What are you working on?

I've been working on understanding and using hypnosis, which is better described as conditioning arbitrary associations through mind games.The theory and results have been quite promising, to understate it.

There has been a lot written on LessWrong about how one should think, but relatively little on how to actually implement these thinking patterns. One of the directions that I want to take this is helping people take these skills and actually implement them on the 5 second level. I also want to see if I can develop a viable 'rationality seed' by installing a gut level appreciation for the importance of taking ideas seriously (and in particular, the idea that rationality matters) as well as a few other select habits.

I've made a ton of progress and I feel like it's almost a new branch of engineering. I have concrete ideas to test and avenues to explore and not enough time to explore them all at once.

I'm looking for other people that would be interested in being brought up to speed on the theory and then running experiments with me. I'm excited to see where this can be taken :)

PM me if you are interested.

For over a year now, making full use of my body has been a big hobby. To this end, I am learning silly human tricks. It has taken a few weeks of sporadic effort and I am now able to snap my fingers consistantly. My next goal is to be able to whistle. I have made little progress so far and am not yet able to whistle particular notes. Previously successful projects of this type were refining my senses of smell and temperature. Now I can reliably tell the temperature of water or air to the degree C with a range of roughly -20 to 45C. Calibrating my sense of temperature was easy enough; I would feel something, guess the temperature, then read off a thermometer. If I was wrong, I might say something like "Oh so that's what 23 degrees feels like." and then feel it again.

Other ongoing projects of this sort are to smell relative humidity and to sneeze only in the presence of a bright light. I've lost a bit of progress since last thread, now darkening my field of vision works to prevent a sneeze, but I still sneeze occasionally at normal indoor room brightness. When I feel like sneezing I look at a bright light until I either sneeze or stop feeling like I need to. It could be that the CFL I normally use is not bright enough for my purposes. "Hazards of Light" by Cronly-Dillon et al. suggests that I would be safe using a much more intense lamp.

I am working on finishing up a philosophy paper about whether "fine-tuning" (the claim that the physical constants and initial conditions that permit the evolution of life and conscious observers are rare in the space of physically possible parameters) supports "multiverse" hypotheses according to which the cosmos is huge and is heterogeneous in its local conditions. One major argument for the view that fine-tuning does not support multiverse hypotheses is due to Ian Hacking, who claimed that this inference is analogous to an "inverse gambler's fallacy" where a gambler enters a casino, witnesses a roll of dice resulting in double-sixes, and concludes that the people must have been throwing dice for a while.

While going through Nick Bostrom's book Anthropic Bias, I've found his discussion of Hacking's argument (and of an significantly improved recent version by Roger White, available here ) somewhat unilluminating, although I thought there must be something wrong with the argument. Going through the existing replies to this argument in the literature I've found counterarguments that either fail straightforwardly or (more commonly) render fine-tuning irrelevant to whether multiverse hypotheses are confirmed, degenerating into an almost a priori argument that I find very implausible. I've found a fairly simple way of seeing how exactly the Hacking/White argument goes wrong, by combining Bostrom's self-sampling assumption with a technical fix independently arrived at by a few other philosophers. This solution does not generate the implausible a priori argument for the multiverse that previous approaches in the literature do, as long as the reference class (for applying the self-sampling assumption) satisfies some weak requirements.

The result is a critical review paper going through the literature while building up the concepts needed to understand the proposed solution. I've produced all the content by now, and am now mostly working on finishing a draft, integrating notation across sections, making it readable to philosophers with at least rudimentary knowledge of Bayesianism, and in general improving the paper to meet top-tier journal standards.

Been coding a seed AI. Halfway there - it's already superintelligent and has taken over the universe, just need to work on Friendliness now.

I'm working on becoming more physically attractive. Towards this end, I've been 1) upgrading my fashion based on recommendations from one of my highly skilled roommates, 2) implementing Tim Ferris' 4 Hour Body system to lose weight and gain muscle, and 3) handling random small things having to do with my physical appearance. Towards this end I've 1) bought new shirts and a watch, 2) have been eating paleo and working out twice a week (as per the recommendations from Ferris) for the last 3.5 weeks, and 3) bought new shaving cream, new facial moisturizer, hydrocortisone for eczema, cryotherapy for a wart on my toe.

My goals for the respective sub-projects are 1) new jeans, shoes, and shirts so I can wear my new style 5-7 days a week, 2) drop fat while gaining muscle until I'm under 190 for weight and have a visible 6 pack, and 3) handle the wart and have the items available to get into a constant schedule of maintaining my peak appearance in terms of skin quality and minor things like nose hair. Perhaps I'll make a weekly checklist.

I'm working on this because I made major updates this summer about the importance of physical beauty for men, for relationships and for career reasons. Secondly, I see myself as the kind of person who should be excellent at everything, and I enjoy looking awesome. Third, I've internalized lukeprog's idea that one's body and fashion are hard-to-fake and instantaneous signals of quality. Fourth, I was inspired by this quote from Michael Anissmov:

"A transhumanist who professes to be interested in transcending the human who is too lazy to exercise is like a Christian who is too lazy to pray or attend church..."

I've been working on an article/essay summarizing my work with PredictionBook.com and what I think I've learned. It's going pretty well; I think I could post it tonight, but I'd rather finish making a particular big batch of predictions first.

EDIT: It's up at http://lesswrong.com/lw/7z9/1001_predictionbook_nights/

Since ten years back a sub-field of quantum information theory has emerged, quantum game theory. Regard it as the intersection of quantum mechanics and game theory. It deals with game theoretical situations where the participants use entangled quantum states, quantum superposition and unitary operations as resources to gain advantages compared to classical counterparts.

I am designing and (trying) solving a quantum game using three level quantum states, qutrits (compared to the usual qubits, two level systems).

Finding a job that will allow me not to live in Waco, my first priority. Plus, other neat stuff like the recent contest that interferes with that.

I just finished learning how to type properly, which I had neglected to do in high school. I finished reading Foundations of Neuroeconomics with another LWer. We're deciding what to read next.

I'm currently trying to become competent at mathematical proofs. I've hired a tutor and I'm practicing about an hour a day. My goal is to understand probability theory as I think it will help me correct some subtle issues with a statistical package I've designed (which I am otherwise very pleased with). I'd also like to better understand some advanced MCMC techniques.

I'll be doing the free online Stanford AI course.

Oh, and yesterday I were feeling to ill to do anything actually productive like hang on internet forums, so I started messing around in python and got a fair bit into an experimental, and I quote, "brain machine interface using only hardware available on a normal PC" through a bunch of neurological tricks mostly learned from this site. It's crazy enough that it might actually work, in which case it's a pretty rad shortcut to IA and getting yourself a codeic cortex for the price of only a beeping-induced aching head and a seemingly-pointless-circular-movement-induced aching hand. I may or may not work on this again.

I've made progress in two areas:

• An intermediate goal of accumulating money & power
• A primary goal of dating successfully

I situated myself as the lead for my company's sexy new product. On Tuesday I led a well-received demonstration to a potential customer, and on Wednesday I told my boss that I wanted a new title with more pay. He's a much better negotiator than I am, but we're still talking, anyway. The details of the agreement we reach or don't reach will determine where I live and work in 2012.

I continue to accumulate cash despite my best efforts to blow it on nonsense. I've started a business that I hope will serve as an investment vehicle for most of my savings for the next year or two. Investing in a market sector that I'm familiar with ought to be a better use of resources than stocks, where I don't know as much and still might only expect to make 10-20% per year.

I've started to play the social games that I swore off for a long time, since I think it's the best way to get people to do what I want (yuck! Even saying it like that reminds me why I quit years ago). And I've been failing, often spectacularly and in front of my friends, but at least I'm trying, and I remind myself that the difficulty is what makes it worth doing. I've taken chances pursuing two single women, and things went great until they went horribly. It's both frustrating and addicting, like when I was learning to program, but the structure is more hidden and the rules aren't as rigid. I'm excited to keep working at it.

link to previous threads is broken. It's not set up as a relative link.

So, mostly to sharpen my programming mind, I am writing an e-mail client in a combination of C, emacs-lisp and guile-scheme, all based on a database (searching) approach to e-mail, but still supporting folders. I hope it'll be ready for the next version of mu. It's been especially a nice learning experience to figure out how to write non-trivial emacs-lisp programs. And I like very much how I can already use the e-mail client for my normal communications, and making improvements whenever I need something.

Then, I'm training for a marathon, still this year. It will be my third, and I'm aiming for a time, maybe 3:45, which will be challenging, yet seems not unreachable. I'm training quite a bit, and have been experimenting a bit with a diet for this - after reading Taubes' Good Calories, Bad Calories. I've been trying to avoid carbohydrates and eat more proteins. I'm not really sure what to think about Taubes' non-mainstream dietary advise (which would be an interesting but different discussion). I am not overweight at all, but it seems to do well for my strength/endurance, but yeah, n=1.

Finally, it seems I'm exceeding my one-book-per-week target for this year it seems. I'm trying to alternate classics, modern/sci-fi and pop-sci, with some more technical books thrown in now and then. Many books I consume as audiobooks, which obviously goes well with my marathon training.

I recently became aware of how much I deeply don't understand the quantum end of theoretical compsci, so I'm trying to get a decent handle on that.

I've also been doing work on some problems related to the behavior of polynomials over finite fields. Theorem: Let F_q be a finite field with q elements, and let f be a polynomial of degree n with coefficients lying in F. Then if the image of f is not all of F, then the number of elements in the image of f is bounded by q - (q-1)/n. See here for a proof.

One corollary of this is the following: Let f be a non-trivial cyclotomic polynomial. Then over a finite field F_q, the size of the image of is bounded by q - (q-1)/n. This follows from observing that if a non-trivial cyclotomic polynomial has a root in some finite field then it factors into linear factors in the obvious way and thus has more than one zero. Either way we can apply the above theorem.

This has lead to think about the sizes of the images of polynomials over finite fields in general. In particular, in the cyclotomic case can we improve the q - (q-1)/n bound substantially? And is there some nice way of describing what polynomials are subject to this bound over all but finitely many finite fields?

I've written about 50 pages in the last few weeks (working on a novel), and gotten to feel the awesome high of a writing "flow state" again, which I hadn't felt in quite a while. Schoolwork may have been neglected somewhat. I am trying to commit to at least looking at all of my stories every day and seeing if there is anything that I want to write.

I'm training for my first taekwondo tournament, which is in 2 weeks. I've made huge gains in flexibility, probably put a bit more muscle on my legs (calves especially, swimming does not do a lot for that), noticeably improved my balance and general coordination, and finally started to get the hang of poomsae (patterns).

I'm also signed up for the Stanford AI online course, along with at least one other member of the Ottawa lesswrong community, who will hopefully be able to support me through catching up in linear algebra and programming skills.

Improving social skills: I have made a number of new friends over the summer, took notes, started using alcohol as a social tool, and hit on and picked up a number of young women successfully.

Mathematics: I have been reading Silverman's "Arithmetic of Elliptic Curves" and attempting all of the exercises at the behest of my advisor, and attending number theory seminars at Stanford.

Practical: My computer's keyboard is having problems so I tried to fix it but I may have to replace it (every time I type "p" it also goes back a space, and other issues.)

LessWrong: I have been reading and taking notes (though my notes have suffered due to keyboard issues) on "The Skeptical Environmentalist" by Bjorn Lomborg, a Danish professor of statistics and former member of Greenpeace who evaluates the facts on various environmental issues. It is a great read and I'm glad I'm doing it but it is rather long.

Mostly just learning stuff. Signed up for Stanford's AI and ML courses, and just finishing Manning's "statistical natural language processing". Plan to apply some statistical methods to a rule-based system at work that needs too much maintenance.

• http://reddragdiva.co.uk/lj/nyan.mp3 - the 4yo's favourite dinosaur is the parasaurolophus, so the loved one will be coming up with an 8-bit one of those that flies through the air farting rainbows. Any good meme must have 4yo appeal.
• Trying to make actually sensible sense of various concepts I've met in the worlds of aesthetics, art criticism and p-stm-d-rn-sm. After throwing various standard texts in the field against the wall with great force (well, imagining myself doing so, since I was reading them on my phone), I've been discovering that putting the complete works of Severed Heads on my phone and playing that seems to produce productive-looking thoughts. Possibly Tom Ellard's superlative grasp of the essentials: "Everything you do will be forgotten one day, so don't get all la-de-da."

I've been trying to apply John Perry's Structured procrastination more purposefully. I've been taking on numerous projects that feel important but probably have negligible consequences if they are left undone.

As far as projects I've taken on (amidst having to send out grad school applications) I've been authoring a weekly op/ed column in my school paper with a friend. Our school is small enough for us to get away with just about anything with some intellectual merit; copyright issues, nootropics, the Ig nobel prizes, anything of interest that comes up. I use this as motivation to get some writing done every week. I've also have a "book" on the backburner (a vehicle for toying writing up various meta-analyses of speculative technologies, the ethical debate surrounding them and possible social implications surrounding their implementation and dissemination), something I can use to hash out thoughts and practice scholarly research. Maybe something will come of it, maybe not; as I said I'm trying to keep a critical mass of projects a la Perry, and I'm doing this because I follow the pattern that Perry is talking about; I only commit to a couple of highly important tasks and put them off by messing about doing nothing. Now I put them off by adding five pages to my "book" or writing a column or collaborating on some other project. I've also taken on tutoring a graduate comp sci student in theory of computation, picking up some new information/coming up with new explanations that might help the student is also something I can do while avoiding doing something else. I may also help with the layout for our undergraduate history journal.

So far I've actually found all of this to be helpful. I've been unusually productive over the past couple of months and I've broken out of a bit of a funk that had been building up due to a brief self-imposed isolation (and devotion to studying). I've actually found that the time I do spend studying now leads to more retention and progress (note that this may be in part due to my purposeful acceptance of spaced repetition; I previously had an inexplicable aversion to reading -even skimming- anything more than once or twice). All of this is to be taken with a grain of salt, however, as the novelty of structured procrastination hasn't yet worn off and may be contributing to some level of akrasia busting.

As an additional note, I've lost 40 lbs and added considerable muscle mass in 5 months by getting regular exercise and cutting junk food/fast food out of my diet, and I plan to continue along with this by slowly altering my lifestyle. It isn't exactly going paleo and sticking to a strict workout regimen, but I'm certainly making headway.

As far as educating myself, I've been reading a lot of material on neuroscience and cognitive science and on Bayesian networks and machine learning.

That's it for now, though I may have left something out. Now to go do those few chores around the house I've been avoiding...

In this comment I set myself four goals. Here is a short update:

I'm teaching myself Java. My goal is to complete an app for analyzing raw genotypic data from personal genomics services (like 23andme) by summer 2012.

I'm currently 17% done working my way through Introduction to JAVA Programming, by Y. Daniel Liang.

I'm training 6 days a week to score 300 points on the USMC PFT (I have no intention of joining the military, I simply think it is a good goal in terms of overall physical fitness). I am increasing my running speed at a rate that is 75% slower than my previous attempt (at which I accumulated several injuries that prevented me from going to the gym for over 5 months). If I don't get injured again, then I expect to reach this goal by 9/2012.

I'm have been running 3.15 miles in 30 minutes and performing 13 pull-ups for the last 4 days.

I'm trying to diminish the amount of folk activism I engage in. I tried going cold turkey once before, but failed after only 3 weeks. This time, I flip a coin every time I notice myself about to start. I only allow myself to continue if it lands tails up. So far, so good.

Since using a randomizer I am fairly sure that I have decreased my folk activism by greater than 50% (although I could be merely deceiving myself by subconsciously creating more opportunities to engage in folk activism and then doing so only half of the time).

This project is none of the Internet's business.

I have been (unexpectedly) succeeding at achieving this goal, but don't know why. Perhaps it is just a fluke?

Last time I said:

So, I've started writing an article related to this in collaboration with another LWer. One of my goals is that like the idea of contributing content to the site. I was also curious, and I feel that the majority of my personal curiosity is satisfied, and finishing the project by communicating what I learned to others is what is being difficult. There are several reasons for this. One is that I can always learn more, and make a better article. I've also realized this is a lower priority than my school/work activities, so it keeps being put off.

Whether or not to keep working on this (the topic was physical intuition) is something I have been discussing w/ other Seattle LWers. I wrote a summary recently, which made writing a paper seem less daunting. However, it also revealed tons of gaps in my research which I had filled in with speculation. I got a book to read. I am still putting this at low priority over schoolwork, especially now that school has started.

I was a summer camp counselor for a gifted education camp, and many of the kids there are quite lonely, so I am writing an article about keeping in touch with the friends they made there.

Wrote an article, never finished it because I was too lazy to edit it. Probably wouldn't be that much effort to actually finish.

I have an incomplete in a class, and I have the final paper about halfway done.

Yay. Wrote paper. Now to get prof to change grade.

Also more than halfway done with a report/presentation for work. Finished.

Separating work and socializing, so that I can do each more effectively. Allocating time for each.

Separating work and socializing is going ok---definitely better. With more, smaller chunks of good socializing, (rather than rare, long, exhausting periods) I feel better.

If I am working and my roommates come home and are being social, I try and make the decision to either go to my room, or to put down my books and talk, or at least recognize that I won't be very productive and that is ok.

I want to learn better ways of tearing myself away from a crappy/less interesting situation and dismissing myself while keeping on good social terms. Sometimes I am torn in the middle. Usually with television--- it catches my attention and I don't commit to watching or leaving to go do something else and ignore it.

I'm starting to exercise more. I used to just run, and only sometimes. I've been doing some non-weights exercises pretty often. Part of this is focused on posture, but otherwise pretty general. I'm getting better at paying attention to when exercising would feel fun, and I am surprised that I have the right energy level to do something at least at some point almost every day.

Everything else I've been doing is just school stuff.

I have been trying to invent an AI for over a year, although I haven't made a lot of progress lately. My current approach is a bit similar to how our brain works according to "Society Of Mind". That is, when it's finished the system is supposed to consist of a collection of independent, autonomous units that can interact and create new units. The tricky part is of course the prioritization between the units. How can you evaluate how promising an approach is? I recently found out that something like this has already been tried, but that has happened to me several times by now as I started thinking and writing about AI before I had read any books on that subject (I didn't have a decent library in school).

I have no great hopes that I will actually manage to create something usefull with this, but even a tiny probability of a working AI is worth the effort (as long as it's friendly, at least).

A programming language that has the semantics necessary to elegantly express a new kind of garbage collector. A rudimentary prototype of the collector, written in C++ with a terrible interface, appeared to confirm the idea.

At least, that was the initial goal. The more I investigate the design choices involved in programming languages, the more room for improvement I see.