Babble challenge: 50 ways of solving a problem in your life

1. Join an MMO, I was happy when I had a good community in a guild
2. Ignore covid, find a bjj gym that's already open
3. Move to NZ where covid is over
4. Host secret dance nights. Though I don't have enough floor space
5. Treat online dating like a full time job till I find something fulfilling
6. Move back to FL, set up mat room for bjj, train with old friend
7. Try and reconnect with family
8. Road trip. I'd really prefer to do this after covid so I can see what places are normally like to pick my next city to live in
9. Take up outdoor rock climbing. Why is it so cold here
10. Take up rock hounding. Why is it so cold here
11. Dedicate myself to the side project idea L said he'd buy if I made
12. Dedicate myself to babbling side project ideas every day until I find something I like even better
13. Go back and get a ML PhD
14. Dedicate myself to finding a really big signing bonus that doesn't require much vesting to finish up the last of the money I need
15. Quit, let myself be really bored for a while so I find inspiration
16. Find some sort of online community outside of an MMO
17. End it all
18. Become a monk
19. Donate everything to light a fire under my ass to earn it back
20. Come up with some cool series to write for LW, live off the validation in the comments
21. Become a game dev
22. Become an indie game dev
23. Start learning a solo dance, replace swing dancing with zoom dances
24. Learn parkour
25. Write a book
26. Survey everyone I can access both in person and online how they're staying social to get more ideas
27. Dedicate myself to wood working
28. Dedicate myself to fixing my house up to increase the sale value
29. Hang out at parks and try and start as many conversations as possible
30. Find some sort of social game that involves talking to strangers at the park
31. Bike through the parks, trying to start at least one conversation a day but mostly just bike
32. Learn an instrument. Busk in the park
33. Set up Bob ross painting stations in the park. Let strangers join
34. Start dating my ex who would probably still date me, even though I don't think enough issues have fixed for it to work and it would cause drama
35. Bike through the whole city and note the areas with the most people who look receptive to conversations
36. Switch careers to psychotherapy. Get my social needs fulfilled from comforting my clients. Yes I know it doesn't work like that, but no pruning
37. Become twitch streamer
38. Try and obtain monk like contentment without becoming a monk
39. Switch to using kink based online dating sites, possibly find better matches?
40. Learn tarot cards, give readings in the park
41. Read in the park
42. Get a cat
43. Get a bonded pair of cats
44. Start a life project to gamify everything I can
45. Play a lot of video games to numb the pain
46. Start an only fans
47. Restart competitive programming
48. Hand out baked goods at the park
49. Really try and push for wings & liftin' nights to happen as often as possible
50. Try and really optimize my health to see if that affects my mental health
51. Antidepressants
52. Antianxieties
53. Prune this list, because boy does it need it

 Fibromyalgia

1. Start seeing a rheumatologist
2. Go to medical school and become the leading expert researcher on this topic
3. Break up with my boyfriend so that I have more control over my sleep schedule
4. Join a stress management group like my therapist told me to
5. Hire Sarah Constantin to do a MetaMed thing for me
6. Pretend it's not happening so it goes away (Sarno method)
7. Join a sports team
8. Solve mind uploading so physical illness ceases to exist
9. Replace all my limbs with prosthetics
10. Smoke a lot of weed
11. Lobotomy
12. Run 2 miles every day so I get dem endorphin highs
13. Take strong sleeping pills that promote deep sleep
14. Hire someone to plan and cook all my meals so that I get the right balance of nutrients and none of the allergens
15. Hire a live-in masseuse
16. Try CBT specifically for chronic pain
17. Do 30 minutes of yoga twice every day
18. Live alone and adopt a cat so I have no social stressors but also don't get so lonely that it's harmful to my health
19. Full body compression suit (more dakka for compression socks and arm braces!)
20. Sleep (and work?) in a float tank
21. Spend a whole frickin ton of effort and money on an ergonomic desk setup that I'd actually use
22. Invent suspensors (like in Dune) to support part of my body weight and thus put less strain on my joints and muscles
23. Take tricyclic antidepressants (which also mitigate chronic pain)
24. Hire someone to give me piggy back rides everywhere
25. Become a politician so that I have to be on all the time and don't have time to pay attention my symptoms (seems like it worked for JFK)
26. Meditate a bunch
27. Invent a salve that get rids of pain
28. Find a form of caffeine or some other stimulant that doesn't put me to sleep, then take that every single day to make me be awake
29. Join daily house exercise
30. Eat pig thyroid
31. Human touch is supposed to be healing, so just cuddle with people all day every day
32. Move somewhere where it's always sunny and I can just bask in the sun all day and get that sweet sweet vitamin D
33. Just try eating every plant I see and see if that ends up being a cure for fibromyalgia
34. Marry a billionaire because it's probably fixable if you just throw enough money at it
35. Go on the all meat diet
36. Go keto
37. Find something I enjoy doing so much that I just forget about everything else; preferably some cool artistic thing, like painting
38. Ask everyone around me to stop giving me any sympathy or cutting me slack when I have symptoms (maybe instead just yelling at me to try harder, like a sports coach) so that if the Hansonian signaling theory of chronic pain is right my brain will learn to stop pulling that shit
39. Implant electrodes in whichever gland that is that's implicated (the hypothalamus?)
40. Retrain my pain sensors by delivering really strong electric shocks to my skin every once in a while, so that the daily level of pain stops registering
41. Replace all my bones with titanium and get soft tissue transplants from someone who doesn't have loose tendons
42. Live in a forest, because being nature is good for mental and physical health
43. Have someone I trust become dictator of the world so that I don't have to worry about political instability 
44. Move back home to help raise my friend's baby, because babies are warm and soft and squish, and as the fourth parent I won't have to be sleep deprived but will also probably still be busy enough to not dwell on my own problems that much
45. Go on a true elimination diet in case the cause is a food of some sort
46. Go on HRT to transition to male, because men are less likely to suffer from fibromyalgia
47. Actually analyze my Oura ring and life-tracking data so that I can see if there are any correlates to flare-ups
48. Read those crackpot books that claim to have found the cure for fibromyalgia and then try out their non-FDA-approved drugs
49. Catch COVID, since it seems like that has a bunch of non-obvious effects on the body, so maybe it'd fix my problems
50. Invent a time machine and make my younger self sleep more and stop eating gluten and dairy sooner

1. I often go to bed later than I would like
2. I’m insufficiently coupled with the economy
3. I don’t have people in my life who both A) I trust to think straight, and B) will have my back in any situation
4. My eyesight is getting worse
5. Improving my skills at creativity takes more time than I can often justify spending
6. I often don’t feel like doing things that I know I need to do
7. I don’t have enough time in my life to do all the things I want to do
8. I don’t always know what the negative side effects of all of my actions / inactions will be
9. I consistently get lower karma scores / engagement on LW than I would like ; I feel like if I was A) as smart as my ego says I am and B) as good of a communicator as my ego says I am, then I would have more status on LW

50 Ways to Become Sufficiently Coupled with the Economy:

1. I can sell music on bandcamp
2. I can call someone who works at Tesla, and ask them if they can hire me
3. I can use the contact form on Tesla’s website, and ask them to hire me
4. I can ask people in my *extended* family if they know of any jobs that might suit me well
5. I can apply to jobs in grocery stores or cafés or bars etc. nearby
6. I can search for firms that are hiring in another country, and call them / email them, and ask if they can hire me
7. I can physically visit firms in my current city, and ask them if they need any workers (probably a bad idea during the pandemic)
8. I can advertise on craigslist (or reddit? or youtube?) that I can tutor people via the internet
9. I can try to get a tutoring job
10. I can offer martial arts lessons to people over the internet (I used to teach martial arts as my job)
11. I can do bounties on Bounty Source
12. I can do random jobs on Fiver?
13. I can do freelance music work on Upwork
14. I can ask my friends if they know of any jobs that would suit me well
15. I can make little gadgets, and try to sell them on the internet (note: I have no experience with making objects, but I want to learn this skill)
16. I can do chess hustling somewhere (can a mediocre chess player profitably hustle?)
17. I can do writing, and people who donate money to my writing can vote on which topics I write about
18. I can do paid calls with people, where they tell me about things that they’re confused about, then I try to learn about the thing, then help them be less confused
19. I can contribute to the LW source code, and impress the LW team so much (I have no idea why they would be impressed by my coding) that they offer me a job working on LW
20. I can edit Wikipedia for money (in ethical ways. There’s many ways selling edits on WP would be very unethical, and I would never want to do anything that would fall in that category)
21. I can do daily Youtube videos, and set up a patreon for the videos
22. I could write and then sell a mini-book about habits that I’ve found helpful
23. I could knock on people’s doors, and ask them if there’s anything that they would be willing to pay me for (Pandemic though!)
24. I can buy tech that is broken, figure out how to fix it / make it work again, and sell it for a profit
25. Amazon mechanical turk?
26. I can become mayor of my city (???)
27. I could sell drawings
28. I could sell abstract art / doodles in my style of doodling
29. I can ask Y combinator give me a job as an assesor (?)
30. I can write a book of poetry, then sell it
31. I can sell things I no longer have a use for? (won’t make me sufficiently coupled, but can make me less uncoupled)
32. I can look on craigslist for random gigs, then do them
33. I can become an Uber driver (But I don’t want to worry about my car becoming a liability. Is it possible to uber-drive other people’s cars?)
34. I can sell pieces of paper that I have taken notes on / have doodled on, specifically ones I think may be aesthetically interesting
35. I can try to find everything I’ve ever written, and compile it into a book (or different volumes), and try to sell it
36. I can look up companies in Denmark (which I have ties to, but don’t currently live in), and ask them if they are willing to hire me + pay for me to fly to Denmark
37. I can post this in the comments on a thread on LW, and hope someone gets the message that I’m a smart + creative person who needs a job
38. Do a “hostage writing” thing, where I write something, but only publish it if I receive a certain amount of money (As Vitalek Buterin has suggested)
39. Do face paintings (or whatever the equivalent of my abstract art style is… or both) at a festival
40. Introduce myself to some indie game developers, preferably with enough success that they can pay me, but not so big / established that I’m just some random guy, and offer to write music / code for their game (since I have experience doing both)
41. Introduce myself to different bands (similar criteria as above), and offer to play for their band (I could probably do a decent enough job on bass, guitar, vocals (maybe), or keyboards given a little bit of practice, and the part not being too hard)
42. Email researchers at the university in my city (or even other universities), and ask them to pay me to help them with their research
43. Challenge myself to create a new video game every day for a month, and sell my favorite games from the project
44. Do a one-on-one call thingy, where people tell me about their problems, and I try to come up with ways to solve their problems (like a therapist or coach, but with a different skill set than a therapist or coach, and not as over-qualified)
45. Contact different musicians, and offer to write music for them / workshop their musical ideas with them
46. Chat with my cousin who’s an entrepreneur, and hopefully come up with some cool idea that I can help him with
47. Create Doordash, but it’s for shopping at stores + interacting with customer service (both IRL and on phone / online) (Probably already exists in the Bay Area, but do it for my locality instead of the Bay)
48. Do a thing where I chat with people about their Anki decks, and try to figure out ways they can use Anki more effectively
49. Work as a translator (I used to be good enough with Danish that doing DK -> ENG would be feasible, but I’d need to practice to get back to that point… Plus, DK -> ENG probably has a good bit more supply than demand)
50. Become a freelance voice artist

1. Just respond to all emails that want to schedule meetings with "sorry, I don't take meetings anymore, if you want me to talk to you send me a Google Doc that I can comment on"
2. Set up a calendly that has exactly four slots per week, and just send that whenever someone wants to schedule a meeting with me
3. Move to Europe and change my name
4. Adopt polyphasic sleep and use the additional time for deep work
5. Adopt a daily meditation habit and use the resulting clarity to think better about my life
6. Go to an OAK retreat and use that to gain more mental clarity
7. Move out of my group house so that I am less distracted
8. Become a nomad that doesn't have any responsibilities and have impact on the world by writing a pseudonymous blog
9. Quit all my grantmaking commitments so I have time to focus on LW 
10. Make a list of everything that is distracting me, then magically fix them
11. Style my hair into spikes so I look menacing and people don't want to talk to me anymore
12. Block all websites and video games
13. Track all of my time, then do weekly reviews in which I debug what wasted most of my time, and take appropriate action
14. Order food in bulk so I don't have to spend time ordering food or cooking
15. Turn off my computer automatically at 8PM so that I have to use pencil & paper and other dumb media to reflect more
16. Go on frequent walks.
17. Commute to an office that is a 30 minute walk away so I can reflect on the way there and back
18. Uninstall Slack and other instant messaging apps
19. Invest in the stock market so I can become really rich and then just buy out lots of personal time for myself
20. Buy an even faster computer so I can be faster at programming so I have more time to think
21. Hire someone to be my personal assistant so they can do all of my gruntwork
22. Hire someone to impersonate me in meetings, so I don't have to go to them
23. Lobby for the addition of an additional 8th day to the week, so I can use that day to do deep work
24. Just sleep less
25. Keep track of all the external commitments that take up all of my time and figure out which ones are dispensable, then not do them
26. Move to the east coast, which magically will make my life less distracting and make it easier to get things done, because of something something cultural osmosis?
27. Move into manufacturing physical goods, which are less likely to give rise to ongoing maintenance problems and sudden crises
28. Write a blogpost every day about what I am thinking
29. Only eat soylent so I can spend less time distracted with preparing/cooking food
30. Do lots of art-projects as a form of meditation that will allow me to express my thoughts on what I should do with LW and my life
31. Ask other people to meet with me to think about strategy and my life.
32. Reread Getting Things Done and maintain a healthy GTD system
33. Set up an auto-responder that I won't be very responsive to emails, so I don't feel bad about not responding to emails
34. Build my own note-taking system that is distraction-free and that I can tweak so I can build an environment that I can iterate on so that I can think more clearly
35. Start using Roam again
36. Keep a centralized record of all the projects that I am working on, and review it every week or month
37. Escape to the moon and build a moonbase with a more functional civilization that can grow into something much more productive than current humanity, then retire and have time to think
38. Go on lots of long hikes with different people
39. Move to some location where COVID isn't happening and hang out lots on cafes where I can usually get a lot of work done
40. Fake my own death, then come back when everyone will have dealt with me not following up on all of my commitments
41. Only work in pomodoros
42. Use Twitter a lot, build a large following, then use the threat of the mob to attack anyone who wastes my time (this is obviously a really bad idea)
43. Recruit my brother to work with me, then sometimes have him attend my meetings instead, since our voices sound kind of similar
44. Take lots of nootropics
45. Clean my room and all other rooms I work in so I have a less distracting work environment
46. Imitate Richard Stallman and just use software that is usable under an Open Source license. Then nothing can send me notifications because basically nothing on computer will work anymore.
47. Take a class on management and/or operations and use that to spend my time much more effectively
48. Ask Geoff Anders whether I can have more courses on strategy with him, then use those techniques to think about my life
49. Attend more babble challenge events so I can come up with more ideas on how to solve my problems
50. Build friendly AI, then solve all the problems, including this one

1. Schedule fixed times each week
2. Reminder on phone
3. Get someone to ask me how it’s going every week
4. Join learning group
5. Join and do Kaggle projects
6. Look for alternatives to Kaggle
7. Find a mentor
8. Sign up for a course
9. Sign up for more expensive courses to motivate me
10. Beeminder or something
11. Ask for suggestions on courses
12. Read up about Akrasia in general
13. Look up jobs and requirements
14. Internship
15. Find low effort content to combine with high effort
16. Programming camp
17. Combine with current job
18. Look to get reassigned to move more towards field
19. Look for opportunities within current job to use skills
20. Break down into smaller tasks
21. Make full list of everything I want to learn, break it into manageable chunks
22. Delete games / other distractions from phone
23. Turn off all push notifications
24. Timelock phone for times I should be learning
25. Stop being lazy
26. Just give up (cut my losses)
27. Choose something else to learn
28. Be more direct in what I actually need to learn instead of what is suggested in courses
29. Focus on the bits I actually enjoy
30. Take a couple of weeks break guilt-free, come back refreshed
31. Play music whilst working
32. Look if anyone has made Anki Decks
33. Read data science blogs
34. Watch data science youtube stuff
35. Don’t do too much at once (avoid burnout)
36. Do lots all at once (Do it when I have the motivation)
37. Take more regular breaks whilst doing it
38. Just start and see if I feel like it once I’ve been doing it for 10 minutes
39. Get more comfy work chair
40. Get better equipment
41. Focus on the goal
42. Get more sleep for better energy
43. Reward myself after I’ve done something
44. Talk about my successes with people
45. Write up what I’ve learnt

Create a fun exercise:

1. Ex1: Robot raspberry pi
2. Ex2: Checkers learner
3. Ex3: Minecraft mod
4. Ex4: Look up fun projects online
5. Ex5: Write bot for Darwin game (and then fail to submit it…)

1. Adjust my level of paranoia about future adversity. (Before I am comfortable retiring, I need to be confident that even in quite improbably bad possible futures I will not run out.) [4]
   1. Take up Buddhist-style meditation or Stoicism or something of the sort, cultivating an inner conviction that even the worst that can happen (whatever it is) is survivable.
   2. Persuade my wife to take up with someone else and bring our child with her, so that I no longer have to worry about the wellbeing of other people besides myself. (This has obvious adverse consequences of its own. On the other hand, it is also an answer in category 2 below as well as in this category 1.)
   3. Do extensive modelling of plausible financial futures; the how-much-do-I-need heuristics I use are fairly conservative, and perhaps looking at it more closely will show that I don't need to be so careful.
   4. Change my current policy of assuming (almost certainly very counterfactually) that my parents will be immortal, squander all their money, choose to leave it to a dogs' home rather than to me, etc. (I currently make that assumption because (a) I think it's healthier psychologically not to see one's parents' deaths as an opportunity, (b) I think it's healthier psychologically to take responsibility for one's own financial security, and (c) I don't like relying on things that are outside my control. I don't actually think changing this would be good overall.)
2. Reduce how much money I feel I need in retirement. (Most of these, if implemented immediately, also increase how much I can save, which also helps.) [11]
   1. Get out of the habit of eating fancy food. Buy the cheapest of everything and get used to it, find a repertoire of frugal but edible meals, stop cooking unnecessary things like cakes, etc.
   2. Stop buying books.
   3. Stop upgrading computer hardware; progress has slowed a lot, after all.
   4. Move to a smaller house, thus reducing utility bills and certain local taxes.
   5. Don't have a house at all; live in a caravan or car, or a tent, or become a squatter. (This may also be a way of making 1.2 happen.)
   6. Move to an area where things are cheaper.
   7. Move to a completely different country where things are much cheaper.
   8. Completely give up driving; walk, cycle and use public transport.
   9. Tell my child not to expect any more than the barest minimum assistance from me -- no paying of university fees, no help buying a house, etc. (This may also be a way of making 1.2 happen.)
   10. Abandon hobbies that cost money, replacing them with ones that are free or nearly so.
   11. Contract a disease that greatly shortens my likely lifespan but doesn't require expensive care before my tragically premature death.
3. Acquire more money. [19]
   1. Just keep on working and saving for a while.
   2. Negotiate aggressively with my employer for a higher salary.
   3. Shop around actively for jobs that might pay more.
   4. Identify changes in my skills, behaviour, etc., that would make me more likely to be promoted, and implement them.
   5. Switch from tech R&D (which is pretty well paid and mostly fun) to finance (which is better paid but I would probably find much less fun).
   6. Move to a city where salaries are higher. (In the UK, currently working in Cambridge, that probably means London. Note that cost of living there is really high so it would not obviously be a win overall.)
   7. Move to a completely different country where salaries are much higher. (That would mean the US. Not the same completely different country as in 2.7 above.)
   8. Wait for my parents to die.
   9. Turn to crime. If sufficiently unprincipled, I could probably find several ways of getting hold of quite a lot of money.
   10. Return to my long-ago-abandoned career in pure mathematics and somehow solve one of the "Milennium Problems". (Not a strategy with a very high probability of success.)
   11. Gamble (e.g., lottery tickets). Negative expectation, of course, but it could solve this problem. Probably more likely to than trying to prove the Riemann Hypothesis.
   12. Start a company and lead it to a successful exit.
   13. Sell some organs.
   14. Sell a lot of my existing possessions. (Most things sell second-hand for much less than they were bought for new; this isn't a great way to raise money.)
   15. Get divorced and marry someone very rich.
   16. Become an artist and persuade the art world that my creations are (or, almost as good, soon will be) super-valuable.
   17. Persuade my wife to take a higher-paid job.
   18. Persuade my child to take a job and hand the income over to me. (Difficult to make much money this way at her current age, even aside from ethical issues and the like.)
   19. Stop donating to charities.
4. Get other sources of money besides salary and investment earnings/growth. [8]
   1. Write a computer or phone app that people are willing to pay for and remain so for the next several years.
   2. Buy a house (or apartments, or commercial property) and rent it out. Obviously only any use if the rental income plus appreciation minus expenses is more than I currently get in appreciation of other investments.
   3. Invent and patent some wondrous new invention, and collect royalties. (Another low-probability strategy.)
   4. Write books. (Not too difficult to make very small amounts of money this way. More is unfortunately much harder.)
   5. Found a religious cult and let it be known that donations are pleasing to the gods.
   6. Start a pyramid scheme, and watch the suckers' money pour in.
   7. Get elected to high political office. Let it be known that I take bribes.
   8. Get elected to high political office. Let it be known that I might be willing to arrange for regulations to favour certain companies. Just happen to take nicely paid non-exec directorships, advisory posts, etc., with them after leaving office. Of course this is not at all the same as 4.7 above, dear me no.
5. Change the world in such a way as to invalidate (pessimistic) assumptions implicit above. [5]
   1. Persuade the government of the country where I live to implement a robust universal basic income scheme.
   2. Develop a superintelligent AI, sufficiently well aligned with humanity's interests that the near-magical technologies it develops usher in a new post-scarcity age.
   3. Develop a superintelligent AI, which doesn't give a damn about humanity's interests but is sufficiently well aligned with mine that the near-magical technologies it develops, or the near-magical criminal schemes it thinks up, or whatever, give me everything I need for the rest of my life.
   4. Lead a communist revolution, after which private property is an irrelevance and the glorious all-benevolent state will ensure that everyone has everything they need.
   5. Create a new cryptocurrency and persuade everyone to start using it instead of dollars, RMB, bitcoin, etc.
6. Other. [3]
   1. Die. My financial needs for retirement are then zero. (This is another one that has a few downsides.)
   2. Abandon my preference for not needing to work. I still won't feel comfortably able to retire, but I won't care any more.
   3. Once such a thing is possible, get uploaded. Virtual-me is probably cheaper to run than real-me.

1. Delete unnecessary accounts
2. Use password manager
3. Delete unnecessary apps/programs
4. Unsubscribe from newsletters, instead read in-depth literature on things I want to learn
5. Delete screenshots of e-book pages (after I noted the relevant part down)
6. Do stuff from the doing later list now
7. Keep only the most important bookmarks
8. Use mind palace for daily chores, as a calendar, to memorize recipes etc.
9. Learn shortcuts
10. Less light information sources
11. Spend more time with people I love or find interesting (less with others)
12. Create a capsule wardrobe
13. Start onetime projects and finish them fast if they bring joy/are useful
14. Otherwise discard them
15. Get another plant within next five days or gift the pot (reminds me otherwise of my old one ;-;)
16. No mindless browsing allowed
17. Search for feedback (so I do less unnecessary work)
18. Raise my hand in class every time I think of an answer
19. Try things from my try-things-list
20. Write regularly on LessWrong
21. Become a Toastmaster and regularly attend events
22. Participate in competitions
23. Learn another memory technique (forgot the name)
24. Find out what others think of me
25. Start to think more realistic about myself
26. Donate and gift a lot of my stuff
27. Break big things into smaller and easier things
28. Spending 10 min fully focused on a thing I want to learn everyday (increase to more things/more time)
29. Write down things I want to do, learn etc. Assign numbers from 1 to 10 according to how important they are. Discard the things on the end of the list.
30. Assign to the rest of the list numbers according to how easy they are and start doing  them
31. Read books about how to efficiently interact with other people, mental math and other mind tools etc.
32. (After I read through most of the books I have) Create an account on goodreads
33. Establish rules for when buying things (for example a certain price, certain colours, only necessary things etc.)
34. Delegate tasks
35. Learn how to focus better (reading about it, experimenting)
36. Set timers when working on tasks
37. Remove everything which could distract me
38. Own only a few things so that cleaning will never be a problem again, cause any arrangement out of all the things I own looks cool and creative
39. Tell others to gift me only non-consumer things
40. Meditate lots and become enlightend
41. Figure out how to become more effective and rational
42. Live from now on like a cave woman
43. Act like crazy and get into a psychiatry
44. Commit a serious crime and get caught
45. Die
46. Marry somebody rich who is completely okay with... well, me
47. Almost die and as a result stop being able to care for myself
48. Program the ultimate AI companion
49. Help humanity so that humanity owes me and I never have to do a thing myself ever again muhahahahaha
50. Define existing as meaningful

Time it took: When I remove the time I spend on writing something down, getting up and doing it and than coming back to delete the thing I wrote (sometimes, sometimes not) .... It took me less than... forty/fifty minutes?

• Epistemic horror at 2020
• We traumatized each other a bit. Alas.
• We've been lonely awhile. Geez.
• Meditation on Winter (mostly classic)
• Person A is right.
• Person A is wrong.
• Person B was right? Wrong? Person B just wants a regular solstice, dunno.
• Beyond the Reach of God
• We did a lot of good things re Covid this year.
• We wasted our time this year.
• Clock of the Long Now. Big Future.
• Redo of Siderea's Spanish Flu thing.
• 500 million
• Person C's grandma / Year
• Person D's Year
• Montage of imaginary people's year
• The remote first community hypothesis
• Friends are people who grew up together.
• Sorry to the people who were left adrift
• Gratitude for the people who tried
• What did the sacrifice mean?
• Virtues of rationality for the year
• Who are we trying to become?
• There are no growups
• History of plagues
• Epistemic horror at politics
• Regular horror at politics
• While we were fretting about covid, GPT3 happened.
• Get GPT3 to write a speech by Eliezer
• What was it like, for Ray in particular (honest version)
• What was it like, for Ray in particular (censored version)
• The Virtue of Darkness
• The Virtue of Fire
• What does the virtue of Ash mean to Ray?
• The Black Death may have been responsible for industrial progress. Epistemic horror / awkwardness
• Inside history, you don't get to know whether you're in a downswing or not.
• Good things happen slowly. Bad things happen fast
• Reason isn't magic (i.e. we did 'okay' this year, but there were limits to how well we could have done)
• Meditation on the present (who are we, today, right now?)
• Meditation on the past (previous generations of plague)
• Governor of Georgia
• Decentralization (optimistic spin on "I can't take care of all of you")
• Remember to have friends
• Meditation on the Future - What's the 25th, 75th and 50th percentile future look like?
• Growing up together - Friends are people you grew up with. I wish we were better coordinated this year, but I'm not sure you get to get good at coordination without having something like 2020 happen to you.
• Keeping on just doing what needed to be done, without getting overly distracted by covid
• Our intellectual lineage
• Questions worth asking about how we handled this year
• Narrative Gravity
• Getting curious

 50 Ways of improving my financial situation:

1) Look for a higher paying job

2) Look for a bank account that pays a higher rate of interest

3) Put money in an ISA

4) Research undervalued shares, and then buy some

5) Search for treasure

6) Buy cheaper food

7) Go on fewer holidays

8) Buy a lottery ticket

9) Cancel the TV license

10) Move to a property where you have to pay less council tax

11) Be more careful at turning off electrical appliances when you aren't using them to reduce the electricity bill.

12) Wash less often to reduce the water bill.

13) Stop using my smart phone.

14) Sign up to a site that pays you for doing surveys

15) Join Amazons Mechanical Turk

16) Sell things I no longer need on an online website

17) Find somewhere to live with a lower rent

18) Turn the heating down

19) Try and find an electricity provider with lower prices

20) Try and find and internet service provider with lower charges

21) Buy more things second hand

22) Look for a part time job in the weekends/evenings

23) Put more money into the pension

24) Wait for sales before buying things, if there purchase can be delayed

25) Found a company, and hope it is a big success

26) Look for a self help book on getting rich

27) Do training for a profession where the salaries are higher

28) Take any overtime opportunities if they are offered at work

29) Go on fewer day trips

30) Try and get more done during the working day in the hope of getting a bigger bonus

31) Be careful to use any vouchers you get at the supermarket

32) Hunt around for any discount codes you can use with on line retailers

33) Move the bank account to one that pays you an incentive for switching

34) Do more research to find the lowest possible price before buying something

35) Move to a country with a lower tax rate

36) Recycle old ink cartridges for cash

37) Ask for a pay rise

38) Take advantage of refer a friend offers

39) Use split ticketing more often to cut the amount spent on rail tickets

40) Write a book and try to get it published

41) Enter competitions to win things instead of buying them

42) Take part in medical drug trials for money

43) Make a horrible piece of modern art and enter it for the Turner prize to win a lot of money

44) Don't visit the family as often

45) Invest in companies via brokers that charge lower fees

46) Ensure my savings accounts that pay the highest amount of interest always have the maximum amount of money in them

47) Take advantage of zero percent credit card deals to delay paying them off. I will gain a bit more money by keeping it in the bank for longer.

48) Try and find a company that will insure my possessions for less.

49) Learn how to repair clothes instead of buying new ones.

50) Create a website and get money from hosting adverts

1. Discover the laws of nature
2. Build a great house and culture around it
3. Find the most scenic views in the universe
4. Find the most compelling dramas, fact or fiction
5. Discover what kinds of life can exist
6. Make for the most extended experience (outlive everything)
7. Make the most complex thought and presence with the most extended brain and mediation
8. You probably spawn into the world midway. Cataloque all the stars, all the past events.
9. Discover what kind of life is the most optimal at profileration. Solve the game theory of the universe.
10. Make the most connected universe by encompassing everything in a communication network
11. Question what is existence and deduce what kind of superdimensional existence leaves a hydrogen-dust shadow universe
12. Explore and find the most rich structure. Marvel at the map of all of computation.
13. Max out affordances and puppetmaster the world at your whim.
14. Max-out wireheading by building the most tranquil solipsistic trap with the most pleasing simulation (instead of transcending, descend)
15. Max out the most spontaneouity by having the greatest and wildest adventure
16. Form the most deepest connections by learning about all of the sentience of the universe, every detail of every occupants life
17. Map out phenomology and study what kind of artistic expereiences are possible. Find all the styles and all the art forms
18. Find the most energy efficient way for dust to collapse into a galaxyfaring civilization
19.  Find the most nurturing way of achieving the most numerous amounts of most autonomous other agents that maxime their own expression.
20. Locate yourself in the multiverse possibility space
21. Figure out the possible techtree variations
22. Map out madness
23. Find the most effortless way of existing by having the least amount thoughts
24. Make the most dense energy packing (why, but I guess it is an achievement, it means the biggest black hole, right?)
25. Find the most painless way to stave off ennui
26. Figure out the longest possible trajectory of possiblities to keep the universe the most unique as long as possible (max out snowflake)
27. Solve all the puzzles of the world with all the starting resource combinations
28. Make the most hard to predict circumstances possible and experience greatest surprise
29. Figure out the minial set of assumtions to ascend to world mastery
30. Find out the minimal brain to answer every question poseable
31. Find out the optimal code to max out artistic expereince for the widest variety of psychologies (the ultimate game)
32. Fix chair
33. Fix sleep rythm
34. Learn to be in connection to other people
35. Master all the sports
36. Master all the professions
37. Master a profession
38. Be okay with your limitations
39. Write a game
40. Actually research in preparation to writing a game
41. Actually discuss hard things
42. Find people that would help me write a game with
43. Identify what makes me hold back
44. Finish projects that I start
45. Start projects that I think
46. Think about actually burning problems
47. Be okay to say when a problem seem frivolous
48. Problemsolve when the solution is not in sight
49. Experience own life even when it doesn't match expectations
50. Be in the moment even if it seems to turn into a problem I might fail to solve

~ 50 minutes

Question too nebolous to do safeties.

I felt that I got around limitations in thinking. The problem framing started to shift a lot around 32. It didn't seem that I actually shifted question. I feel like getting the first stuff out of the way was helping in the process. There seems to be some meta-blockage that was in fact cleared by "just doing it" and what the "it" was seemed nebolous but it also seemed helpful it was allowed to be nebolous. It allowed me to stay true also to the minority thoughts.

• 1. Find side projects that are fun and small, such that they're easy to do and I want to do them.
• 2. Take away the schleps from levelling up, which is often the overhead of figuring out exactly *how* to go about it, e.g. by:
• 3 Hire tutors/personal trainers.
• 4 Work with colleagues who keep levelling up and thereby putting implicit pressure on me to do so.
• 5 Curate a list of tutorials that I'd be really excited to try. A tutorial is just a effort in --> learning out machine!
• 6 Pay deliberate metacognition to where I make mistakes, and have a routine of doing this at a fixed interval, so I know where my growth edges are.
• 7 Have a video repeatedly playing on a screen in the corner of someone learning something. Social pressure!
• 8 Choose work projects with an eye to one I don't yet know how to do, which will force me to learn.
• 9 Meditate and do visualisation on myself as an agent capable of learning and growth, such that I don't flinch away from things I don't know how to do, and at a deep level become more inclined to reach towards them.
• 10 Have a regular time interval habit (e.g. once a quarter) of showing my work to people with mastery or a high skill level, and asking them how to improve. In particular doing this with the same person over time so they can have a sense of whether I'm growing or not
• 11 Keep finding quantitative metrics of the skills I care about. Track them, and check that they're growing over time.
• 12 Challenge a friend to who can achieve the highest skill in a domain. The competition will motivate me to try harder.
• 13 Pick domains of learning where it's easy to make progress but highly unlikely to ever reach the end. (I wonder what this would be??)
• 14 Post about my intentions publicly, thereby committing me to them more strongly.
• 15 Go around to a bunch of people who seem like they achieved mastery and didn't plateau, ask for their secrets.
• 16 Make a Bountied Rationality post for someone to review the literature on this for me.
• 17 Create a community of people dedicated to continual improvement, and have everyone try things and figure out the best strategies
• 18 Manipulate an evil person into blackmail me into doing something terrible to me unless I keep improving.
• 19 Get a powerful and inspiring tattoo about continual progress.
• 20 Watch a motivation video each morning.
• 21 Go to 5 friends. Ask each to check in with me at a particular point in the future (can be as short as 1 week and as long as 2 years), to ask a particular set of questions to see if I'm still levelling up, and, if not, commit to sit down *right there and then* to find ways of solving that problem
• 22 Same as 21, but using the postal service that sends a letter to yourself at a particular point in the future.
• 23 Come up with a set of potential strategies, then design mechanical turk studies to see which ones actually work.
• 24 Become a motivation speaker about continual improvement, to the point where I would feel like a total hypocrite if I didn't actually practice what I preached myself.
• 25 Figure out the neurology of learning, and what supplements to eat to learn more.
• 26 Figure out if there's some trauma etc. that's holding me back from learning and particular domain, and, if so, do therapy for that.
• 27 Have a slack channel where I keep posting little messages when I've learnt something new/expanded a growth edge, and where give praise and motivation (and where others can also post about their learnings)
• 28 Have a monthly "challenge", where I pick some goal that seems like I can't really do it, but give myself a month to accomplish it.
• 29 Same as 28, but have someone else pick my goal -- just like a wise master, they can push further than I thought was possible.
• 30 Do regular metacognition to maintain a sense of where I can have the highest returns to skill growth (e.g. instead of trying to move from 99.9th to 99.99th percentile guitarist, moving from 50th to 99th percentile coder)
• 31 Fill my social media feeds with people who keep growing and learning, get rid of people who plateau
• 32 Become an artist and create art that's hyper-optimised to inspire me in particular to keep learning
• 33 Go through some instances when I was really excited to learn something, and actually wen through with it; and try to meditate on why I was excited and what value I derive, so that I can do more of that.
• 34 Read account of great figures from history and their learning protocols
• 35 If I feel like I can't grow more, make things harder for myself. If push-ups are too easy, use a weight vest. If coding some app is too easy, see if I can do it twice as fast. If designing a thing in photoshop is too easy, see if I can do it using only the keyboard and not the mouse.
• 36 Set myself exciting goals and rewards that'll only be paid out if I manage to reach a certain level in some skill.
• 37 Actually just list down all the skills I care about growing in. Just reifying them into an external list might make me more likely to start noticing and analysing when I am and am not growing.
• 38 Just have an open-ended, meandering conversation about skill growth with a friend.
• 39 Do a babble challenge on skill growth.
• 40 Design my life to have a bunch of "equilibirum popping mechanisms" -- things that make it such that I can't really get locked into an equilibirum. My ask some clever friend to make plots to make my life absurd once a year, have weekly reviews/check-ins with a coach, etc., in ways where I shake things up and reevaluate.
• 41 Move city, move house, move team, change furniture. Shake things up and see if it has good effects.
• 42 Set aside some time daily or weekly to actually practice new skills. Even if in a less relevant domain (say, knitting). Just having the habits and culture around me of learning a skill in one domain, will keep those muscles alert and have positive overflow effects into other domains.
• 43 Make big spectacles of my monthly challenges (mentioned above), e.g. using Twitch streams and FB events, such that I feel really motivated to do something great.
• 44 Treat it like an interesting science problem: how can I figure out the optimal way for me to learn? Solve that science problem.
• 45 Keep exploring and trying random new things. Have a day a month to say, sample a Wikipedia list of "list of activities (filtering for things I've never done), and then do those things.
• 46 Try to learn a skill backwards and with only one hand, see if I discover more surface area on how it works.
• 47 Apply for jobs requiring skills I don't have, or announce events requiring skills I don't have, forcing me to learn in order to pull those things off.
• 48 Figure out how to make progress in a domain where I am among the experts, and there are no tutorials or obvious next steps. Otherwise this seems like a strong failure mode for where I would plateau.
• 49 Instead of thinking of it as "learning"; think of it as "trying" different "styles". E.g. if I've always only done object-oriented programming, then do functional programming. If I've been designing things Tufte-style, look for a different way of making graphs. Try to build up a mental library of models or styles, such that I can compare and triage as needed. The term "horizontal learning instead of vertical learning" comes to mind. I've never heard it before, so if it already means something else, that's an accident.
• 50 Invest in things like sleep, exercise and nutrition. Lack of energy is probably a key failure mode preventing from learning and growing.