Dragallur

@Azrael Amazing, thanks for sharing! Can you please outline what amount of meditation, self-inquiry and other type of formal practises you did? Did you have some strict schedule of 1 hour of SDS and self-inquiry every day? What was their role?

@Leo Gura It sounds like a reasonable decision. Also thanks for leaving the thread open for any input from us!

253rd day: Time is here It is time to finally write here something right? McKenna I am reading the third book of Jed McKenna. It is great, I was considering to shorten my time on meditation, he kinds of rants against it. Right now I am doing mix of spiritual autolysis and self-inquiry. It is quite interesting, I have couple of pages of basically garbage, I found out that when you write with closed eyes you get much better connected with what you are writing. Enlightenment vs Human Adulthood In the books he mentions how he would not advice anybody enlightenment except those people that have to (which are usually highly depressed people ) and that he would advice human adulthood and that that is exactly what everybody actually wants, because so many people are looking for happiness, love and so on in enlightenment but you will find that in human adulthood. I have not encountered some rigorous definition yet but basically everybody is a child but you can wake up still in the dream and become an adult (enlightenment is waking up from the dream). Sports I have been hiking somewhat and riding a bike so that was nice though I should probably go out running again or something like that. I had my last lesson of yoga here and now I am on my own. I should push the challenge a bit better. Dragallur

@JKG Just a note, Notice that the decision if you go with what your father tells you vs doing math is not only about the situation and about the one decision, it has bigger context. Also it might easily happen that you need both skills and the decision is more of, what you want to learn in school and what alone.

I think you are making the habit of new experience/czc too easy for yourself. There will be everyday something bit out of normal day life and then you can just write it down without trying something actually hard/new.

@Dodo Yes I have met someone, its definitely worth it! So likeminded people are usually not in your everyday life.

That is actually quite cool field. I would recommend books like Thinking Fast and Slow (well that is not really about statistics but I wonder when it will apear on Leo's list). From what I have heard scientists often underestimate this field though you need it every single time you interpret some data.

@Visitor Even in theory it does not work. Pi is still smaller number than 4 which also means that it is finitely big and there is no infinite circumference, that is what I am trying to show you. I think you are using the word infinite for a length instead of number of digits.

@VisitorJust because there is infinite digits does not mean anything weird has to happen in real world. How would it not meet its beginning? If you draw a perfect circle Universe does not care about how you write down its circumference, it will simply be a circle. 1 x pi = pi .. thats it there is nothing really special about that.

@Gabriel Antonio Are you asking existential question or a normal one?

What, no! Where did you come up with that? If the diamater of circle is 1 then the circumference is exactly pi, but pi is not infinite number, it only has infinite many of digits after decimal point.

Oh do not worry about that! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P_versus_NP_problem

@Sevi alright, i am not planning any length but i will join on the 4th. Probably only advice, be prepared that its going to be long, like extremely. You will think that its eternity after half of the time, push through and you can do it!

@Sevi Were you trying to finish it in one session without changing postures? Why exactly did you quit?

247th day: Stuff Azrael from this forum has amazing posts, I really like his insights. My exchange year is almost over. When I return back I will make a huge post on the forum about it. Also grades in school are mostly closed which makes me quite happy. I have moments where I do not know what the hell am I doing here. Its weird but then next moments I am back in monkey mind and creating stories. In the last days I have done a lot of math and physics. It was lot of fun and yesterday I noticed that new year of one contest is starting. If I am able to get 50% from all problems across the whole year I wont need to do any test for the University! I already finished first problem related to astrophysics and now I am working on a bit harder one about mechanics. Its too late uhh.. Dragallur

@JKG There are so many "little" programs that you could learn through. Lets say, programming AI capable of playing first simple Tic-Tac-Toe (TTT) than TTT on 10x10 surface or even AI that would learn the optimal tactics in simple TTT.

241nd day: Challenge (64 days) I did not train so much in the last days because I was away over the weekend. I can almost touch with whole palms the floor. Weekend I was at a seminar with YFU which means other exchange students. It was great though I did not get my options for eating.. mostly bread. I socialized quite a lot though I always miss some point it seems when everybody is already talking in their groups and I am like alone standing there. In the end I talked quite a lot with some girls from China and Japan and later with guy from USA and a bit with another one from USA who also likes astrophysics. It was interesting, you can tell that some of the people are quite cool. There were lot of smokers too, that surprised me. When I drove back home I saw in train a guy who was sitting cross-legged and had headphones. He ended the meditation and I just liked that decided to sit with him and we talked a bit. He was doing mindfulness and he studies applied ethics, cool. Sadly he did not know Leo whom I mentioned. School We are doing less and less. Tommorrow I am writing last test I think. Its from history which is hardest with German but I like that its only for 45 minutes. This week I have to read quite thicker book than usually so I will do that in the breaks. Dragallur

You rock! I was going to tell you to start acting upon your list as soon as possible but apparently you were faster, great job.. personally I would actually explain it instead of using story but the decision is yours!

@Gabriel Antonio The video is originally from Jana

This reminds me of Harry Potter and Methods of Rationality. There very smart Harry had similar problems when he was younger. All the kids in competitions beated him, but in the end they would become adults who would talk about how smart they were when they were younger. He on the other hand knew about rationality and in the field itself had huge advantage.

@JKG @Huz About the arrogance... Its an extremely valid point. Once you start to think that you are becoming better than other people that do the stuff you might have as well just fucked up. Most people have the option to compare themselves only between small spectrum of people, like school lets say. In my opinion high school does not show much about how good you are at subject as they are not able to test many things that person needs to be lets say, great mathematician. Mathematics is not about learning and applying procedures on some problems in high school text book. For me it happened exactly the other way around. Firstly I happened to be friend with a boy of my age who is basically one of the best in physics in the whole Czech Republic (considering a physics contest and some other things), he certainly seems to have values that would help him even outside of this stereotypical high school physics. I realised after finding out how way above he is that I am just cooking my own soup without looking on the other people. Here in Germany they praise me as somebody who is amazing in mathematics and physics and always ask me advice, its completely pathetic because I know that I am just a person that got a bit of interest in it but have not done the real work... and yet there would be more humbling appreciated. This does not mean that you can not create a great AI unless you are the best (which you might be), I think that it is a false assumption.

@Alex K I think she already has few years, it would be boring to write it down and just increase the number all the time!

235th day: CZC Sometimes on wednesdays I go and meet with some refugees who are learning german. It was too easy for me but in the church building there are some people of my age who are playing game and speaking to each other and so on. I came with bike which was like 9 km or so. I was extremely sweating because it was warm which made me a bit uncomfortable infront of the people but then I was not very close to anybody. Introduction was kind of weird, I should start by saying my name. They first started by everybody saying what has been happening the last few days. I said that I wrote a test and I did not understand a part but that I did well in my math test, other people were saying something similar about grades. Then they prayed and thanked God for sunshine and that they could meet together, I knew they believe in God so it did not surprise me. I decided to not do anything. In USA they say when the school begins kind of oath to America and I never wanted to say that in a way but there you simply have to. I decided that I do not need to do it with them. Everybody had closed eyes except me, two people opened them probably because they were interested about what I was doing. Then they played a movie about evolution, all of them are probably creationists there. The video was so dumb. After it I pointed out few things but, uhh, the guy kind of ignored me and then I decided to say no more. I realised that they created a bubble where they reinforce their cherished believe. It was so sad and I know that (unless somebody secretly was not going with them) they were so far away from realising how much brainwashed they were and probably none of them will ever realise it. When you know what to look for in this type of videos you immediately realise how much it is made just to persuade you with bunch of straw man arguments. This whole thing of course says a lot about me and that is great. I at all do not regret going there and maybe will next time too. It reminds me of DarkMatter2525's video called God's God, its amazing. Dragallur

@JKGIt might help you to learn also about cognitive science. Check out about AI some projects like Deep Blue, AI that is learning by itself. Also terms like AI singularity and Human-friendly AI.. those things might get you interested and you might get better sense of what you want. There is a lot of potential in AI that is learning by itself and it might be the future of humankind. Search about AI that is able to create music or write poems, learn how it works.

234th day: Challenge (71 days) I can hold my fingers way further down. It feels good. Head is about 7-12 centimeters above knees, I am better when sitting down. I need to use chairs for side split, not that I would be so good but its simply otherwise difficult to practice it. CZC I did not do anything in particular though I realised how many people greet me back when I run for example, not other teenagers though. I realised that there are some challenges that are simply "kill level" some things that would be best for hard core nightmare. Math I am just practicing some math. In today's test I got 97/100 points. I lost the three because I did not provide sufficient explanation, thats important too. I am wondering what will happen when I return to Czech and we learn what I already learned here or in Khan Academy. I guess I will have to bringing my own work. In this sense there is nowhere to run because school will at some point provide the stuff especially if I want to go to University to study physics. I stopped watching all Khan Academy videos because I can do it a bit faster. I focus more on practising and moving onwards. I also really like to write on paper the symbol for integral, its so elegant! My papers where I do math and physics are quite full but I do not want to use new ones so I will continue to just fill them up, I like to do it if I first write with pencil and then with pen I can basically make two layers, thats cool. Diabolo I improved quite a lot. I can start vertax now and I even started to learn tricks like: infinite suicide or genocide. Its fun just to go out that do that for half an hour. Running I was running out again today. I was a bit slower than yesterday but I found out nice way where I can run on grass (not so bad for knees). Repeating thoughts Today thanks to @JKG and her very brave idea () I realised something about my pattern of thoughts. It started with me getting to know rationality and also as I later realised, with something me and my sister were doing. Every time when it was some "nice" time like: 11:11 or 12:34 she would say "Wish something its eleven eleven". I did that for fun and then after some time I realised that my wishes are limited and that I do not think big enough.. I wished for something small to happen that was in my mind at that moment. Then the only wish that I started to use was "I wish for universal peace". Now this way of thinking is stuck with me and might blind me to other perspectives (as always). For example when I wonder what would be the perfect day I take it to extremes and say that in that day everybody would get enlightened and there would be no wars etc. The thing is though that I wish this only in the "rational way" and not really listening to what I would want even if it would something smaller. Also there is lot of showing off included which makes it less authentic. Dragallur