Be Well Tuned

What's this?

It's is a very unusual guide to improving your brain and your life:

• No bullshit.

  • It doesn't waste your time. Information is given minimally in bullet points.

  • Each skill has clear results, with detailed information that lets you evaluate your progress. Pretty soon, you'll know it's real.

  • No religious or mystical connotations.

• Detailed causal models.

  • If you don't like the approach suggested by BWT, you can substitute your own ideas and get equivalent results.

  • You can also plot your own way though the skill tree. It isn't here to tell you what to do, but rather to give you new, empowering options to choose from.

• Fundamental level.

  • It's not another bundle of productivity advice, or a miscellany of life tips and tricks.

  • Rather, it's about tweaking the fundamental settings of your brain. If you get them precisely right, most other "life advice" will become unnecessary or effortless to apply.

• Assumes you can think.

  • The correct approach is probably to keep in mind at the same time that the instructions are broken, and also that there are profound insights that can be learned by trying to follow them.

  • Before you can learn something, you need to find it in yourself to admit that you don't already know it. You have been warned.

The skill tree

• Note 1: all the top-level skills have very, very strong effects. If you learn them, you will have no trace of doubt about whether they work, and about whether they have really improved your life.

  • Try to also apply this principle of clarity to all sub-skills that you will encounter on the way. Whenever you aren't sure that something is working, assume that it isn't and continue learning.

  • If you get stuck, bored, confused, or can't make the instructions work for any other reason, get in touch. Or even better, you could pre-register before starting!

• Note 2: do not fix with cognition what can be fixed with chemistry. Before anything else, your brain is a biological machine.

• Basic survival.

  • Tune Your Emotional Processing

    • Sub-skills:

      • Gendlin's Focusing

      • Pause Your Feedback Loops

    • Because nothing will get done if you don't show up for it.

  • Tune Your Cognitive Strategies

    • Sub-skills:

      • Track Reality With Beliefs

      • Upgrade Your Decision Theory

    • Because by default you'll spend your life repeating the same mistakes over and over.

• Doing it the smart way.

  • Tune Your Motor Cortex

    • Sub-skills:

      • Relax All Your Muscles

      • Sense Your Body with Extreme Clarity

        • Become Very Alert and Calm

    • Because no matter how many years you've spent not thinking about this, controlling muscles is still the main thing your brain does. If you get this right, magic happens.

  • Tune Your Ontology

    • Sub-skills:

      • Make Your Own Concepts

        • Compress Every Idea

      • Augment Your Memory

    • Because learning from experience can't take you all that far if you have wrong models. If you get this right, magic happens.