Things I wish I knew earlier

This page used to be called “Advice for young people”. I’ve renamed it to make it clearer that it’s not really intended to be useful to most people.

Warning: i’m making a bunch of changes to this page as of 2018–2020, so right now it’s a weird mix of things i believed in 2014–2015 plus things i currently believe (in 2018–2020).

What this page is about

In high school it is common to feel the frustration described in the introductory paragraph for Cognito Mentoring:

You love learning. You spend a lot of time reading fiction or learning about science or solving math problems or all of the above. School doesn’t meet your intellectual needs. Classes often emphasize rote memorization of disjointed collections of facts. You only know a few people who you can talk about ideas with. You wish you had more, and you wish you had better perspective on what there is to learn and how best to learn it.

While the Cognito Mentoring info wiki provides excellent general advice, here I hope to give more specialized advice; in particular, this page is tailored toward my past self, and documents advice/“cheat codes”/“redpills” that I wish I had gotten while I was in high school. Therefore this page is unlikely to suit most people (since the target audience is my past self, and I tend to be unusual by most standards). Another way to describe this page is to say it is a list of all the things that have profoundly influenced and inspired me up to this point. Yet another description of this page: it’s my attempt to counter the farce that is present-day “liberal arts education” (which aims to help people develop “critical thinking”); I want to give my own version of a true liberal arts education. As such, you should expect it to take several years to actually absorb most of the content on this page, if you actually take advantage of the opportunities (by exploring all the sites I link to, reaching out to people, going out and actually doing things that are suggested, and so on).

Feel free to connect with me if you have questions or just want to talk to me.

Health

• Be extremely cautious about international travel, even to supposedly developed countries. The viral illness that I believe is responsible for 4+ years of weird chronic illness I got in the UK. Nowadays in the post-COVID world, such things are more well-known and mask wearing is normalized, but back then it wasn’t a thing I really thought about.
• Use even more extreme caution when getting sick from a cold or something. I was somewhat cavalier about it because in all my life up to that point I would fully recover from colds, I was traveling and trying to get value out of my travels, etc. But looking back, it’s possible that not trying harder to just rest and recover may have contributed to the chronic illness, but this is still super speculative.
• Health “annoyances” in younger years may cascade into huge debilitating illnesses in later years. Looking back, I had things like shortness of breath and mild chronic constipation that I thought were fine to have/livable and indeed back then they were, but perhaps not treating them at the time is what led to my chronic illness (although I did go to primary care multiple times for these problems!). However, iatrogenic risks are a thing and a healthy person has bigger opportunity costs so spending time on boring health research is potentially a huge cost without clear benefit… I can’t be confident about the calculation here so it’s hard for me to say what I would have exactly advised to a younger version of myself.
• Probably don’t become vegetarian/vegan until you know more about health/nutrition/biology than even I do in 2023. In particular, I don’t think “vegetarians don’t get enough vitamin B12 so just supplement that” is sufficient knowledge to become a vegetarian. I think reducetarianism might still be okay, but I don’t know how much meat of which kinds is sufficient.
• See also intuitive nutrition case studies
• Exercise seems important and I maybe wish I had spent more time on it (though it’s not clear it would have made any difference to me).

Risks

One of the interesting things about being chronically ill is that “minor” stressors affect me a lot more than they do for healthy people.

Maybe one framing is the accident triangle: being chronically ill bumps me down so that a lower level accident affects me as much as a higher level accident. Or in other words, it lets me viscerally feel/observe lower level incidents in a way that normal healthy people are unable to observe them. Examples: summer heat, certain foods, bright lights, etc. This suggests that to be “safe”, even healthy people can emulate chronically ill people in certain ways (resting more, avoiding even mild heat, etc). However, there’s things like eustress/“desirable difficulties” (from education psychology) that point to the opposite conclusion. Overall, I still feel very confused here.

School

My thoughts on school as of late 2018:

• I really wish I had tried harder to escape school much earlier. By junior high, it was obvious that I hated school and that escaping was better. Why didn’t I actually quit school? [insert long list of excuses] Don’t make the same mistake! If quitting school seems impossible, then, well, shut up and do the impossible!

Marcus Geduld:

“[S]chool […] is a pathological environment. It’s pathological, because it sells itself as a “place of learning” while shunning the best learning tool there is [i.e. failure]. In school, the worst thing you can do is fail. If you fail seriously enough, you get “held back” or, at the very least, you get branded with an F. School teaches you to loath failing, which is basically teaching you to loath learning.”

Some other points:

• Sometimes it’s good just to know that you are not the only one who is extremely frustrated with high school. Even conventionally successful intellectuals like Noam Chomsky hated high school; see my answer to the Quora question “What would Noam Chomsky think of unschooling?”, for instance.

• “Drawbacks to Formal Education” by Brian Tomasik

• “Free the Education Market” by David Shellenberger

• Looking at the resources on Cognito Mentoring is a good idea.

• In general, however, it’s probably best to stay mainstream until you have demonstrated success doing unusual stuff.

• One can treat the system like a constraint (CM), like a day job (Paul Graham), etc.

• Actively search for alternatives. For example, if one lives in Washington State, then the early entrance programs at UW might be one option. See for instance Alex K. Chen’s review on Quora.

Paul Graham

Entrepreneur Paul Graham writes good essays on various topics, including high school. Even Vipul Naik of Cognito Mentoring highly respects Paul Graham:

I’m a great fan of Paul Graham, essayist, entrepreneur, and co-founder of startup accelerator Y Combinator (along with his wife Jessica Livingston, whom I also admire greatly). Through Y Combinator, Graham has changed the startup and tech company landscape and profoundly affected the world. (Some Y Combinator-funded companies you’ve probably heard of are Reddit, Airbnb, Dropbox, Scribd, Disqus, and Stripe). Graham also started Hacker News, a Reddit-of-sorts for the programmer/startup crowd. In the world of letters, Graham is better known for his long-form essays that include incisive social commentary. If you haven’t yet read his pieces, I encourage you to check them all out (I particularly like this one, that might be somewhat relevant here). He’s done more for the world than most people, including me, could dream of. And he knows a lot more about how the world works than I do.

The primary essay Graham has on frustration with high school is “What You’ll Wish You’d Known” (which tells students to treat high school like a day job so they can do more important things outside of school). His “Why Nerds are Unpopular” may also be of interest.¹ Below are the parts from “Why Nerds are Unpopular” that most resonated with me:

At the time I never tried to separate my wants and weigh them against one another. If I had, I would have seen that being smart was more important. If someone had offered me the chance to be the most popular kid in school, but only at the price of being of average intelligence (humor me here), I wouldn’t have taken it.

[…]

I think the important thing about the real world is not that it’s populated by adults, but that it’s very large, and the things you do have real effects. That’s what school, prison, and ladies-who-lunch all lack. The inhabitants of all those worlds are trapped in little bubbles where nothing they do can have more than a local effect. Naturally these societies degenerate into savagery. They have no function for their form to follow.

[…]

As a thirteen-year-old kid, I didn’t have much more experience of the world than what I saw immediately around me. The warped little world we lived in was, I thought, the world. The world seemed cruel and boring, and I’m not sure which was worse.

Because I didn’t fit into this world, I thought that something must be wrong with me. I didn’t realize that the reason we nerds didn’t fit in was that in some ways we were a step ahead. We were already thinking about the kind of things that matter in the real world, instead of spending all our time playing an exacting but mostly pointless game like the others.

We were a bit like an adult would be if he were thrust back into middle school. He wouldn’t know the right clothes to wear, the right music to like, the right slang to use. He’d seem to the kids a complete alien. The thing is, he’d know enough not to care what they thought. We had no such confidence.

A lot of people seem to think it’s good for smart kids to be thrown together with “normal” kids at this stage of their lives. Perhaps. But in at least some cases the reason the nerds don’t fit in really is that everyone else is crazy. I remember sitting in the audience at a “pep rally” at my high school, watching as the cheerleaders threw an effigy of an opposing player into the audience to be torn to pieces. I felt like an explorer witnessing some bizarre tribal ritual.

[…]

Nerds still in school should not hold their breath. Maybe one day a heavily armed force of adults will show up in helicopters to rescue you, but they probably won’t be coming this month. Any immediate improvement in nerds’ lives is probably going to have to come from the nerds themselves.

Merely understanding the situation they’re in should make it less painful. Nerds aren’t losers. They’re just playing a different game, and a game much closer to the one played in the real world. Adults know this. It’s hard to find successful adults now who don’t claim to have been nerds in high school.

It’s important for nerds to realize, too, that school is not life. School is a strange, artificial thing, half sterile and half feral. It’s all-encompassing, like life, but it isn’t the real thing. It’s only temporary, and if you look, you can see beyond it even while you’re still in it.

Peter Thiel

From “Peter Thiel: Education = the Catholic Church circa 1500” (HT Alex):

There is something very odd about a society where the most talented people all get tracked towards the same elite colleges, where they end up studying the same small number of subjects, and going to the same small number of careers. And that strikes me as sort of a lack of diversity in our thinking about the kinds of things people should be doing. That’s very limiting for our society as well as for those students.

From “Is Peter Thiel the Martin Luther of Education?” (HT Alex again):

People thought they could only get saved by going to the Catholic church, just like people today believe that salvation involves getting a college diploma. And if you don’t get a college diploma that you’re going to go to hell.

[…]

The reform will come from outside the system and the question people always have is, ‘What does the next education system look like? What will it be?’ And I think, like what happened to the Catholic church post 1500, I think there isn’t going to be a single new institution that will replace it. And this, of course, was the disturbing message of the 16th century was, the institution wasn’t going to save you. You have to figure out how to save yourself. And in a similar way there’s no education institution that will save you. Young people have to figure it out on your own. And that is the last thing anybody wants to hear.

And HT Alex again, from “Peter Thiel – Conversations with Tyler”:

We need to ask, what is it about our society where those of us who do not suffer from Asperger’s are at some massive disadvantage because we will be talked out of our interesting, original, creative ideas before they are even fully formed?

Rationality community and resources

Since about 2007, there has been a growing community—both online and offline—based around the idea of “rationality”, i.e. the idea that one should (1) have beliefs that correspond to reality, and (2) execute actions in the real world so as to achieve one’s goals. Learning about rationality is valuable in itself, but there is also an aspect of being in a “rationalist community” that appeals to many.

I think the best places to look are: LessWrong, gwern’s site, and Slate Star Codex (a blog by Scott Alexander). In fact, both gwern and Scott Alexander are active users of LW who chose to branch off to their own websites.

In particular, for high school students,

LessWrong

It is however important to emphasize that having a good fit with the community of LW may be important. For instance, I know several intelligent people who cannot stand LW.

• find more high school-related posts.

Main page: LessWrong.

gwern

gwern is probably one of the most well-known users on LessWrong. He also has a website that has numerous essays on everything from nootropics to Wikipedia editing. His notion of Long Content is also especially inspiring: “if one holds onto every glimmer of genius for years, then even the dullest person may look a bit like a genius himself”. For high school students especially, the essays “On Stress” and “On Disrespect” may be of interest. His stories also tend to have “lessons” (like Kafka’s parables) and are entertaining to read.

I think part of the appeal of gwern is that he inspires many people because his website doesn’t look like “magic”; one can agree that, given enough time, anyone can attempt what he did.

One thing that gwern does particularly well is emphasizing the importance of planning for the long term. For instance he uses free software, URL archival tools, plain text for his site, etc.

Slate Star Codex

Slate Star Codex is an interesting blog ranging in topics from romance to social justice to reactionary politics. See the top posts for more. He is particularly good at steelmanning opponents’ arguments. He is also good at picking out useful content on the internet, especially from Reddit (displayed on his recurring links posts).

The “graduation speech” Scott gives may be of interest. I think it’s entertaining to read, and makes some good points, but ultimately doesn’t do anything new. (In other words, I think Paul Graham’s essays already provide a lot of the heuristics of the argument; Scott does do a better job of linking to sources and using numbers though.) I get the feeling that my views didn’t change after reading this, though perhaps for some, reading the article will give more coherence to their ideas. The conclusion is specifically disappointing, since it abruptly ends with “kindness is what’s important”. The essay also doesn’t provide much that is actionable; one is left wondering “Okay, so what do I do?” (In this sense I think Cognito Mentoring does a much better job.)

Scott Alexander also has an older website called Raikoth, which has the The Consequentialism FAQ.

Depression

As of late 2018, my basic take on depression:

• While I was depressed, depression sometimes seemed like a pretty interesting mental state to be in. However, now that I have been not depressed for a long time, looking back, I see that depression was not an interesting mental state after all. That is to say, you should try to escape the depressed state as soon as possible!
• Despite being a “materialist” (in the consciousness sense), I think I didn’t take materialism seriously enough, and in my day-to-day life, I was still implicitly acting like a dualist. Specifically, I wasn’t acting as if things like sleep, a good diet, being hydrated, and exercise were important.
• In my case, I think my depression was primarily due to being stuck in school and not taking care of myself (see previous bullet point).

old version:

High school can be a source of depression, since it is essentially child abuse. Depression can in turn cause other problems. I’m not really an expert on the topic, but you can read my page on Depression.

I also do more academic research into depression as an effective altruism cause on the Depression page on the Cause Prioritization Wiki.

See also pages like “Existential depression in gifted individuals, which has passages like:

A particular way of breaking through the sense of isolation is through touch. In the same way that infants need to be held and touched, so do persons who are experiencing existential aloneness. Touch seems to be a fundamental and instinctual aspect of existence, as evidenced by mother-infant bonding or “failure to thrive” syndrome. Often, I have “prescribed” daily hugs for a youngster suffering existential depression and have advised parents of reluctant teenagers to say, “I know that you may not want a hug, but I need a hug.” A hug, a touch on the arm, playful jostling, or even a “high five” can be very important to such a youngster, because it establishes at least some physical connection.

[…]

It is such existential issues that lead many of our gifted individuals to bury themselves so intensively in “causes” (whether these causes are academics, political or social causes, or cults). Unfortunately, these existential issues can also prompt periods of depression, often mixed with desperate, thrashing attempts to “belong.” Helping these individuals to recognize the basic existential issues may help, but only if done in a kind and accepting way. In addition, these youngsters will need to understand that existential issues are not ones that can be dealt with only once, but rather ones that will need frequent revisiting and reconsideration.

Another page, “Vulnerabilities of highly gifted children”, which has:

It is important to remember that a child with an IQ of 164 is as different intellectually from a child with an IQ of 132 as that child is different from the 100 IQ child. Forcing a child with an IQ of 164 to learn at the pace of the average child, or even the pace of the moderately gifted, is akin to placing an average child in a special education classroom and asking that his/her learning rate be slowed down to keep pace with the rest of the class. The frustration of highly gifted children forced to stifle their love of learning in inhospitable environments can result in withdrawal, behavior problems, or psychosomatic symptoms.

See also “Dealing with intellectual isolation” on the Cognito Mentoring info wiki.

Anxiety

i’m still figuring this one out.

Love

2020 update: I’ve definitely given up on this for the next year.

see https://predictionbook.com/predictions/181602 for updates.

https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/rhZge5qmZKwJ8BMDM/open-and-welcome-thread-march-2020/comment/9kYHBu5kLC8GBiXmA

JONATHAN BLOW

Loneliness

eliezer:

I often feel isolated to some degree, but the fact of isolation is a bit different from the emotional reaction of loneliness. I suspect and put some probability to the suspicion that I’ve actually just been isolated for so long that I don’t have a state of social fulfillment to contrast it to, whereby I could feel lonely, or as it were, lonelier, or that I’m too isolated relative to my baseline or something like that. There’s also the degree to which I, personality-wise, don’t hold with trying to save the world in an Emo fashion…? And as I improve my understanding of the world more and more, I actually would not say that I felt any more isolated as I’ve come to understand the world better.

i disagree with the last sentence. i think my loneliness has gotten much worse as i’ve learned about the world. as i become more sane, everyone else looks more and more insane. eventually it can seem like the only way to make more friends is to actually create more smart people in the world, rather than just finding them!

see also:

http://grognor.blogspot.com/2016/12/originally-published-october-3-2014.html

“tfw your epistemic peers are scattered about, unreachable, and slowly disappearing before you, leaving you stranded, alone, wretched” https://twitter.com/Grognor/status/678963892609921024

“I have moved from epistemic loneliness to abject epistemic despair. why are so many things I see clearly so incommunicable” “because if they were communicable, others would have done so and it’d be part of the memeplex already. or they’re illusory. yes I know.” https://twitter.com/Grognor/status/748374798573707266

“stop wantonly excluding me from your secret clubs” https://twitter.com/Grognor/status/858766382955200519

also check out jonathan blow. search “small number” on https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Jonathan_Blow

Death

was grognor right? i still don’t know!

(still working through this)

• One thing I regret is not signing up for cryonics really early on in life. Maybe 2016 or 2017 was the correct year to do it (otherwise I would probably have to use my parents’ money to pay the premium, which may have been hard to argue for). By 2019 I was already experiencing my symptoms. Sometimes one has just 2–3 years to sign up for cryonics, and if you miss that window you’re screwed for life.

Effective altruism

see also my effective altruism page.

From “Existential depression in gifted individuals”:

Because gifted children are able to consider the possibilities of how things might be, they tend to be idealists. However, they are simultaneously able to see that the world is falling short of how it might be. Because they are intense, gifted children feel keenly the disappointment and frustration which occurs when ideals are not reached. Similarly, these youngsters quickly spot the inconsistencies, arbitrariness and absurdities in society and in the behaviors of those around them. Traditions are questioned or challenged. For example, why do we put such tight sex-role or age-role restrictions on people? Why do people engage in hypocritical behaviors in which they say one thing and then do another? Why do people say things they really do not mean at all? Why are so many people so unthinking and uncaring in their dealings with others? How much difference in the world can one person’s life make?

[…]

In such depression, gifted children typically try to find some sense of meaning, some anchor point which they can grasp to pull themselves out of the mire of “unfairness.” Often, though, the more they try to pull themselves out, the more they become acutely aware that their life is finite and brief, that they are alone and are only one very small organism in a quite large world, and that there is a frightening freedom regarding how one chooses to live one’s life. It is at this point that they question life’s meaning and ask, “Is this all there is to life? Is there not ultimate meaning? Does life only have meaning if I give it meaning? I am a small, insignificant organism who is alone in an absurd, arbitrary and capricious world where my life can have little impact, and then I die. Is this all there is?”

In some sense, effective altruism is an answer to the questions “What should I do with my life?”, “Can I do anything meaningful with my life?”, etc.

Although effective altruists claim that effective altruism is a question, not an ideology, if you pay enough attention, each subset of effective altruists clearly has its own agenda. So you can’t necessarily trust EAs.

I liked this article by Larissa MacFarquhar: “Extreme altruism: should you care for strangers at the expense of your family?”

Online presence and content creation

My main page on this is Content creation: the organization and dissemination of knowledge.

See also “Maintaining your online presence” on the Cognito Mentoring wiki.

I think now that content creation may be one of the best ways to produce lasting value. It’s always best to think in the long term; practicing a sport, for instance, may provide short-term satisfaction, but in the long term (say, after ten years) it is difficult to say what overall effect the sport had. (There are obviously creative ways to provide value even with a sport, e.g. by recording it and therefore providing entertainment even after one has stopped playing.)

Another point: if you’re extremely unusual compared to the mainstream/masses, then chances are, you’ll have trouble finding appropriate peers in real life. This is why it’s important to expand your search online, and one of the ways to get people’s attention online is by producing great content.

2020 update: i think when you are younger, you should focus more on producing “obvious” or reference works. writing timelines or wikipedia articles is a good start. or helping a more senior person’s research (e.g. by digging). the reason for this is that when you’re young, your ideas will basically all be bad. this is probably field-dependent, e.g. in math or more technical subjects you could probably do good work even when you don’t understand the world very well. but for philosophy, EA-like worldview building, and stuff like politics/opinions your opinions will just be bad. you could still keep a blog/diary but i wouldn’t suggest putting in a huge number of hours (e.g. researching something in politics and writing it up as a blog post seems like a bad idea).

as you get older, you will hopefully “go woke” in some sense. i’m not really sure how to explain what this is like or how you would know that e.g. you’re “going woke” instead of going crazy. one sort of litmus test of sorts is to try reading a bunch of Wei Dai blog posts. if you don’t bounce off, if you instead have thoughts like “wtf this guy is so amazing” then you might be on the right track :). i think it’s easy to have “wtf gwern is amazing” thoughts at like age 15–17, but for wei, it might be more like 20–25 (depending on how much info you consume in your teens).

once you go woke, you can start to do basically anything. like, if you’re hanson/caplan-pilled on politics, weipilled on philosophy, and carl/eliezer-pilled on various other aspects of the world, then you can actually start to think non-dumb thoughts about many topics. so at this point, you can trust yourself to write about politics/society/love/whatever, and it won’t be predictably-obviously bad. (it might still be bad, but it will probably be bad in non-obvious/interesting ways.)

Thinking about careers

My basic stance on careers as of late 2018 [updated August 2020]:

• If you share my values, then I think not working at a crushing day job is important. Many people complain that they hate their job/complain about “bullshit jobs”, but then they keep working at such a job. It seems to me that these people (1) actually secretly like their jobs or buy into the protestant work ethic so are on some level fine with wasting their lives away, (2) have competing interests, like earning enough money to buy things or impress actual/potential mates, or (3) are working at a day job temporarily as a way to build up a financial buffer or practice being functional. In the case of (1), I can’t really help you (you don’t share my values). In the case of (2), I think you ought to introspect more and see if these things are really worth it. In the case of (3), I think this is fine, and you should keep doing this until you feel ready to quit/move onto the next stage of your life.

2020: the hardest thing about careers is how to make enough money to support a wife and kids (if that’s what you want). all of this is assuming AI timelines are like 40+ years away. living a minimal single existence is easy just by doing freelance work/working a programming (or other high-paying) job for a small number of years. (i’m still not entirely sure why grognor couldn’t do this.) but once you get to wife+kids, everything is much harder, and i still haven’t figured this one out. check back in a few more years! :’)

From June 2021:

I think cucking is fine if it’s for: - short-term for building up some financial buffer - immigration status, if the country you work in is meaningfully better than your original country for your goals - practice for being functional - people who actually don’t have ambition and just want a decent life without planning too much - people for whom the money/status is actually a terminal goal

everything else is kind of meh or actively repulsive to me

Finding content online

One useful skill to have is identifying useful content online (something that is not taught in schools). Here are some places to check out:

• My guide on reddit
• For maximum transparency, I’ve released my Atom/RSS subscriptions (with some confidential URLs removed) publicly.

Identifying good people

I’ve moved this section to https://wiki.issarice.com/wiki/People_watching#Identifying_good_people

(see my People page for my specific recommendations, so you can judge whether you think i know what i’m talking about)

Books

As of late 2018, my basic view on books is that books are pretty useful, and there are some great books out there, but books tend to be overrated by intellectualist types (but, strangely, underrated among the people I interact with most). I think one ought not weight books more heavily owing to their length; treat them kind of like blog posts. To read a book, don’t read it cover to cover; rather, skim it and try to find something interesting in it. If there is nothing interesting in the book, just toss it. Unless a book is really good, if you are reading it cover to cover, you are doing it wrong.

Some books I have enjoyed:

• Dawkins’s Selfish Gene
• Bryan Caplan’s Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids
  • See also an overview on LessWrong
• Gary Drescher’s Good and Real
• Daniel Dennett’s Consciousness Explained
• Michael Huemer’s The Problem of Political Authority
• Eliezer Yudkowsky’s Sequences (note: the published book version cuts out comments and some of the posts. I think https://www.readthesequences.com/ is a good start, especially if you wouldn’t bother reading any of it otherwise, but eventually you may want to use GW/LW to read all the comments and omitted posts) and Inadequate Equilibria

Extracurriculars

My basic 2018 stance on extracurriculars:

• I think almost all extracurricular activities, especially the common ones (sports, practicing an instrument, becoming a club leader), are intrinsically (i.e., ignoring signaling benefits) useless in the long run. The case becomes even stronger once you consider opportunity costs.
• If you feel like you are being left behind by your peers by not doing respectable extracurriculars, then try as much as possible to ignore this social aspect of your environment. Ignoring one’s social environment is a useful skill to learn.
• If one wants to attend an elite college, then doing respectable extracurriculars may be worth the cost. I’m not an expert on this subject.

See also “Chinese loses math face-off to U.S.”:

But to some, losing the Olympiad offers hope that painful, nightmarish years spent studying for the contest could finally be over.

“This is just wonderful that China finally lost the contest,” one Chinese Internet user exclaimed on social network Weibo. “Hopefully the Math Olympiad won’t scourge our children anymore! It has shattered so many kids’ dreams!”

Doing hard things, doing something important

Richard Hamming’s famous talk, “You and Your Research” is very inspirational. There is a video of the talk, though I think reading it is better, since I don’t particularly like the way he gives the talk.

Some good quotes (emphasis mine):

In order to get at you individually, I must talk in the first person. I have to get you to drop modesty and say to yourself, “Yes, I would like to do first-class work.” Our society frowns on people who set out to do really good work. You’re not supposed to; luck is supposed to descend on you and you do great things by chance. Well, that’s a kind of dumb thing to say. I say, why shouldn’t you set out to do something significant. You don’t have to tell other people, but shouldn’t you say to yourself, “Yes, I would like to do something significant.”

Another:

Another trait, it took me a while to notice. I noticed the following facts about people who work with the door open or the door closed. I notice that if you have the door to your office closed, you get more work done today and tomorrow, and you are more productive than most. But 10 years later somehow you don’t know quite know what problems are worth working on; all the hard work you do is sort of tangential in importance. He who works with the door open gets all kinds of interruptions, but he also occasionally gets clues as to what the world is and what might be important. Now I cannot prove the cause and effect sequence because you might say, “The closed door is symbolic of a closed mind.” I don’t know. But I can say there is a pretty good correlation between those who work with the doors open and those who ultimately do important things, although people who work with doors closed often work harder. Somehow they seem to work on slightly the wrong thing - not much, but enough that they miss fame.

And:

I started asking, “What are the important problems of your field?” And after a week or so, “What important problems are you working on?” And after some more time I came in one day and said, “If what you are doing is not important, and if you don’t think it is going to lead to something important, why are you at Bell Labs working on it?”

Jeff Meyerson’s answer to “How can I overcome the depression from being rejected by all the top tech companies I have applied to?” is particularly good:

You need to build something.

Build a complicated, hulking four-month deliverable that nobody else commissioned and that nobody else will care about. Make a game, or model an elevator system, or an economic phenomenon. Put it on GitHub, but don’t expect anyone to look at it.

You will learn so much, but that’s not where the most value comes from.

Building something big insulates your ego.

If you have built and shipped something cool and unique on your own, nobody can deny your identity as an engineer, even if you sometimes forget how to find all the subsets of an int array that sum to k.

Academia

Beware of the “tunnel vision” of mathematics and physics (and other STEM fields too), in which people consider these fields to be their “calling” and won’t look into anything else. In particular, while knowing about the possibilities of academia is important, going to graduate school should not be one’s default path. As Holden Karnofsky of GiveWell says, regarding academia, “[p]eople usually either completely ignore that possibility or they completely ignore every other possibility”. Also you always have to remember quotes like “I have known more people whose lives have been ruined by getting a Ph.D. in physics than by drugs”. Remember that there also exist blogs like 100 Reasons NOT to Go to Graduate School.

For Cognito Mentoring pages, see “Academia”, especially “Leaving academia after graduate school” and “Alternatives to academia”.

A good thing to remember is that there are already too many people in academia. Academia is insanely crowded, and institutionally you’re very replaceable. My personal opinion: just stay away from academia unless you have a very good reason. In particular, if you’re neurotic or mentally unstable at all, just stay away. See also Bryan Caplan’s forthcoming book on education. See also one of my absolute favorite answers on Quora: Vipul Naik’s answer to “Why did you leave academia?”

See also the question “Why do undergraduate admissions in the U.S take into account nonacademic criteria?” (about undergrad admissions, not grad school).

Raman Shah says that avoiding a PhD is the best way to prevent your twenties from being as bad as his:

If I had to choose one thing, I’d say avoid a Ph.D. Mine is done, and I’m proud of my work and flaunt my credentials whenever I need to, but it really took a lot out of me.

Six years of financial belt-tightening, weekends, nights, and the brutal bumps of a cut-throat business took their toll. Your twenties are typically a time when a lot of tough personal things happen, as you learn to identify bad people by tangling with them and learn how to nurture a relationship by losing some very serious ones. I can attest that the stresses of these difficulties are worse when you’re in a weak financial situation, face the drama and life-on-hold suspended animation of grad school, and work too much to have a chance to really stop and think.

See also “Self-Help: The Obvious Remedy for Academic Malemployment”:

Loudly identify the risks that many grad students fail to take seriously. Point out the malcontent of earlier cohorts that took the road the next generation is contemplating. Remind them that the economics Ph.D. is an atypically sweet deal, even at lower-ranked schools. Then leave them alone.

Computer skills

I’ve found it pretty useful to know how to use computers well. There are several aspects to this:

• Programming. I’ve found this useful for automating tasks, building websites, making money (through contract work), coding up small toy models to better understand a problem, and being able to read/understand software that others write.
• Algorithms and data structures. Beyond basic programming skills, I haven’t found knowledge of algorithms/data structures to be too useful. Occasionally something may come up where having this knowledge is useful, but the vast majority of the time, basic programming skills suffice. This might change in the future if I do work that is more intensive on this front. I think a big reason for this is that in high level programming languages, the abstractions are usually good.
• Familiarity with many websites/the internet.
• Unix tools/command line. I’ve found this useful. There are some things you can and maybe should skip or only learn the minimal amount of (bash programming comes to mind).
• Hardware. I don’t actually know much about computer hardware, and my current impression is that I haven’t lost out on much by not knowing.

you can usually pick this up as you go, by e.g. reading online tutorials, experimenting on your own, and occasionally working through in a more systematic fashion (e.g. textbooks).

Mathematics

• beware tunnel vision
• at the same time, knowing a lot of math can be useful
• once you go woke, it can be hard to go all in on math, so it might be good to do this while young (and if you invest in Anki, you’ll be able to keep all this knowledge indefinitely into the future with little maintenance cost)
• usefulness of math depends on the subfield. e.g. i think statistics/probability and linear algebra are probably the most generally useful ones, and there are some things like complex analysis and number theory that i haven’t learned (and i haven’t had to learn so far).

Learning how to learn

One of the things I most wish I could go back and tell my younger self is the importance of learning how to learn new things (in particular, hard technical subjects). The problem is that this topic tends to be dominated by fluffy books and articles, and thus tends to have a very low signal-to-noise ratio. I think I rightly judged much of this material as fluff, but what I did not do was ask myself “huh, everything here sucks, so can I invent something better?” (I guess this is another lesson I would like to impart to my younger self, which is that many things suck in the world and it’s often possible to do better.)

Briefly, here are some principles to learning effectively (which I hope to expand on at some point):

• it’s easier to learn a new thing than learn a specific new thing; this is the de re vs de dicto distinction. “it’s easier to learn something (de dicto) than to learn something (de re)”. (see also this post.)

  elaboration on this, copied from here:

  What I meant is that I could have a mindset like “I’m going to learn linear algebra this month, and will spend all my learning time on linear algebra” (“learn a specific new thing”, de re) or I could have a mindset like “I’m going to learn some unspecified new thing each day, whatever it may be, depending on what I feel curious about on each day” (“learn a non-specific new thing”, de dicto). I’ve found the latter to be much more enjoyable/easy for me.

  The connection with the de re vs de dicto terminology is that if I just say “Bob is going to learn something new today”, it isn’t immediately clear whether Bob has a specific thing in mind, just like in the Wikipedia article sentences like “Peter believes someone is out to get him” or “Jana wants to marry the tallest man in Fulsom County” don’t make it clear whether Peter or Jana has a specific someone in mind.

• spaced repetition works, but it’s not magic, so you have to learn how to use it well. in particular, throwing cards at random into Anki is not an effective way to learn. there are many pitfalls here. the best introduction as of 2024 is still this one by Michael Nielsen. but see also this subreddit which I created where I collected all of the “how to write good Anki cards” material I could find.

• trust your sense of boredom, but also learn to cultivate it. if you’re getting bored of something, there’s usually a good reason for it (e.g. material is too easy or too difficult), and you can switch to learning something else. (there are similar lessons here, e.g. in mathematics you should trust your sense of aesthetics, but also learn to develop it in response to new mathematics). There are multiple kinds of boredom. The most common ones I experience are something like “bored because I want to learn something else” and “bored because I don’t see the point, so I want to skip ahead to see where this will even be used”, but there are many others. see also this post which tries to untangle some of the things we mean by boredom.

• putting math problems into anki works well for remembering math, but there are many subtleties involved, in order to make sure you stick with it. I explored some of these subtleties here but it’s not organized very well yet.

• just reading is not enough (by a lot) for learning new math. you have to do some combination of doing the exercises in the book, coming up with your own exercises, asking questions, checking assumptions for theorems, a bunch of stuff for definitions, cross-reading multiple books+wikipedia (some books use nonstandard notation or definitions and don’t tell you, so part of what you have to do is to learn the underlying concepts of which the written-down definitions are only one possible manifestation).

• making concepts intuitive vs passably being able to work with them (see satvik beri’s answer on quora)

• learn what it feels like when material is: too easy, too hard, just right.

• learn to tell the difference between pointless pedantry (e.g. insisting that functions are sets) and useful pedantry (e.g. checking edge cases like those involving the empty set)

• there is something like an “optimal order” for learning undergraduate math. i’m not entirely sure what this order is, but i have some idea of the pieces (e.g. metric spaces before general topology). see also this page, though that page only considered the first step (which subfield should you start with?) and not the whole sequence you should follow.

• some books have polarizing reviews (e.g. baby rudin is “the best book on analysis” or it is “way too terse”). this is a hint that the book has an “optimal background” for it, and you should think about what this background might be. in particular, for baby rudin, it’s written for people who are already very familiar with proving things and have an experienced teacher/tutor to help you. you should not just jump in and use it as your first introduction to proof-based math.

• in the beginning, write out the gory details of proofs. maybe complete the natural numbers game, which will make sure you’re not cheating by leaving out any details – a computer checks your work!

• some weird ego/self-esteem issues: learning to be okay with being confused/stuck, learning to be ok with not solving a problem instantly, being ok with being a beginner. real learning is not like high school where as long as you’re relatively sharp, everything makes sense instantly. in real learning, most of the time you are stuck. recognize that schooling is an unnatural environment that has messed with your intuitions about how often you should feel stuck (you feel stupid if you don’t instantly understand everything).

• many explanations suck, but sometimes the solution isn’t to go find a different explanation. many math textbooks are written in a way that assumes you will be putting in a lot of work, but they don’t explicitly tell you this. (it helps a lot to have an experienced tutor-type person around who can tell you things like “yes, this kind of struggle is good, just keep going and you will understand it” or “this thing is absurdly difficult for you because you are lacking one crucial concept called X, so learn that first and then come back to this”. if you don’t have anyone to tell you things like this, then you just have to learn to map “how the struggle feels” to “what action i need to take”, which takes a lot of experience.) often things get mysteriously easier when you play around with concrete examples.

• “learn a bunch of things well in the next year” is easier than “learn this one thing well in the next month”

• i had the mistaken impression when i was younger that i was a “quick learner” or that i was already “good at learning” because i was able to get good grades in school. it was only when i was learning things which were actually hard and actually required thinking that i realized i wasn’t retaining as much of it as i thought i should.

  • high school math (in the US at least, unless you go to some elite school where they start teaching you college-level math or you do a lot of contest problems or something) is a joke. many topics have a very short “window” – you don’t need to retain things for very long at a time, so you can just cram/learn the algorithms by rote. you might not realize how much you don’t actually know, because the problems in the book only ask you to execute some very specific algorithm.

Here is a brief description of how i learn math (as of August 2019):

1. i ask myself what seems most interesting to learn (usually i am working through some books or i have a specific thing i want to learn)
2. i read for a bit. anytime i come across something interesting/new, i add it to anki. (this part needs a lot of explanation)
3. if i come across a part of a book that requires some sort of verification, i do that, using pencil and a notebook.
4. i work out some exercises or make up my own. after i finish an exercise, if it was not a too tedious one, i write it up and add it to anki (in a separate problems deck). writing this up sometimes catches subtle errors i had in my original reasoning. while i do this, i might also search up solutions to see if there is a better way to do it. This deck is designed so that i see this problem only about a month later, which is a good test to see if i’ve successfully internalized the material. for writing up proofs in anki, it’s better to err on the side of being pedantic/meticulous, because in a few months you may have forgotten subtle things which cause small errors in your proof (which would be hard to notice if your proof writeup is hand-wavy). (January 2024 update: i think i was too inclusive about adding problems to anki. it ended up being way too many problems and i eventually just stopped doing the problem reviews altogether. so my new recommendation would be to only add a problem if it “speaks to you” in some way: you love it, you hate it with a passion because you were so close to getting it but you just didn’t have that one insight, you find it amazingly beautiful, you think it’s at the heart of this subfield of math, whatever. those guys are the keepers. everything else you just solve once and forget about it. it’s ok. you could even write it up nicely so you can refer back to it if you ever want to, but don’t add it to anki.)
5. if i encounter something i don’t understand, i write a question down, in a notebook or text file or maybe math SE (really it should be written in a spaced inbox but i didn’t have this back then). sometimes, i will be able to answer this question in a few months, after i’ve learned more things. but other times, it’s something that seems difficult to answer, so i don’t get a quick answer. (I haven’t tried this, but it might be good to find a tutor in the subject and ask them all your questions. One problem for me is that many of the things i want to learn don’t have tutors listed on wyzant.)
6. if i come up with a better explanation of something, or a better systematization, i will write it up. these days, i put these on the ML subwiki userspace.
7. in the evening, i go through my daily anki reviews (including the problems deck).

some additions since then (as of february 2020):

• sometimes adding stuff to anki is exhausting. if this is the case, it might be better to write a wiki page. that way, you will still be able to have a record/a way to load up your understanding when you come back to the topic later, but you won’t need to constantly be nagged by anki into recalling the stuff. this is especially good for things that you’re not sure you understand 100%, or stuff where aren’t sure if you really want to retain it long-term.
• focus on simple examples that you can fit in your head all at once.

People

I’ve moved this section to People.

Extreme worldviews

as carl says blah blah understand basic points of multiple worldviews. with mainstream worldviews, you are likely to have exposure anyway. with more extreme worldviews, you’re not likely to come across some of them. the goal is not to adopt these worldviews, nor is the goal to just laugh them away. the goal is to (1) consider the arguments at the object level and see if they make sense, and to steal any insights they might contain; (2) at the meta level, ponder why some clearly intelligent people can write such clearly insane things.

with that out of the way, here are some specific suggestions:

• moldbug
• PUA
• ted kaczynski
• Bruce Charlton (medical hypotheses papers)
• accelerationists?

Other ideas—expanding your imagination

Alex K. Chen often talks about the important of expanding your imagination of what’s possible. Here I’ll provide some of my thoughts on how best to do that, in particular by giving examples of things that have expanded my imagination. In general, the best way to do this is to just read a lot of things from a very diverse set of places, and to interact with a lot of people as well. It really helps if you have a lot of friends who are into the newest things, because you can learn a lot about the most exciting things that are happening.

• Cognito Mentoring in general

• Eschewing the mainstream: how to ignore implicit (and explicit) social pressures? How to ignore for example pressure to complete homework assignments?

• Experimenting with homelessness; see gwern

• “Activism Goes Away After Graduation” by Sam Alexander. Ōe Kenzaburō has also written a short story (“Human Sheep”) that explores this psychology of not wanting to “get justice” after a traumatic event.

• in college: how little grades matter. radical experimentation, how little people remember from lectures/class, opportunity cost of college.

• the importance of creating things and having something to look back on; take the example of Uber: on bad days, Travis Kalanick can just look at the usage chart of his company.

• Quora has a lot of information on Education Disruption.

• Although Cognito Mentoring is officially in maintenance mode, there is still a wiki with a lot of useful information. (Disclosure: I contribute to the wiki.)

• conventional intellectual heroes like Bertrand Russell, Feynman, Chomsky, etc., can be good to a certain extent, in that they show you how to stand up for something, apply critical thinking, etc. However, compared to LW and the “new wave” of critical thinking in the 2000s/2010s, they are somewhat outdated.

• Read Roy Baumeister’s “Is There Anything Good About Men?”

• In general, you should stalk the lives of the most promising entrepreneurs like Mark Zuckerberg, Travis Kalanick (see especially his failcon talk), Jeff Bezos, etc. These people are the new wave of “most impressive people”, following traditional impressive people like Feynman.

• Some other possible names from this post:

  • Venkatesh Rao
  • Gregody Rader
  • Daniel Lemire

• experimenting with nootropics might be a good idea

• Also see Katja Grace’s post on advice to “aspiring undergraduates”. In particular:

  In case you actually want to learn things, it is not clear whether university will help or hinder this on average. There seems to be a lot of variation between people. If you are unsure whether having someone talk at you for hours at a time while you struggle to write down what they said ten seconds previously helps you learn, sit in on some lectures before you sign up. Doing so is usually free.

  If you are ambitious and/or idealistic, and like being so, realise that university seems to often destroy these characteristics. Or perhaps that’s just the adult world. Anyway, be wary of accidentally picking up the impression that ambition and idealism are arrogant naivete inappropriate to the subjective, intellectually impenetrable real world, in which a person as small as yourself should be eternally grateful if someone finds them worthy of pushing papers. Unless you see good evidence for it of course, or would find it useful for enjoying your career in paper pushing.

• I’m starting to think that colleges really are mostly useless. In particular, if you put in effort to strengthen your online presence and find good peers online, then it’s very likely that the people you can talk to online will be much better than the people you can talk to at your university. (Though keep in mind potential benefits of talking to people in person.) In particular, don’t feel bad if you are lonely all the time. I tend to take the view that socializing with people from whom you will gain little is worse than not socializing at all.

• Even if you go to an elite school, are you really getting much out of the social scene? Are the things you’re learning in class really useful?

• “To Fall in Love With Anyone, Do This” and “The 36 Questions That Lead to Love”

• Let the Poor Have Fun

• “BuzzFeed doesn’t need ‘trust’ to win the Internet”

• Quote I really like from ‘ “I was a middle-aged virgin” ’:

  “Gentle, nurturing touch is new for most older virgins,” Blanchard explains. “Many don’t recall ever being touched that way before by anyone. Imagine what it must feel like never to have known gentle touch, and then to have someone hold your hand, stroke your arm, run their fingers through your hair. It’s a profound experience. Often, clients cry.”

• From “Being Single Is Hard”:

  But anyway, the part I actually find hard about being single is that I never get touched, and this is always overlooked and undervalued. This is where the myth of self sufficiency breaks down.

• Trashing Teens

• How does one discover their natural talent? How did you discover yours?

• maybe learning about a lot of econ concepts is a really good idea for young people:

  • price elasticity of demand: Price elasticity of demand
  • supply and demand
  • Overton window (not econ)
  • broken windows
  • ideological turning tests
  • make-work bias
  • ideas from thinking, fast and slow
  • LessWrong jargon (to some extent)

• some math concepts (like countability) might be useful as well

• P(HONY)

• Those Whom The Gods Love Grow Young: Some Notes on Wilde, Greece & Youth

• Another thing (HT Alex again): documenting everything can be really important. Part of this is to allow yourself to be stalkable (so it can lead to meeting more interesting people, providing value to them, and so forth), but also having access to a lot of the things you’ve done can remind you of all the amazing things you’ve done.

  Of course, it’s very easy to make fun of people who try to record things instead of “experiencing things”, e.g. people who just write about people instead of “going out in the real world”, or people who travel but only to take a bunch of photos. While this is a valid criticism, I do think that often it’s possible to do both without much trouble. Participating online, for instance, is one way to “naturally” record things as you do them (this is one reason I like content creation so much).

  Also, it can seem embarrassing to have a lot of your “stupid” things you do online to last, but consider that everyone else also does a lot of stupid things online. It might be good to use a pseudonym while young, or to post things in places where it’s easily privatable, but my suggestion would be to never permanently delete things.

• I like a comment by pjeby on altruism and comparing one’s beliefs and actions with those of people successful in some particular way.

  • Related: abundance and scarcity mindsets

• Why Not To Break Up With Friends

• Learn about keyhole solutions and purchasing offsets². Also think about how to get what you want in creative ways; in particular, watch out for situations like the following (by Katja Grace, quoted in Yvain’s “Diseased thinking: dissolving questions about disease”):

  …the situation reminds me of a pattern in similar cases I have noticed before. It goes like this. Some people make personal sacrifices, supposedly toward solving problems that don’t threaten them personally. They sort recycling, buy free range eggs, buy fair trade, campaign for wealth redistribution etc. Their actions are seen as virtuous. They see those who don’t join them as uncaring and immoral. A more efficient solution to the problem is suggested. It does not require personal sacrifice. People who have not previously sacrificed support it. Those who have previously sacrificed object on grounds that it is an excuse for people to get out of making the sacrifice. The supposed instrumental action, as the visible sign of caring, has become virtuous in its own right. Solving the problem effectively is an attack on the moral people.

• “Reinventing Explanation” by Michael Nielsen. Also “Striking user interfaces”.

• “The Moral High Ground of Free Trade” (HT Vipul). See also Isaac M. Morehouse’s comment, “Incentives matter. Market competition is a great civilizing force.”

• The Genius Famine: Why we need Geniuses, why they are dying out and why we need them by Edward Dutton and Bruce Charlton

• Spend some time reading through papers in Medical Hypotheses.

• From Industrial Society and Its Future (as published in Technological Slavery by Feral House).

  Page 44:

  The moral code of our society is so demanding that no one can think, feel and act in a completely moral way. For example, we are not supposed to hate anyone, yet almost everyone hates somebody at some time or other, whether he admits it to himself or not. Some people are so highly socialized that the attempt to think, feel and act morally imposes a severe burden on them. In order to avoid feelings of guilt, they continually have to deceive themselves about their own motives and find moral explanations for feelings and actions that in reality have a non-moral origin. We use the term “oversocialized” to describe such people.

  Page 48:

  We use the term “surrogate activity” to designate an activity that is directed toward an artificial goal that people set up for themselves merely in order to have some goal to work toward, or, let us say, merely for the sake of the “fulfillment” that they get from pursuing the goal.

• “The Bipolar Lisp Programmer”

• talk about: music, art, wasting time on internet, literature

• common human stuff

Backlinks

• some thoughts on college education
• vision statement
• education