I went to Spark Weekend SF last weekend, a ‘lifehacking conference’. I had never been to a lifehacking conference, and expected it to maybe be a little bit fun, but a little bit hokey. It wasn’t hokey at all: it was pretty darn great, with high-quality people and really interesting content. Here’s what we talked about:
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Abe Gong, “Using Force Multipliers for Willpower”
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Abe is a data scientist focusing on wearables, and his message was the following: willpower is limited resource, and we don’t overcome our problems through sheer willpower, but rather by being smart about how we use it. And the smartest use of willpower is probably to spend it changing our environment, because the subconscious mind is shortsighted and ornery, but takes cues from the world around it. And very importantly: technology can help with all of this.
Abe’s vision of how tech can help: He talked about how he uses reminders to do things, that we can manufacture new habits, and even extend old habits (‘after brushing teeth, do X’), and more generally, integrating the question of ‘are you doing what you’re supposed to be doing?’ into our day.
Abe gave us all a task: change your environment in 3 ways to make yourself more productive.
Comments:
I’m hardly doing his talk justice- he had lots of good foundational thoughts and actionable advice. My favorite part was how, since willpower fluctuates throughout the day, we should use our high-willpower peaks (“temporary ability to do hard things”) to make small changes that help all day long. He didn’t have a technological “willpower killer app”, but he’s working on launching a new company, Metta Smartware. So maybe he’s got something up his sleeve.
One question I find myself wondering: what *is* willpower? This is not anything like a settled issue, judging by SSC’s recent post on the topic. Abe said it was nigh-impossible to increase it, and this seems to be consistent with the literature, but if we had a better understanding exactly how the willpower dynamic worked, could we do anything cool with that knowledge?
Abe’s conception of willpower: temporary opportunity to do hard things, a quantity that varies considerably throughout the day.
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Julia Galef, “Using Trigger Action Plans To Facilitate Change”
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Julia (of CFAR fame) started out with the ‘Parable of the Sphex’, a story about a really rigidly OCD insect that can’t change its habits even when it’s obvious the habit isn’t working. And, she says, we all are more like the Sphex than we realize: often we have trigger-response patterns that fail, badly, and we fail to change them. But we have the *capacity* to change them, unlike the poor Sphex, and changing habits with poor outcomes is an absolutely critical skill.
Julia talked about this in the context of ‘rewriting our code’ with trigger-action plans. These are of the form, ‘if X, then Y’ — overwrite a bad one with a good one. Now, Julia was very careful to say it’s not necessarily easy to do this: you’ve gotta be smart about how to build a new trigger, put effort into following the plan, and smart about debugging it when it breaks. Her bottom-line message: this stuff isn’t magic… but it does work, and is a critical skill for self-improvement.
Julia’s challenge: come up with one TAP (Trigger->Action Plan) that will help with some goal.
Comments:
Julia had a lot of good things to say, and I found myself agreeing with her advice and her attitude. Really a great speaker too, explaining a lot of dense stuff quickly and clearly (I think she does a lot of this with her organization, CFAR). Thinking about whether these techniques would work for me got me wondering:
I feel like belief in self-improvement / lifehacking methods is often a self-fulfilling prophecy: if you don’t believe they can work, they won’t, whereas if you believe in them, they can seem pretty easy, and I think it’s natural to sorta feel like people who aren’t doing them are just silly/lazy, and should just buckle down and do them and improve their lives. But belief is not as plastic as this! E.g., look at how sticky religious beliefs are, or the feeling of victimhood. We often don’t choose our beliefs, and even if they’re non-adaptive, mere self-fulfilling prophecies, or demonstrably false, they can be very durable.
So how do you get a person to viscerally believe lifehacks would work for them? I used to think lifehacks wouldn’t work for me, and they didn’t. Now, I think they sometimes can, and they sometimes do. How did I make this transition? I was talking with Will Eden about this, and mentioned my change in attitude probably came from hanging out with people I really really respected who really bought the concept of lifehacking. Over time, I slowly came around to the idea that no, it wasn’t just empty promises, and yes, it could work for me too. Our peer group really has a surprising amount of influence over our views— Will mentioned the saying, “You’re the average of the five people you spend the most time with,” and I think this might be a ‘hidden variable’ in a lot of lifehacking successes and failures.
Julia’s definition of a ‘Trigger-Action Plan” (TAP).
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Aubrey de Grey, “Attempting to Defeat Aging”
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Aubrey, a noted anti-aging researcher (whom I’ve heard speak quite a number of times now) opened with a contrast of infectious diseases vs. age-related diseases: medicine has been great at fixing the former, but absolutely terrible at fixing the latter.
Why? Aubrey says it’s because the way geriatric medicine thinks of age-related ‘diseases’ is all wrong. Aging is about accumulation of damage, and it’s unavoidable: metabolism leads to damage, damage leads to pathology. So these age-related diseases are just a side-effect of being alive. You can’t “cure” alzheimer’s or cancer the way you can malaria, because you can’t “cure” this genetic damage, only go in and fix it after it occurs.
He contrasts geriatric medicine with gerontology, which he says is better, but still bad, because it’s more focused on describing than intervention, and at best could only ‘slow down’ aging. Instead, he argues, we need a way to fix the damage— we can have old cars that function perfectly well a century after they were made— why not human bodies if we can give them periodic ‘tune-ups’?
Aubrey identifies seven types of damage, with options for repairing each. The argument is that if we fix all these seven things, we’ve effectively cured aging.
He finished with an exasperated plea: everybody he talks with seems entirely concerned with the sociological considerations of what could go wrong if we cured aging. He thinks we’re largely ignoring the sociological considerations of what could go *right* if we cured aging. Because aging really, really sucks!
Comments:
I think de Grey is absolutely right on most things, especially his most important message: aging sucks and isn’t a law of nature we can’t do anything about! But I think his understanding of damage is limited and he’s much too attached to his original list of seven types of damage (he was proud of not changing his original list after 14+ years of progress in the field, but to me this is a bit of a warning sign he’s not open to conceptual or factual revisions). One way his and my understanding diverge: he would never say we’re born with damage, a.k.a. genetic load, whereas I would.
So I think his list of 7 types of damage is both overly narrow (he doesn’t directly address inherited *or* accumulated DNA damage) yet also too pessimistic: genetic engineering techniques could not only fix multiple kinds of damage at once, but also improve a fundamental driver of aging, inherited ‘genetic spelling errors’. Still, one has to admire his dedication- I think it’s been a long, hard road for him to get as far as he has, soldiering on through (very often misguided) criticism after criticism, and I think his work has really moved peoples’ attitudes.
Aubrey’s action item: was to buy his book and/or give him lots of money for his research, which seemed a bit not-super-practically-useful-as-a-lifehack.
Aubrey’s “seven types of damage” that he thinks add up to aging.
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Mikey Siegel, “Transformative Technology: An Evolution of Medicine”
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Mikey, an engineer-turned-consciousness-hacker, opened with an observation and a question: “Happiness depends on more than external circumstances. What does it mean to be truly content?”
He talked about his experience at a meditation retreat, where he had a fundamental change in perspective: after countless hours of meditation, something just ‘clicked’ and he felt “okay-ness with everything”. The pain of cramped muscles, hunger, and whatnot were still there, but somehow not bad. And he thought: “We all have the capacity to feel this, regardless of circumstances.” And now he wants to help people reach that state with technology.
He spoke about how Enlightenment isn’t some special Buddhist thing, but rather part of being human. And so is suffering. Meditation is a technology we invented, some 3000 years ago, to optimize our mind-states…. and it works. The problem is that meditation more-or-less involves being ‘unplugged’ from technology, which is legitimately hard in many circumstances. But maybe it can be adapted to work with, not against, the trends and constraints of modern life.
So, his thesis: If you can quantify enlightenment, you can increase it. We can quantify it with current technology- so that means it’s ripe for hacking. He ended with various comments on fMRI studies and the tech he’s worked on.
Comments:
Mikey’s topic is near and dear to my heart. What is human flourishing? Can we measure it and optimize it? How can technology help? These are the right questions to ask. I am super glad he’s asking them.
However, I wonder if fMRI studies, brain region activity, and HeartMath’s tech are as good as they seem for understanding ‘how to measure enlightenment’: it often works, but will never give you a crisp understanding, and there are a million ways it can mislead. They’re pretty “leaky” abstractions. So I dig the first part of the message: let’s hack consciousness! But I’m leery of the second, that the paradigms we have available are a satisfying technical or philosophical basis for doing so. (I hope to put my money where my mouth is and publish something on this general topic soonish.) That said, a good implementation of a workable paradigm beats a non-existent implementation of a hypothetical perfect paradigm any day, and Mikey was working on some pretty amazing things last time I talked with him… things that I can’t wait to get my grubby paws on.
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Adam Bornstein, “Engineering The Alpha In You”
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Adam’s a fitness/diet guy- worked at Men’s Health, wrote some books, and is here to talk about diets.
First, diets are tough. Lots of people try them every year, and generally they fail. Mostly, they don’t fail because they’re weak: they fail because the common wisdom about how to think about losing weight is so completely wrong.
Actionable advice that’s not wrong:
– Cardio is 4x more popular for weightloss, but weight training is 2x more effective.
– All diets can work, but they differ in how sustainable they are! Don’t be a masochist. “If you love pasta, don’t go on the paleo diet.”
– “The pleasure from two cheeseburgers is equivalent to one orgasm” – your body needs that pleasure somehow, so have the orgasm instead of the cheeseburgers.
– Weightloss happens in chunks, not gradually. If your diet seems to plateau, keep going, give your body time to recalibrate its metabolism, and you’ll start losing weight again.
– “If you make it hard to fail, you will succeed.” Use positive reinforcement, one step at a time, form good habits (Eat More of the following at Each meal: protein of vegetables). And set realistic expectations.
– Carbs are probably not as evil as the low-carb/paleo crowd portrays them. Everything in moderation.
Comments:
Adam was a great speaker, even if his slides were a little haphazard. He made some comment about ‘all diets work equally, assuming equal macronutrient (carb/fat/protein) proportions’ that seemed odd to me, as the premise of the low-carb/paleo diets is that we eat too many carbs and should eat fewer. Still, his large themes and specific recommendations seemed pretty spot-on, and a lot smarter and wiser than the conventional wisdom. If I was a billionaire I’d hire him as my diet coach.
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James Norris, “Using Technology To Upgrade Yourself”
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James had a short talk to cap the more formal part of the day. His basic message: The ‘Limitless pill’ doesn’t exist, but 750+ lifehacking tools do, and they can do a lot of the same things, with the bonus of actually existing.
He listed, rapid-fire-style, some lifehacking tools he recommends (judged on efficacy, ease, and evidence):
Goals:
Coach.me – instant coaching for any goal.
Beeminder – they take your money if you don’t achieve your goals.
Mindbloom- they visualize your goals like a tree- if you fail it dies.
Stickk – a commitment tracker that takes your money if you fail, and either gives it to your choice of charity, or ‘anti-charity’ (organization you hate).
Food:
Mealsquares, Soylent, DIY Soylent – zero-effort nutritionally-complete(?) food-replacements.
Meal Snap – take a picture and it’ll tell you about your food.
Pre-made Paleo – a fully paleo meal shipped to your door.
Smart Body Analyzer – it tells you your weight…. and shares it on facebook.
Exercise:
7 Minute Workout, Stronglifts 5×5- apps that coach you through a workout.
Wearables – lots of options, find the one you like.
Sleep/energy:
Eye masks – wear them! They really work. [Mike’s note: this is something I’m definitely going to try.]
Sleep Genius, other sleep trackers – check the quality of your sleep.
Various options for a bright blue light that will increase alertness.
F.lux – leech the blue from your screen late at night. [Mike’s note: I think this really works.]
Mental well-being:
Headspace – guided meditation app
Muse – neurofeedback/mindfulness/basic rhythms hardware+app combo.
Cognitive:
Khan academy – offers a smart, step-by-step guide through learning complex topics.
Anki – digital flashcards.
Imperative – you enter what you like, it figures out what career might resonate with you.
80,000 hours – similar theme, but optimizes for social impact.
Mint – pay bills easily.
Betterment – investing made easy.
Levelmoney – it’ll watch your bank account and tell you when to stop spending.
Wealthminder – smart management for investments.
Rescue Time – an app that tells you exactly how much time you waste.
Maelstrom – inbox 0.
Dating:
Tinder, Ok cupid – relatively easy ways to meet people romantically.
Appearance:
Combatant Gentleman, Trunk Club – click-to-door shopping for people who hate shopping.
Spirituality: psilocybin, aka mushrooms.
And finally, James mentioned The Kit, a site for open research on lifehacks, and showed a short video from BJ Fogg (message: look at change as a design challenge, not a willpower challenge… and focus on successes, because small changes have ripple effects).
I got the impression that James was very, very invested in everybodys’ success, and you could just feel his genuineness. It was very cool. Though now I’ll live in fear of letting him down if I fail on my goals (50% joke).
Afterwards, we broke up into smaller groups, tasked with making 3 goals for the next 30 days. Of course, instead of doing this, I typed up this review. I know— I’m totally busted.