Leveling IRL - level 1

The biggest problem here seems to be that a lot of these things would be pretty annoying even if you had well beyond the skills necessary to accomplish them.

Self-control and Social seem like the worst offenders here, especially insofar as it's harder to dismiss them as something you already know you can do (I already know I can run a mile or what passages I have memorized, but I don't count how many times per month I meet with friends, or how many times per month I work two hours straight).

It also threatens to conflate how skilled you are at things with how much you're willing to do something just to tick off a box on a worksheet. Imagine someone arranging four meetups, then calling back and saying "Actually, I'm not interested in meeting up at all, I just asked you to meet up to prove I could do it, for this online worksheet thing. Anyway, I'll talk to you next time I have some real plans, and sorry about the inconvenience."

(if you don't believe anyone could possibly be that pathetic, consider that it was the first thought that came into my mind when I saw that requirement.)

This is even more true of self-control. Anyone could work two hours straight to save their own life, most people could work two hours straight if there's a big project due the next day, but I don't know how many people could work two hours straight because a leveling worksheet told them to.

This is more practical sounding than I was expecting it to be. I think it'd be best to have seperate skill tracks (i.e. level 1 Strength, level 1 Social, etc). So people who don't feel the need to memorize a passage don't need to.

At the same time, you DO want to encourage diversity, so maybe "To become a level 1 Human, bring four separate skills up to rank 1 in the space of a month."

What mostly concerns me, though, is this. Relevant line:

"I begin to feel like I've accomplished my goals. It's like I think that adulthood is something that can be earned like a trophy in one monumental burst of effort and then admired and coveted for the rest of one's life. "

These are ALL too high for level 1 (as a rough estimation they seem to me more like level 3).

Level 1 ought have been something that most people would have few gaps in, so that it would motivate them to fill in those few gaps. And once they'd filled those gaps, and taken pride in completing Level 1, and have little "Level 1 human" merit badges to show off, then they'd find encouragement in proceeding to Level 2.

Creativity Level 1 should be writing a short 100 word story -- there are a number of 100-word ficlet communities, so then these people would extra reward by posting those stories to such comunities. Or they're small enough that we could post such stories to a dedicated thread. Memory Level 1 should have that same 100-word barrier. Or perhaps just "memorize 10 phone-numbers". Cooking should be as easy a cooking task as you can make it: the boiling of an egg, perhaps.

I like the idea of levels for particular skills, but the idea of general levels doesn't appeal to me. One comment:

Memory: memorize and recite a passage of your choosing, at least 250 words long, without making any mistakes.

I use Anki a lot. I enjoy memorizing useful things. Memorizing a passage is of really little use to me and sounds mind-numbing.

http://www.purplemath.com/modules/ordering.htm - this is probably a useful reference for math problems. Although Level 1 might start with Arithmetic.

I'd also point out that your choice for physical basically requires access to a gym and knowledge of how to safely handle weights, which makes it (IMO) a really bad metric - I'd suggest something like "Hundred Pushups" and it's parent programs, or possibly a set of alternate tracks there. (My concern is primarily "requires a gym", which, no, seriously, not everyone has access to one of those, and even fewer people consider it worthwhile to spend money on)

"Running" a mile ought also properly be defined. Does a 16 minute mile count? I've generally seen a 10 minute mile as the slowest that's considered properly running, rather than just jogging, but that's "person who has been practising routinely for a few weeks."

It might also be a good idea to have a rough metric of how difficult a thing ought to be - is Level 1 "an average person could do this without practice"?

Last, I'll throw in my two cents that the memory requirement struck me as rather steep until I realised I have memorised "Still Alive", at ~275 words, without even trying. So there's an easy cheat mode for most people, I'd guess :) (I suck at memorising lyrics, but my friends break in to it often enough that it's worthwhile.)

This sounds a lot like the Scouting merit system, in a good way. I learned more life skills from Scouts then I ever did from public education.

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Regarding self-control, there's a slight issue with using time spent rather then task accomplished. When the task involves an ugh field, I've become quite good at spending time "working" without accomplishing anything.

For the math omission, why not use the practice lessons from Khan Academy? Something like, be able to do everything up to exponents.

I think it should be a "do a certain number of the below" style thing, to account for different skill sets in people. For example, I have close to no programming experience, and there are others who have no abilities in writing or memorization.

For chess, there are programs online that have computers of various difficulty levels, that would be an easy way to judge chess ability. But, this would be another example of specialized skill sets; I know some people who are extremely intelligent but have no chess ability whatsoever, and they shouldn't be held down to a low level solely due to lack of ability in this one area.

Negotiation: ask a minor favor of somebody, and obtain it. (Examples: borrow a friend's Kindle for a day, get someone to drive you somewhere, etc.)

The list has some glaring omissions, like math or chess, because I don't yet know of a crisp enough way to test those skills. Ideas are welcome!

Go is a much better game than chess and lends itself much better to measure progress since it already has a grading scale. Gnugo: http://www.gnu.org/s/gnugo/gnugo.html is said to play around 7-5kyu on a 9x9 board so on level 1 you should be able to always beat it with a 6 stone handycap.

I fear that the level requirements look kind of random.

I agree that we need to start from something, and sooner rather than later. But i strongly feel the need to have requirements based on science and rationality. For example the ExRx tables are a good start, but passing a scale there means different things to different people, i'd rather have a unified scale based on bodyweight and sex. A possible solution might be to take the world records (which appear to average out at around 3,5x bodyweight regardless of sex) and have that value be the highest level. And then devide that number by the number of levels you want to have in this first version, for example 99. Obviously things change over time and i'm fine with redefining the highest possible level over time.

I also feel the need that others expressed, to have each individual item level independently from others. Maybe it could be like the windows rating system, the lowest score is your total level score. Letting go of putting everything into 1 level also solves the problem of disability, someone would be able to reach high levels for a lot of things except say strenght without the need for special exceptions.

One other thought: It would probably be useful to provide resources for people who are interested but don't know how. For instance, I'd recommend "Learn Python The Hard Way" for anyone who has never done programming before, as I've had three friends with zero experience manage to get decently in to it without issue :)

I'm finally level one! ...though I had to fake the buy vs. rent calculation, because a real one didn't come up.

I'm concerned that people with no training might hurt themselves attempting to squat, deadlift, or power clean on their own.

Maybe we can just call it "fitness" instead of strength & endurance, and give people tracks or classes they can choose to pursue?

See http://nerdfitness.com/blog/2010/05/10/real-life-role-playing-what-is-your-profession/ for more on this suggestion.

Unlike levelling up in a game, where once you accumulate the xp or whatever, you've got that level and magically gain enhanced abilities, in real life levels are those abilities. To be at level 1 as described in the OP has to mean not just passing all those tests once, but to be able to call on all of those abilities at any time -- the ability being proven by actually calling on them from time to time.

Avoiding the errors listed here might count as Level 0. If you're falling down on any of those, talking about higher levels is wishful thinking.

The requirements seem partially too high and the third rule is simply silly. Why is strength so much more unimportant than memorising 250 words? 250 words is too much. Strength is very well defined in your link as "minimum strength required to live a comfortable life". Endurance seems a bit high and what is defined as "running"? It would be better to define a certain time to complete a certain distance to be more precise. 1 mile seems a bit much though. Finance is a bit too high. Creativity is way too much, start by writing limericks or haikus or something similarily small. These are merely my opinions.

Overall your approach seems to suffer from the problem that a designer needs to know everything about every subject to properly define levels and still cannot account for individual differences in talent or experience. I therefore suggest here again an approach similar to a learning tree as seen at Khan Academy: http://www.khanacademy.org/exercisedashboard . It can in effect emulate the behavior of a leveling system but is much more flexible and more importantly the task of cataloging all human knowledge and skills can be split up so that experts in the respective fields can design the learning branches for their fields. "Levels" then can be rewardet for completing certain tasks on those branches but "sublevels" for different fields of knowledge can be awarded too.

A few years ago I went through a phase of buying and reading "Man Skills" books. There are an awful lot of these floating around, on the premise that all sorts of traditionally male-domain skills (putting up shelves, bleeding radiators, carrying out fireman's lifts, etc.) are conspcuously absent in an army of foppish errant manchildren milling around society in their twenties and early thirties.

Gender politics aside (most of the skills in question seem pretty unisex in their usefulness), I do wonder if there's some sort of common "completeness" aspiration they're tapping into, which the spirit of this post is also tapping. The entire list above seems to be the lowest of low-hanging fruit, and while it's certainly useful to be able to do all of the things on that list, progressive levels would probably have significantly diminishing returns.

I think this a good idea in general, but I see some problems in the specific.

First, the list seems sort of arbitrary. For example, why "write 500 words of fiction" rather than "paint a simple picture" (I'm not much of an artist, but I'm sure someone else could make that more specific -- "use four watercolor colors to paint a picture of an x" or something) or "create a simple song"?. Similarly, why cooking rather than, say "learn how to fold a fitted sheet" for household skills? I think it would be better to create a longer list and then say leveling up requires satisfying at least eight of the criteria. This would also solve the "I just don't care" problem (e.g. my non-knowledge of programming is a consequence of lack of interest, not lack of discipline, so I would not choose it as one of my required skills).

Second, the difficulty of these criteria seems very uneven. And that's a very subjective thing. To me, most of these seem about right for level 1, but Self-Control seems too easy, while Memory and Finance seem like they should be at least level 2. However, I suspect other people would rank them differently. Relatedly, it would probably be easier to appropriately scale level 1 if you first established what the peak level is and what that would look like (that is not to say that people should stop trying to improve after that point -- martial arts ranks stop at Judan even though self-improvement continues after achieving that rank) .

Finally, I think the Strength aspect is just misguided, at least according to the specific criteria cited. Deadlifts and cleans in particular can be fairly dangerous if you aren't doing them correctly, which makes them an odd choice for level 1. More generally, bulking up doesn't actually improve life for most people. I would substitute Tone for Strength, and base it on #pull-ups, #pushups, #situps, and #squats (w/o weights) to failure.

ETA: Heinlein appears to me to be doubly mistaken. First, because specialization and comparative advantage are one of the things that set humans apart from other animals. Second because social insects do not have a lot of different specializations (I stand ready to corrected by any entymologists around, but my lay understanding is that there is a basic worker - drone - queen division, and that is about it).

Memory: memorize and recite a passage of your choosing, at least 250 words long, without making any mistakes.

That seems overly high. I could probably do it, but it would be way more difficult than I would expect from Level 1. Why not start by memorizing a haiku or a 4 line poem?

Cooking: make pancakes.

Why not start with something even simpler? Boil rice. Boil an egg. Make a hot-pocket.

Level 1 in chess is probably like 1000 ELO.

Advice: It's easier to memorize poetry or song lyrics than prose.

The difficulty level of the "memory" test strikes me as somewhat harder than the others. 250 words is this long - I think that's a more substantial effort than the others, relative to my current "level". (Consider this feedback not critique - this is how it comes across to one particular LWer, not necessarily typical.)