Improving your mental abilities

[Admin]

There is no shortage of people trying to get smarter but usually that does not actually work out. There is no shortage of people falling for "take these drugs to become smarter" which obviously isn't going to work out.

There are certainly ways in which you can improve your ability to make various decisions but unfortunately that tends to not generalize so it will often be rather specific and not carry over for other areas. You can for example get better at poker by playing it and learning from it (especially if you have access to special tools like GTO solvers), those skills you learn will to some extent also carry over to other areas even if it's rather limited.

 

[Admin]

Learning to utilize specialized areas of your brain
While you can always try to use your general logic ability to solve certain tasks said general ability is rather limited so you want to offload tasks to other areas that can handle that more efficiently.

You can for example utilize your visual intelligence to solve all sorts of problems that can be represented in 2D or 3D. By incorporation time you could even technically think in 4 dimensions but that's about as high as you can do with that.

This is similar to how you can use the GPU in a computer to take load of the CPU allowing it to run a lot faster because the GPU is has a lot more potential for brute-force calculations while the CPU is a lot more limited in that regard. Here however just like with the brain you are ultiminately limited by the underlying performance since even if you could offload more to the GPU doing so might not help since the GPU might become overloaded resulting in worse performance instead.

Interestingly people who don't consciously visualize tend to still be able to solve those problems by unconsciously doing those visual calculations.

 

[Admin]

Improving your underlying graphical intelligence
best way to improve your 3D abilities is probably to play first person video games with a limited field of view and not have the game include things like on-screen maps.

You could for example try to beat firewatch without using the map (i did that twice).

I did notice that i had trouble at first when i played metroid prime 3 but once i had gotten used to the first person view i very much liked it, since then however i never had any such problem with any game including ones that should be harder in that respect.

 

[Admin]

Disabling mental blocks
This is actually a bit dangerous since it will cause emotional distress at least initially for most people (as they realize how wrong they were) in addition to causing you to realize how people around you were wrong which causes social problems if you point that out to them.

For me that happened when i did crypto trading for a while and it caused me distress for years before i was able to get a handle of things and clean up the mess i had caused myself from earlier bad decisions.

 

[Creamer]

I think the biggest upgrade to one's mental abilities comes by becoming an atheist.
when you gain the skill to talk shit about Yahwah Allah and the tooth fairy, you unlock
critical thinking and a hunger for truth.

 

[Admin]

Improving your intuition and knowing when to rely on it
What people call "intuition" is simply the result of neural network calculations that are outside of our conscious awareness.This is obviously not fully reliable but it can still get to the right answer when more simplistic (and conscious) logical reasoning isn't going to work.

The way you improve your intuition is by practicing and getting experience, the more experience you get with something the more reliable your intuition will become.

In the case of No Limit Hold'Em there are solvers you can utilize to train yourself against (for GTO skills) in addition to the training you get from playing with other people (for exploitative strategies).

But when simple logical reasoning can be used (such as 1 move in chess letting your opponent checkmate your king) that can be trusted above any intuition you have. If you for example know that a gambling game is negative ev (like with the typical online casino) than any feeling you have that you are going to win should be discarded and you need to re-tune/retrain your intuition so it will arrive at the right conclusion.

 

[Admin]

When your intuition and simple logical reasoning is in conflict
If can be that there is something you are overlooking and that your gut feeling or whatever is picking up on something not being quite right (such as some deal seeming like a good idea at first).

But it can also be that you are simply lacking in training/experience causing you to get a feeling "this is a good idea" when it really isn't.

This actually happened with me with vintologi. I came across situations where i was like "this can't be right" but i couldn't logically explain why and it has been really hard to figure out what i was actually missing/overlooking.