Post ridiculous munchkin ideas!

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.

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.

Again, we need one-direction communication channels here.

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.

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.

Anecdotally, this seems to work. I've become a much better writer while spending a lot of time in a writers' irc channel.

Or cluster with outliers. The population is large enough that you should expect to find enough outliers to form a peer group.

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.

That was what impressed you? Not my creation of a real-life financial perpetual motion machine?

...it seems much more sensible...

This is the "ridiculous munchkin ideas" thread, not the "sensible advice you've already heard" thread.

This could potentially be considered fraud.

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.

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.

I wonder how Jewish names perform relative to gentile names.

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.

original Eliezer Yudkowsky sounded more like a scientist.

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?

It reads like a pretty good scientist name. I have no idea how it sounds ;)

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.

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...

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'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.

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...

That's an advantage! My name will thus be subconsciously associated with high-status people.

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.

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.

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

Names whose spelling is ambiguous are generally a bad idea.

In New Jersey, it's a bit over one hundred.

Cheaper to get married and then divorced, maybe.

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?

I'm not a native English speaker, but I believe the three examples you gave are pronounced the same.

2)Kalero is easier to pronounce than caleiro right?

Their about the same.

What connotations does Kalero give?

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.

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.

But what if I want expectations about my rationality level to be artificially high?

How does katydee find it?

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.

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.

Just tell people in such a way that only the kind of people you'd want to have higher status will pay attention.

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.

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.

How do you guys feel about sharing hacks to increase your status, given that status can be a bit of a zero-sum game?

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.

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.

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.

I'm curious as to how you went about identifying such a nootropic.

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.

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.)

@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?

@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.

'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.

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.

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.

I wonder if there is a way to munchkin this cost

There sure is. As described in the blog:

... but if you're doing patents on your own, here's how to start off cheap. File a provisional patent in the US (the only country that counts) for $110, with a brief description in ordinary language. It lasts for a year, and you can file up to a year after you release your “invention” in a software product (if you even intend to do that). So, you have two years to find funding for the real patent, or just to abandon the provisional patent once your company is either stable and successful or stable and dead.

(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

You don’t care much if the patent office accepts your patent. What's important to you... is that it gets filed. You can honestly list "patent applications” on your CV ... It takes five to eight years for the patent to get finally approved [which is so long that no one much cares about the difference when reading a CV].

Archive.org copy (takes a few seconds to load)

Archive.is copy

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:

1. 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.
2. 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).

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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?

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 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.

Intermittent fasting solves a number of these issues...

needing to eat every 2-3 hours to keep my blood sugar under control

This makes me want to ask if any of the people on the soylent diet are diabetic and how that's going.

Kickstarter actually rejected them. :(

More here

I think most MLP fans are in the intended demographic. Teenage male fans are simply more salient than grade-school female fans.

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.

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.

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.

"Caffeine has a tremendously wide variation in action," Regestein admits. "The people who say 'I can drink a cup of coffee right before I go to bed and go right to sleep' aren't lying." Hard biochemical research confirms the fact. Carney describes "one common strain of laboratory mouse, Jackson's Lab's SWR strain, inbred since the 1920s, who is just totally immune to the effect of caffeine: there's no dose that will excite him--not 100 milligrams per kilogram, which would be equivalent to 100 cups of coffee in a human.

And the opposite:

Carney points out that if some individuals are not much affected by caffeine, others--some 5 to 10 percent of the population--are hypersensitive to its effects. These individuals are the most likely to succumb to a serious coffee habit, exhibit the greatest physical and personality effects from it, and have the greatest difficulty in finally kicking the habit.

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.

Does that work for you?

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.

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 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

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.

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.

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.

Please read "without assuming any real gains from..."

invest in inflation-indexed bonds.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.)

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).

"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.

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.

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.

Extraordinary claims....

Sociology of science calls this the Matthew Effect

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.)

It seems less risky/way easier than trying to get the same benefits while working within academia

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.

but you won't get the external motivation/guidance/sanity-checking

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.

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?

You'd probably be an even bigger intellectual celebrity if you took the academic path.

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.

Yes but before you get tenure you've wasted your most productive and fun youthful years getting tenure.

...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 Vigil want to post under his own nick? If so, better register it while still available.

...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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

This is incredibly pedantic. (Also rather unjustified, due to my own lack of knowledge regarding occult enthusiasts.) However:

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.

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.

You can always say: "Well, it's just my mind doing something strange." At the same time it's a hard confrontation.

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.

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).

What would you estimate the cost/benefit ratio to be, and what variables do you think are most relevant?

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?

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.

That sounds like some serious dedication to internal family systems for someone who is very superstitious.

According to an anonymous poster on 4chan:

Pretty much everyone that has them has reported that they do a lot of interesting things that are just plain impossible for a puppet, from memory access (can retrieve a lot of lost memories, or even remember entire books in perfect detail) to reported dream experiences to them joining you in your dreams and have their own experiences.

I proposed a simple experiment to test if the tulpa is its own being: have the tulpa work in parallel with you own some problem, for example, some advanced math. You would be focusing all your attention on something specific thus having no time to work on the problem, while the tulpa does just that. If the tulpa succeeds, you can conclude that it's its own independent mental process separate from your own.

One person who was asked to performed this experiment reported some success that's just not feasible for normal humans. Failure was reported for those that parroted (regular imaginary friend).

I plan on trying this stuff for myself and experimenting, then I will know for sure.

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.

If domain experts say that the obvious ways to exploit having a tulpa fail, they are probably right.

There are tulpa domain experts?

Domain experts saying that the obvious ways to exploit a phenomenon fail is usually evidence against the existence of said phenomenon.

The most promising idea is to exploit your interpersonal instincts: trick your brain into thinking someone is there. This has benefits for social extraverts

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.

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.

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?