I've seen dukkha translated as something more like "unsatisfactoriness" which puts a kind of Stoic spin on it. You look at the cards you've been dealt, and instead of playing them, you find them inadequate and get upset about it. The Stoics (and the Buddhists, in this interpretation) would recommend that you instead just play the cards you're dealt. They may not be great cards, but you won't make them any better by complaining about them. Dunno if this is authentic to Buddhism or is more the result of Westerners trying to find something familiar in Buddhism, though.

My point is that in English "experience such severe pain that one might prefer non-existence to continuing to endure that pain" would be considered an uncontroversial example of "suffering", not as something suffering-neutral to which suffering might or might not be added. I understand that in Buddhism there's a fine-grained distinction of some sort here, but it carries over poorly to English.

I expect that if you told a Buddhist-naive English-speaker "Buddhism teaches you how to never suffer ever again" they would assume you were claiming that this would include "never experiencing such severe pain that one might prefer non-existence to continuing to endure that pain." If this is not the case, I think they would be justified to feel they'd been played with a bit of a bait-and-switch dharma-wise.

There can be pain without suffering. If pain is experienced without attachment and aversion, there is no resulting suffering. If the Buddha were to stub his toe, there would be pain, but he would not suffer as a result.

I wonder whether "suffering" is an adequate translation. I get the feeling that the Buddhist sutras and our common vulgate are talking past each other. See for example MN144, in which Channa slits his wrists to end his pain, and the Buddha says he was sufficiently enlightened that he will not be reborn. Channa complains: “Reverend Sāriputta, I’m not keeping well, I’m not getting by. The pain is terrible and growing, not fading; its growing is evident, not its fading. The winds piercing my head are so severe, it feels like a strong man drilling into my head with a sharp point. The pain in my head is so severe, it feels like a strong man tightening a tough leather strap around my head. The winds slicing my belly are so severe, like a deft butcher or their apprentice were slicing open a cows’s belly with a meat cleaver. The burning in my body is so severe, it feels like two strong men grabbing a weaker man by the arms to burn and scorch him on a pit of glowing coals. I’m not keeping well, I’m not getting by. The pain is terrible and growing, not fading; its growing is evident, not its fading. Reverend Sāriputta, I will slit my wrists. I don’t wish to live.” If that's "not suffering" then "not suffering" isn't all it's cracked up to be.

Anselm: I have discovered a truly marvelous proof for the existence of God, which this tweet is too small to contain. 🙏😇

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HnNNGWQEX7CgaqBt2/notes-on-reverence

Excerpt:

“I am an atheist, and am addressing an audience in which, if I’m not mistaken, respect for the tenets of established religion is fairly low. But I want to explore reverence — in the spirit of Chesterton’s Fence — because it is common to many virtue systems across cultures and across time. Among the questions that concern me:

• “Are there aspects of reverence that are valuable that rationalists can preserve and nurture in their own ways in their own traditions?
• “Is reverence perhaps so valuable that it is worth taking a ‘leap of faith’ beyond the limits of rationalism in order to practice it?”

Took a couple of years, but my dystopian future has arrived:

May, 2024: Google search starts to put "AI Overviews" above its web search results. [BBC] "Google's new artificial intelligence (AI) search feature is facing criticism for providing erratic, inaccurate answers. Its experimental 'AI Overviews' tool has told some users searching for how to make cheese stick to pizza better that they could use 'non-toxic glue'. The search engine's AI-generated responses have also said geologists recommend humans eat one rock per day."

my current best guess

FWIW, from Iris Murdoch's Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (p. 323): "If we study one moral concept we soon see it as an aspect of another. It is true on the one hand that as moral agents we tend to specialise. The high-principled statesman may be a negligent father (and so on). It may seem as if we have a limited amount of good motivation available and cannot expect to be decent 'all round'. There are familiar ways of characterising people in terms of individual characteristics. Yet also a closer look may show this as superficial, and we then wish to say that the impulse toward goodness should stir the whole person."

Here 'tis: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/iofy4cWC9AWzZDtxc/notes-on-gracefulness

If you are worried that nobody obsessively overanalyzes the concept of love in a desperate search for something solid at the base of the concept, worry no longer.

I'd be curious to hear your thoughts about how insight-frisson might be induced by psychedelics/marijuana in terms of your model. Anecdotally, these drugs seem to promote both a lot of false-positive insight-frisson experiences (the feeling of having an insight is vividly there, but the insight itself seems to dissolve upon inspection) and genuinely insightful insight-frisson experiences (a conceptual discrepancy you didn't even realize you had suddenly comes to light, and a way of resolving it follows soon after, in a way that endures beyond the acute drug experience).

It sounds like you want to say things like "coherence and persistent similarity of structure in perceptions demonstrates that perceptions are representations of things external to the perceptions themselves" or "the idea that there is stuff out there seems the obvious explanation" or "explanations that work better than others are the best alternatives in the search for truth" and yet you also want to say "pish, philosophy is rubbish; I don't need to defend an opinion about realism or idealism or any of that nonsense". In fact what you're doing isn't some alternative to philosophy, but a variety of it.

A hypothesis that explains the perceptions can be a just-so story. For any set of perceptions ζ, there may be a vast number of hypotheses that explain those perceptions. How do you choose among them?

In other words, if f() and g() both explain ζ equally well, but are incompatible in all sorts of other ways for which you do not have perceptions to distinguish them, ζ may be "evidence for the hypothesis" f and ζ may be "evidence for the hypothesis" g, but ζ offers no help in determining whether f or g is truer. Consider e.g. f is idealism, g is realism, or some other incompatible metaphysical positions that start with our perceptions and speculate from there.

An author I read recently compared this obstinate coherence of our perceptions to a GUI. When I move my mouse pointer to a file, click, and drag that file into another folder, I'm doing something that has predictable results, and that is similar to other actions I've performed in the past, and that plays nicely with my intuitions about objects and motion and so forth. But it would be a mistake for me to then extrapolate from this and assume that somewhere on my hard drive or in my computer memory is a "file" which I have "dragged" "into" a "folder". My perceptions via the interface may have consistency and practical utility, but they are not themselves a reliable guide to the actual state of the world.

Obstinate coherence and persistent similarity of structure are intriguing but they are limited in how much they can explain by themselves.

It's a characteristic of philosophy, too, at least according to the positivists. If you're humoring a metaphysical theory that could not even in theory be confirmed or falsified by some possible observation, they suggest that you're really engaging in mythmaking or poetry or something, not philosophy.

This is a brief follow-up to my post “Redirecting one’s own taxes as an effective altruism method.” Since I wrote that post:

1. Scott Alexander boosted (not to be interpreted as endorsed) my post on Astral Codex Ten, which helped to give it more than typical reach.
2. In a flinchy spasm of post-SBF timidity, GiveWell explicitly told me they did not want to get their hands dirty with my donations of redirected taxes any more.
3. My tax arrears for 2013 ($5,932 original tax + ~$5,467 in interest & penalties) were annulled by the statute of limitations.
4. I made a $5,932 donation to Charity Entrepreneurship to celebrate.

According to Seigen Ishin (Ch'ing-yüan Wei-hsin):

"Before a man studies Zen, to him mountains are mountains and waters are waters; after he gets an insight into the truth of Zen through the instruction of a good master, mountains to him are not mountains and waters are not waters; but after this when he really attains to the abode of rest, mountains are once more mountains and waters are waters."

(D. T. Suzuki, Essays in Zen Buddhism, First Series, 1926, London; New York: Published for the Buddhist Society, London by Rider, p. 24.)

1. We inhabit this real material world, the one which we perceive all around us (and which somehow gives rise to perceptive and self-conscious beings like us).
2. Though not all of our perceptions conform to a real material world. We may be fooled by things like illusions or hallucinations or dreams that mimic perceptions of this world but are actually all in our minds.
3. Indeed if you examine your perceptions closely, you'll see that none of them actually give you representations of the material world, but merely reactions to it.
4. In fact, since the only evidence we have is of perceptions, the "material world" is more of a metaphysical hypothesis we use to explain patterns in our perceptions, not something we can vouch for as actually existing.
5. Since this hypothesis is untestable, it is best put aside when we consider what actually exists. The "material world" is not a thing, but a framework and vocabulary useful for discussing regularities in what is really real.
6. What is really "real" -- what the word "real" means -- is our moment to moment perceptions and interpretations, which appear to us in the form of a material world that we inhabit. 
7. GOTO 1

How to best break out of this loop?

And then today I read this: “We yearn for the transcendent, for God, for something divine and good and pure, but in picturing the transcendent we transform it into idols which we then realize to be contingent particulars, just things among others here below. If we destroy these idols in order to reach something untainted and pure, what we really need, the thing itself, we render the Divine ineffable, and as such in peril of being judged non-existent. Then the sense of the Divine vanishes in the attempt to preserve it.” (Iris Murdoch, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals)

In my fantasies, if I ever were to get that god-like glimpse at how everything actually is, with all that is currently hidden unveiled, it would be something like the feeling you have when you get a joke, or see a "magic eye" illustration, or understand an illusionist's trick, or learn to juggle: what was formerly perplexing and incoherent becomes in a snap simple and integrated, and there's a relieving feeling of "ah, but of course."

But it lately occurs to me that the things I have wrong about the world are probably things I've grasped at exactly because they are more simple and more integrated than the reality they hope to approximate. I think if I really were to get this god-like glimpse, I wouldn't know what to do with it. I probably couldn't fit it in with anything I think I know. It wouldn't mesh. It wouldn't be the missing piece of my puzzle, but would overturn the table the incomplete puzzle is on. I have a feeling I couldn't even be there, intact, in the way I am now: observing, puzzling over things, trying to shuffle and combine ideas. What makes me think I can bring my face along, face-to-face with the All?

I have the vague impression that in spite of getting some obvious (to the outsider) things wrong (fervently believing the preposterous), Mormons or LDS culture get some less-obvious things unusually right (relative to non-Mormons/LDS culture generally). I'm curious about those things, how they felt from the inside, and how the rest of us look in comparison from inside that culture. What are some things you think LDS culture does well that the rest of us might be able to emulate?

The reason I said "not funny" is not my sideways way of saying "I don't approve of that sort of thing" but is more related to the point in your second paragraph. You can't just state your opinion in the form of a joke and turn it into a joke that way. (Except perhaps in some rare edge cases: "Knock knock. Who's there? Epstein didn't kill himself.") It's like if I said "What do you call a ladder? An accident waiting to happen." Have I said anything funny, or have I just chosen a strange way to say "I think a ladder is an accident waiting to happen"?

And in the case of Bob, I can certainly imagine someone from another culture, or who is young and sheltered, etc. not being up on American stereotyping and for whom such innocence would not be merely affected innocence.

I've been in a long pause on adding to the sequence, although I've been quietly updating some of the existing pages behind-the-scenes. I hope to pick up the pace again at some point.

As for the floundering of SotF&E... I still think it's a good model, but getting something like that off the ground is hard work and requires that a lot of things go right. For one thing, it takes a critical mass of people who believe in the promise of it enough to put in the work; it's not something people can absorb passively. It's hard to find enough people who are willing both to stretch out of their comfort zones and to take time out of their already busy days to dedicate to an unproven eccentric project like this. When the early-covid isolation/quarantine stuff hit it really took the wind out of the sails of social projects like SotF&E, and I haven't felt confident enough to try to restart it.

You might also find some food for thought by ordering from these menus:

• Notes on Caution
• Notes on Prudence
• Notes on Temperance
• Notes on Self Control

I think I see where you're coming from on this, but there are a few things to consider:

First, a lot of your criticisms apply most strongly to my own particular idiosyncratic method, and when evaluating it solely as an effective altruism strategy. In fact, I chose the method I did largely as a variety of conscientious objection, not as effective altruism. My post here highlighted the possibilities of tax resistance as an effective altruism strategy, but my own motives for my resistance are more complicated and I did not choose my own method of resistance to optimize its charitable donation possibilities. If you judge it by that standard, it will admittedly look pretty weak. But it's also possible to choose tax resistance methods differently from how I have done, in a way that prioritizes effective altruism over conscientious objection, if your motives are different from mine.

Second, I think you exaggerate the precariousness of my position. I'm not impoverished. I'm actually doing pretty well. I put aside something like 35–40% of my income for retirement, and every year I put roughly the equivalent of my health insurance deductible into a Health Savings Account in case disaster (or distracted driver) strikes. I make about the median annual income for an individual in the U.S., and have saved up more than the median retirement savings for someone in my age bracket. I'm not "brutally curtailed" or living in "self-imposed poverty". I'm a reasonably well-off person living in the lap of luxury here in California and enjoying the fruits of the most fabulously prosperous time our species has yet experienced. I can't imagine feeling deprived like this.

Third, you underestimate the charitable impact of my resistance if you only include the $5k/year or so that I donate and ignore the hundreds of hours of volunteer work (not, perhaps, effective-altruistically optimized, but nonetheless good) my particular technique has helped me to put in.

Fourth, your argument that "if you wanted to fix any of this, you... couldn't pay off your existing $90k+ liability" is incorrect. If for some reason I changed my mind about all this and wanted to wipe the slate clean, if I were too poor to just pay the full amount, the IRS is like many debt collectors in this regard: it would rather get something than fail to get everything, so it's willing to bargain. It will ask you what you can afford (demanding that you fess up about your income and assets) and then come up with some figure that doesn't totally bankrupt you, telling you that you can eliminate your tax debt entirely if you can come up with this lower sum. It's called the Offer in Compromise program (https://www.irs.gov/payments/offer-in-compromise).

As I mention in my post: "There is a law on the books that makes willful failure to pay taxes a criminal offense. However it is almost unheard of for the U.S. government to criminally prosecute someone who files an honest and correct tax return but who will not voluntarily surrender the money."

American "war tax resisters" have been willfully refusing to pay taxes for decades, often going out of their way to make public declarations of their willful intent (sometimes in letters to the IRS itself). In the last 80 years, of the tens of thousands of American war tax resisters who have done this sort of thing, exactly two have been prosecuted merely for willful failure to pay. One was in 1942, and targeted the leader of an emerging war tax resistance movement (he was prosecuted for failing to purchase a war tax stamp to put on his car, so also this was not really an "income tax" refusal prosecution). The other was in 2005, and targeted an attorney who had two previous tax convictions and whose legal practice tended to get on the nerves of prosecutors by specializing in the vigorous defense of dissidents like Huey Newton, Judi Bari, Dennis Peron, etc.

Given this track record, I think it's accurate to say that criminal prosecution for willful failure to pay your income taxes is not the sort of thing the typical refuser has to worry about.

Thanks for the response. This goes far enough afield of my expertise that I don't think I can give very helpful answers to your specific questions. I don't have any experience with corporate tax refusal of this sort. In the very limited anecdotal reports I've seen, it seems like the IRS is most likely to crack the whip and potentially pursue corporate officers when 1) the corporate entity fails to pay employment taxes (payroll/social-security taxes) after withholding them from employees' paychecks, 2) when there's actual fraud/dishonest filing involved, 3) when there's no filing of required forms; in roughly that order of severity. I'm much less confident in anticipating the IRS's behavior here than I am in the case of individual tax-nonpayers.

As far as the 10-year limitations deadline, again here I have much less information to go on for corporate taxpayers than for individuals. I know in the case of individuals, once the tax debt passes the "collection statute expiration date" it just sort of vanishes from the system and so they stop bothering you about it.

Note that if the corporate entity formally files for bankruptcy that this suspends the ticking of the statute of limitations clock until six months after the bankruptcy is resolved.

Yeah, it's an imperfect first-stab calculation at best. But that doesn't mean that 1 in 12,000 is necessarily an underestimate because while the 8,143,000 denominator may be exaggerated for the reasons you suggest; the 699 numerator is too, for the reason I gave ("even if every one of those prosecutions had been of people who merely refused to pay"). In fact, few to none of those 699 prosecutions were of people who merely refused to pay. An appendix to their report shows how many indictments the IRS pursued in a variety of categories (this adds up to more than 699 because some non-tax crimes e.g. narcotics, money laundering are also prosecuted via the same unit). Non-payment doesn't even make the list:

• Abusive Tax Schemes: 35
• Corporate Tax Fraud: 23
• Financial Institution Fraud: 20
• Bank Secrecy Act: 338
• Employment Tax: 142
• Healthcare Fraud: 69
• Abusive Return Preparer Program: 112
• Identity Theft: 88
• Money Laundering: 701
• International Operations: 143
• Narcotics: 475
• Non-Filer: 115
• Public Corruption: 27
• Questionable Refund Program: 51
• Terrorism: 33

I believe it's not actually true that, if you merely repeatedly neglect to pay your taxes, the I.R.S. will inquire into your motives and intent in order to decide whether to come after you with both barrels blazing. As far as I can tell they do not have the resources or inclination to do that sort of investigation.

I base this largely on the experience of American war tax resisters. They are often loudly self-incriminating about their willful intent: sometimes going so far as to write letters to the I.R.S. explaining their motivation. Of the tens of thousands of Americans who have engaged in war tax resistance over the years, I know of only two in the past 80 years who have been criminally prosecuted merely for willful refusal to pay taxes (there have been others who have been criminally prosecuted or jailed for things like filing inaccurate forms or contempt of court, but those were cases in which they were defying the law in ways that went beyond merely not paying). The war tax resistance movement keeps pretty good records on its "martyrs" so if there were other cases like those two they would probably have come to my attention.

Last I heard, about 40% of U.S. citizens don't have passports to begin with, so I expect that at least for some readers, this isn't such a big deal. For the rest it is certainly a consideration to factor in. Note that it typically takes some time before it becomes a problem: you accumulate $59,000 (actually more, as this number is inflation-adjusted) in delinquent taxes, the I.R.S. notices you're over the limit and submits paperwork to the State Department, then somewhere down the line your passport expires and you're unable to renew it until you resolve the tax delinquency (and go through a State Department paperwork dance of your own).

FWIW, some tips on how to improve your resolve here: Notes on Resolve

Aesthetically, opera seems like it slots in well to a Very Gay modern niche, in that it is flamboyant, is dramatic to the point of histrionic, lends itself well to backstage scuttlebutt about prime donne and other such inside baseball dish, is nicely campy in its traditional overwroughtitude of costume and set design and vocal fireworks and Götterdämmerung, and is a good object to lavish conspicuous aficionado-points on. It's as gay as green is Irish.

I'd also like to see what work people have already done that I don't already know about.

See Notes on Attention for some possible leads.

I'd add "Covid" to the hypotheses. At the time it was difficult to sustain many varieties of coordinated grassroots activity, even something as banal as a book club, just because you didn't want to meet indoors in groups and because alternatives like Zoom were off-putting to some and suboptimal in many ways. People may have relished the opportunity to come out in the streets and protest a bit, or to engage in social media histrionics, but to sustain this sort of activism in a meaningful way requires the sort of organizing and group deliberation that was unusually difficult at that time.

This reminds me of a POV that I find perennially tempting, a sort of Buddhism verging on solipsism:

"Reality Itself" is already completely here and completely available to you. That indeed is the definition of Reality Itself: the actual subjective contents of the present moment, your (pre-"assessed") subjective experience. To discover Reality Itself, you don't have to assess your subjective experience as though it were merely evidence left behind by the real reality that you have to examine for clues. It's already the real deal. Our ideas about "objective reality" (atoms and quarks and fields, but even chairs and tables and people) are models and linguistic conventions we find helpful for discussing, finding patterns in, and predicting Reality Itself, but they are not themselves Reality Itself hiding behind our subjective experience. You can learn interesting things about Reality Itself by examining it and subjecting it to scientific analysis, but you can't get any realer that way: any closer to reality. You're as close as you can get already -- it's right here; you can't miss it.

See also: Notes on Resolve

This will probably be dismissed as glib, but: human alignment.

FWIW, here's how my "investment" strategy has been changing ("investment" considered broadly, in a time=money sense).

I'm weighting foreign language acquisition less than I used to, in part because advances in AI are making that a somewhat less-valuable skill than I had originally anticipated.

I'm googling for websites a lot less than I used to. This is partially because Google's web search has declined in quality (and while its competitors can roughly match it, none have really leapfrogged it) and partially because the web itself has become such a morass of crap. I'm correspondingly increasing my investment in particular sources of web content (these seem vulnerable as well, so I'm keeping my options open, but by the time AI starts writing LW content on the regular it might be worth reading). I'm long on the wisdom of the ancients, short on anything expressed in an op-ed.

I've given up on Twitter/Facebook, and am finding my long-shot investment of time in Mastodon to be paying off better than I'd hoped. I'm tentatively exploring other fediverse options.

I've been divesting from politics / political arguments broadly for a while, and shifting to a more-local focus on political action (meaning not just action involving governments & elections, but any organized efforts for social goals). This is I think in part motivated by an inchoate hunch that our ability to rationally observe and engage in useful discourse about events outside of our own back yards is going to be terribly disrupted by AI/bot-fueled disinformation.

My retirement portfolio is slightly more tech-heavy now, but I otherwise don't feel confident picking winners & losers among public companies or sectors and haven't made any galaxy-brained I-think-I'm-smarter-than-the-market moves.

So far, my policy of frugality has paid good dividends. My spending has been largely in sectors less-affected by inflation, and I have accumulated enough buffer savings that if my job gets automated away I'll have some time to pivot gracefully.

I continue to be long on health, and take steps to secure a vigorous longevity to the extent fortune allows. Whatever happens in the coming decades, I don't want to miss it.

Reduced it by ~43kb, though I don't know if many readers will notice as most of the reduction is in markup.

Since you've gone with the definition, are you sure that definition is solid? A reasoning process like "spend your waking moments deriving mathematical truths using rigorous methods; leave all practical matters to curated recipes and outside experts" may tend to arrive at true beliefs and good decisions more often than "attempt to wrestle as rationally as you can with all of the strange and uncertain reality you encounter, and learn to navigate toward worthy goals by pushing the limits of your competence in ways that seem most promising and prudent" but the latter seems to me a "more rational reasoning process."

The conflation of rationality with utility-accumulation/winning also strikes me as questionable. These seem to me to be different things that sometimes cooperate but that might also be expected to go their separate ways on occasion. (This, unless you define winning/utility in terms of alignment with what is true, but a phrase like "sitting atop a pile of utility" doesn't suggest that to me.)

If you thought you were a shoe-in to win the lottery, and in fact you do win, does that retrospectively convert your decision to buy a lottery ticket into a rational one in addition to being a fortunate one? (Your belief turned out to be true, your decision turned out to be good, you got a pile of utility and can call yourself a winner.)

LessWrong is a good place for:

Each of the following bullet points begins with "who", so this should probably be something like "LessWrong is a good place for people:"

A more rational reasoning process tends to arrive at true beliefs and good decisions more often than a less rational process.

It's not clear from this or what immediately follows in this section whether you intend this statement as a tautological definition of a process (a process that "tends to arrive at true beliefs and good decisions more often" is what we call a "more rational reasoning process") or as an empirically verifiable prediction about a yet-to-be-defined process (if you use a TBD "more rational reasoning process" then you will "tend[] to arrive at true beliefs and good decisions more often"). I could see people drawing either conclusion from what's said in this section.

Although encouraged, you don't have to read this to get started on LessWrong! 

This is grammatically ambiguous. The "encouraged" shows up out of nowhere without much indication of who is doing the encouraging or what they are encouraging. ("Although [something is] encouraged [to someone by someone], you don't have to read this...")

Maybe "I encourage you to read this before getting started on LessWrong, but you do not have to!" or "You don't have to read this before you get started on LessWrong, but I encourage you to do so!"

See also: Under what circumstances have governments cancelled AI-type systems? 

For some food for thought on this question, see:

• Notes on Wisdom and
• Notes on Rationality

from the LessWrong Notes on Virtues sequence.

California adopted a "Housing First" policy several years ago. The number of people experiencing homelessness continued to rise thereafter. Much of the problem seems to be that there just aren't a lot of homes to be had, because it is time-consuming and expensive to make them (and/or illegal to make them quickly and cheaply).

It seems to me that a major factor contributing to the homelessness crisis in California is that there is a legal floor on the quality of a house that can be built, occupied, or rented. That legal floor is the lowest-rung on the ladder out of homelessness and in California its cost makes it too high for a lot of people to reach. Other countries deal with this by not having such a floor, which results in shantytowns and such. Those have their own significant problems, but it isn't obvious to me that those problems would be worse (for e.g. California) than widespread homelessness. Am I missing something I should be considering?

Has anyone done an in-depth examination of AI-selfhood from an explicitly Buddhist perspective, using Buddhist theory of how the (illusion of) self comes to be generated in people to explore what conditions would need to be present for an AI to develop a similar such intuition?

Might be helpful:

• Notes on Ambition
• Notes on Industriousness

See also: Notes on Empathy

See: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/35eEHAXis3jMqETod/notes-on-attention#How_can_you_improve_your_attention_

FWIW: I dropped out of high school a year early via the GED route. I am very glad I did, and recommend it. At the time this was not really an option that was discussed above-ground by e.g. guidance counselors: instead the assumption was that you'd either graduate from high school or "be a drop-out" with all sorts of bad connotations.

I enrolled in a community college and began taking my lower-division undergrad courses there (and some electives that I was curious about). This was far less expensive than taking the equivalent courses at a university, and by and large the lower-division courses I took at community college were of higher quality than those I later took at university (smaller class sizes, professors seemed to care more).

OTOH, my friends who stayed behind for their high school senior year described it as being a much better year than others: more collegiality, a better social scene in general. So if your high school social life means a lot to you, you ought to add that into the calculations.