Frequently expose myself to shocking/horrific pictures, so that I am generally less sensitive. I’ve been doing this for a while, watching horror movies while doing cardio exercise, and it’s been going well. One might also try pulling pics from (WARNING) shock sites and using spacedrepetition to schedule exposures.
Become insensitive to exposure to cold water by, for example, frequently taking cold showers or ice baths. This apparently helps with weight-loss as well. I’ve done this with immense success. After you’ve practised this, you will literally feel like some weird heat is being generated from someplace inside you when are exposed to cold water, and not feel cold at all. See here.
Become awesome at mental math. I’ve been practising squaring two-digit numbers mentally for some time (school, what can I say) and I’m really good at it.
Learn mnemonics. I was fortunate to teach myself this early and it has been insanely useful. Practise by memorizing and rehearsing something, like the periodic table or the capitals of all nations or your multiplication tables up to 30x30 or whatever.
Practise visualization, i.e. seeing things that aren’t there. Apparently some people lack this ability, and I don’t know how susceptible this is to training, so YMMV. Try inventing massive palaces mentally and walking through them mentally when bored. This can be used for memorization (method of loci).
Learn to do lucid dreaming. Besides being awesome in and of itself, this can help you practise things or experience weird stuff.
Learn symbolic shorthand. I recommend Gregg. I did this in my second year of high school, and it’s damn useful for actually writing stuff and taking notes as well as as a conversation starter.
Look at the structure of conlangs like Esperanto and Lojban and Ilaksh. I feel like this is mind-expanding, like I have a better sense of how language and communication and thought works after being exposed to this.
Learn to stay absolutely still for extended periods of time; convince onlookers that you are dead. Being in school means you have ample opportunity for practice.
Learn to teach yourself stuff. Almost everything you can learn at high school or university can be taught better by a good textbook than by a good teacher (IMO, of course). You can get any good textbook on the internet.
Eat healthily. This has become a habit for me. Forbid yourself from eating anything for which a more healthy alternative exists (eg., no more white rice (wild rice is better), no more white bread, no more soda, etc.). Look into alternative diets; learn to fast.
Self-discipline in general. Apparently this is practisable. Eliminate comforting lies like that giving in just this once will make it easier to carry on working. Tell yourself that you never ‘deserve’ a long-term-destructive reward for doing what you must, that doing what you must is just business as usual. Realize that the part of your brain that wants you to fall to temptation can’t think long-term—so use the disciplined part of your brain to keep a temporal distance between yourself and short-term-gain-long-term-loss things. In other words, set stuff up so you’re not easy prey to hyperbolic discounting.
Learn not just to cope socially, but to be the life of the party. Maybe learn the PUA stuff.
That said, learn to not care what other people think when it’s not for your long-term benefit. Much of social interaction is mental masturbation, it feels nice and conforming so you do it. From HP and the MOR:
For now I’ll just note that it’s dangerous to worry about what other people think on
instinct, because you actually care, not as a matter of cold-blooded calculation.
Remember, I was beaten and bullied by older Slytherins for fifteen minutes, and
afterward I stood up and graciously forgave them. Just like the good and virtuous
Boy-Who-Lived ought to do. But my cold-blooded calculations, Draco, tell me that I
have no use for the dumbest idiots in Slytherin, since I don’t own a pet snake. So I
have no reason to care what they think about how I conduct my duel with Hermione
Granger.
Learn to pick locks. If you want to seem awesome, bring padlocks with you and practise this in public :P
Learn to control your voice. Learn to project like an actress. PUAs have also written on this.
Do you know what a wombat looks like, or where your pancreas is? Learn basic biology, chemistry, physics, programming, etc.. There’s so much low-hanging fruit.
Learn to count cards, like for blackjack. Because what-would-James-Bond-do, that’s why! (Actually, in the books Bond is stupidly superstitious about, for example, roulette rolls.)
Learn to play lots of games (well?). There are lots of interesting things out there, including modern inventions like Y and Hive that you can play online.
Learn magic. There are lots of books about this.
Learn to write well, as someone else here said.
Get interesting quotes, pictures etc. and expose yourself to them with spaced repetition. After a while, will you start to see the patterns, to become more ‘used to reality’?
Learn to type faster. Try alternate keyboard layouts, like Dvorak.
Try to make your senses funky. Wear a blindfold for a week straight, or wear goggles that turn everything a shade of red or turn everything upside-down or an eye patch that takes away your depth-sense. Do this for six months, or however long it takes to get used to them. Then, of course, take them off. The when you’re used to not having your goggles on, put them on again.
You can also do this on a smaller scale, by flipping your screen orientation or putting your mouse on the other side or whatnot.
Become ambidextrous. Commit to tying your dominant hand to your back for a week.
Humans have magnetite deposits in the ethmoid bone of their noses. Other animals use this for sensing direction; can humans learn it?
Some blind people have learned to echolocate. Seriously.
Learn how to tie various knots. This is useless but awesome.
Wear one of those belts that tells you which way north is. Keep it on until you are homing pigeon.
Learn self-defence.
Learn wilderness survival. Plently of books on the net about this.
Learn first aid. This is one of those things that’s best not self-taught from a textbook.
Learn more computer stuff. Learn to program, then learn more programming languages and how to use e.g. the Linux coreutils. Use dwm. Learn to hack. Learn some weird programming languages. If you’re actually using programming in your job, though, make sure you’re scarily awesome at at least one language.
Learn basic physical feats like handstands, somersaults, etc..
Use all the dead time you have lying around. Constantly do mental math in your head, or flex all your muscles all the time, or whatever. All that limits you is your own weakness of will.
Learn how to tie various knots. This is useless but awesome.
Not so useless. I’ve gotten a surprising amount of mileage out of a Boy Scout-level knowledge of ropework; it’s one of those skills that doesn’t come up very often but makes your life vastly easier when it does. Tying a tent down in high winds, for example, is made much simpler if you’re familiar with the bowline or one of its variations.
Become insensitive to exposure to cold water by, for example, frequently taking cold showers or ice baths. This apparently helps with weight-loss as well. I’ve done this with immense success, and even some real-world application (hiking to a waterfall with my parents, and being able to swim without getting cold). After you’ve practised this, you will literally feel like some weird heat is being generated from someplace inside you when are exposed to cold water, and not feel cold at all. See here.
My “possible unacknowledged major risk” detector triggered on this paragraph. In particular, “you will literally feel like some weird heat is being generated” pattern matches against how I’ve seen hypothermia described. While I don’t know enough about it to say for sure if this is necessarily bad, I will say that the required due diligence for this is substantial, and the potential upside doesn’t seem very compelling.
The rest of the list looks like mostly good ideas, though.
Two or three minutes under cold (or at least colder) is an awesome morning wakeup IME. You can run hot afterwards if you like.
Seriously, you[1] are not going to induce hypothermia in five or ten minutes of cold water. That’s just silly. Hypothermia is not a significant risk of ten minutes’ swimming in a non-heated pool, for example.
(If you’re doing the New Year’s Day Alcatraz Swim, of course, you may care to make sure you’re warmed properly afterwards.)
Two or three minutes under cold (or at least colder) is an awesome morning wakeup IME.
The effect is probably mostly Mammalian diving reflex, which is triggered by colder-than-21°C water contacting the face, with other factors (such as showering your whole body) much less relevant.
No, I buy it. This is basically just reinventing the fire or tummo meditation. Like biofeedback in general, it’s not easy to learn to control your temperature (and what OP and I do may just be a kind of vasodilation and not genuinely generating extra heat like the studied monks), but it does seem doable.
Learn different kinds of meditation really well (loving-kindness, concentration, insight). This can also be practiced at any time.
Learn some poems with fluidity (this can of course be done with spaced repetition). If you learn for long enough, maybe you can learn parts of an epic. If you want to be really impressive, learn it in the original language (however, try to get the pronounciation right!)
Make predictions until you know you’re well calibrated
Frequently expose myself to shocking/horrific pictures, so that I am generally less sensitive. I’ve been doing this for a while, watching horror movies while doing cardio exercise, and it’s been going well. One might also try pulling pics from (WARNING) shock sites and using spaced repetition to schedule exposures.
I was thinking it might generally help you to suppress your emotions, which I think is the key to success in many areas. Watching a horror movie is a conflict between your caveman-brain screaming at you to run and your rational brain telling you not to. If you can listen to reason rather than instinct on this, perhaps you will be better able to do so when faced with other situations. For example, if you are in a religious community your instinct tells you to conform, whereas your reason (hopefully) tells you the religion is false.
I also think it might help with general rationality—it’s not good to have massive holes in your mental map where there are things you’re too scared to think about.
Ironically, ever since I’ve started watching horror movies, I haven’t had a single nightmare, whereas I used to have them rather often.
It may be a useful survival trait in some sense, but it’s not useful in others. Often I run into situations where people lose their heads over something that is not a real issue.
“EEWW!” “Oh, the bucket is full of maggots? OK, let’s go dump it in the woods.” “Oh, I couldn’t possibly do that! EEWW!”
Or people will freak out over some feces or urine, and stand around discussing how disgusting it is rather than just cleaning it up.
I imagine doctors have similar opinions about normal people and blood (not a reflex I’ve had much luck with controlling consciously).
More importantly, this is a kind of mindfulness meditation, which generalizes—if you can step back from maggots or feces and ask yourself ‘is this really something to be perturbed by?’, then surely you can do the same for many other issues. (I have read that sometimes Buddhists or Hindus would meditate in front of rotting corpses, but that’s probably taking it a bit too far.)
Feeling revulsion about things seems like a useful survival trait.
I’m not planning to lose my sense of revulsion any time soon, only to become able to ignore/suppress emotions when they’re not useful, like when deciding on a charity to sponsor or whether to eat revolting celery or non-revolting cupcakes.
Controlling your emotions is probably better-taught by participating in an adult-
literacy program, or voice-only technical support
Horror movies are entertaining, and if you have cardio equipment you can easily do 2 hours of exercise painlessly while watching one. If you already use spaced repetition, it might take at most 10 hours total over the course of your lifetime to get a hundred shock pictures and rate the due ones daily for how much you flinched when you saw them.
The first option in particular seems orders of magnitude more efficient than spending hours answering boring tech-support calls for low pay.
Oh, nono. I didn’t mean for low pay, I meant for free. Sorry about that.
A senior citizen computer program would also work well for the same reasons (immediate feedback about communication)
Working or volunteering at a rest home might be even better. Controlling revulsion might be useful, but controlling frustration and helplessness may be even more useful.
Become insensitive to exposure to cold water by, for example, frequently taking cold showers or ice baths. This apparently helps with weight-loss as well. I’ve done this with immense success, and even some real-world application (hiking to a waterfall with my parents, and being able to swim without getting cold). After you’ve practised this, you will literally feel like some weird heat is being generated from someplace inside you when are exposed to cold water, and not feel cold at all.
Seth Roberts found some negative results from taking cold showers, including weight gain and slower brain function.
I started taking showers ending in a few minutes of cold water in December. Haven’t stopped doing them, the full body stimulation kick I get from them is great fun. Haven’t noticed much changes otherwise, but getting acclimatized to cold water after a week or so is a neat trick.
I’m doing it every time I take a shower now. There might be something wrong with my brain.
Seth Roberts found some negative results from taking cold showers, including weight gain and slower brain function.
And Tim Ferriss does well from it. YMMV. It’s definitely one on the list of hacks to try.
(I turn my shower cold occasionally. I often get the results D_Malik describes. That said, sometimes I’m just really not in the mood to turn my shower cold. Therefore, it may be something I should train myself to do even when I don’t feel like it.)
Does anyone know of a place to just buy one of those belts that tells you which way north is? I’ve looked and can’t find such a thing.
Am therefore probably going to just make one, are there other things that it’d be useful to sense in a similar way? The first thing I think of is just the time, but maybe there’s something better?
I’d be interested to hear from other LessWrongians if anyone has bought this and if it lives up to the description (and also if this model produces a faint noise constantly audible to others nearby, like the test belt); I’m the sort of person who measures everything in dead African children so $149… I’m a bit reserved about even if it is exactly as awesome as the article implied.
On the other hand, the “glasses that turn everything upside” interest me somewhat; my perspective on that is rather odd- I’m wondering how that would interact with my mental maps of places. Specifically because I’m a massive geography buff and have an absurdly detailed mental map of the whole world, which I’ve noticed has a specific north=up direction. Obviously those glasses probably won’t help shake the built-in direction (if I just get used to them), but I’d still be interested to see what they do.
Oh MAN, I had a big long list here somewhere...
Frequently expose myself to shocking/horrific pictures, so that I am generally less sensitive. I’ve been doing this for a while, watching horror movies while doing cardio exercise, and it’s been going well. One might also try pulling pics from (WARNING) shock sites and using spaced repetition to schedule exposures.
Become insensitive to exposure to cold water by, for example, frequently taking cold showers or ice baths. This apparently helps with weight-loss as well. I’ve done this with immense success. After you’ve practised this, you will literally feel like some weird heat is being generated from someplace inside you when are exposed to cold water, and not feel cold at all. See here.
Become awesome at mental math. I’ve been practising squaring two-digit numbers mentally for some time (school, what can I say) and I’m really good at it.
Learn mnemonics. I was fortunate to teach myself this early and it has been insanely useful. Practise by memorizing and rehearsing something, like the periodic table or the capitals of all nations or your multiplication tables up to 30x30 or whatever.
Practise visualization, i.e. seeing things that aren’t there. Apparently some people lack this ability, and I don’t know how susceptible this is to training, so YMMV. Try inventing massive palaces mentally and walking through them mentally when bored. This can be used for memorization (method of loci).
Research n-back and start doing it regularly.
Learn to do lucid dreaming. Besides being awesome in and of itself, this can help you practise things or experience weird stuff.
Learn symbolic shorthand. I recommend Gregg. I did this in my second year of high school, and it’s damn useful for actually writing stuff and taking notes as well as as a conversation starter.
Look at the structure of conlangs like Esperanto and Lojban and Ilaksh. I feel like this is mind-expanding, like I have a better sense of how language and communication and thought works after being exposed to this.
Learn to stay absolutely still for extended periods of time; convince onlookers that you are dead. Being in school means you have ample opportunity for practice.
Learn to teach yourself stuff. Almost everything you can learn at high school or university can be taught better by a good textbook than by a good teacher (IMO, of course). You can get any good textbook on the internet.
Live out of your car for a while, or go homeless by choice.
Can you learn to be pitch-perfect? Anyway, generally learn more about music.
Exercise. Consider ‘cheating’ with creatine or something. Creatine is also good for mental function for vegetarians. If you want to jump over cars, try plyometrics.
Eat healthily. This has become a habit for me. Forbid yourself from eating anything for which a more healthy alternative exists (eg., no more white rice (wild rice is better), no more white bread, no more soda, etc.). Look into alternative diets; learn to fast.
Self-discipline in general. Apparently this is practisable. Eliminate comforting lies like that giving in just this once will make it easier to carry on working. Tell yourself that you never ‘deserve’ a long-term-destructive reward for doing what you must, that doing what you must is just business as usual. Realize that the part of your brain that wants you to fall to temptation can’t think long-term—so use the disciplined part of your brain to keep a temporal distance between yourself and short-term-gain-long-term-loss things. In other words, set stuff up so you’re not easy prey to hyperbolic discounting.
Learn not just to cope socially, but to be the life of the party. Maybe learn the PUA stuff.
That said, learn to not care what other people think when it’s not for your long-term benefit. Much of social interaction is mental masturbation, it feels nice and conforming so you do it. From HP and the MOR:
Learn to pick locks. If you want to seem awesome, bring padlocks with you and practise this in public :P
Learn how to walk without making a sound.
Learn to control your voice. Learn to project like an actress. PUAs have also written on this.
Do you know what a wombat looks like, or where your pancreas is? Learn basic biology, chemistry, physics, programming, etc.. There’s so much low-hanging fruit.
Learn to count cards, like for blackjack. Because what-would-James-Bond-do, that’s why! (Actually, in the books Bond is stupidly superstitious about, for example, roulette rolls.)
Learn to play lots of games (well?). There are lots of interesting things out there, including modern inventions like Y and Hive that you can play online.
Learn magic. There are lots of books about this.
Learn to write well, as someone else here said.
Get interesting quotes, pictures etc. and expose yourself to them with spaced repetition. After a while, will you start to see the patterns, to become more ‘used to reality’?
Learn to type faster. Try alternate keyboard layouts, like Dvorak.
Try to make your senses funky. Wear a blindfold for a week straight, or wear goggles that turn everything a shade of red or turn everything upside-down or an eye patch that takes away your depth-sense. Do this for six months, or however long it takes to get used to them. Then, of course, take them off. The when you’re used to not having your goggles on, put them on again. You can also do this on a smaller scale, by flipping your screen orientation or putting your mouse on the other side or whatnot.
Become ambidextrous. Commit to tying your dominant hand to your back for a week.
Humans have magnetite deposits in the ethmoid bone of their noses. Other animals use this for sensing direction; can humans learn it?
Some blind people have learned to echolocate. Seriously.
Learn how to tie various knots. This is useless but awesome.
Wear one of those belts that tells you which way north is. Keep it on until you are homing pigeon.
Learn self-defence.
Learn wilderness survival. Plently of books on the net about this.
Learn first aid. This is one of those things that’s best not self-taught from a textbook.
Learn more computer stuff. Learn to program, then learn more programming languages and how to use e.g. the Linux coreutils. Use dwm. Learn to hack. Learn some weird programming languages. If you’re actually using programming in your job, though, make sure you’re scarily awesome at at least one language.
Learn basic physical feats like handstands, somersaults, etc..
Polyphasic sleep?
Use all the dead time you have lying around. Constantly do mental math in your head, or flex all your muscles all the time, or whatever. All that limits you is your own weakness of will.
So anyway, that’s my idea-dump. Tsuyoku naritai.
This list is itself a small feat of awesome. Well done.
Not so useless. I’ve gotten a surprising amount of mileage out of a Boy Scout-level knowledge of ropework; it’s one of those skills that doesn’t come up very often but makes your life vastly easier when it does. Tying a tent down in high winds, for example, is made much simpler if you’re familiar with the bowline or one of its variations.
Tying objects on top of or in cars for transport is a pretty practical skill.
This is great. It should be a top-level post itself.
My “possible unacknowledged major risk” detector triggered on this paragraph. In particular, “you will literally feel like some weird heat is being generated” pattern matches against how I’ve seen hypothermia described. While I don’t know enough about it to say for sure if this is necessarily bad, I will say that the required due diligence for this is substantial, and the potential upside doesn’t seem very compelling.
The rest of the list looks like mostly good ideas, though.
Two or three minutes under cold (or at least colder) is an awesome morning wakeup IME. You can run hot afterwards if you like.
Seriously, you[1] are not going to induce hypothermia in five or ten minutes of cold water. That’s just silly. Hypothermia is not a significant risk of ten minutes’ swimming in a non-heated pool, for example.
(If you’re doing the New Year’s Day Alcatraz Swim, of course, you may care to make sure you’re warmed properly afterwards.)
[1] in the general case
The effect is probably mostly Mammalian diving reflex, which is triggered by colder-than-21°C water contacting the face, with other factors (such as showering your whole body) much less relevant.
Seems to have a lot more effect when it’s a shower, not just cold water on my face.
No, I buy it. This is basically just reinventing the fire or tummo meditation. Like biofeedback in general, it’s not easy to learn to control your temperature (and what OP and I do may just be a kind of vasodilation and not genuinely generating extra heat like the studied monks), but it does seem doable.
Personal additions:
Learn different kinds of meditation really well (loving-kindness, concentration, insight). This can also be practiced at any time.
Learn some poems with fluidity (this can of course be done with spaced repetition). If you learn for long enough, maybe you can learn parts of an epic. If you want to be really impressive, learn it in the original language (however, try to get the pronounciation right!)
Make predictions until you know you’re well calibrated
Try to be mindful of your posture – how straight is your back, where are your shoulders? Maybe set up a random timer that reminds you to do this
Learn the basics of dressing well, then refactor your wardrobe (starting point for men, practical information for women seems to need no resource)
Learn the basics of investing, and actually put some money into it
Just curious what the benefit is.
I was thinking it might generally help you to suppress your emotions, which I think is the key to success in many areas. Watching a horror movie is a conflict between your caveman-brain screaming at you to run and your rational brain telling you not to. If you can listen to reason rather than instinct on this, perhaps you will be better able to do so when faced with other situations. For example, if you are in a religious community your instinct tells you to conform, whereas your reason (hopefully) tells you the religion is false.
I also think it might help with general rationality—it’s not good to have massive holes in your mental map where there are things you’re too scared to think about.
Ironically, ever since I’ve started watching horror movies, I haven’t had a single nightmare, whereas I used to have them rather often.
I’m not sure that this is the best way to do this. Feeling revulsion about things seems like a useful survival trait.
Controlling your emotions is probably better-taught by participating in an adult-literacy program, or voice-only technical support
Edit—please disregard this post
It may be a useful survival trait in some sense, but it’s not useful in others. Often I run into situations where people lose their heads over something that is not a real issue.
“EEWW!” “Oh, the bucket is full of maggots? OK, let’s go dump it in the woods.” “Oh, I couldn’t possibly do that! EEWW!”
Or people will freak out over some feces or urine, and stand around discussing how disgusting it is rather than just cleaning it up.
I imagine doctors have similar opinions about normal people and blood (not a reflex I’ve had much luck with controlling consciously).
More importantly, this is a kind of mindfulness meditation, which generalizes—if you can step back from maggots or feces and ask yourself ‘is this really something to be perturbed by?’, then surely you can do the same for many other issues. (I have read that sometimes Buddhists or Hindus would meditate in front of rotting corpses, but that’s probably taking it a bit too far.)
I’m not planning to lose my sense of revulsion any time soon, only to become able to ignore/suppress emotions when they’re not useful, like when deciding on a charity to sponsor or whether to eat revolting celery or non-revolting cupcakes.
Horror movies are entertaining, and if you have cardio equipment you can easily do 2 hours of exercise painlessly while watching one. If you already use spaced repetition, it might take at most 10 hours total over the course of your lifetime to get a hundred shock pictures and rate the due ones daily for how much you flinched when you saw them.
The first option in particular seems orders of magnitude more efficient than spending hours answering boring tech-support calls for low pay.
Oh, nono. I didn’t mean for low pay, I meant for free. Sorry about that. A senior citizen computer program would also work well for the same reasons (immediate feedback about communication)
Working or volunteering at a rest home might be even better. Controlling revulsion might be useful, but controlling frustration and helplessness may be even more useful.
Edit—please disregard this post
Just the image of the OP doing situps while watching ISIS propaganda is so very Patrick Bateman in American Psycho...
Seth Roberts found some negative results from taking cold showers, including weight gain and slower brain function.
I started taking showers ending in a few minutes of cold water in December. Haven’t stopped doing them, the full body stimulation kick I get from them is great fun. Haven’t noticed much changes otherwise, but getting acclimatized to cold water after a week or so is a neat trick.
I’m doing it every time I take a shower now. There might be something wrong with my brain.
And Tim Ferriss does well from it. YMMV. It’s definitely one on the list of hacks to try.
(I turn my shower cold occasionally. I often get the results D_Malik describes. That said, sometimes I’m just really not in the mood to turn my shower cold. Therefore, it may be something I should train myself to do even when I don’t feel like it.)
Does anyone know of a place to just buy one of those belts that tells you which way north is? I’ve looked and can’t find such a thing.
Am therefore probably going to just make one, are there other things that it’d be useful to sense in a similar way? The first thing I think of is just the time, but maybe there’s something better?
You mean the North Paw?
I’d be interested to hear from other LessWrongians if anyone has bought this and if it lives up to the description (and also if this model produces a faint noise constantly audible to others nearby, like the test belt); I’m the sort of person who measures everything in dead African children so $149… I’m a bit reserved about even if it is exactly as awesome as the article implied.
On the other hand, the “glasses that turn everything upside” interest me somewhat; my perspective on that is rather odd- I’m wondering how that would interact with my mental maps of places. Specifically because I’m a massive geography buff and have an absurdly detailed mental map of the whole world, which I’ve noticed has a specific north=up direction. Obviously those glasses probably won’t help shake the built-in direction (if I just get used to them), but I’d still be interested to see what they do.