Notes for a speech held just after I left the Benton House and headed back to Finland.

I think the Visiting Fellows program has made a lot of progress during the time that I've been here. In a way, I'm sad to leave now that the program seems to really be getting its act together. I think this has partially been because of Jasen and Louie taking over Anna's responsibilities and giving her the energy to do all kinds of neat stuff. Having more kinds of group stuff, be it grant-writing or frequent rationality training sessions, is awesome. Partially it's also because we have a lot more energetic people now, doing various projects of all kinds.

In many regards, I think that the last month of my stay has been the one that I've gotten the most out of. On my first month, I was generally disoriented and trying to find something meaningful to do here. On my second month, working with Eliezer was for some reason draining most of my energy. It was during this last month that I've began actually feeling productive and useful, doing things like trying to write a Less Wrong post a day for a week. Which I admittedly haven't pulled off yet, but I have gotten pretty close on a few times.

During the early parts of my stay, I wondered whether coming here had been a good idea. Now I can honestly say that I'm glad that I came, due to lots of reasons. I'll start with the mundane ones. This was the first time that I traveled abroad for an extended period of time, and lived in a house that I shared with like fifteen people. I feel like that was a valuable experience, even though I can't precisely articulate the effects. I've learnt a lot about SIAI and how it functions. Also, being separated from many of my close friends for such an extended period of time forced me to cope with it. While I've been here, I've been making a lot of progress in taking control of emotions. Part of that was the fact that I felt so miserable that I just had to do it, part of it was due to listening Michael Vassar's various talks, part of it was due to reading books like the Happiness Hypothesis and Feeling Good that were floating around here, part of it was due to Alicorn's writings on the topic, and part of it has been helped by the habit card thing. Part of it was just the general atmosphere of wanting to become stronger.

I made a post on Less Wrong yesterday, about having a rationalist identity. I had one even before coming here, but here it has been made more concrete. I've done calibration exercises, made an effort to develop the art of rationality by writing good Less Wrong posts, lived with people who actually and genuinely cared about this thing. I think that where rationality was previously a kind of passive part of my being, the stay here has helped towards ingraining an active rationality into my thought patterns. It's not just a warning flag that's raised when I encounter or notice incoherent thought, anymore. It's a force that makes me more actively seek exploitable patterns and helps see through the layers of deception that have been woven into society. We should be capable of hacking pretty much anything, if we just put our minds to it.

Lastly, I've made lots of friends. Now, that's the kind of cliche you'd expect to hear from anyone making a departure speech, but I don't know if you realize how significant that actually is to me. When I realized that I had actually made lots of friends here, a few days back, I was genuinely surprised. It's usually been really hard for me to get close to people, and while I've had lots of acquintances, I have had only a few friends. Here, being friends has been something that's happened pretty much automatically and without needing any effort. I'd like to say a few brief words about everyone.

[a few brief words about everyone]

If any of you ever come to Finland for some reason, meet up with me. I'd welcome any one of you as a guest. If I ever get back to visiting the United States, I'll definitely try to find you guys. But if neither of those happens, I'll see you after the Singularity.

Long time, no update. As I write this, there are only about two and a half weeks left of my stay.

I kinda wish I'd have been updating more often. A lot of my early posts are somewhat negative in tone, and so a person reading through the posts might get the impression that this has been primarily a negative experience. And for a while it was like that, but that time seems like it's in the distant past by now. Heck, I have difficulty even really remembering that time properly anymore.

I do still look forward to getting home and seeing all my friends again, but I don't feel horrendous homesickness like I used to. Part of it is simply getting used to being here, part of it is an active effort to reprogram my thoughts by interrupting any negative ones, and part of it is simply the fact that I won't be here for that much longer anymore. I do feel that my virtue ethical conversion has, unlike many other "big changes" in the past, really had a lasting effect on me. That hasn't been the only component, though. Another was reading a book about cognitive behavioral therapy that emphasized the effect that simply changing your thoughts will have on your behavior. A third has been the attitude around here that everything can be hacked, including your own emotions. I did previously kind of think that, but I hadn't fully internalized it: I would simply accept many of my emotional shifts or hang-ups as something that just needs to be lived with. I still need the occasional reminder, but in general I don't just passively accept bad moods anymore. As my elephant learns this new mode of thought, it will hopefully become automatic over time.

To mention an example of a more active approach, there was Burning Man Precompression party in San Fransisco last weekend. Now, I've usually been bad at making small talk, as well as approaching strangers in the first place. This time around, though, I consciously made it a goal to train my elephant some new habits, so I decided I'd strike up ten conversations with different strangers during that evening. And it worked great, I had several pleasant albeit short discussions with various people. Had I not started to really internalize the attitude that my brain is mine to twist to my will, I don't think I would have done that.

(That was quite an event, by the way. I almost didn't get in, because I was "smart" enough to leave my wallet back at the house to make sure it didn't get stolen. Only problem being, my ID was in the wallet, and the event had an age limit of 21. Ooops. I spent about an hour standing outside and waiting with Justin, until Sean McCabe showed up. His iPhone could display relatively high-resolution pictures, so Dennis took pictures of my passport and sent them to Sean. Those were good enough for the security guard, who then let me in. Among other things, the party had a pair of scantily-dressed girls, and what few clothes they did have had NASA's logos on them. I also saw a guy who seemed to be wearing nothing but shoes, faerie wings, and a condom. Everyone there was really friendly, too. Great party.)

A lot of things have been happening in the house. Previously, I mentioned a point system that I said I would talk more about later on. Well, updating so rarely kinda killed the point of saying much about the point system. It was basically an experiment we had going on for a month. People could earn various amounts of points by doing things such as writing papers, keeping in touch with SIAI contacts, doing the dishes or having conversations that the others thought were valuable to them. The idea was that if people wanted to stick around at the house for longer than three months, they'd become "continuing fellows" who'd need to earn 5,000 points in the first six months of their stay and 9,000 points every six months thereafter. (I found this system to lift my mood for a while, since me working with Eliezer gave me more than enough points to clearly mark my stay as valuable.)

That system isn't really in effect anymore, though. Around the beginning of this month, there was a reorganization in the way the house in run. Anna, who'd been rather overworked and would have preferred to do more research anyway, stepped down from the position of being in charge of the house. That task was taken up Jasen (who originally arrived here only one day after me!) as well as Louie. At the same time as that decision was made official, it was also announced that any decisions about whether or not to let fellows remain for extended periods would be made by the SIAI board. After that change, the point system lost its purpose.

I think I also mentioned daily e-mails as well as daily 10-minute meetings with Anna before. Both of those are pretty much gone. The 10-minute meetings stopped partially because Anna was busy, partially because people had a feeling that they weren't getting that much value out of them. (I wonder if we should resume something like it, though.) The daily e-mails have been replaced with a log of our doings that we keep at an internal wiki-like site. That one works better in practice than the daily e-mails did, since you can edit in several days' worth of doings at once. If you don't keep your log recent, Jasen will come and glare at you until you do.

The whole Visiting Fellows program is also becoming more focused now. Turns out I shouldn't have worried so much about producing things in the first month I was here, for the main purpose of the program is for people to learn rationality and useful skills that they can put to use in life. Of course, actually doing stuff is often the best way to learn things, but things are done more for the sake of learning than for the sake of doing alone. For that purpose, we are now trying to have daily discussions about rationality topics. Anna also talked to me a few hours back and said that we'd start doing more tutoring. She asked me both whether I thought I had skills I could tutor people here in, and whether I had any skills I wanted tutoring in from specific people. (I couldn't think of anything, so she said she'd just make up something and I could change it after finding out how much I hated what she ended up choosing for me. I thought that sounded fair.)

Working with Eliezer has still been tiring. We talked about that yesterday, and determined we should try rotating more people as his helpers to give me a bit of time to recover. We'd need to do that soon in any case, since I won't be here for indefinitely. Talking about Eliezer, whenever he updates Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, half the house gets stuck reading the update for half an hour.

There are now a lot more people in the house than there were when I got here. We are going to be acquiring a second house and expand in order to make room for all the fellows, soon. Some of the newcomers have been pretty darn impressive, too.

I'm also working with Louie Helm on a paper about the differences in bandwidth between various parts of the brain vs. between various individuals, and the relation this has on superintelligence. Expect a Less Wrong post of this, hopefully soon. On the topic of papers, my submission I made to ECAP2010 was accepted, so I'll be visiting Germany in October. This time SIAI is sponsoring my admission, too, so I don't need to pay it out of my own pocket like I did for last year's ECAP.

This weekend, me and at least two others are going to go fight with swords. Whee.

I was going to write about the new points system we have here and stuff, but yesterday there were a bunch of things that triggered a weird change in me. I'm still not entirely sure of what's happening, so I'll try to document it here.

It all started when Michael Vassar was talking about his take on the Twelve Virtues of Rationality. He was basically saying that a lot of the initial virtues (curiosity, relinquishment, lightness, evenness) were variants of the same thing, that is, not being attached to particular states of the world. If you do not have an emotional preference on what the world should be like, then it's also easier to perfectly update your beliefs whenever you encounter new information.

As he was talking about it, he also made roughly the following comment: "Pain is not suffering. Pain is just an attention signal. Suffering is when one neural system tells you to pay attention, and another says it doesn't want the state of the world to be like this." At some point he also mentioned that the ideal would be for a person's motivations not to be directly related to states of the world, but rather their own actions. If you tie your feelings to states of the world, you risk suffering needlessly about things not under you control. On the other hand, if you tie your feelings to your actions, your feelings are created by something that is always under your control. And once you stop having an emotional attachment to the way the world is, actually changing the world becomes much easier. Things like caring about what others think of you cease to be a concern, paradoxically making you much more at ease in social situations.

I thought this through, and it seemed to make a lot of sense. As Louie would comment later on, it was basically the old "attachment is suffering" line from Buddhism, but that's a line one has heard over and over so many times that it's ceased to have much significance and become just a phrase. Reframing it as "suffering is conflict between two neural systems" somehow made it far more concrete.

An early objection that came to mind was that, if pain is not suffering, why does physical pain feel like suffering? My intuition would be that if this hypothesis is correct, then humans have strong inborn desires not to experience pain (which leads to the mistaken impression that pain is suffering). If you break your leg, your brain is flooded with pain signals, and it's built to prefer states of the world where there isn't pain. But it's possible to react indifferently to your own sensation of pain. Pain asymbolia, according to Wikipedia, is "a condition in which pain is perceived, but does not cause suffering ... patients report that they have pain but are not bothered by it, they recognize the sensation of pain but are mostly or completely immune to suffering from it". Further support comes from the fact that our emotional states and the knowledge we have may often have a big influence on how painful (sufferful?) something feels. You can sometimes sustain an injury that doesn't feel very bad until you actually look at it and see how badly it's hurt. Being afraid also makes pain worse, while a feeling of being in control makes pain feel less bad.

On a more emotional front, I discovered a long time ago that trying to avoid thinking about unpleasant memories was a bad idea. The negative affect would fade a lot quicker if I didn't even try to push them out of my mind, but rather let them come and let them envelope me over and over until they didn't bother me anymore.

So I started wondering about how to apply this in practice. For a long time, things such as worry for my friends ending up in accidents and anguish for the fact that there is so much suffering in the world have seriously reduced my happiness. I've felt a strong moral obligation to work towards improving the world, and felt guilty at the times when I've been unable to e.g. study as hard as conceivably possible. If I could shift my motivations away from states of the world, that could make me considerably happier and therefore help me to actually improve the world.

But shifting to focus to actions instead of consequences sounded like getting dangerously close to deontology. Since a deontologist judges actions irrespective of their consequences, they might e.g. consider it wrong to kill a person even if that ended up saving a hundred others. I still wanted my actions to do the most good possible, and that isn't possible if you don't evaluate the effects your actions have on the world-state. So I would have to develop a line of thought that avoided the trap of deontology, while still shifting the focus on actions. That seemed tricky, but not impossible. I could still be motivated to do the actions that caused the most good and shifted the world-state the most towards my preferred direction, while at the same time not being overly attached to any particular state of the world.

While I was still thinking about this, I went ahead and finished reading The Happiness Hypothesis, a book about research on morality and happiness that I'd started reading previously. One of the points the book makes that we're divided beings: to use the book's metaphor, there is an elephant and there is the rider. The rider is the conscious self, while the elephant consists of all the low-level, unconscious processes. Unconscious processes actually carry out most of what we do and the rider trains them and tells them what they should be doing. Think of e.g. walking or typing on the computer, where you don't explicitly think about every footstep or every press of the button, but instead just decide to walk somewhere or type in something.

Readers familiar with PJ Eby will recognize this to be the same as his Multiple Self philosophy (my previous summary, original article). What I had not thought of before was that this also applies to ethics. Formal, virtuous theories of ethics are known by the rider, but not by the elephant, which leads to a conflict between what people know to be right and what they actually do. On these grounds, The Happiness Hypothesis critiqued the way Western ethics, both in the deontologist tradition started by Immanuel Kant and the consequentialist tradition started by Jeremy Bentham have been becoming increasingly reason-based:
( Read more...Collapse )

Haven't posted in a while, again. Here's an interview with Mike Blume, a long-time Visiting Fellow. I'll shortly be making a more personal post, as well describing the new points system we've began using recently.

--------------

Kaj: The description of Mike on the 2009 Visiting Fellows page says that he 'is a Ph.D. student in experimental particle physics at the University of  California at Santa Barbara. He holds a B.S. in Physics from the University of California at Irvine.' As you can probably guess, he's been around here for a while, as he was already in last summer's Visiting Fellows program. When I got here he was taking care of SIAI's sysadmin needs while at the same time interning with Rolf Nelson and his startup. Recently he's been moving some of the sysadmin duties over to Louie Helm, as Mike is currently seeking to test his l33t coding skillz in the greater Silicon Valley economy.

Mike, would you say that this description is accurate, or is there something you'd like to add to it?

Mike Blume: I think it's fairly accurate, though obviously I'm not really a PhD student anymore.

Kaj: I could ask about something else, but I don't think our readers would appreciate being left hanging right that. So a few words on how come you stopped with that?

Mike: Hmm, that's a good question. One answer would be that upon reflection, it didn't seem like the best way to reduce existential risk. I'd gotten into physics with a sort of "knowledge for its own sake" ethos. And I still love that ethos, and find it beautiful, but it turned out there were things that needed to be taken care of first.

Kaj: So how have you been reorienting yourself to actually reduce existential risk better?
( Read more...Collapse )

What this page is about: I'm doing a three-month stint as a Visiting Fellow at the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence. These diaries chronicle my experience.

I was asked to make a single linkable page from which you could display all of my travel diary entries in chronological order. You could do that via using the siai 2010 tag, but that displays the latest entry first, which can be inconvenient to read. So here they are, listed from the earliest to the latest. This post will be updated as I make new entries.

Travel diary, day 1 April 5th - April 6th
Travel diary, day 2 April 6th
Travel diary, day 3 April 8th
Travel diary, day 4 April 9th
Travel diary, days 5-6 April 11th
Travel diary, day 7 April 12th
Travel diary, days 8-9 April 14th
Travel diary, days 10-11 April 16th
Travel diary, days 12-19 April 24th
Travel diary, days 20-26 May 1st
Travel diary, day 27 May 2nd
Travel diary, days 28-36 May 11th
Travel diary, day 37 - interviewing Alicorn - May 12th
Travel diary, days 38-47 - interviewing Mike Blume May 25th
Travel diary, days 48-49 (or, how I am becoming a virtue ethicist) May 27th
Travel diary, days 50-77 June 24th
Travel diary, departure speech July 15th

As promised, here's the first part of my interview series. It's meant to give you a feeling of what kinds of people I'm spending my time with in the Visiting Fellows program.

Alicorn (alicorn24 on LJ) was already here when I got here, and will in all likelihood still be here after I leave. Less Wrongers will know her as being one of the people with the highest karma on the site. I was kinda surprised when I met her, because somehow I'd gotten the impression that she'd be really shy and stuff, but she turned out to be really outgoing and extroverted and not shy after all. Her school allowed people to make up their own degrees so long as they also completed some 'real' degree, and as a result she has degrees both in Philosophy and World-Building, which is totally awesome.

She writes serial fiction together with Tethys at elcenia.com, and has her own webcomic (which is cute and which I like) at htht.elcenia.com. Alicorn also makes good food (see her cooking blog) and likes petting people's hair, if they allow it.

Kaj: So, tell our readers, how did you come to be here?
Alicorn: I originally sent an e-mail last fall, asking about the summer, because at the time I expected to be in grad school for the forseeable future. I didn't get a firm response because there were so many summer applications to sort through and no clear idea of how many spots there were. Then, come the spring semester, I decided I wasn't happy, discerned no school-compatible way to fix that, and asked Anna if I could come out if I were able to leave right away instead of at the end of the school year. After some consideration and discussion, the answer turned out to be "yes"; I withdrew from school, packed up, flew out here, and proved useful enough to be kept around.
Kaj: 'Useful enough to be kept around' leads us pretty naturally to the next question, which is, what are the things that you do around here?
Alicorn: I write Less Wrong posts sometimes, although lately while I have lots of ideas, they aren't gelling properly. I've started doing a lot of outreach, because I love to chat with people, including the people SIAI wants someone to stay in touch with. I've also been doing some human capital development projects, absorbing more content and developing new skills.
Kaj: Too many potential lines of interr... uhh, interviewing that I could pursue, I have difficulty picking which ones. The outreach thing sounds interesting - do you generally get to talk with people about Singularity-type stuff a lot, or is it more general conversation? What kinds of people do you talk with that you count as outreach?
Alicorn: I have a pretty low ratio of Singularity-stuff to general conversation. For one thing, this probably increases my long-term quantity of Singularity conversations: people will be more willing to listen to me pontificate on that sometimes if it's not all I ever talk about! A lot of my contacts are people I was already friends with before I got involved with SIAI - some through Less Wrong, some not. In order to count for outreach at all, they have to have relevant interests, though - I can't include every one of my friends on my list of contacts for this reason.( Read more...Collapse )

Day 36... since I'll be here for, uhh, *counts* 100 days, that means that over a third of my visit has already passed. Whoa - it certainly doesn't feel like I've been here for that long.

The mind is a weird thing. For some reason, a week or so ago I just completely stopped worrying about the "what should I do with my life" issue, and got back to the old "well, I'll just find whatever to do" mindset I had previously. Weird. Ah well, I'm not complaining. Also, while I frequently keep feeling terribly homesick, the realization that it's been over a third suddenly made me feel like I don't want to leave this place. Gah.

The end of last week was busy, as most people were scrambling to write conference presentations to submit to ECAP10 before the deadline passed. I, too, managed to get something submitted, basically a shortened and rewritten version of the article that I currently have under review for Minds & Machines. (I contacted them about whether it'd be okay for them to also submit a copy to a conference, and they said it was fine.)  Now I'm kinda ambivalent about whether I want M&M to accept my paper or not, for I realized that there's a lot of expanding and rewriting that I could do on the original article that I submitted... I also started working on a paper on the complexity of human values, but realized I wouldn't have the time to finish that in time for the submission deadline. I do intend to expand that to a longer paper, though.

I've been doing pretty well on the "personal projects" and "helping others" parts of my personal goals, but haven't really gotten anything done on the "personal growth and education" part. But I finally got around doing more of that yesterday, when I was again helping Eliezer with his writing. We've determined that for as long as I can still say that I've read everything he's written that day, it's fine if I do various other stuff while watching him write. So while there, I started doing what I've been wanting to do for a long time, but never got around: reading the latest articles from various scientific journals. To make sure I actually remember what they say, I also decided to briefly write down and summarize their contents. I only actually got one article summarized (about the comparative study of cognition; the summary is at the end of this post, in case anyone's interested), for the second article was interesting enough that I started hunting through its references and wasn't patient enough to stop to write a summary. With some luck, I should be able to put the time at Eliezer's to maximal use: both help him write, and make myself read up on the stuff I should've been reading up on for a while now. On the topic of helping Eliezer, yesterday he told me that half of what's been written in the book manuscript so far has been with me present. That was kinda cool, and also a little surprising - I hadn't realized we'd already gotten that much written.

Starting tomorrow, I'll start doing an interview series profiling various people in the house. So far I've only been talking about myself, briefly mentioning various other people. I figure that my readers would be interested in knowing the kinds of people that I'm living with. First up is an interview of Alicorn, a long-time Less Wrong poster. If there's anything in particular you folks want to know about the people here, leave a comment and I'll make sure to include that question in my interviews.

Below's the summary of that article I managed to read yesterday.

 

( Towards a bottom-up perspective on animal and human cognitionCollapse )

Feeling a lot better today. Not sure of the exact reasons: though I did have a motivating meeting with Anna in the evening, I was already feeling good in the morning. Maybe it was just the act of venting my uncertainties here that did it, or maybe it was some brain chemistry-related thing that just happened to return to balance during the night. Dunno. Main thing that it got fixed (for now), whatever it was.

Anna's working to make the Visiting Fellows program somewhat more structured. The exact details are still somewhat a work-in-progress, but I was very pleased even by the things that have been thought of so far. This makes it considerably easier for me to figure out what I'm supposed to be doing here, and when I should be satisfied with what I've achieved. For instance, now we have a recommendation that fellows work roughly 60 hours a week, divided roughly evenly between A) direct contribution (working on a useful project), B) Learning and/or plotting their personal trajectory (i.e. deciding what they want to do with their lives, like I've been trying to figure out) and C) helping with others' projects or learning or helping create a more positive community. People are also recommended to write at least 1000 words, four days a week. "This writing can include almost anything related to existential risks or rationality -- notes to oneself, personal brainstorms, emails on relevant issues, draft posts for Less Wrong or for local Less Wrong.  It is meant primarily to prompt thought, and secondarily to help develop writing skills, and particularly the ability to write quickly."

We also made a plan about the things I want to improve and accomplish while I'm here. For the "learning" part, Anna thought that improving my writing skills even further would probably be a good idea. She also asked me about the things on the official Curriculum I thought I wanted to improve on the most. We settled on math (I really need to brush up my calculus soon, and get over the ugh field I have around it), charisma (which probably counts at least as much as raw intelligence in life achievements) and physical exercise (since I don't usually get enough of it).

For projects, I'm first looking at submitting something at this year's ECAP conference (probably a shortened version of a paper I already submitted to Minds and Machines' transhumanism CFP, and which may or may not be accepted), also make more LW posts and prepare some other conference / journal papers. For helping others, well, I'm helping Eliezer, and I'll try to help Justin develop his writing skills. And so forth. Yay!
( My goals under the cutCollapse )

Random overheard conversation:

Justin: So who all went to the store?
André: Anyone want Thai tonight?
Justin: Kaj went to the store? No, Kaj's there.
André: Thai, not Kaj. Food from Thailand.
Justin: Food from Kajland?
André: No, Kaj is from Finland. They both end in 'land, but they're very different countries.

First off, apologies to those people who've e-mailed me but to whom I haven't gotten around writing back. (That's at least you, Jarkko, as well as various people I got into conversations with online.) I've been feeling rather drained a lot of the time, for reasons which I'll soon discuss.

Still wondering whether coming here was a good idea or a mistake. Looking at things from a purely utilitarian perspective, I should be satisfied. I'm now "working" with Eliezer three days a week, and each time when I'm there, he gets around 5000 words written on his book. That's very valuable, as his writings reshaped the way I think for the better, and the book could do that for - potentially - millions more. So if I were judging things solely on the basis of how much good I was doing here, I should be happy.

But... meh. I can't help the feeling that pretty much anyone could do what I do there, sitting next to him and watching him write. It's kinda draining, even though I'm mostly free to surf the web or whatever while there. I don't really get that much of a feeling of accomplishment from it anymore. Anna did remark that an ability to do "something that anyone could do" is an accomplishment in itself - that is, the ability to do something even though it isn't great and glorious and exciting. She mentioned, and my own experience agrees, that getting volunteers to do exciting things is easy, but getting them to do the less glamorous work (of which there is much more to do) is much harder. I guess I should consider that as a merit.

Three days a week leaves me two days for other things, weekends excluded. I do finally have in mind a specific working project that I could work on, but I'm not yet sure how much I can get done on that or if I should try to do something else in the first place. Need to still talk about it with Anna. The book days seem to leave me sufficiently drained that I have difficulty getting anything done on the in-between days. But I don't think several book days in a row would be much better, either (neither for me nor Eliezer).

I wonder if I should just treat my time here basically as a vacation: be content with the three days of a week during which I'm actually of some use, and just relax and not be worried about my productivity during the remaining time.

Been feeling wretchedly homesick this whole day. I think I mentioned in some earlier post that I previously thought I couldn't spend extended periods away from Finland, but being here made me change my mind. Well, I recant that now. The people here are nice, but I really miss the people back at home.

Still thinking about what I want to do with my life. For some years, I thought I'd want to do a PhD and go into academia. Well, I still might want to do that, but a few days back I realized how little of that motivation was actually very thought-out. The way the Finnish educational system works, after nine years of elementary school (age 7-15) you pick whether you want to do three years of generic academic high school, or roughly three years of vocational training for some job. If you think you want to get a job that requires a university education, you go to high school. More commonly, many also go to high school because they have no idea of what they want to do with their lives and need time to think.

I went to high school because I needed time to think. To a degree, I also went to university, into a sufficiently multidisciplinary educational program, because I needed time to think. That was the path of least resistance - can't figure out what to do? Continue studying and hope you come up with something good. Large part of my intention to go into academia was probably my brain just being on autopilot - continuing to do what it'd been doing before was the path of least resistance. Especially since a geeky kid could more easily get a feeling of validation from school grades than anything else, so school was automatically endowed with a general halo of approval. Unfortunately, you can't just keep studying forever, for there are no degrees past the PhD. (Yes, one could get multiple degrees of the same level, but by then you couldn't live off study grants anymore and had to figure out a job to support you.) This fact, as well as a general disillusionment with academia that I've been experiencing lately, has been forcing me to evaluate what exactly it is that I'd actually want to do.

For the most part, though, I find that I'm evaluating different career prospects more from the perspective of pain than gain motivation. I'm not as much looking for a career I'd enjoy, but rather a career that would be the least unpleasant. Part of it probably comes from just being here - I'm in contact with too many people obviously much smarter or generally more talented than me, and then I get the feeling that I'm not really good at anything. Yes, I know, this is a fixed mindset biting me. And yes, I also know that this place is drawing people from a very narrow distribution and most people I'll meet in life won't be equally smart and I should realistically expect to do fine. And that there are lots of other things than just smarts that count. And so on.

But... I dunno.

Long time, no write.

The house is quiet right now. My mother (hi, mom!) asked what we do on weekends. It varies: on Saturday we typically do something as a group, or if nobody comes up with something that enough people would be interested in, we generally just hang around. The first Saturday that I was here, we went out to an Indian buffet place to eat. On the second, we didn't do anything in particular. Today, most people went to see a computer history museum. I considered going - I suspect I would have found it interesting - but decided I'd rather sleep in and enjoy the peace and solitude of a quiet house for once. I think just about everyone is either at the museum or somewhere else. I think Steve is the only person other than me who's here at the moment.

Sundays are kinda off - they're called "human capital days". For those, people are encouraged to hold various workshops on the things they know and teach them to others. Their exact content varies a lot - last Sunday, Andre held a Krav Maga lesson as well as some improvisational games. I won't be here for this Sunday's workshops, though, since I'll be seeing a friend tomorrow. Even though I only knew her online, Lani was pretty much my best friend for some years, around the time when I was fifteen. We've drifted off somewhat since then, but that doesn't mean I wouldn't use the opportunity to finally meet her in real life now that I happen to be in the San Fransisco area.

The week's been pretty good, and at least for now, I've mostly gotten over my "should I even be here" worries. There have been two major reasons for that. Michael Vassar showed up during the end of last week/beginning of this week, and discussed with us some of the plans he had for SIAI. Somehow, something in what he said pushed me to decide that darnit, I'll stop worrying about whether I'm useful and do something. I've now compiled a preliminary list of topics for academic papers that I could possibly work on while here, and I'm determined to start actually working on them soon. (Although unfortunately for my plans to pass some of them off as a computer science Master's thesis, they all lay pretty firmly in the cognitive science sphere, implying that if I do want to graduate faster I shouldn't switch majors after all... ah well, I'll worry about it later on. And I do already have one paper that might pass for CS under review to a journal.)

The other reason is that Eliezer Yudkowsky showed up here on Monday, seeking people's help with the rationality book he's writing. Previously, he wrote a number of immensly high-quality posts in blog format, with the express purpose of turning them into a book later on. But now that he's been trying to work on the book, he has noticed that without the constant feedback he got from writing blog posts, getting anything written has been very slow. So he came here to see if having people watching him write and providing feedback at the same time would help. He did get some stuff written, and at the end, asked me if I could come over his place on Wednesday. (I'm not entirely sure of why I in particular was picked, but hey.) On Wednesday, me being there helped him break his previous daily record on amount of words written for his book, so I visited again on Friday and agreed to also come back on Monday and Tuesday.

In practice, "helping Eliezer write" doesn't really require me to do much. Mostly I just sit next to him and watch him write. Occasionally I make a suggestion or two, some of which have actually found their way to the manuscript (if the final version still has the xckd reference, I'm the one to blame), but mostly I just watch. Apparently having someone looking expectantly at the text is enough to prompt writing activity. (This does not surprise me. I know from writing fiction that I get far more done far easier if I'm writing it together with someone, and part of it is definitely in the knowledge that another person will read it as soon as I've written it out.) You might think that this would get boring quickly, but the topic is interesting enough for me to enjoy watching the way the text takes form. After all, I've read most of his previous blog posts on the topic and would definitely have intended to buy the book in any case. It's also interesting to see the way that the ideas take a more refined and clearer form, and having someone type them out slower than I would usually read the text prompts me to really think over the stuff while it's being generated. I think that helps me get a slightly deeper understanding of it than I would otherwise. (Also, I do have my laptop with me, so if I get really bored I can just surf the web in the meanwhile.) And even though I don't actually do much, whenever I see him complete a new section, I too get a feeling of accomplishment. So far, I've usually been there for around five or six hours at a time.

While here, I've gotten (again) badly hooked on Might and Magic VI, a computer game back from 1998. It's amusing - the basic gameplay consists mainly of going to a dungeon, killing monsters until you've ran out of hit points and spell points, and then leaving the dungeon to recover. Repeat until the dungeon is empty and you've collected all the loot inside. Repeat until all the dungeons in the game are empty. But combined with that are fifteen different areas to be explored, people to talk to, quests to complete... and most importantly, a character development system where you're constantly acquiring more experience points and therefore skill points to raise your various skills. Then you can visit various trainers around the world to obtain an Expert or Master ranking for your various skills. Not to mention all the improved arms and equipment you pick up during the game to boost you further, all of this combining to the pleasure of seeing the weaker enemies becoming easier and easier to kill. Until you run into the harder enemies and have to repeat the same drill, of course. It's a simple reinforcement system that feeds you with constant rewards (the same formula I hear World of Warcraft, not to mention countless of othe games of this type), masterfully exploiting the way our brains are wired for seeking immediate reward. The fact that I recognize how it works doesn't make it any less effective.