I want to point out that this question doesn't quite test for the right thing. One way an organization like CFAR can cause extreme life improvements is by encouraging participants to do extreme things generally in order to increase the variance of alumni outcomes after the workshops. That leads to potentially many extreme improvements but also potentially many extreme... disimprovements? And the latter are harder to notice because of survivorship bias. (There's also regression to the mean to watch out for: you expect the population of CFAR workshop attendees to be somewhat selected for having life problems and those could just randomly improve afterwards.)

I expect the main benefit of CFAR training should be that it improves median outcomes; that is, that it improves alumni ability to consistently win. But this is hard to test for by asking for anecdotes: it would be better to do statistics.

Within 3 months of attending a CFAR workshop I had left my job for one that I preferred and that paid 15% more. Within 6 months I had started exercising daily (previously once every few weeks), waking up consistently at 6am (previously varied anywhere from 8-10am), and eating significantly healthier (I also started eating vegetarian meals 2-3 times a week, previously 0). Independent of any of these concrete behaviors, I now have a very strong belief that I can intentionally construct/change my life and behavior in ways that will actually work.

Post hoc ergo propter hoc, etc. I have a fairly strong belief that attending a CFAR workshop and interacting with the alumni community has been at least partially causal in me improving my life, but I don't think any of what I've said constitutes good evidence of that claim.

The first time I read the sequences, they were earth-shattering revelations that upset my entire life. The second time I read them, I could only make it few a few posts, because everything they said was obvious. So one gain for me is that existential/religious questions no longer bother me. I got answers that satisfied me, and I've moved on with my life. I suppose you could argue that I could have found the same answers somewhere else, but honestly, I doubt it.

Another big change is how I argue with people. One of my favorite Less Wrong ideas is the Taboo a word sequence. I use this all time. Whenever I encounter some vague statement like "Freewill is nonsense" or "We should live in a more just society" or something like that, I taboo the word and try something else. I approach words differently. I don't know if this has improved my life, but I no longer feel as though I am incapable of expressing myself and my position.

I think I may be more rational. I know, without a doubt, that participating in LessWrong has caused me to self-identify as a rationalist, more than I would have if I had not come here. I feel that this self-identity is enriching and has made me a better person.

I try and do something I have never done before every other week. This habit was inspired and reinforced by Less Wrong. This has made me less afraid to do new things.

I often catch myself rationalizing. This didn't used to happen, I think.

I've installed various mental habits from my time on Less Wrong. My habit of trying to notice rationalization as it happens, in combination with the "Tsuyoku Naritai" attitude, led me to become much more serious about physical fitness. In the last fourteen months, I've gone from moderately overweight and sedentary to lean, fit, and strong, with a minimum of the motivation issues that had previously prevented me.

I've never attended CFAR and am not especially deeply involved with LW, so this may not really be the kind of example you're looking for.

Search "Rationality Diaries" on LW to see a huge archive of examples from recent years. (Those are places where users upload recent stories of victory from their lives.)

I worked as a neuroscience research assistant for 5 years. For the latter 3 of those years, I had wanted to leave that job and move on to something better, but had been unable to make a decision about what to pursue and to actually pursue it.

7 months after my first CFAR workshop, I started a new job making 25% more. There were other causal factors. Part of the motivation to do job searching was due to the fact that my research position would be ending, and part of the salary increase was due to the fact that I left academia. But I also credit CFAR training, including the follow-ups and the support I got from the community, as a significant cause of this success.

Other semi-quantifiable changes: -I keep a budget now. -I'm investing money for retirement each month. I was not investing any before. -I've learned 1.5 new programming languages, and have learned several new statistical analysis methods (consider that I was doing almost nothing in terms of job-relevant skill development prior to CFAR). -I've started a biweekly productivity meeting at my apartment (before I did not organize events other than the occasional party).

I've made many other changes in my life regarding habits, learning and practicing new things, and pushing the boundaries of my comfort zone. Perhaps the most important thing for me is that I no longer have the sense of being overwhelmed by life, or of there being large categories of things that I just can't do. I'd say this is mostly the result of a cascade of changes that occurred in my life due to attending CFAR. And to repeat what nbouscal said, I feel like I can change my life in ways that will both work and feel good.

You might be interested in the book Getting Things Done. It was written before smartphones and cloud syncing calendars but it can easily be adapted to To-Do lists and managing your life in the modern age.

A basic summary is thus: Every action you need to do but haven't yet done is an open loop in your mind. You have to keep thinking about it until you do it, and close the loop. However, lots of things can't be done except at specific times and places. You can maintain seperate to-do lists for things that can be done anywhere (Call a friend to schedule a movie, tie your shoe, etc.), and things that need you to be at your desk, at work, or at a grocery store. Storing all the myriad things that you need to do in life in your head is stressful and difficult to successfully accomplish. If you offload this information to contextual to-do lists, you can forget about the open loop and rely on your general system to remind you if it only if you can actually do something about it. This allows you focus on things you're doing in the moment, without worrying that you're forgetting a bunch of things you still need to do.

The phrase "Non-Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions" seems to be nearly unique despite being a straightforward perturbation of a pop culture reference.

I'd call it "Smart Answers to Stupid Questions Repository".

To your privacy concern, I'd say it's a non-issue. If you post in a thread like this, the assumption is that you're putting your post out in the open for The Entire World to read, link to, quote, rebut, etcetera (largely because this is, in fact, the case.)

Maybe too obvious but: Ask around. Ask your friends, family, acquaintances... Your personal network is a key factor to finding a job (especially if you're not picky about what job you want).

As for rounding out your CV, create a category called: skills. Skills your probably have: Fluent in MS Office, research (you're at university right now, no?), out-of-the-box thinking (you're on LW, after all, you'll be better than average at this), works well in team (if you did any sort of team sport or online game)...

If you can't come up with anything for the "skills" category, ask your friends and family. They should be able to help you out.

Coding + stats skills + some biology = the world is your oyster (pharma, research labs/institutes, postdocing if you aren't sick of academia yet, bio startups if you feel you can get invested in something again, etc). I am sorry you had a toxic experience in graduate school. I know this does not help, but I can tell you these are very common, especially in your field.

Just wanted to say good job for realizing the problem was probably with this job, not with you. You may find it helpful, motivationally, to talk to friends/acquaintances and ask them what they like best about their job, so that "a job that doesn't make you miserable" feels more achievable and you feel more hopeful/driven about pursuing it.

I say this b/c a friend of mine was miserable at his job, and I realized how miserable when I told one funny story about my workplace, and he wondered if he could work there, specifically, because I didn't seem unhappy. It was clear he didn't alieve that you could be less unhappy than he was (throwing up every day) at most jobs. In that state of mind, it's hard to get excited about applying!

Also, try to do nice things for yourself, generally. Being as unhappy as you sound in your job is kind of like having walking pneumonia -- it's a big energy drain on everything else you're doing. You may find it helpful to ask "What would I do to be kind to a friend who had walking pneumonia?" and then do those things for yourself. You'll wind up in a new job eventually, but, in the interim, you may want to make sure you treat the symptoms, as well as the root problem.

Ask your professors and school career services and fellow students what are some good non-academia career options. Most people who get a PhD in your field aren't going into academia, so where are they going?

Research Labs and Pharma/other medical companies (which I imagine are your major prospective employers), or some bio-oriented software companies will have wildly varying work environments. Do your best to choose one that seems to have a friendly, lower-pressure environment. Cultivate your life outside of work, and make friends inside. Save some money.

There's good odds that the professional world will treat you better and demand less than your PhD program.

Then figure out where you want to go from there.

Whether this feeling is irrational depends on what causes it. It makes sense to worry about a community you like becoming popular, since it means that an increasing number of people would join it, potentially reducing its quality.

(I'd be remiss if I didn't link this Mr. Money Mustache post on index funds that explains why they are a good idea)

To buy an index fund, you buy shares of a mutual fund. That mutual fund invests in every stock in the chosen index, balanced based on whatever criteria they choose. Each share of the mutual fund is worth a portion of the underlying investment. At no point do you own separate stocks - you own shares of the fund, instead.

Toy example: You have an index fund that invests in every stock listed on the New York Stock Exchange. The fund invests in $1,000,000 of stock split evenly among every stock on the NYSE, then issues a thousand shares of the fund itself. You buy one share. Your share is worth $1,000. You can sell your shares back to the fund and they will give you $1,000. Over the next year, some stocks go up and some stocks go down. The fund doesn't buy any more stock or sell any more shares. On average, the nominal value of the NYSE will go up by about 7%. The fund now owns $1,070,000 of stocks. Your one share is now worth $1,070.

The dividends go wherever you want them to. The one share of a thousand you bought above entitles you to 1/1000 of the dividends for the underlying stocks in the fund's entire investment. If you're smart, they go to buy more shares of the fund because compound interest will make you rich. You can have them disbursed to you as money you can exchange for good and services, though.

Investing in an index fund is very easy. You will pay by direct withdrawal from a bank account, so you will have to do something to confirm you own the account, but other than that it's like buying anything else online.

Index funds cover costs - which are low, because buying more stock and re-balancing existing stock can be done by a not-that-sophisticated computer program - by charging you a small percentage of your investment. This is reflected by your shares (and dividends) not being worth quite 100% of the fund's value. Index funds are good because they have a very low expense ratio. Many normal mutual funds charge upwards of 1% annually. A good index fund can charge about 0.20%-0.05%. That means you pay your fund about $20 for the privilege of making you about $700, every year.

Opinion time: I own shares in index funds. They are amazing. For a few hours work setting up an automatic transfer and filling out paperwork, I am slowly getting rich. I don't need the money any time this decade, so even if the market crashes tomorrow in a 2008-level event, overall the occasional 1990s-style rises cancel that out, leaving real growth at about 5% assuming you use any dividends to purchase more shares.

I will let you skip the next part of this process and recommend a specific fund: The Vanguard Total Stock Market Index, VTSMX. It invests in every stock listed on the NYSE and NASDAQ. If you have $10k invested in it, the expense ratio is a super-low 0.05, and American stocks are very broad and exposed to world conditions as a whole (this is good - you want to spread out your portfolio as much as possible to reduce risk). Go to vanguard.com , you can figure it out online.

I think I could talk about the minutiae of investing all day. It's fascinating. I should write that post about investing and the Singularity one day.

There are two typical ways to invest in an index fund, plus one way that isn't.

1. Buy a mutual fund that mimics the index you want to buy. You technically own shares in the mutual fund, which is an undivided right to a tiny percent of the whole pool. To get your money out, you have to redeem your shares, which happens at the fair market value. (It used to be that redemptions happened at fair market value at market closing price; I don't know if that is still true.) To fund redemptions, the fund has to keep some cash on hand, so some small percent of your money isn't actually invested. If you invest in mutual funds in a taxable account, the churn in fund holders' redemptions create trades that cause capital gains, which creates taxable income for the fund as a whole. It will be a small percent, but it will still be there (on top of taxation of any dividends). This is because the legal model applied to your investment is like you are a partner in a partnership, where you get an allocation of profits and losses that are separate from your receipt of cash.

2. Buy an exchange traded fund that mimics the index you want to buy. These are still mutual funds in operation. The main difference here is that the shares in the fund are themselves tradable. Theoretically, I think this means that the fund does not have to redeem as much, so it can hold much less cash. It would do redemptions if people were bailing out of the market generally, so that sellers outnumber buyers. But the issuer can essentially make money by arbitraging any difference, which means effectively redemptions pay for themselves. Being exchange traded means that the mutual funds have to make some additional SEC filings, but these have become routine once EFT's became popular, and the costs are spread over a truly vast number of people. The other main difference is that you only pay taxes on capital gains when you sell your ETF shares. That is because the legal model treats an ETF like an investment in a corporation, where the corporation's profits and losses are not attributed to you, and you only get something when you get cash.

3. You can also buy all the shares yourself, which is something called a "synthetic" fund sometimes in rarefied circles. It eliminates all of the potential capital gains taxes until you sell the underlying assets, but it means that you have to buy a set of shares that would be really expensive and only comes in oddly sized chunks. For example, if you want to buy the stocks in the Dow Jones, that is 30 different stocks, any you would have to buy one of each. That might cost you $1,531.72. Who wants to buy investments at a price of $1,531.72 per unit? What do you do if you have $1,500 or $1,600?That is why ETF's are so attractive. They get all of the convenience of the mutual fund, the capital gains tax treatment of owning shares directly. Index funds, whether regular mutual funds or exchange traded funds, also have the benefit of spreading fixed costs over huge numbers of people, so the expenses are usually very low.

/r/sex is pretty good

how can it be that it matters if the amount of positive value and negative value in the universe is infinite.

Not sure if infinities really exist. Pretty sure it's important to not be a dick.

In math, "measure" is a way of assigning a "volume" (or length, area, probability) to infinite sets. The "cardinality" of the set of numbers between 0 and 1 is the same infinity as that of the set of numbers between 0 and 2, but the standard "measure" of the latter set is twice as big. You can sum up certain types of functions defined on a continuum by "integrating" those functions values using the appropriate measure.

If there turns out to be a continuum of possible universes created by, say, a particle decay, then there's also a natural physical measure that corresponds to the probabilities we observe; the set of universes in which the particle decays before 1 half-life would be "twice as big" in some sense as the set of universes created in which the decay occurs between one half-life and two half-lifes. If someone offers to do something for you if-and-only-if a particle decays before one half life elapses, you should figure out the expected utility of a 50-50 bet, even if the reality might be that your decision is affecting two different infinities of subsequent universes.

There's a lot I'm glossing over and/or don't understand myself here (why is the probability measure the only ethical measure? lots of different-but-self-consistent measures can always be mathematically well-defined) but hopefully that at least explains the vocabulary a bit.