After achieving my dream (ever since the speech Paul Graham gave to my Harvard freshman computer science class) of getting paid to program in Lisp, I shifted my focus to understanding the human brain well enough to figure out how to reprogram (and refactor) it. Tools and paradigms I’ve been excited about recently include Less Wrong-style rationality, Spaced Repetition Software, Internal Family Systems therapy, Nonviolent Communication, Transactional Analysis, hypnosis, and NLP.
I’m currently an SAT tutor for Advantage Testing, and a coach. Click here to schedule a session.
I live at Tortuga, an intentional community in Mountain View, which I discovered and ended up at through getting excited about seasteading, which I see as one of the most promising ways to change the world (along with what Singularity Institute does).
Some of the material I’ve internalized with SRS (as of March 2011):
- Mysterious Answers to Mysterious Questions
- A Human’s Guide to Words
- Nonviolent Communication
- Crucial Conversations
- How to Talk So Kids Will Listen and Listen So Kids Will Talk
- You Don’t Have to Take It Anymore (what I got from this was an emotional reconditioning technique I have found very useful)
- Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion (I’m maybe 1/4 through this)
- Self-Therapy (the steps of how to do it, and some other parts too)
- Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming
- Teach Like a Champion: 49 Techniques that Put Students on the Path to College (first category of techniques so far)
- a bunch of PUA material
- How to Flex Your Rights During Police Encounters
- Getting Things Done (just started this)
- Eat That Frog (about 10% of the book so far)
- about 100 of my favorite short passages from books (lots of overlap withthese)
- 100 Major System pegs
- hypnosis instructions
- the best advice I’ve gotten from other people
- the best advice I have for myself
- best practices for making SRS decks
- lots of stuff about facial expressions and body language
- some of David Deida‘s insights
The coolest change I’ve made so far with IFS was transforming a pattern of denying socially reality because I was afraid that seeing it for what it was would make most of my interactions seem empty into a growing capacity to read people.
I also improved my eyesight about one diopter in each eye by doing a bunch of things, including eating paleo, becoming more aware of the tension in my eyes by going in a sensory deprivation tank, and asking the “blurry part” to step aside. My eye doctor thought it sounded ridiculous and then told me to keep doing it once she saw that it worked.
I’ve also learned techniques for unblending from emotions and beliefs at will, so that I no longer identify with them and can examine them from an outside perspective. I’m sure I don’t use this ability often enough.
Crocker’s Rules and Draco’s Rules are in effect.