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Building up your 'consciousness' muscle improves your optimism because the world is less scary to you. We're intimidated by big strong people in close quarters despite knowing that it's not a physical fight.

Being physically strong gives you a charisma and confidence around other people not because you're thinking "Oh yea I could beat any of these people up" but because it's a relief from the pressure from others.

Being 'consciously' strong means being disciplined. You know that even for something really difficult you can apply sustained effort of consciousness longer than most people. Even if you're not talented at it you know that you can apply 10 times the effort most people do.

Having something like 6 pack abs if a signal of this. It's rare enough that it's a high level signal of ability to achieve things. This signal is weakest for high school jocks but is every high signal for older men.

Being able to taste the differences in expensive wine is also a signal of this. Most people cannot applied micro-level consciousness to the extent of being able to tell apart wines. Peasants are defined by their lack of ability to be subtle.

So to summarize... learning things is like architecting a bridge for different types of terrain and gaps. Different tasks are different gaps. Knowledge is a 'solution' from an external source that teaches you how to pass a specific gap.

Knowledge is so useful because it can come in the form of "mental models". A mental model is like having gpt-3 embody a form of intelligence for you. You have have it spit our random conclusions for you to review.

It's like having a robot that can built bridges and also has a database of ALL solutions to ALL known gaps in ALL of history. Why learn any architecture when these robots can do everything? Why get a 6 pack of abs when we have guns?