World Improvement Plan: Mind Exaltation

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So, now that I discontinue my mathematics and physics studies, what comes next? Looks like I need to come up with some good plan how to improve the world, and still earn some money to fulfill my demands. After some minutes of thinking about how to name my approach, I came up with the name Mind Exaltation, which neatly summarizes what I want to do. To improve the world, we need to improve our minds. In the posts “Capability Criticality: We Are Just As Good, Benevolent and Rational As Our Skills Permit.” and “Capability Augmentation Will Solve All Our Problems!” I’ve explained why it is so important to improve our minds: It enables us to get better in any sense.

The Mind Exaltation plan involves two projects: Radivis.com and the personal development site project, which has no fixed name yet. On Radivis.com I present my science fiction stories and the philosophical concepts that are exemplified in those stories. On the personal development site I will present articles, like those long ones which I presented here on deathrant.net during the last month.

Radivis.com
That site is for my science fiction stories and the philosophical ideas behind it. Currently it’s just a blog with some quite unfinished stories, but it would be no problem for me to add a forum and a wiki. Currently I’m working on Exaltation Dominance, which is a story about a rapid and radical total transformation of our world. Exaltation Dominance is a bit crazy, but it’s based on a relatively simple underlying idea. If you really want to know it, just contact me directly and I will tell you more.

Now, that I decided to spend much more time on that project, I installed some programs which help me to handle the project more effectively:

• Storybook is a software for organizing the plot, scenes, characters, location and ideas.
• LyX is a LaTeX-based document processor which offers high-level typography.
• Jutoh is for making ebooks.

All these programs are freeware (at least in the basic version) and available for various operating systems. Up to now, I just used Google Docs (and Google Wave before that) to write my stories. That had the advantage that my stories were in the cloud, but I didn’t really make a lot use of that advantage.

How do those stories improve the world?
Look, the basic ideas are these:

• Visionary Inspiration: I write about interesting future scenarios and hope that readers think “Oh, cool, I’ll do/create something like that in real life.”
• Mind Expansion: When I first came across the ideas in my stories they really freaked me out! But now I am relatively comfortable with them. In any case, they killed some parts of my naivety and changed my view on the world around me. If you read my stories the same could happen to you.

At least my stories come down to being thought provoking stuff. As a newly self-proclaimed writer one of my first priorities is to improve my writing skills. Does anyone have a good suggestion where I can get them from?

Personal Development Site Project
My dramatic recent progress, the realization of Capability Criticality, and some inspiration from various blogs convinced me that it would be an awesome project to make a personal development site which explains all the techniques I used to make that progress and more. But what would make my site different than other personal development blogs?

• My site would have a basis in some of my philosophical ideas. Philosophy does have some nice applications to personal development – just ask the Stoics.
• I like to approach the problem in a more systematic fashion. Currently I use some kind of self-management system to keep me productive and balanced. Also, I want to put some emphasis on methods which are empirically shown to work – in the sense that studies or quantitative personal experiments have shown that they were effective.
• Science is the way to go. Readers are encouraged to become DIY personal development scientists who can make private experiments and apply the scientific method directly.
• Gamification (there’s a blog about that) and quantification are used as central elements.
• As transhumanist I try using the best technologies to get the best possible results.

I think those are enough good reasons for adding another great personal development to the bloggosphere.

The details of branding and the technical implementation of the project aren’t completely determined, yet. I have used this blog as training platform over the last weeks, which explains some of the recent changes. So, I will probably stick to WordPress, as it is usually considered as one of the best solutions. And since I also use WordPress for Radivis.com, it would add to the consistency of my projects.

Need Feedback!
If you want to support me, and help me to build a really good site, you can already start writing some comments about what you like about my recent posts and what could be improved. Even if I am not a complete beginner, I am not a pro blogger, yet. If you notice something that’s rather wrong here, please feel free to point it out. Thanks! You are also encouraged to voice specific wishes what you want to read about. Certainly, I’m not running out of ideas, but getting more good ideas never hurts (if you know how to manage them, that is).