Where to Intervene in a Human?

The highest-level hack I've found useful is to make a habit of noticing and recording the details of any part of my life that gives me trouble. It's amazing how quickly patterns start to jump out when you've assembled actual data about something that's vaguely frustrated you for a while.

The Intel story's source should be cited. It's in Only The Paranoid Survive by Grove, Chapter 5:

I remember a time in the middle of 1985, after this aimless wandering had been going on for almost a year. I was in my office with Intel's chairman and CEO, Gordon Moore, and we were discussing our quandary. Our mood was downbeat. I looked out the window at the Ferris wheel of the Great America amusement park revolving in the distance, then I turned back to Gordon and I asked, "If we got kicked out and the board brought in a new CEO, what do you think he would do?" Gordon answered without hesitation, "He would get us out of memories." I stared at him, numb, then said, "Why shouldn't you and I walk out the door, come back and do it ourselves?"

Currently, the website directly follows ("without hesitation") but slightly mutates this ("brought in" => "brings in", "memories" => "the memory business").

But the problem with Intel — it was in the wrong market! — was so deep that the place to intervene was at a very low level, the foundations of the entire company.

Wouldn't this be better described as a very high level, not a very low level? You seem to adopt this mapping later on:

Or, if you're in a crippling environment like North Korea or Nigeria or Detroit, then perhaps the highest level intervention for you is to get up and move someplace better.

Ask whether you're hitting 'the basics of what normal people think makes people healthy.' Sebastian Marshall has a good list:

• Drink lots of water
• Enough high quality sleep
• Not too much sleep
• Eat fruits and vegetables
• Scale back on any intoxicants
• Spend time in nature
• Spend time with people you respect
• Read books you enjoy
• Think/plan on what your goals are
• Some light moving around/exercise (even just a walk)
• Fresh air
• Clean up your environment a little
• Get small, achievable wins

Intuition pump: you have a low-powered genie who can grant wishes to the level of contemporary technology available on the open market. What do you ask for before you get to "man, I wish I could consciously regulate broad measures of neurological activity inside my brain"?

Michael Keenan pointed out that Scott Adams recommends maximizing one's energy should be the priority. That sounds pretty plausible.

A bit off topic, does CFAR accept bitcoin?

In my experience, one doesn't notice things that are wrong until there is something to contrast them to. For example, you might not even notice that you need new glasses until seeing the world through better ones.

So a first step might just be radical change. Be mindful of the adjustments you're making when changing food, location, or employment. Flail about a bit and do informal self-experimentation along as many dimensions as possible. This should help highlight location / emotional / physical conditions and suchlike that are getting in the way.

In fact, I suspect almost nobody is that self-optimized. We do things like neurofeedback because (1) we don't think enough about choosing the highest-leverage self-interventions, (2) in any case, we don't know how to figure out which interventions would be higher leverage for ourselves, (3) even if there are higher-leverage interventions to be had, we might not successfully carry them through, but neurofeedback or whatever happens to be fun and engaging for us, and (3) sometimes, you gotta stop analyzing your situation and just do some stuff that looks like it might help.

(5) Neurofeedback is fun. I certainly wouldn't do it because I thought it was the single most effective thing I could possibly do that second. But I like doing fun things sometimes.

[One of those (3)s should be a (4).]

What the argument that neurofeedback has a relatively low utility?

I don't think it's setting a good example for the CFAR to use an unreliable (self-serving, given from hindsight) anecdote to make a point. The source listed for that story is an autobiography by one of the people in it.

If the truth of the events doesn't matter, why not use a more accessible urban legend than one that requires knowledge of microprocessors vs memory chips and the timeline of Intel's relative success?

North Korea or Nigeria or Detroit

These seem to go in increasing order of "that really needs to be made more specific before calling it a 'crippling environment'."

Nothing new but doing thorough predictions about things you think you understand and follow up on them, being very fastidious about concreteness about predictions prevents me from re(miss)interpreting vague predictions when I get the results.

What algorithm could be used for discovering the next best intervention one can make to improve oneself?

Trying a bit of this, a bit of that, and comparing results? I doubt it can get any more precise, because the interventions on different levels can be, well, different.

For small changes I would recommend trying each strategy one week (to filter out work-day cycle and other noise), and having a set of similar tasks, randomly assigned to those weeks; or one repetitive task. But some level of change would probably disrupt such setting. As an example, if my task is to "motivate myself to clean my room" and the intervention is "move to a different environment", then of course, when I move to a new room, cleaning it is a different task than cleaning my old room, so it is not completely fair to compare my efficiency in those tasks.

Could the high level be discovered gradually, instead of making the first correct guess? Such as: start with some low-level improvement, and when you find that something is stopping you, analyze it, and do a meta-action. So instead of starting at the right level (and risking going too meta), we could instead start at the right place (where the outcome is measurable) and gradually find the necessary level of change.

But even this cannot be done exactly, because at a sufficiently high level I may choose a different outcome. For example, I work at a paperclip factory, and my initial goal is to make more and better paperclips. First step: I try doing overtime, but then I find I am too tired to continue this way. Second step: I get regular sleep, exercise and eat healthy food. Third step: I attend paperclip-making lessons. So far my progress is measurable. Fourth step: I realize I actually don't care about paperclips, I just do it to make money; so I change a job to something that pays better. Oops, my first metric (paperclip) just broke; I need to replace it with money. Fifth step: After having enough money I realize that more money does not bring me most happiness, so I would prefer having more free time while making the same amount of money; or maybe less money but also less expense. Oops, my second metric broke too, and no replacement is precise enough... I could try some psychological questionaires for measuring happiness, but that seems to easy to cheat.

The first place to improve is stop doing stupid things. If you don't know what you're doing that's stupid, then figure that out, and stop doing it.

The first thing anyone must do before any other self improvement is even logically possible is doing something about self deception, otherwise any self improvement attempts degenerate to be a form of wireheading as you will self deceive as to what the self improvement achieves, and you would end up improving your ability to self deceive.

I would suggest dropping this belief in silver bullet self improvement, burying it, and putting a stake through it's heart, as the first step. If you look at the accomplishments of people who couldn't just improve their subjective performance by improving ability to self deceive - technical fields for example - about the only type of self improvement you see is training, on complicated problems, with tests.

The self deception is a cognitive process that we are reward/punishment conditioned to do, internally, when doing free form non-externally verified thought. E.g. a Christian would be subject to anxiety-like feeling when considering the arguments against the Christianity, and reward feeling when coming up with arguments why Christianity is right, and would get conditioned to feel good about invalid approach to reasoning and feel bad about valid approach to reasoning. Quitting religion won't reverse this conditioning. The conditioning could perhaps be reversed by studying mathematics for long time and doing the exercises (and getting punished for self deception as self deception would be resulting in failures), or some similar occupation where there is reliable external verification of correctness.

edit: Sorry, christianity is only meant as an example. This applies to any other ill-founded belief, religious or otherwise. The same can also happen the forms of atheisms that include belief in validity of an invalid reason against existence of god. The christianity is simply a world's most popular religion at the time, and by far the most popular in the developed countries, and so it is an important case.