Ultralearning in 80 days
I want to be awesome. I’m going to be awesome.
I have nine months until I start college, and I aim to make the most of the abundant free time I have until then. From what I’ve read, I see that Less Wrong values scholarship highly.
For the first 80 days, I’m going to spend a minimum of:
One hour studying CS from MIT OCW (5:00-6:00 AM) every morning
I’ll spend more (a lot more) time whenever I have it.
One hour learning Quenya (6:00-7:00 AM) every morning
I want to be able to think and journal in a language nobody else speaks
Broader meta-skills I want to acquire:
Type at an average of ~150 WPM and ~98% accuracy
Writing
I’m going to publish weekly posts detailing my progress
Put together a plan to learn to write and execute it.
Regarding Rationality (the ultimate meta-skill):
Read at least 20+ books on rationality, decision-making, heuristics and biases, etc.
Practice
(I’d appreciate any feedback / advice / questions if you have them).
Good choice of topic.
Everyone has their own needs and tolerances, so I won’t presume to know yours . . . and if you’re trying to build daily habits, “every morning” is probably easier to reliably schedule than “every night” . . . but still, sleep is a big deal, especially for intellectual work. If you’re not unsually good at going without for long stretches, and/or planning to turn in before 10pm to compensate . . . you might benefit from a slightly less Spartan schedule.
What kind(s) of writing do you want to be able to produce?
I’m curious how you plan on practicing your rationality, and how you intend to measure improvement. As far as I can tell our subculture has been trying to figure this out for a decade and change, with sharply limited success.
Quenya resources you might find useful (though you’ve probably seen most of these):
The Vinyë Lambengolmor Discord—Extremely helpful community.
Eldamo—The main dictionary (includes lots of useful neologisms), but it also has an intro to Quenya.
Quettali—Constructs the declension and conjugation tables for the words in Eldamo’s dictionary.
If you also want to write in the Tengwar, see Tecendil and BSSScribe.
Thinking in Quenya might not be a reasonable goal.
Cool! I’m going to add my thoughts here, but I’m no authority so feel free to ignore and do whatever feels best.
Waking up early is fine as long as you’re also going to bed early. Chronic sleep deprivation is bad.
If you’re studying CS, give special attention to machine learning and the current AI landscape. It’s hard to predict what AI will look like in five years, but it’s the most important thing to be tracking.
If learning Quenya is fun and intrinsically rewarding, then that’s great, but if you’re doing it for practical reasons there are probably more efficient options. I actually have a system for writing things I don’t want anyone to read. I write in English, but I replace key words with other words based on associations that only I would find meaningful. This requires no preparatory memorization and is basically impossible to decrypt without my brain, as long as I don’t give away the meaning with context clues.
For writing, the two essential things are to have good ideas and to communicate them clearly. In my opinion Scott Alexander is the best example of this, so here’s his guide to nonfiction writing. I endorse just copying his style unless you find something you like better.
I would add a few things about writing:
Make everything predictable and standard except the most important parts that you want to emphasize.
Be honest and use the tone that feels most natural.
Spend most of your effort searching for the best ideas. Then just write them down clearly.
For general rationality, books aren’t all that helpful in my opinion. There’s a sensitivity to the specifics of each situation that’s hard to transmit except by direct example. I think you would get more out of following people who seem smart. I endorse Eliezer Yudkowsky, Scott Alexander, Wei Dai, Gwern, Connor Leahy, Dwarkesh Patel, and Stefan Schubert.
I guess you will have several recurrent tasks and some short/medium-term goals, then i’d recommend using something like this to track how calibrated your predictions/estimations are:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/8JEHPAcJ6ppywtkqK/calibrated-estimation-of-workload
It helps you not only to organize what you are doing and how are you progressing, but also to cultivate a better sense of how to estimate what you can do and get used to develop a quantified way to make predictions using the shorter feedback of your tasks. It doesn’t automatically translate to other domains, but at least you will already have a better framework to make predictions about other things, e.g., you will have a clearer idea what it means to say that “something should happen with a x % chance.”
It doesn’t takes much effort after you get used to it, and if you are going to keep a to-do list, the predictions add almost no extra burden. Checking the results is mostly automatic (you can experiment with other ways to look at the data, ex. based on how long are the predictions or for a specific project of kind of task), and it gives you good feedback on how to adjust the predictions you will make next. And, it helps you to get a better view of what is possible to do each day and prioritize what is more important. For example, after i automatically predict what i have to do one day, i can review the predictions based on the load i know i can handle and some other past information to have a better estimation of what i expect to accomplish that day.
Additionally, there is no guilt after failing to do everything, because the idea is to push yourself and correct until you can finish the expected number of tasks.
I noticed i could push myself to more thing this way than if i had just a common to-do list to complete and i could just balance how much i need to work and how much i can just procrastinate to finish what i’ve set. I could also set some goals or have more abstract tasks, e.g. “finish a big project,” and then start breaking it into smaller goals/tasks to track how i was progressing and to distribute the load until the deadline, instead of just work in small bursts and eventually try to do too much when the deadline was getting closer.
The only caveat is that you will game your predictions, as focusing on the ones with a higher prediction because you are expected to complete them more often and don’t mess with your calibration curve, but soon you will learn to incorporate this kind of information to make your predictions. And, it is also possible to use this to your advantage later, for example, by picking a tasks that repulses you, and keep getting postponed, and assign a higher chance that you you do it, and then just do it because you said you were going to do it.
While I can appreciate it on the level of nerd aesthetics, I would be dubious of the choice of Quenya. Unless you’re already a polyglot (as a demonstration of your aptitude for language-learning), it seems unlikely—without a community of speakers to immerse yourself in—that you’ll reach the kind of fluid fluency that would make it natural to think in a conlang.
And if you do in fact have the capacity to acquire a language to that degree of fluency so easily, but don’t already have several of the major world languages, it seems to me that the benefits of being able to communicate with an additional fraction of the world’s population would outweigh those of knowing a language selected for mostly no-one else knowing it.