Ideas I’d Like To Work On

BETTER THOUGHTS

Why not train our thoughts as we train our muscles? Cognitive Behavioral Therapy has been used successfully to mitigate depression and affirmations are used to encourage success of sorts, but why not apply thought training more generally? We can indeed choose our thought patterns if we make conscious effort. Although it’s possible expert thought processes rely on explicit knowledge, I bet that many categories of thought processes – for a variety of categories of activities (including leadership, task management and completion, sports, stock trading) – could be explicitly excavated into flow charts, and people could train. See http://zacharyburt.com/2011/04/i-know-kung-fu/ for more details.

BITCOIN

I am tremendously excited by this weird new digital currency. My intuition is screaming at me to get in on it. I’ve been right a lot, but it could be survivorship bias. I am thinking of putting at least $1000 USD of my own into Bitcoin, but there are also vast startup business opportunities here.

KHAN ACADEMY FOR X

People do not like to think. People like steps and they like being told what to do. What if a variety of skills could be taught and quizzed in a procedural format?
I’m thinking of going through the KA lectures and studying them anyway.

DIGITAL HAPPINESS

Maybe you could think of this as a subset of KAforX. What are the problems people have – how can you solve them? What are the things that make people happier – how can you provide them with them?

SELF EXPRESSION MEETS DATING

I have a humble intuition that Facebook has failed where MySpace once succeeded: enabling self-expression. How can we map self-expression in all of its forms (social; memetic; energetic… ) and how does it relate to dating?

FRIEND FINDER

It’s a lonely world but it’s possible to meet up with like minded people. It’s just largely a hit or miss process and it’s governed by chance. There are inherent problems with this; like, if someone is looking for a friend, it’s kind of a turn-off. But it needs to be done. I would use principles from Click to govern its creation: principally, quantity of commonalities is more important than quality of commonalities.



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  • http://website-in-a-weekend.net/ Dave Doolin

    In my personal, non-politically correct and totally uninformed opinion, should anyone care to ask, MySpace has a lot of room to grow by simply being everything Facebook is not.

    Because Facebook, you know, it feels kind of stuffy to me. Restrictive. Confining.

  • http://mkeblx.net/ mkeblx

    A Khan Academy where you pay for lessons with Bitcoin.

  • http://blog.inquirylabs.com/ Duane Johnson

    Zach, I have something to add to the friend finder idea (oh, but before I do, go with your intuition on bitcoin, I think the ways they can be used and the experimentation to be done in this new economy are far more valuable than any loss you will incur from possible devaluation). Ok, friend finder… we are influenced heavily by our peer group, perhaps more than we even are willing to believe. And when I say peer group, I don’t even necessarily mean our real friends–we construct a version of our friends in our minds. So it is what we believe our friends are. This peer group gives us a sample from which to compare ourselves… (I’m kind of lazy, but not as lazy as Mike… It’s ok to wind down this weekend, kick back a bit, that’s what my friends do and it serves them well… etc.) But often, as you pointed out, our peer groups are an accident… not only are they few, but they are not even a Simple Random Sample! :) In other words, there is a great deal of bias necessarily embedded in our peer group that we might not even be aware of. Ok, so tieing this together with self improvement and “better thoughts”… what if we had a Facebook for improvers? In other words, what if we could get a little help in the accident of our friend choices such that the median socio-economic status (or some other valuable metric) of our friends was orchestrated to help us improve our own status?

  • http://www.zacharyburt.com/ Zachary Burt

    yes – totally – very insightful, that “we construct a version of our friends in our minds” i agree 100%
    this has caused me a lot of strife

    let’s keep thinking about this

    is it better to have friends who are slightly below – so we can feel superior? [probably better for happiness..]
    or slightly above – so we can improve ourselves by forcing ourselves to be lifted up to their level, in order to keep pace and fit in?

  • Anonymous

    Hi Zachary,
    try http://smood.it about digital happiness and let me know what do you think about it!

  • http://www.zacharyburt.com/ Zachary Burt

    oh, very cool… i signed up for an invite

  • Anonymous

    wow, cool! superfast!

  • http://blog.inquirylabs.com/ Duane Johnson

    Great question–”is it better to have friends who are slightly below… or
    slightly above”. I’m sure this has been studied in social psychology
    before… I will ask some of my friends (who are psychologists) about this
    :) The question seems to be something like, “What factors pertaining to a
    peer group most influence an individual to attain to higher levels of
    success, happiness in life?” If the answer includes any clear measurables,
    we could include them as part of a peer-finding network.

  • Anonymous

    I would say it’s better to be with people slightly above because you’ll be growing as you get pulled up by these people – even if it means hustling and feeling a bit inferior at times. Growth / progress is essential to happiness. When you’re with people you’re “above” you’ll feel slightly bored and stagnate because every time you try to go bigger, you get dragged down by your peers.

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