In which Malcolm tries things. Kind of like my old Habit-a-week project but instead some of these things could just be one-offs. This page represents part of an experiment to cause me to try more things.

Why? I’ll quote Dan Keys from the Center for Applied Rationality, analyzing a thousand people’s self-reports on how many times they tried things and how many new successful habits etc they adopted:

“Breaking down acquiring techniques into its two components, techniques tried and hit rate (techniques acquired divided by techniques tried) all of the effects discussed above involving acquiring techniques appear to be due to trying techniques, and not to the hit rate.”

— Practical Benefits of Rationality (LW Census Results) (Results, section III)

In short, the more new techniques you try, the more successful techniques you’ll learn.

I’m tracking the things I try by tweeting them with the hashtag #trythings, the feed of which is shown on the right. I’m also using beeminder (see graph below) to make sure I #trythings at least twice per week.