Top Posts

If you’re looking for the very best of mindlevelup, distilled and crystallized, check out mindlevelup: The Book.

Otherwise…

Here are what I consider some of my best blog posts (barring the stuff in The Book, of course). Either they introduce what I think are they key ideas in rationality, or they’re filled with concrete tips for self-improvement.

A Developmental Framework for Rationality is Kegan + rationality, int erms of the stages you go through (maybe) when thinking about rationality.

Instrumental Rationality: A summary of how rationality designed to be helpful goes into two-ish categories. Helpful for understanding how different skills all fall under the same category of “rationality”.

The Post-CFAR Series: A series of five essays that develop ideas I had after attending a Center for Applied Rationality workshop. Features a mix of practical advice and high-level philosophizing on the nature of rationality. (There’s a PDF compilation of all ~20 pages here: Post-CFAR Workshop Compilation.)

Recovering from Failure: Sometimes we’ll break promises to ourselves. This post is about picking yourself up and trying to understand exactly what went wrong.

Dichotomies: A look at how different distinctions can be interesting to ponder and what they lend to our discussion of productivity / winning at life.

The Ladder of Interventions: A list of different techniques in increasing order of strength.

Decision Theories in Real Life: Takes theoretical decision algorithms and tries to translate them into concrete, real-world examples. Results are mixed, but definitely food for thought.

Insight Porn: An overview of my thoughts towards media that focuses on delivering intellectual stimulation.  Explores how a shift back to normal-level actions are probably important.

In Defense of the Obvious: Arguments and intuitions for why “boring advice” tends to be the best advice. Obvious things are likely obvious because they are helpful low-hanging fruit advice.

My Workflow: A post that outlines things that I do which help keep myself “on-target”. Features pictures of my notebooks, goal sheets, timers, etc.

Living in the Moment: A collection of ideas that center around the idea of managing your internal mental state.  Offers concrete examples and suggestions.

Fighting Procrastination: Summarizes some basic research on procrastination.  Covers precommitment and a few other concepts in economics applied to fighting procrastination.

One Year Review: A summary of how my thoughts changed in 2016.

There is No Akrasia: As advertised.

(Updated as more things get posted.)