Intellectual lifehacks repo

post by Antoine de Scorraille (Etoile de Scauchy) · 2025-02-25T16:32:09.814Z · LW · GW · 2 comments

This is a question post.

Contents

  Hereby, our intellectual lifehacks repo:
None
  Answers
    1 ashtree
    1 Dave5
None
2 comments
  1. I really like dimensional analysis. It's a simple and powerful trick, almost magical, that allows you to distinguish between plausible and chimerical formulas.
  2. I really like the type signature. It's a simple but ontologically important change for classifying different objects. [1]
  3. I really like computational complexity, and its marketing version "Does it scale?" It's a simple but powerful trick for understanding and designing systems and rules. [2]
  4. …

Let's list our ‘intellectual lifehacks’ here, i.e., elements of knowledge that have properties like. :

I don't have a proper definition other than ‘I feel like it’ to the question ‘Does this count as an intellectual lifehack?’, but I'd like to make it clear that I'm setting the bar very high. I hope you'll be able to connect the dots with n=3... Anyway, share and discuss!

Hereby, our intellectual lifehacks repo:

  1. ^

    See: How to keep the essence of a theory by looking at the type signature, or to make progress on ontologically unsolved questions [LW · GW]

  2. ^

    See: How to import such intellectual lifehack in another intellectual field

Answers

answer by ashtree · 2025-02-25T21:10:16.188Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
  • If something takes longer than expected to get to an answer, think about how you could have seen the problem to be able to solve it faster to be able to solve it faster in the future[1].
    • As an extension, optimize everything. If something is slow and you do it often enough, doing it faster is worth it. Relevant XKCD.[2]
  • Flip a coin if you are struggling to decide between option in a situation where there are relatively low stakes. This exposes to you your gut instinct immediately, which is more than good enough most times, and it is far faster than logically finding an answer.
  1. ^

    e.g. the whole strategy of "dynamic programming", write a recursive solution, then memoize it, then reduce the amount of memory if you don't use it anymore. This works because you have changed your perspective from what clever thing can I do to how can I solve this with a smaller subproblem.

  2. ^

    This also applies to physical actions like walking and opening doors. Most people do these slowly, but since you spend so much time doing them, it is extremely worth it to focus on what you're doing.

answer by Dave5 · 2025-02-25T18:51:11.164Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Dimensional analysis is in instance of type signature checking, as fully understood. Unfortunately very few type systems for existing programming languages support the type transformations necessary to implement it directly.

2 comments

Comments sorted by top scores.

comment by Cole Wyeth (Amyr) · 2025-02-25T17:24:10.916Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

It seems that lesswrong was (before it became mostly AI content) essentially just a massive compilation of such intellectual life hacks. If you filter by the right tags (Rationality?) it should still be usable for this purpose. Have you determined that there is not currently a good centralized table of this kind of content?

Replies from: Etoile de Scauchy
↑ comment by Antoine de Scorraille (Etoile de Scauchy) · 2025-02-25T17:54:43.478Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

On a quick search, I couldn't find such a repo. I agree that this is/was the heart of Lesswrong, but what I'm aiming for is more specific than ‘any cool intellectual thing’. A lot of LW's posts are about contrarian viewpoints, or very particular topics. I'm looking for well-known but surprising stuff, to develop common knowledge.

Should feel like: ‘OMG, everyone should know [INSERT YOUR TICK]’