I got into LW in high school, and looking back, the most useful thing I got out of LW was “just do stuff”.
Humans are pretty bad at predicting, in advance, what is going to work well and what they’re going to enjoy or excel at. We need empirical evidence. So just go take that internship, do that volunteering, found that student society, email that academic to ask to discuss their paper, enter that competition, sign up for those extra classes, etc. Have a sense that more is possible, and that you will genuinely be an awesomer person if you are Doing Stuff rather than being on Twitter or Tiktok all evening, and that you might learn new things about yourself if you Just Try Stuff. Don’t dismiss yourself as underqualified or undeserving.
The point of rationality is to win at life. Reading blogs is useful if it’s helping you win at life, and if you realise it’s not helping you win at life, then you can and should read less blogs. If the blogs are helping, read more of them. But don’t lose sight of the idea that this is supposed to be making you Win At Life.
You don’t need permission from anyone to Just Do Useful Stuff. You can come up with an idea for a useful project—like, I don’t know, starting a student society or lunchtime club about EA at your high school, or making a film documentary about some area of psychology or charity, or doing a review of some scientific literature and writing up your results to publish on LW, or whatever. And if you don’t have the skills yet, then you can go learn them—by signing up for classes, or finding video tutorials on youtube, or just getting started and learning-by-doing. And maybe someone will find your research/work/project genuinely helpful. The point is that you don’t wait for a wise old wizard to appear and hand you a Quest before you save the world; just spot an area of the world that needs improving, and go improve it. You have a lot more time in high school for this sort of proactivity than you’ll have as an adult, and it is a really really really insanely good habit to build while you’re young.
I got into LW in high school, and looking back, the most useful thing I got out of LW was “just do stuff”.
Humans are pretty bad at predicting, in advance, what is going to work well and what they’re going to enjoy or excel at. We need empirical evidence. So just go take that internship, do that volunteering, found that student society, email that academic to ask to discuss their paper, enter that competition, sign up for those extra classes, etc. Have a sense that more is possible, and that you will genuinely be an awesomer person if you are Doing Stuff rather than being on Twitter or Tiktok all evening, and that you might learn new things about yourself if you Just Try Stuff. Don’t dismiss yourself as underqualified or undeserving.
The point of rationality is to win at life. Reading blogs is useful if it’s helping you win at life, and if you realise it’s not helping you win at life, then you can and should read less blogs. If the blogs are helping, read more of them. But don’t lose sight of the idea that this is supposed to be making you Win At Life.
You don’t need permission from anyone to Just Do Useful Stuff. You can come up with an idea for a useful project—like, I don’t know, starting a student society or lunchtime club about EA at your high school, or making a film documentary about some area of psychology or charity, or doing a review of some scientific literature and writing up your results to publish on LW, or whatever. And if you don’t have the skills yet, then you can go learn them—by signing up for classes, or finding video tutorials on youtube, or just getting started and learning-by-doing. And maybe someone will find your research/work/project genuinely helpful. The point is that you don’t wait for a wise old wizard to appear and hand you a Quest before you save the world; just spot an area of the world that needs improving, and go improve it. You have a lot more time in high school for this sort of proactivity than you’ll have as an adult, and it is a really really really insanely good habit to build while you’re young.