December Monthly Bragging Thread

Won a big bet, made more money off Bitcoin than I have ever earned normally, bet the world like a boss, did some neat statistics, finished transcribing a great novel, interviewed with Mike Power & the BBC, doxed a drug lord.

I've added sufficient value to Wikimedia to be flown over (as a volunteer) to help with the interviews for the next Chief Communications Officer, i.e. press person. (Since I've been the leading volunteer press person for Wikipedia since 2005.) I'm moderately proud of this. Assuming your border personnel let me into your wonderful country at all, of course ...

I'm also running for the English Wikipedia Arbitration Committee. (Questions, how I voted.) We'll see how awesomely that works out. It's a shitty, shitty volunteer job, but I feel that sucking force one feels in a volunteer organisation when a competence-shaped hole opens up. I'm going in as the "set it all on fucking fire" candidate, but I've actually done this job before and know very well I could do this shitty job for two years and do it well ... even though the most tediously awful part of the job is dealing with fellow arbitrators. Ah, battles for insanely low stakes.

Update: Visit was fun. Didn't get on arbcom, feel fine about that (though admittedly not very awesome from it).

Got a super awesome new job with Beeminder, and will be moving to Portland in a month. Got rid of so much clothing in preparation for move. Continuing to get rid of things that I don't consider worth moving.

New hobby, making earrings, has been fun and rewarding, and I get pretty earrings out of it. Also, learned to make cake pops, and working on a braid rug.

Held a mega-meetup in Columbus that went off well. Handed off the running of Columbus Rationality, and it's proven to be self-sustaining.

Medical All Things- Got put on allergy shots (did the "rush immunotherapy" where they give you the first six months worth of shots over the course of a single day). Dentisted the cavities.

Major life progress from November:

1) I feel like I've brought my social media addiction under control. I might still spend the whole day on Facebook, but now it's mostly because I choose to: I haven't lost a day to the site against my will for a while anymore.

I achieved this by following the advice in _The Power of Habit_ and changed my routine while keeping the reward same. Namely, whenever I get an urge to go on FB when I shouldn't, I check my notifications via the slow GPRS/Edge connection in my phone. The slowness combined with the tedium of typing on a phone keyboard makes the experience much less rewarding, and easier to pull out of. (I just hope that I won't be forced to upgrade to a real smartphone at some point.)

2) Shifted my diet in a much more vegan direction by finally eliminating the cheese pizzas from it and generally making an effort to stop buying foodstuffs containing animal products. I thought this would be considerably harder, but it turns out that the shift from a meat-eater to mostly vegetarian was MUCH more difficult than the shift from mostly vegetarian to mostly vegan, at least for me.

I got a new job with pay in the low six figures, starting January.

I wrote roughly 10k words of fiction.

I completed the first draft of the paper describing the internal workings of my parallel fitting engine.

I made a quick prototype of an idea I had for a wargame, to see if it would be interesting. Downloadable here; known to work on Windows 7, not known to work on any other operating system. Feedback welcome. Please note: This is the minimal possible game, intended only as a quick-and-dirty test of concept. It is minimal to the point that it just kicks you out when you win.

I co-drafted the new version of the Creative Commons licenses which has been released at long, long last.

I've taken up gymnastics classes after a break of about 20 years. Have managed to get a back walkover without killing myself. (Still working on the back handspring I was terrible at as a child.)

I realized that if I felt a strong impulse to begin a conversation with "I don't want to pick a fight", this meant I did want to pick a fight, so I put off the conversation, which went well later.

Last month, I entered my second powerlifting competition, where I squatted 358lbs (while my calves and quads were cramping, NO FUN), bench pressed 264lbs, and deadlifted 407lbs. Mediocre numbers for my bodyweight, but personal records all the same.

I also conquered an existential crisis and have made big plans to change my life around for the better (moving career from IT to computer science). I've begun working on habits and skills that will help in that transition.

I've also started organizing a local polyamory meetup group.

Designed a new musical instrument and played it live at two dances.

I am making real progress to become more mathematically proficient, and working towards the long term goal to be able to do effective research in Friendly AI http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/g9l/course_recommendations_for_friendliness/

Completed the following courses Calculus 1 [https://www.coursera.org/course/calc1] Calculus 2 [https://www.coursera.org/course/sequence] General Game Playing [https://www.coursera.org/course/ggp] Metadata [https://www.coursera.org/course/metadata]

My blog was listed as "optional reading" on the syllabus for a course on critical thinking in Hong Kong.

I learned PHP, Javascript, HTML, and wrote my first program since AP comp sci back in high school. It's also the first program which I wrote for an actual reason, rather than for the sake of learning to program in a class setting.

• organized a talk by Peter Singer that exposed 300+ Harvard students to effective altruism
• organized an effective altruist group on campus to the point where fifteen of us are running fundraiser for GiveWell's top charities (compared to 2-3 people hanging around and talking last semester)
• wrote a fairly well-received post here
• successfully applied for a number of internships in order to get more information about job prospects in finance
• wrote somewhere in the neighborhood of 20,000 words of blog/essays/math

In mid-November, I translated a 15,000-word contract from German to English in a week. It was my largest paid translation job and my first translation from German; previously I had translated documents from French and Italian, languages in which I am significantly more experienced. I didn't consider myself particularly qualified to translate German (though I had been planning to add it to my repertory eventually), and it seems to have been assigned to me through some sort of oversight. Nevertheless, I did it successfully, which increased my sense of what kinds of things I am able to do.

Gave my first ever public talk. It was an hour long, to a it thirty teenagers, at Liverpool University (I'm 16, btw).

I started from randomly selecting cards in a deck and got all the way to proving Bayes' Theorem and talking about its implications.

Whilst wearing my Bayesian Conspiracy t-shirt.

First thing that comes to mind that I just did tonight...I stumbled across a probability "paradox", noticed that it had an infinity in it, got suspicious, expressed it in a form with finite population size, and took the limit as the population size went to infinity, and what do you know... the paradox vanished in a puff of canceling fractions.

Organized a medium sized event all by myself, including contacting a stranger, getting money to bring him in, and then planning all the details of the event!

I spin fire, and I had my first spinning experience where I enjoyed myself the whole time, instead of mostly being nervous about it. Not coincidentally, it's also probably my best performance.

Work: I've written several texts on less wrong, in particular one about effective altruism under such extreme flow, that 6 hours elapsed before I checked the time.

Love life: I've had three romantic encounters with three beautiful and magnificent human beings, full of magnetism, balance, and sexual energy.

Bureocracy: I can't overstate how proud I am that I have already managed to subscribe to two scholarships and UC Berkeley, and if I keep the current rate, it looks like I'll actually not fail miserably in subscribing to the 10+things I need to. I have been known to lose hundreds of opportunities because I can`t go through forms. So this is the major Winner.

I fill my bathtub with cold water, add 40 pounds of ice, and stay in until the ice melts. (Don't try this yourself until you have built up cold resistance by first taking cold showers, then cold water baths, and then cold baths with a little bit of ice.)

As I age the winters are becoming less pleasant and this is in part an attempt to alter my winter set point happiness.

November was NaNoWriMo.

I didn't officially participate, but I nonetheless wrote about 20,000 words, same as the last few months - if I can keep that up, I should be a competent writer in about five years. Yay!

I had my first book published. It's a textbook for upper elementary school, and I'm reasonably confident it is the only such textbook in the world that includes

• an explanation of the planning fallacy

• a description of confirmation bias and survivor bias

• a sub-section titled "What do you think you know and why do you think you know it?".

Composed my first substantially original melody, a setting of a medieval Hebrew poem. I'm proud because I've usefully applied principles of music theory I learned last spring.

Completed 4 more courses on Udacity. That's one per week!

I've gotten my sleep cycle under control by forcing myself to go to bed earlier. (Bought a second alarm clock. One means wake up, the other means go to sleep).

I've kept off the weight I lost last month (but not, alas, lost any more).

I've written ~80% of a manuscript, (for NaNoWriMo), and I intend to finish it by Christmas.

I did well on my performance review at work.

Published a paper in Think, and got a paper officially accepted for publication in Communications of the ACM. Now I just need to sit down and write a review article on debiasing or something so I can have peer-reviewed work in philosophy, psychology, and computer science... without bothering to get a Bachelor's degree first.

I wrote about 17,000 words worth of fanfiction for NaNoWriMo, with a bit of help from Beeminder.

I started doing yoga. Meditate every evening after writing in my diary. Take a melatonin and some fish oil to sleep like a baby. In the morning I take D3 and some fish oil. Also I force myself to eat much more vegetables.

Maybe I am not more productive but I am most certainly happier.

I have a "real job" for the first time, my mental health is better than its been before, despite occasional problems with th ejob stress due to combination of medication, cbt techniques and therapy.

I raised money for AMF by running a fundraiser at my school.

Figured out Matlab well enough (with massive help from a labmate in the physics program) to write some scripts that automate my low-level data analysis for work that previously took 3+ hours into 5 minutes of carefully selecting parameters and 2 seconds of processing.

I answered my own question on Math Stack Exchange, and thus avoided a pocket veto, wherein a question gets deleted if it has a negative vote total and no answer after 30 days.

Aced all my classes in my first quarter at Stanford, took up blogging (again!) and used (social) pre-commitment techniques to stick with it, finished a timeboxing analysis and found some interesting patterns in how I manage my time, started deliberately tracking short- and long-term goals and established systems with which to track these resolutions, and began a segmented sleep experiment (and will continue for a week or more based on how things go).

I taught my mum how to make a Gmail account. Trust me, it's harder than you think.

Last month, I visited a school of dance with a number of other composers from my university, to meet students there and explore possible future collaborations. I had misunderstood how the meeting would take place, and so I only realised I'd have to give an informal presentation about my music when I was already at the train station.

I'm an okay public speaker but nervous about presenting on my music, but the hastily-improvised presentation went really well, I got a great response from the dancers, and met several people who expressed an interest in working with me in the future.

I'm feeling more confident about my presentation skills, my ability to communicate about my music, and my music itself as a result.

I put online a video that is a "spiritual atheist" ritual/meditation that very reliably gives people deep experiences entirely free of superstition, by using techniques of mindfulness meditation and NLP.

It also obeys a stricter set of formal rules than almost anything of its length ever published in the English language: strict common meter, double rhymes, no first or second person singular (so it can be spoken in unison, ceremonially) and strictly facts-only with only the slightest use of metaphor.

I've released it into the public domain, and it is the first of seven of its kind: the Seven Secular Sermons.

Please see it, upvote it, send the link, react to it, remix it etc.