[miscellaneous]

Thank you for the detailed and interesting comment. I wish I could maintain my productivity for extended periods of time like you do. Unfortunately I find that my cognitive abilities drop-off very quickly when become tired.

Also you talk of an 'intelligence switch'. Could you explain what you mean by that?

[K0SM0S]

Sure. It might be quite long if I really explained in detail, though. I really need to write the book of that eventually. Here's the very incomplete gist of it.

The idea of an intelligence switch is basically a set of methods, a system, to train and foster the use of some "meta" forms of intelligence so to speak, whose primary purpose is to improve / enable / train intelligence itself. It's very much not a hack (efforts...) but does yield compound-like growth. It's very transdisciplinary in nature in that it does require exposing yourself to many fields and many mental frameworks or logics/models (the more, the better I suppose).

I guess you could say it's a framework for the languages of intelligences, whose output (UI) is conscious thought and effect is actual real-world skills (actions) or models (world views) — technical, mental, social, emotional, political etc. What an exquisitely cheesy yet accurate-enough metaphor.

It's pratically very comprehensive and probably sounds like "be great all-around with a super-trained brain" to most people, I'm afraid. Not quantum science though, elements and concepts are quite simple, but there's no shortcut to training each step.

If you want pointers you might recognize, there's the book "Mindset" by Carol Dweck (2008, iirc), and a certain branch of (very practical, down-to-earth) philosophy dating back to Ancient Stoics all the way to 20th century Stephen Covey (the famous "7 habits", at least one in particular), passing by Viktor Frankl ("3rd" school of psychoanalysis dubbed "logotherapy" from logos, speech).

You might have heard the quote: “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”

Well, the training/building of this "space" + a "growth" mindset, I argue, can take 80% of people at least halfway there (leaps and bounds further than whatever is/are current average intelligences, well enough to kickstart and reap massive further improvements over the next generations).

Knowledge of these methods and principles reminds me a lot of the Scientific Method for instance, hard at first to mold your brain with such rigor, but once internalized a formidable enabler of thought — at a civilizational scale. It's just vastly more general in scope than science or logic, and encompasses — by definition, not necessarily easily/always felt — all possible forms of intelligence, including meta-intelligence itself.

It's no secret either, most of it is out there for the taking, has been for decades, sometimes millennia; but there is so much noise and intox obfuscating.

[freshbagels]

I'd love to read a blog post/book explaining this in more detail.

I'm also interested in hearing more about the 'happiness switch', and how you trained yourself in your 20s to work for 12~16 hours a day.

[K0SM0S]

The training is a mix of: obsession, up to and beyond exhaustion; grit, driven by passion; a relatively 'fast' metabolism, fueled by food and naps. Nothing magic, bootcamp-style.

Basically, working your day thing (studies, work, obligations) then spending all your free time nerding on something. It progressively morphed from goofing around to learning with a professional mindset, building stuff.

It's important to pace yourself; it's a marathon on a daily basis. However in the long run, over the weeks, it's more like an agile sprint: you work a lot for some weeks or a few months at most, then relax, rinse and repeat.

____

The happiness switch

I've found there are fundamental functions in human beings that pretty much describe us entirely. It's a model, deduced from reality, which in turn helps me 'mold' my reality (i.e. aspects of my personality, how I choose to experience things).

This set of skills can be trained; it seems to be 'working' with anyone, but there are 'prerequisites'; exactly which is unclear (for now).

One of the by-products of this is a happiness switch: your emotions inevitably vary, but you are able to maintain your desired "global state" nonetheless. So you do feel sad sometimes, or angry etc.; but at the same time, it's only one aspect of you, one function, namely emotions are the "language of the body", it's just information. They shouldn't drive you, but inform your decisions, your choices. That's one thing you can train. This is where Shakespeare's famous quote takes its full meaning imho: “nothing good or bad but thinking makes it so.”

Emotions are energy though: all our functions produce some 'effect', which may be usable, alone or in combination with others — for instance, cognitively we know that emotions act as a catalyst for memory, to break out of 'RAM' into long-term knowledge. This is a bridge (a powerful one, it's called 'passion' in some cases, 'impression' in other contexts...) between emotions and thinking.

The main sources are Stoicism and/or comparable schools of thought (Zen notably, and a cross-slice of many religions, myths), some critically validated modern 'self-development', cognitive studies (psychology, neurology, etc., e.g. the "hexaco" model), and books/authors/ideas in-between that demonstrate the empirical/statistical 'truth' of some principles (those that endure the test of time, with success). Also a bunch of business/consulting literature that strongly validates ideas, if only empirically — plus autobiographies etc. The spirit of the general enterprise is to validate sources by who speaks — e.g. only take advice from those who succeeded at what you seek, preferably the greatest, including people you don't like — and validate ideas themselves by experience, by real-world application.

So while the endeavor might seem quite intellectual, it's only the tip of the iceberg, the small gate of knowledge — immediately after lies practice, lifelong mantras. That's actual philosophy, what the word meant until the turn of the 20th century: practical advice and repipes for a good living.