I think the current US tax rate on capital gains is at 0% if you earn little, 15% if your income is in a “medium” range and it can climb to 20% if your wallet is really thick.
This is not based on any personal research but on what my father told me, yet seeing how much time he is (and especially has been) spending in this field, that he keeps up to date, and that generally speaking he is a reasonably smart man, I have no reason to doubt his expertise in this topic. Naturally he’s enthusiastic about this but he wouldn’t warp facts. Every time I visit I unsually tend to leave with more insight in this field than I really want to. He also keeps close track on how the value of his private collection rose over the past, how it still rises, and I know what the figures look like.
Back on track, I should have made the disclaimer that I’m not really familiar with US tax law. The main point I’m making here however is that it is a very safe long term investment that is practically guaranteed to pay out substantially more than what you buy it for in the long haul. This should hold true regardless of what country you’re from.
I wasn’t aware you’re not in the US. If your country has high capital gains taxes compared to income taxes, the balance might be different in the US. However, stamps and other collectibles have many problems:
-- Stamps can get stolen, lost, or burned in a fire. It’s hard for this to happen to stocks (unless you’re behind the times and have them as a pile of paper certificates)
-- If you buy a type of collectibles that you’re actually interested in, your desire to keep a co llection of something you’re interested in may lead to poor decision-making on a financial level
-- When buying stamps and other collectibles, you generally have to pay retail prices, and when you sell them, you only get wholesale prices. And you can sell a stock any time; selling a collectible is a big deal and takes effort.
Also, I find it very doubtful that stamps aren’t subject to inheritance or estate taxes.
I agree. It may be easy to avoid paying tax on the gain in value, but that does not mean one is complying with the tax law.
That said, if one is holding stamps as an investment, it is plausible that gains would be taxed at the capital gains rate instead of the ordinary rate (in the US).
Disclaimer to any reader: I am not your lawyer. I am not a tax lawyer. I didn’t do any legal research. Don’t rely on my opinion for any reason. Definitely don’t rely on this opinion to try and pay less taxes. If this is a real issue for you, hire someone to do the research, or do it yourself.
I wonder if Magic Cards (Specifically the Power Nine cards and Beta Dual Lands) are not a good investment? They have multiplied by about 10 in price over the last ten years. I’ve known people who had 300 Serra Angels, a terrible investment whose price decreased from 8 dollars to about 1 or less over the years.
Magic is both a collectible and a game, I don’t know how that factors in expected value return.
Usually the top 0,3% (in future relative scarcity in Type1 and Legacy) increase steadily in price no matter what, top 1% unless they are reprinted (in which case both up and down can happen) and most of the rest goes down. But only with years and years of experience can a player tell whether a card will belong to the select few. Svi may have informed opinions on that.
Just to spend some time calibrating future-me confidence in Magic price calibration, I’ll say some outrageous hypothesis: Up: Time Vault, Mana Drain, P9 except timetwister, FOW, Karakas, Fetch, Duals, mutavault, moxen. Down: All non-tribal creatures pre-2008, jace, all dual trual lands except above, baneslayer, wrath of god. There you go future 2017 me, stop trusting yourself that much and never invest in what you mind thinks it is superexpert at without much evidence.
I wouldn’t know about magic cards, sorry.
Stamps would be my choice because they have many advantages over other types of collectibles. Magic cards may share many of the benefits stamps have over other collectibles considering the similar format, but stamps surely have special perks magic cards don’t.
Stamps have the advantage, that they are the number 1 collectible in Germany and many other parts of Europe and they have been forever. Coins and other things don’t come close in terms of how widely they are collected and the bigger the demand, the easier it is to monetize if you have a worthwhile collection that is interesting to the collector base. There are stamps which one can assume will be interesting for many decades to come—there is for example a deep fascination with the Third Reich so stamps that came from Germany and the occupied territories during that time are generally sought after. What’s also interesting is “catastrophy mail”, that is mail that was delivered on planes or zeppelins that were destroyed while the letters themselves could be salvaged from the wrecks.
There are many nieche topics that stamp collectors could choose to base their collection(s) on, which may indeed suffer from vaning interest over time in the collector base, but there are also some other topics that will probably remain interesting in the very long run and thus demand will always be there and fluctuate less than the demand for other topics.
I know that magic is huge but will it remain so for another fifty years? (Assuming the absence of apocalyptic scenarios). I’m quite sure stamps will be there because they are carrying historical information and are an integral part of the first “reliable” long distance communication technology humans managed to make work (apart from books perhaps, though they usually had no specific individual as recipient in mind and thus really are quite a different communication technology).
What I have taken from this is any time I travel abroad I should get in touch with my stamp investing friend and form a strategy for finding good local deals that have a likely long term value, possibly in other markets, and also I should try to make more friends expert in such collectibles investing for the same reason. I have not concluded I should expect to beat the market without a similar effort.
If you are much better than the market at predicting how cards will trend, you should probably be working for Star City or some other secondary market giant.
Probably the continuous uptrend in the P9 et al. can be understood as rational if the continued growth of the game is uncertain. There’s always the black swan possibility that Wizards will catastrophically fuck up in some way and hence let them tumble down. In addition, the growth of eternal formats is itself limited by the availability of staples. I would suspect there’s an upper limit to how expensive the Moxen and friends can get on this basis alone—logarithmic growth of the game entails linear growth of Vintage and Legacy. This is, after all, why they created Modern, for which Modern Masters is possible.
I generally work better combining a comfortable outdoor environment, sunlight (outdoors can help at night, but if it’s sunny and not blisteringly hot, that’s even better), music (louder seems to increase the happiness response, but I haven’t noticed a correlation between music volume and productivity), and for me, a braille display (I can’t read and listen to music at the same time otherwise, unless I turn the music volume down to the point of pointlessness). I also find that air quality is important, though that could be more psychological on my part (this could have to do with why it’s easier to work outdoors, or in well cleaned/ventelated areas). I went so far as to buy an air filter for this, but seeing as my parents were (and still are -_-) the gatekeepers for me and buying things, I never replaced the filter in it (it’s supposed to be replaced every 60 days), so I can’t comment on whether or not it was particularly effective. If indoors, I’ve found that I generally function better with more light and moving air (opening windows tends to be more effective than climate control machinery).
I’ve used the above to sustain output on multiple occasions, but the trouble is, I can’t seem to make it last for more than a couple weeks at a time. I’m wondering if there isn’t some obvious reason for this; for instance, the past week has been one in which the weather has been too awful to work outside, and I have more and more often not bothered getting a braille display, but I really have to stop and reflect to notice this; otherwise it just seems like business as usual!
On food:
Simple carbs = bad (most brand name cereals, pop tarts, Little Debbie-type things all kill productivity and mood for hours).
Protein = Good, though more sensitive to balance than most other types.
Salty things seem to be generally helpful to cognitive performance. The risks of too much salt make me a bit worried about this one; am I mistaken about said risk? Or does my relatively low bloodpressure help in that regard?
Apples tend to make me sleepy; bananas tend to be more uplifting, although if I’m particularly inactive or eat them with the wrong things (for instance, too many pringles), pain can result.
In early 2011, I experimented with coffee, having avoided caffeine (other than chocolate) for the overwhelming majority of ten years before that. The results were positive, provided I didn’t use coffee more than twice a week. (I have not had access to coffee since then.)
I generally only drink water, though gaterAid / fruit juices weren’t uncommon as recently as last year. Fruit juices seem to fit into the general pattern of high-carb things (something of a seditive), while GaterAid seemed to be helpful, at least for the first few months.
A hack I could use is ways to improve people skills while effectively blind and living with my parents in a very pedestrian unfriendly town. From a strictly utilitarian perspective, my lack of the ability to summon minions is a huge impediment to many of my projects. (Being completely and utterly isolated outside of the internet sucks in general, of course, but it’s impossible to ignore the huge pile of utility I could amass by having PR superpowers.)
Lowering salt too much (down to recommended levels) is risky
Some people have blood pressure which goes up on a low-salt diet
I would hazard that if people on a lower salt diet increased their potassium intake substantially they’d see positive outcomes. Based on CVD research it seems to go
high potassium, low sodium>high sodium, low potassium>low sodium, low potassium
in terms of outcomes.
That’s good to know (I would have predicted the opposite).
I seem to have relatively low blood pressure in general (it isn’t surprising for my pulse to sound like squirts rather than thumps...). This makes me think I should avoid things like alcohol, but I haven’t actually researched this.
Use KCl in addition to NaCl, this should at least double the amount you can use before having to worry about it.
Note: Some people find KCl to taste terrible while others find it pretty similar to normal NaCl.
Pure KCl tastes terrible, but I personally find a 50:50 blend with NaCl to taste better than NaCl alone when added to food.
lol no one here said “obtain some Bitcoin”
https://www.statmuse.com/money/ask/bitcoin+price+may+15+2013
Is there a similar advice repository that is one level more meta? I want to be able to invent ridiculous munchkin ideas on my own.
An idea that may be too removed from the general field of expertise here. For those who live in suburbs (and have gardens/front yards/...), look at your weeds. Some of them, like Conyza canadensis (incidentally, a very aggressive alien in Europe), may hyperaccumulate certain substances (in this particular case, Hg, Pb, As and some other things you don’t want in your food beyond micro levels). If you leave them to grow until just fruiting and then take out with roots, you will reduce pollution there (and the aliens’ spread). However, you will need to put them somewhere, which may be inconvenient.
While technically true, will it make any difference? How much heavy metals (e.g. in mcg) would one plant accumulate? How many plants will it take to reduce the heavy metal pollution of a patch of ground by, say, half?
There are too many qualificators to go into detail here. You might wish to choose a plant that takes out more of a specific pollutant, or of several. Here are some references for Conyza canadensis specifically, they will give you the general idea why people are interested in this on industrial scale.
http://www.b-paper.com/tag/conyza-canadensis (if this seems to you understandable and not too boring, read the following articles for experimental set-ups)
Potential of weed species applied to remediation of soils contaminated with heavy metals. J Environ Sci (China). 2004;16(5):868-73.
Potential hyperaccumulation of Pb, Zn, Cu and Cd in endurant plants distributed in an old smeltery, northeast China. Environ Geol (2007) 51:1043-1048.
Heavy Metal Accumulation in Plants on Mn Mine Tailings. Pedosphere (2006) 16:1, 131–136.
Identification of a Cd accumulator Conyza canadensis. J Hazard Mater. 2009 Apr 15;163(1):32-35.
Phytoremediation is a developed field, with many plants being screened for efficiency. I would begin with learning what species you do have, and then googling them. (Maybe if you write to some guy who studies something that you have, you can offer him joint research—you gather hay and soil at your place, he analyses them for HM (so you save money). If you have a background in statistics, it raises your chances to Eucalyptus height from about clubmoss height:)
As to ANY difference at all…
The more biomass the plant gains, the more overall quantities of accumulated substances will be taken out (meaning if you weed it out earlier, that will be less effective). Also, if you only mow your lawn, you leave roots in soil, and they will probably contain the highest amounts of heavy metals (and some plants can re-grow later, possibly reaching higher than average concentrations of pollutants). And the part that you have cut off will fly away and add to the general level of pollution. However, if you don’t mow your lawn, it might look less tidy:)) there will be status repercussions:))
If the plant is a serious weed, it would likely produce thousands of easily dispersing seeds per specimen (so you shouldn’t worry about it NOT appearing again). If there is a wetland in your area, sedimentation processes and typically clonal nature of surrounding vegetation (reeds) will make heavy metals accumulate there (wetlands are sinks), so it is a good thing to take them out from surrounding soil in the form of fast-growing, short-lived biomass. In some (usually rural) areas grass is yearly burned, which would release a significant amount of the collected pollutants into the air (and that is not good).
(And of course, trees will gather pollutants from air more than, say, cabbage does, so if there is any significant effect it should be for vegetables and not fruit.)
So I think there is little to gain from not doing it and at least some good gained from doing it.
There are opportunity costs. It costs time and maybe money for procuring the plant.
(Still haven’t found the time to check the literature for the best plant to remove HM, but I remember about it.) I really can’t yet estimate losses/gains in money units; perhapsit could be organized as a community event of promoting neighbouriness. Neighbourhood?
It seems to me like you are more interested in signaling concern about cleaning up heavy metals than actually cleaning them up. Do you agree with that assessment?
I am even more interested in free advice on statistics of soil science, given to an internet user, because I do happen to be a member of a NGO and so have to signal concern more often than I honestly feel it. (After a while concern dwindles, but annoyance grows.) I would not want to signal concern about yet another problem without due preparation in real life.
Does anyone actually do this in real life (as opposed to writing academic papers about it)?
I notice the lack of numbers :-)
If you do have a heavy metals soil pollution problem, do you think bioaccumulating weeds will significantly help? If you do not, why should you bother? Talking about lawns, no one eats that grass, so you can make the argument that it’s better to have contaminants tied up in the soil rather then extracted.
I don’t know if people do this in real life (or I would have chosen a different thread), but one obstacle why they would not is lack of infrastructure. Once you get a truckload of toxic waste, what to do with it?.. Also, I hope to have some numbers for one species (actually, for a fraction of its ecoforms) in a limited range of pollutants in a specific geographic area, under specific land use conditions, collaborating with chemists who will hopefully find the problem interesting enough, AND I live in Ukraine. I won’t have time for it until after defending my thesis. Give me a Latin name, and I will try to come with a prediction, however off key; but generalizing across orders of flowering plants is simply wrong. (ETA: a nitpick. A lawn is not a HM sink. The soil is far too often disturbed, and new layers are not yearly deposited there. It won’t hold the pollutants reliably. Maybe, under some conditions, it is better not to extract them, I will have to think upon it. And the concept of a grass that nobody ever eats blew my mind, it did. Save yourself, man! (Woman, child, alien, AI.) Run! Sell your house to a sci-fi writer and don’t look back!)
I’ll ask a simpler question. What is the best (in terms of heavy-metal concentration as % of biomass) that a flowering plant can do?
(Still haven’t got to read stuff on that, maybe I’ll be more lucky next week. After five minutes by the clock thinking about the idea and its alternatives, have two results: 1) I think veeery slowly, 2) maybe it’s possible to make a thin porous cable stuffed with enzyme analogue to download HM directly from the soil, collect them on electrodes once they are in, and extract massively in a special facility.)
To extract heavy metals from the soil you need a LOT of contact surface. Roots excel at this, cables, not so much.
I know. Still might be more feasible.
I’ve got one. I actually came up with this on my own, but I’m gratified to see that EY has adopted it
cashback credit cards. these things essentially reduce the cost of all expenditures by 1%.
...but that’s not where they get munchkiny. where they get munchkiny is when you basically arbitrage two currencies of equal value.
as a hypothetical example, say you buy $1000 worth of dollar bills for $1000. by using the credit card, it costs $990, since you get $10 back. you then take it to the bank and deposit it for $1000, making a $10 profit. wash, rinse repeat
the catch is, most of them have an annual fee attached, so you it’s a use it or it’s not worth it scenario (note, though, that for most people, if they use it for rent and nothing else, they’ll save about the same as the annual fee). also, most of them need good credit to acquire, so if you’re a starving college student with loans, kiss that goodbye. also, you cannot directly withdraw cash and get the 1%, so you have to come up with a way ton efficiently exchange a purchasable resource for money.
Take Wellbutrin (bupropion) for general mood improvement and increased incentive to Get Things Done. Cycling it does seem to be beneficial, as the body will eventually adjust.
Bupropion did nothing for me.
I suspect this is a special case of the general rule “if you have depression, seek appropriate treatment,” which is really really good advice.
The low hanging fruit is to read the book Feeling Good, which has been shown to help depression in studies.
If you’re trying to extinguish an eating habit alter your sense of taste for the period in which it’s a problem. The cheap and easy way is with mouthwash. If regular mouthwash doesn’t last long enough chlorhexidine mouthwash (marketed as “clinical strength”) will alter taste for around an hour or two. This may be useful for intermittent fasting and reduction in caffeine consumption.
Build an autonomous self-replicating robot. Not a RepRap—those take hours of careful human labor to build. Design an assembly robot to put together parts: something that can pick up a screw, place it in a hole, and screw it in place. This is a hard problem (some current PhD students do similar projects for their research) but the required tools all exist, including ROS and existing robot arm control routines. Some challenging coding is required to execute the assembly steps in order, and some challenging systems engineering is needed to make sure the robot has the observation and control accuracy capabilities needed (e.g. hobby servos may not be accurate enough). The robot arm must itself uses only off-the-shelf parts (stepper motors, encoders, laser-cut parts, off-the-shelf shafts, etc.). This would be a hard problem to solve, but is solvable by someone who’s great at coding, mechanical engineering, and systems engineering.
The munchkin part occurs when this is built. Existing robot arms typically cost ~2x or more the cost of the parts (so the manufacturer can pay assembly labor cost, engineering overhead, etc.). This autonomous assembly robot could thus be substantially cheaper than conventionally manufactured assembly robots. And, scaling up production does not require more workers, just more table/shop space for more robots. So, one robot could be used to make a very large number of additional robots, resulting in a large profit for the owner.
The munchkinnery continues by enabling full automation of more challenging manufacturing problems. Assembling a robot from parts purchased online is easier than, say, assembling a factory. To compete, people would race to automate increasingly complicated problems. Once one person had automated a task (requiring a large investment), others could copy the control code and designs for free (or a license fee) and enjoy increased productivity with lower costs. This would make manufactured goods much cheaper, and possibly make recycling and Mars colonization cost-effective.
Data to support the feasibility of this includes existing examples of high-level robot tasks (welding robots for cargo ship fabrication, navigation and mapping of buildings by drones, various capabilities of the PR2 robot platform) and NASA studies of the feasibility of moon colonization using self-replicating robots.
Side effects may include massive unemployment, creation of a robot-administered police state, and increased risk of self-improving AI.
If you’re a fast reader, you can return an ebook from Amazon within 7 days of purchase really frickin easily. You can buy and return most popular books with a few clicks, without getting off your butt. Sure, libraries are great, but you have to wait if they don’t have your book, you have to transport yourself there and back, and many of them are closed when inspiration strikes at midnight and you realize you want to stay up all night reading some book you literally just heard about but suddenly must have RIGHT NOW (or maybe that’s just me). It’s way better to have a bigger library on your computer. You can try books out and if they’re stupid, at least you only lose the time it took to read it. If you use the kindle cloud reader, you can read on your computer. Then when you’re done, you refund it, and you don’t have to go through the annoying process of shipping anything anywhere, or worry about packaging or it being in the same condition.
Plus if you travel with your laptop, you can then have an unlimited supply of books that weigh nothing, as long as you have internet access, that are effectively free and in a convenient format.
If you’re a slow reader, just buy it, read for a week, return it, then buy it again (and return it again after a week). Repeat until finished.
(Sigh.) It’s bad enough that you’ve chosen to defect; it’s downright evil to try to popularize the notion of defecting. The more people do this sort of thing, the more likely it is that Amazon changes their policies, affecting those of us who are co-operating (i.e., not exploiting the policy).
If you must obtain ebooks by extralegal means, there are such things as torrents and ebook sites, where you will find far more books than you will ever be able to read, and where you will only be committing copyright infringement, instead of infringement, wire fraud, theft of resources, and violation of that stupid US anti-hacking law that Aaron Swartz was being prosecuted under. (Oh, and let’s not forget the part where you just came pretty close to admitting that you’ve committed those crimes already.)
Advocating law-breaking on LW for ethical reasons might be one thing; advocating it for reasons of petty selfishness is quite another.
[Edited to add: this comment is not about protecting Amazon; it’s about 1) not promoting illegal activities on LW, and 2) it not being a good idea to get into a habit of defecting on agreements (whether social/informal or legal/formal because of self-serving rationalizations like, “they can afford it” or “I can get away with it”.]
It would help you argument is you were not to invent quite ridiculous notions just to make something look more scary.
Amazon can take care of itself. It doesn’t need your paternalistic moralizing intervention. If Amazon believes that on net having a policy that allows returns of possibly already consumed goods will produce more profit than a more defensive strategy then it can do so. Save your shaming for people who need your defence or who are being ‘expolited’ in a way that isn’t straightforward (albeit miserly) use of the deliberately included features of a powerful website.
Something actually ethical to recommend would be the use of calibre to convert and remove DRM and then returning the book while keeping it. That’s clearly illegal and something I incidentally haven’t done. I’ve never bothered looking in to the ‘return book’ kindle feature for those books I have purchased from amazon. (I just use that tool for the purpose of getting things into a format TextAloud can convert to mp3.)
Amazon has fired customers before for making too many returns[0]. So be aware that this may get your account banned at some point.
0
Have you seen an instance of this happening to someone who did not return multiple large purchases? I am worried about this happening, but in every instance I read about, the person who got banned had returned multiple TV’s or computers, not small items. However, the ebook return policy has only been in place for around a year, so it might not show up.
With ebook returns, it seems like they only disallow you from refunding ebooks in the future, but do not ban your account
Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer, accountant or investment advisor. I have not tried this, and I’m currently trying to think of reasons why it won’t work.
How to Beat the Tax System:
Suppose one had an investment account and a Roth IRA. Suppose further the investment account had a realized gain for the year. From the investment account, one could sell-to-open a way out-of-the-money cash-secured put at a high limit that no one would buy. As long as you’re the only open interest, you could then buy your option in your other account. You’d in essence be swapping short-term gains for tax-free savings.
You’re hosed if another party rushed in to sell you the put at a lower price, but the savings could easily exceed the cost of commissions if the option is thinly traded enough. I suppose you could just take the market price on both sides, though, if you’re willing to repeat the process until the transition goes the “correct” way.
You can withdraw penalty-free from the Roth IRA when you buy your first house. Or, you could simply reverse the process as needed. This could be particularly helpful if one were having a bad year and had lost more than the maximum investment-losses deduction.
Any downsides to this bit of financial munchkin-ism? Does this constitute tax evasion? I imagine it wouldn’t be provable for anyone other than me (you’re welcome). Are there actually options that thinly-traded?
I am not a tax lawyer, but I suspect the IRS would treat the put-option sale-thingie as a deposit into your Roth IRA (“substance over form” is a recognized tax law doctrine, at least when it benefits the IRS). Likewise, reversing the process likely would be classified as withdrawing from the IRA. So, the general rules for deposits and withdraws from the IRA would likely apply. If I understand your suggestion correctly, the general rules would prohibit most of what you are trying to do.
In short, I don’t think your plan does what you think it does, legally speaking. Whether you would get caught and penalized is a separate question—First, brokerages have lots of reporting requirements, and likely would issue a 1099 or some-such to someone if there were a change in beneficial ownership of an asset. Second, the IRS has an all-but-declared policy of spending a dollar to collect a dime, purely for deterrence purposes.
In summary, aggressive tax techniques without expert guidance is asking for trouble.
Disclaimer to any reader: I am not your lawyer. I am not a tax lawyer. I didn’t do any legal research. Don’t rely on my opinion for any reason. Definitely don’t rely on this opinion to try and pay less taxes. If this is a real issue for you, hire someone to do the research, or do it yourself.
I know nothing about tax law, so this is an important disclaimer. I won’t end up trying this.
To spell out the idea, one could have their Roth IRA and their investment account at separate institutions. The Roth IRA broker would simply see a loss (gain) and the investment account broker would simply see a gain (loss). Each institutions reporting these changes to the IRS is the benefit of the finagling.
Yes, and the IRS would see both transactions under your tax identification number (for an individual, typically the social security number). The IRS is going to have an opinion about what that transaction means for your IRA account, and if your tax return is not consistent with that opinion, the IRS will expect an explanation.
Disclaimer to any reader: I am not your lawyer. I am not a tax lawyer. I didn’t do any legal research. Don’t rely on my opinion for any reason. Definitely don’t rely on this opinion to try and pay less taxes. If this is a real issue for you, hire someone to do the research, or do it yourself.
Learn how to remember people’s names.
Of course you’re horrible with names. That’s because you haven’t learned how to learn them. You evolved to know something like 100 names at a time, so your software needs an upgrade if you want to do more than that. Use the mnemonic technique called “linking” or “chaining”. This video is cheesy, but it’s exactly how I do it.
Calculate the VOI on giving this a try. If you go to conferences very often, or have lots of students, or live in a large city or something, it’s probably really useful to you to be able to remember names. Especially given that you can google any name you manage to remember. And consider the psychological effects! A person’s name is her favorite word, and knowing it is the password to her attention.
By the way, I’d be very interested to hear from any face blind people who have experimented with this.
I suggest a move to Main.
Hang on, this is the discussion section. The entire post is an invitation to discussion—that is not just its primary, but practically its sole purpose.
Do you suggest a move to Main because more people read Main? That may be true, but anecdotally at least one person reads everything on the site. Furthermore, it seems like abusing the category.
Is it because Main posts have higher status? That’s.. probably true, but again seems like conflating category and status.
The solution is probably a code tweak, so although I’m not trying to oppose the move—you’re probably right—getting to the bottom of why it’s a good idea might let us avoid this situation in the future.
Because Main is for higher-quality posts that people who don’t read Discussion read, and then Promoted is for even higher-quality posts for people subscribed to the Promoted RSS feed?
All right, then how about we have a “promotion” axis separate from the “category” axis? Is there enough volume on the site for that, already?
You could just use the number of upvotes on an article. It would still require a code change, but I don’t think we need a new source of data separate from upvotes, categories, and the existing promotion.
That would require a code change.
What role do you have in mind for Discussion posts that you don’t think should also hold for Main posts? (On your original conception of ‘Discussion’ and ‘Main’.) Main-level posts like the Sequences also generally turn into active discussions, so I’m not clear on what is supposed to set Discussion apart.
The difference would be that it’s only discussion, so you know what to expect.
Actually, a single Promotion axis plus tags would probably work better.
I agree that tags probably make more sense. I’m still not clear on what it means for a post or its comments to be ‘only discussion’. Is the idea that the OP in a Discussion post is supposed to be as contentless as possible? Or is there something special about some comments that makes them Discussion comments, and others not?
Not much, no. What originally set me off was the type error of ‘promoted—main—discussion’, which seems like an axis that’s taking two right angles.
Having three stages of promotion, plus tags, should be sufficient. At that, articles already have tags; we just need to use them a little better.
Remember, LW has no budget for non-essential features. Or even for essential ones. So, just click on “Main”, it already takes you to Promoted.
Is main also for posts that garner high-quality discussion?
Who can move a post to main? the author? the moderators? both? anyone else?
Similar to B_For_Bandana’s idea, use the refund system to convert gift cards into cash.
Men might be able to use hypnosis or meditation to give themselves dry orgasms. This would make the withdrawal method easier.
3% hydrogen peroxide (the kind used in first-aid kits) works well for treating acne, for some people.
I’ve been using it myself, but only for about three weeks so far. I tried it because I’d heard its effects were similar to chlorine, and going swimming was one of the only things that had a noticeable effect on my skin. Before I started using the peroxide, I stopped using topical acne medicine for two weeks, but continued taking minocycline (which I was taking for the acne). The acne got worse, but not a whole lot worse—it was only slightly outside the noise. After two weeks with nothing, I started wiping my face and shoulders with peroxide twice a day. After a couple days, there was less acne than when I’d been using nothing, and after the first week it was better than the best it got when I’d been using the old treatments. It’s fluctuated a little after that, but in general it’s much better than before.
The main cost of this is that it’s really itchy immediately after putting the peroxide on. For me, this only lasts a few minutes, but I suspect it would be worse for someone with sensitive skin. I also burned myself a few times when I’d first started using it, but 3% peroxide burns are just itchiness. I’ve also heard that it can hurt for several days if you get it in your eyes, and can stain clothes. I haven’t been using it long enough to know if there are negative long-term effects. The monetary cost is negligible—the sponges to apply it with were the most expensive part, and they’re normal dish sponges.
I’m still figuring out the best way to put it on. I’ve been using a soft, fabric-covered type of dish sponge for my shoulders, which is good for keeping it off my hands, but after a week and a half the plastic backing on the sponge started to fall apart. That was a little worrying, so I’m going to try something else soon. So far, the only thing I’ve tried using on my face is cotton pads made for wiping off makeup and such. They work, but I have to fold them into fourths to keep the peroxide from soaking through too fast, and even then I get a lot on my hands.
I suspect this works for me because my skin is really oily, and not very sensitive. Based on my internet searches, using hydrogen peroxide this way doesn’t appear common, so it’s probably a your mileage may vary sort of thing.
As a more general rule, if something appears helpful but isn’t really practical , google for other things that are similar or have similar effects.
I’m thinking of doing this soon, but I still need to check whether it is possible.
Get an airline miles credit card or other rewards card.
Use the card to lend money through Kiva.org. Since this goes through paypal, I believe this should count as a purchase, thus adding to your miles.
Get the money returned through Kiva; withdraw it onto a debit card connected to a checking account, thus not subtracting from your credit card’s “Net Purchases”.
Repeat for free (discounting time cost) utilons and miles.
The more capital you have, the more you can make at any given point.
ETA: This is probably a bad idea, as it could be seen as fraud. I failed to realize this when I first posted it.
You assume that Kiva pays nothing for paypal money transfer or the credit card.
It’s plausible that Kiva pays that sum from the interest of the loans. It might also be that Kiva has indeed a deal with Paypal that allows them to receive money for free. If they have a deal somewhere in that deal it could be a clause that this doesn’t count as a purchase.
You might trigger some fraud detection system if you try to do that with significant amounts of money. Maybe you even signed somewhere a clause that allows your bank, paypal or kiva to sue you for fraud.
In short, keep in mind that the system has lots of people with an incentive to prevent exploitation and it’s unlikely that you managed to find a useful exploit that 1) bypasses all the checks and balances, and 2) if it ever did exist, was not already found and closed.
In addition, if you want to make money because a system of an organisation is broken, don’t screw organizations like Kiva that produce a lot of public good.
What part of this is screwing Kiva? Temporarily lending money then getting it back is what Kiva is for.
I interpreted the suggestion is being about fastly moving money into and out of Kiva and not doing loans with the usual maturation time.
I was assuming initially that there would be fees charged, but they would be low enough that it would still be worth it.
I had not thought of this being considered fraud. In hindsight, it seems obvious; since it is most likely not worth the trouble of looking through everything I have ever signed, I’m going to shelve this idea.
If you are single, frequent online dating sites and look for people who match your Myers-Briggs personality type.
Whether or not Myers-Briggs measures something real, it definitely worked in at least one happily married case. :-)
so did “find god’s match for you”
if we’re looking at all the successful cases, but none of the unsuccessful ones, of course we’re going to get positive results. also, as positive results go, “at least one” success is hardly reassuring
tl;dr: Excess body fat and obesity are an immune response to gram-negative gut bacteria, not a metabolic problem. Fix it by taking oral polymyxin, or a comparable antibiotic. Further research into good antibiotics for this purpose would be appreciated.
Earlier this year, an article found that bacteria from an obese human could cause obesity in mice. They isolated the bacteria, put it in some randomly chosen mice, and after a few months the mice with the bacteria were fat and had diabetes problems while the control group was healthy. With a second experiment they found that the mechanism is the molecule lipopolysacharride (LPS aka endotoxin), found in the membrane of all gram-negative bacteria. When gram negative bacteria become established in the gut, the LPS triggers a inflammation response from the immune system which causes both fat accumulation and diabetes in the long run. So they’ve established very firmly that gut bacteria are sufficient to cause excess body fat, but whether that’s the main source in the general human population is unknown. (source: http://www.nature.com/ismej/journal/v7/n4/pdf/ismej2012153a.pdf, apologies if it’s behind an academic firewall)
So how does one get rid of gram-negative bacteria? It turns out that there is a common antiobiotic, polymyxin, which specifically targets LPS itself and kills bacteria which produce LPS. Polymyxin is among the most common topical antibiotics (along with neosporin), and can also be taken intravenously or orally. Intravenously it is a mild neurotoxin, but this is not an issue if taken orally.
Finally, it turns out that a study published back in 2006 administered polymyxin intravenously to rats. They found a 46% drop in adipose fat mass in rats given polymyxin. They had no idea what the mechanism was, hypothesized some vague connection to insulin signalling, and it just went down as one of those weird results. But now, in light of the more recent results, we can be pretty sure that gram-negative gut bacteria were the issue. The importance of this study is that it suggests gram-negative bacteria are a major cause of excess body fat in the general rat population, not just a special case of the 2013 study. So, it’s reasonable to suspect that polymyxin would fix most human obesity too. (source: http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10989-005-9009-9)
Quack quack goes the duck. I wouldn’t use such an experimental treatment even on your pet rat.
(It does sound vaguely promising, like thousands of other candidate substances in translational medicine that didn’t pan out.)
Edit: The paper is not from the journal Nature, it is instead from a different journal which is also published by the same company. The paper was published in The ISME Journal, with an impact factor of 7.4, compared to Nature’s impact factor of 31! So next time, please do your research.
The paper is open access, but your link is blocked unless entered directly (they probably don’t accept any non-site values for the HTTP referer field). This link should work.
Also, before you start taking antibiotics, here’s the relevant part from that abstract:
No mention of using antibiotics, polymyxin isn’t mentioned once. As for the second study, there are reasons you don’t administer polymyxin intravenously, and its intravenous efficacy is much different from when taken orally.
No, there were no antibiotics used in the ISMEJ article: ” The volunteer lost 30.1 kg after 9 weeks, and 51.4 kg after 23 weeks, on a diet composed of whole grains, traditional Chinese medicinal foods and prebiotics (WTP diet, Supplementary Information; Supplementary Figure 1)”
No.
Thanks for pointing out the journal error, that has been corrected. Also big thanks for the working link.
The “experiment” with the human subject in the ISMEJ article was stupid, which was why I didn’t mention it. Everything I’m saying is based on the mouse experiments.
I do think your interpretation of these experiments is way too restricted. In a frequentist sense, everything you’re saying is reasonable, since we don’t know how well various results generalize (mouse to human, intravenous to oral, etc...). But in a Bayesian sense, this is pretty good evidence. I guessed that polymyxin would reduce body fat (regardless of how it’s administered) just based on reading the ISMEJ article, which never mentioned antibiotics. That means the first article alone was enough to promote the hypothesis out of entropy. I then found the second article by searching for papers discussing polymyxin and obesity, and the result was what I expected (large drop in fat after polymyxin administration), so that’s a big evidential boost in favor.
Neither of those gives evidence for the mouse result generalizing to humans. However, we do know that gram-negative bacteria are pretty ubiquitous and do trigger an immune response in humans similar to that in mice, so based on the physical systems we should expect a similar response to antibiotics.
There was a special issue of Nature focusing on human microbiota a few months back which seems to have a lot more relevant research with humans, but I haven’t had time to go through them in depth yet (which is why this was a poorly-researched comment rather than a full discussion post).
Ah, but the cool thing is that you don’t need an experimental treatment. We’re talking bog-standard antibiotics, nothing unusual. The only unusual thing is what you’d be trying to do with those antibiotics.
And unlike the usual vaguely promising substances, the effect sizes were huge in both experiments. You don’t get a 46% drop in adipose fat from random noise.
My basic sanity check for any sort of experiment purporting to show a new mechanism responsible for obesity, is “under this mechanism, does it make sense for lots of people to be obese now in America, but hardly anyone a hundred years ago in America, or today in countries like Japan where people have high access to resources but eat less?”
If a mechanism for obesity leaves you confused by the patterns of obesity that occur in the real world, then it’s probably better not to afford it much likelihood.
I’m not sure what your response is supposed to be saying to the grandparent. Wouldn’t this make total sense if gut flora changed in the united states over the past 100 years? especially if you consider that period includes the introduction and widespread use of antibiotics as well as diet changes, chemical effects that are known to change gut flora. Because gut flora is acquired from the mother, it makes sense that different ethnic groups in different parts of the world would have different compositions also. Gut flora in various societies doesn’t seem to have been studied very much (I’m a lazy googler and only found one study that was tangential) but I wouldn’t be surprised if different nations had different gut flora.
Different nations may have different gut flora, but my past googling indicates a degree of national weight average and national caloric intake which would be awfully conspicuous if gut flora were the real mechanism at work.
Perhaps the presence of LPS bacteria and the corresponding immune response provoke a larger appetite.
That’s a possibility, but it’s one under which I would antipredict findings like this.
Perhaps HFCS in particular encourages LPS bacteria. Or perhaps LPS bacteria particularly stimulates thirst for sweet liquids. It’s impossible to know without (preferably both of) historical LPS and a controlled experiment. Also, your link does not establish a causal link between sugary drink consumption and obesity, merely that they’ve been correlated for a few decades.
Well, from that link
Which you would expect if the sodas had a causal relationship with obesity, and probably not if they didn’t.
See also this article.
Can you think of any observations, in humans, which favor the LPS bacteria model of obesity, rather than simply being reconcilable with it given enough ad hoc additions?
Fascinating finding and worth exploring further, but it isn’t a dichotomy. “Not” is not implied when “and” would work just as well.
There are a couple of problems with the premise. First, anything that was really as effective as a cycle of infinite wish spells would quickly violate energy conservation and the second law of thermodynamics. But even toning it down a little, if anything really were unreasonably effective, wouldn’t almost everyone be doing it already? And thinking about it that way, are there ridiculously effective things that we’re already doing? Well, yes, in fact there are.
The first one that comes to mind is reading and writing. Reading and writing is an incredibly effective, efficient, and cheap means of transmitting and storing knowledge. It just blows memory palaces and other techniques right out the window. The reason memory palaces haven’t been much used for the last few hundred years is because we don’t need them any more. Sure there are times when it may be convenient to not have to look a detail up, but it’s certainly not as critical or as common a need as it was pre-literacy.
Another good example of a munchkin technique we all already use is money. Money just beats barter on pretty much every axis you can imagine. It is massively better than the alternative of a no-money society. And it’s so obvious we don’t even think about it. Of course for most of humanity’s time on this planet, there was neither reading and writing nor money. If you think of it like that, there are many other munchkin techniques that we take for granted: electricity, the Internet, modern plumbing, word processors, the scientific method, statistics. The list goes on.
So the real question here is what’s at the margin? What are the unreasonably effective life hacks that a lot of people are doing, and doing successfully, but not everyone? Furthermore, to really qualify it needs to be something that is appropriate for everyone, or at least everyone who wishes to achieve a certain goal; and a large percentage of those people must not be already doing it. For example, an exercise program that works only for people with Type O blood would not qualify if everyone with Type O blood who wanted to be fitter was already doing it. However a 20-minute a day exercise program that could reverse osteoporosis in senior citizens would qualify if only 14% of senior citizens were already doing it.
Are there such reasonably effective, not yet implemented life hacks? I.e. ones for which we have clear evidence that they work, and enough understanding to know who they work for; but that are not yet implemented by a large percentage of the applicable population? Most especially, are there such life hacks that would apply to many LessWrong readers? I can think of at least two. They aren’t as weird and unusual and interesting as some of the suggestions here. Indeed they’re downright boring. However they’re boring because they work, and because they’re well understood and well tested. In keeping with the request to “Post them separately” I’ll introduce each of them in a separate comment.
Having a AGI that goes FOOM and fulfills all of your orders is comparable to having a circle of infinitive wish spells. The fact that nobody yet has such an AGI doesn’t mean that it’s impossible.
Societies without money aren’t barter societies but gift giving societies. Money doesn’t beat gift giving on every axis.
You should look into (INFOGRAPHICS). Collections are floating around in the torrent sphere. I have compiled over a 1k on my FB page for public use. There are encyclopedias written just for you, but you have to seek them out.
Use sand in your coffee instead of sugar. Not only is it free and devoid of calories, but since it doesn’t dissolve, it can also be used over and over again.
A most excellent suggestion! I find that a good high-quality sand from an exotic beach is just the thing. It can also be used to replace the sugar in pastry, though the resulting dental bills are quite high.
I prefer the black volcanic sand from the beaches of Iwo Jima.
Are you serious?
If so, huh?