Leveling IRL

It would be more useful to describe what abilities one would have at a particular level, than the amount of grinding it takes to achieve it. Being able to solve Euler problems at all might be a useful indicator of being a certain level, but having done a lot of them doesn't seem directly important, and if it teaches certain skills, then we should look at those skills directly.

Chore Wars and EpicWin exist. (Haven't actually used ChoreWars. I used EpicWin for a while, I still technically do, but it's not as effective as I'd like.

Up until recently I'd have been highly supportive of this. A few days ago I read a counter argument, specifically to the gamification of education, which made the point that a) when you have extrinsic motivators, people are less likely to care about the things for instrinsic reasons, b) people tend to game the system rather than actually accomplish the thing you intended.

I don't know how true those statements are, but they dampen my excitement about this idea.

No matter what, I think one problem is that people are far too individual for any kind of universal system to work.

This is an incredibly cornball idea, completely worthless for any naturally rational mind, which sounds like it was designed to help out irrational game-obsessed apes instead.

As an irrational game-obsessed ape, I wholeheartedly approve. Thumbs up.

I think a single common leveling scale isn't a useful idea. For instance, I'm not a salesman, and in the other popular context of "cold approaches", doing them would probably reduce the level of my marriage! A scale for each of a few dozen skills would be interesting, though.

Unless this sort of game becomes unbelievably popular, you could try to find some way to calibrate levels by percentiles. Someone in the bottom tenth percentile of (local? national? first-world? age-adjusted!) skill would be level 0, someone in the 97th through 98.5th percentile might be level 20, etc.

I definitely want a leveling scale. I want to earn merit badges and compete annually for friendly trophies. Maybe they can be gamed - that's fine, we'd have to start somewhere, doesn't bother me. This is a project I am and have been excited enough about to actually work on.

So what's the next actionable thing people want to do to move this forward?

I propose the following: anyone can create a merit badge (example to follow in self-reply), and it becomes official if it's seconded and thirded (and not downvoted below -2).

I don't see it working as an external ruleset, but perhaps people could more customarily announce their own leveling up, personal changes that added up to making a difference in some respect, like mastering a major skill, or fixing a mistaken policy (wrong belief) that had influence over you, or gaining a very useful insight.

I've added "make pancakes" as level-1 cooking. Pancakes are a "mix all ingredients and cook" recipe - so pretty straight-forward. I've added a link for a fairly explanatory recipe too.

It took me FOREVER to find http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/User:Cousin_it/Leveling from this page. Is there a way you can edit a link into the OP?

It might be a good idea to suggest alternative courses in each. For example, the Strength test is mostly a test of ability to access weightlifting equipment.

Suggestions (programming and finance already look fine to me):

• Strength: do series of 10 pushups, on 8 separate days within 1 months
• Endurance: swim 500 m without stopping
• Social: initiate a conversation with someone you know and obtain additional information (e-mail address, IM addresses, telephone number, postal address, birthday, family composition). Do that at least 10 times in 1 month, with at least two different people.
• Self control: fast for 48 hours, with food accessible at all times. Do that twice in six months. (Might be medically stupid for a lot of people.)
• Memory: memorize the list of all rulers of the place you live in at least 200 years back (if your country is younger and you can't find an obvious historical candidate, default to US presidents).
• Cooking: deep-fry, stir-fry, and grill (not necessarily on separate days) a vegetable of your choosing

Suggestions for new items:

• Creativity: write 500 words in one sitting, or sketch 5 drawings in one month, or...something about music? The goal here is "make a thing that is pretty, and then keep doing it".
• Games: pick a sport or game with a formal ranking system, and reach the rank right above "complete beginner". Examples: yellow belt (in most of the world) for judo, Elo 1200 for chess, 27th kyu for go. Maybe add a condition like "Pros in that game must exist"?
• I want to add something related to niceness/kindness/altruism. (I've met a really nice devout Christian, and the superiority of our ingroup is threatened. Let's outnice him into the ground and send him home crying!) For level 1 a condition like "Offer help two at least three different people at least 10 times in a month" sounds good - if the condition involves actually helping, there's too much risk of forcing unwanted help on people.

There's plenty of physical fitness programs, such as Hundred Pushups that already effectively give you a leveling system AND an actual training program. I've found them quite useful, although I dropped them as soon as I stopped gaining levels easily.

It doesn't seem like it would be significantly harder to come up with alternatives: A NaNoWriMo training program where you produce 50 words/day for a week, then 100, until you're doing a novel in a month, for example.

I don't see any reason to have "generic" levels which combine physical fitness, problem solving, and socialization, though. There's so much variation even within each of those domains that I'd feel silly even assigning myself a "socialization" score to begin with (I'm horrible at pointless cold approaches, but have absolutely no issues if I genuinely need information from a stranger, for example)

Here's one comic's take on the gamification of human incentive structures.

I assume this isn't supposed to match up with anything else, right? Level 6 isn't reserved for superhumans?

An idea for level 2 programming (note, you must complete all of the below):

1. project euler has its own levels. Become "level 1" within Project Euler (which requires completing at least 25 project euler problems).

2. create an account on stackoverflow.com - gain at least 100 reputation solely from your answers to other people's questions.

3. start a blog based around your programming language/niche - and post at least four blog entries each month

I've added to the "memory" one: for short-term memory, using dual 1-back. No idea if I've made that one too hard....

I've also reduced the difficulty-level for the endurance one. I think "brisk walk 30min" is level 1. "run a mile" is at least level 2 as it requires some training to get there.

I like this and had a similar idea. It did not involve "leveles" but a learning tree, extremely similar to the one found at http://www.khanacademy.org/exercisedashboard . So you would not need "character classes" or "levels" but had an immediate view on the persons abilities. Based on the learning tree you can of course introduce "levels" as a branch of the learning tree and calculate "character classes" based on the proportion of the mastered skills.

Ultimately, this amounts to order all human knowledge into a single hierarchy, but can fortunately be performed step by step. Khan Academy is a first attempt at this though aimed at children, not adults.

I've had this idea before too... but it seems to me like you need to have "character classes", instead of trying to make general "life levels". E.g., here'd be three levels for a character class of "statistician":

Level 1: given data (small enough sample size to calculate by calculator so you don't need a script), calculate basic summary statistics like the median, variance, etc., and be able to interpret them.

Level 2: pass quizzes to demonstrate understanding of basic fundamentals, like the difference between within-group and between-group variance, and how to tease out selection biases from treatment effects.

Level 3: given a basic, measurable phenomenon, and an associated question about that phenomenon, build a model to test it. The model needs to be plausible but not perfect. So for example, let's say that there are a number of dots that appear in a circle, and your question is, are the dots distributed randomly or are they biased in some orientation? (Actually, maybe this would be a higher level, but you get the idea).

If people agree that these "character classes" make sense, then perhaps it'd be best to have some standardized notion of how many levels each class should have and how difficult they each should be to reach.

People who know (relatively) more about a subject should try to design some of these for various subjects. People would then choose to specialize in one or more of the classes. If others agree to make other classes, I'd be happy to pursue this "statistician" class (or pursue it along with others). Does this seem like a good idea?

I like this idea. Describing sufficiently granularr levels would also contribute to positive-feedback cycles, and to some extent even taskification (i.e. I know what I need to learn to level up).

Level 0 rationalist: You think that "Either possibility A must be or possibility B", means "A 50/50 chance either way".

Level 1 rationalist: You no longer think that.

1) Nah, probably not. Some common standards could be nice, but they should be specific, and once we start trying to do something LW-specific rather than some flavor of "general," karma ain't broke. Self-assigned standards might work if you can resist or somehow (like with another person) police gaming the system, but there's already systems for that.

2) The problem is inherent - putting things in this structure requires that you assign them relative worths. There may be an average answer, but average is wrong for a lot of people.

Sounds like fun, but it will take a lot of thought to come up with good leveling criteria. A naive set of criteria is just going to be boring or unproductive.

I think it's a great idea, and I would like to participate (I've thought about bringing up this idea, too). However, I think it would work best as an external (perhaps affiliated?) site.

Yes, I would greatly appreciate such a scale in my own quest to beat Akrasia :)

I never thought cousin_it of all people would stoop so low as to post a self-help thread.

We already have a common leveling scale set out by the universe itself: how many surviving children you have.

If you don't like that one, and prefer an easier proxy, we already have several: the most obvious being your annual income. (Corrected for education level if you prefer.)

If you don't like any of those, and you're looking for easier proxies still, I can only ask: Why? What exactly are you trying to accomplish with the scales you are trying to derive? Once you figure that out, it may be easier to decide what the scales should measure.

Ah, the struggles of people who want to quantify everything in video game terms, whether it makes sense or not. Reminds me of Christian Weston Chandler's "heart level".

(Warning: Googling that name is not for the faint of heart. May cause insanity, outrage, or disillusionment with humanity.)