What are you working on? June 2012

The goal is to date successfully. The subgoal is to get one date. Despite meeting a lot of single women, flirting with them, and getting some phone numbers, none of them have been willing to actually go out, or they've made plans and then cancelled. The working theory is that I'm way less attractive than I think. So I'm debugging my appearance and behavior.

Clothes. My process was this: go online, read about fashion, put clothes on, stare at mirror. "According to this, none of my shirts actually fit!" Go to the store, try shirts on, "and none of these fit either!" Go to a tailor, spend $180 to get five shirts ruined (N.B. test a tailor before giving them a big chunk of your wardrobe). Go to a new tailor, and finally I now own a shirt that fits like it's supposed to.

I had tried improving my clothes before without effect, but I think the latest batch of changes bumped me up a level. I've also been testing out these high-status behaviors, so it's hard to isolate changes, but these are new in the last two months:

1. People walking on the street get out of my way (this led to a lot of "sidewalk dancing" for a while, because I was still expecting them to expect me to move).
2. Pretty girls have started conversations with me. That NEVER happened before.
3. In groups, men have been taking way more shots at me.

Social. I can now reliably initiate conversations with strangers. I did this by noticing that I was comfortable engaging with people, as long as they made the first move (i.e. they said something to me). So I started gradually lowering my standard for what qualified as a first move in my mind, e.g. if they asked me to save their place in a line, then I'd start a conversation when they got back. I'm at the point now where even passive things qualify, like "he's carrying a trombone case" or "she's wearing a cool shirt." And when someone walks across the room to stand near me, to not talk to them feels almost as awkward as ignoring something they said.

This is a useful skill in general, but it's really nice for flirting, because you don't have to rely on them or some external event to throw you together. There are some other benefits too, like having more control of the conversation. The most surprising thing I've noticed is how pleasant it always is: even when I'm hitting on girls that just aren't interested, they're friendly, and never offended. We talk for a while, I say goodbye, and we go our separate ways. What was I so worried about?

There's a lot more that I'm trying, but this comment is already too long. I am keeping a log of my changes that I'm sure will be completely useless to everyone except me, but I'm tracking it anyway. See you in August, hopefully I'll have some good news!

I'm doing mechanism design for eliciting information without money. Most people here are aware of scoring rules and prediction markets, which reward participants according to the accuracy of their predictions. Drazen Prelec's Bayesian truth serum (BTS) is an alternate mechanism that rewards predictions relative to the answers of others instead of the actual event. Since verification is done internally, the mechanism works for questions that would be difficult or impossible to evaluate on a prediction market, e.g. "Will super-human AI be built in the next 100 years?" or "Which of these ten novels was the most innovative and ground-breaking?".

All three types of mechanisms assume the participants want to maximize their score from the mechanism. In many circumstances though, people care much more about influencing the outcome of the mechanism than their score or payment. Consider a committee making a high stakes decision, like whether to fire an executive officer. Paying committee members based on their predictions would be gauche. Scores could be ignored if it meant getting a favored outcome, so BTS is easily manipulated without money. The usual fallback of majority vote is non-manipulable, but can fail to uncover the correct answer if participants are biased. BTS outputs the right answer with enough participants, even with bias. To ensure truth telling in Nash equilibrium, BTS does depends on participants having a common prior, although the mechanism operator doesn't have to know what it is.

So far, I have mechanisms that encourage honesty without money, don't depend on a common prior or specific belief formation processes, and capture ~80% of the potential gains over majority vote in simulations. The operation of the mechanism is fairly straightforward, although why is works is another question. I'm still trying to grasp what makes one mechanism estimate the state better than another, what the optimal mechanism is, or whether an optimal mechanism even exists given my constraints.

My primary focus is writing this up. At some point, I want to deploy a web app for polls on LW. I suspect this would be trivial for someone with actual development experience. I'm open to collaboration on the econ/stats or development side, so PM me if interested.

Psy-Kosh and I are exploring Alice Springs, seeing if you really can make money in Australia. We have harassed all the local restaurants and bars but they say they have no jobs at the moment. I'm making enough to pay the bills at a local fast-food joint, but Psy-Kosh has scruples about serving meat.

I am currently looking for a fruit/vegetable picking as it would:

• Pay enough to allow me to make a profit.
• Enable me to renew my visa in a year.
• Be compatible with Psy-Kosh's ethics.

But even this is a challenge. I may migrate to Darwin or Katherine, where I've heard farm jobs are more plentiful.

I'm working on a video game in which the player controls a horde of orcs and attempts to take over the world. The game is narrated, however, from the perspective of the humans who are being crushed. You get lots of opportunities to commit atrocities, of course.

As far as mechanics go, it's simplified grand strategy tuned so that a typical game takes no more than a couple hours. Haven't gone much beyond design writeups and figuring out my platform (Unity), but I'm only about five hours of actual work into the project.

My realistic goal for the game is for it to serve as a portfolio piece (I work as a game designer). My stretch goals are to get it into the IGF and/or release it on Steam/Desura/etc.

I am working on a tournament simulator for iterated prisoner's dilemmas. The goal is to be able to run another IPD tournament for LessWrong in light of new insights (Afterparty, etc), that allows for some of the more interesting ideas (variable length, evolution, message corruption) to be in play as well. You can view progress here. It is unlikely to be updated in the next few days, though: I've set aside some time for my other project...

Which is: learning Clojure. Both for the sake of knowing Lisp, and so that I can write an IPD simulator that does the really interesting ideas: reading each others' source code, simulating each other, viewing the results of previous games, and so on. Progress on this goal is good: I have a clear idea of how to implement the features. What's remaining is mostly learning about how Clojure handles mutable data structures, and then putting them together.

I am one month away from the official deadline for completing my PhD thesis. It is about Natural Language Processing, more concretely about building a set of tools for morphological disambiguation, shallow parsing, named entity recognition, sentence alignment and such. The topic is a bit parochial, engineering rather than science, as much of it is just applying well-known techniques to Hungarian. Some of our tools are used by the broader language technology community, though.

I would really appreciate feedback. Send me a PM if you'd like to have a look. (You can decide whether you'd like to give feedback after you have looked into it.)

Any kind of project is fair game: personal improvement, research project, art project, whatever.

Oh, I had no idea.

I somewhat recently finished a Flash animation, Manly Brawl on a Big Tree, and I'm working on a sequel. (Warning: this movie is very manly.)

Not sure how much people would want to read about this, but I recently started the /r/NoFap challenge. I've been abstaining from masturbation because I do it too much. While I don't feel like I shouldn't do it at all, I need to get to at least the level of self control where I can do it not at all. Just a few days successfully, and a few weeks of unsuccessful attempts, but I feel like this time it's really coming along.

This is part of a larger plan to increase my general self control, and a concrete first step while I try other various little things.

I bought a commercial EEG monitor called Mindwave ($100). I'm interested in two things:

(1) Can reliable, useful signals be extracted from EEG?

(2) If so, can this (bio)feedback be used for training mental states?

Extra info:

(2) This appears to be the main gimmick for selling these devices. It includes proprietary measures of "attentiveness" and "meditation". You can record these signals over time and see if you can improve your mental state. I was also intrigued by a connection with a program called "Vitamin R", which suggested that you could leave the EEG on while working and it would find your peak productivity times and warn you when your attention wanders. I've tried the meditation program and it does seem to be legitimately measuring something about meditation. I'm able after a few minutes to keep a consistently higher meditation score. An experienced meditator I know (>15 years practice) was able to max out the reading in under 10 seconds, and keep it there indefinitely.

(1) Multiple electrode EEGs have seen a moderate amount of success in the literature. People are able to control up/down/left/right and use this ability to type a few characters per minute. Single electrode EEGs (like Mindwave and several other companies produce for $100-$200) have a more limited capability. Research suggests that they probably do provide some signal that can not be chocked up solely to muscle movement (blinks, etc affect the EEG reading), but these results are quite limited.

I'd like to explore more, since some of my academic research is about extracting signals from noisy data, and this is a very interesting noisy data source (to me), my brain! Eventually, I'd like to do a longer post about brain-computer interfaces for less wrong. Wikipedia article

I just made a chain mail dice bag. Making chain mail is one of the most relaxing activities I've discovered.

I'm inventing, and writing a description of, an alien species as an exercise in creativity.

I develop a vector drawing program. It seams to have a good balance between archivability and ambition for me. So far it has 80% of the functionality i use of Inkscape. Currently i'm struggling with getting the performance from barely usable to smooth.

I'm trying to learn to program. Again.

In my previous attempts I became frustrated by my slow progress, but now I've finished Learn Python the Hard Way and I'm reading through The Django Book while working on a prediction market webapp that uses points instead of real money. Not a particularly original or groundbreaking project, but it's good to actually be making something that might be useful at some point.

An example that it could be useful for could be gaming communities like Minecraft, when it comes to prioritising the implementation of features requested by the users. I'd like to create a reddit-like structure for it, but if it ends up being something I actually launch with user-controlled sub-communities whoever has control over judging the outcome of a bet will have a controversy-causing amount of control.

I'm useless at HTML so I'm either going to have to learn that properly too for the front end or I'll have to enlist my already overly-busy friend to help with that side of things. Or I'll just have something really minimalistic copied from online HTML tutorials and whichever free WYSIWYG editors I can find.

• Finishing to program, in Python, an interactive fiction game, targeted at my D&D group. Doing this for fun, to please some friends with whom I have become geographically separated, and to improve my knowledge and programming practices in Python.
• Aiming to take the JLPT N2 this year, I´m starting to focus my studies in order to identify and address what I still need to learn. Having the certificate would look nice on the CV, and passing the examination would surely be personally satisfying.

Deeprise

I'm authoring/managing this collaborative fiction project.

The format I'm using for this project is one that is ultimately yoked to reader input. So I feel it would be valuable if a few rationalists inclined and entertained by the content contributed some input of their own.

The ultimate goal of this piece is to be an exemplar of the world and creatures I constructed, which I intend to make available as a complete visual/cultural element available for free creative commons use by anyone who has need of beings to fill various roles in the drama.

I am attempting to transition from a beginner exercise program to an intermediate program. the first day of the new program is tomorrow. I reviewed all the intermediate programs that are popular and attempted to synthesize the common elements. I tried not to stray too far from an established program that has worked for lots of people, so I chose the one closest to my goals and tried to only tweak the non-essential bits or make changes others have successfully made.

I believe I was successful as the program looks very good to me and had positive reactions when showed to more experienced lifters. I'll have to evaluate my own recovery over the first 4 weeks of course.

With lifting being a major project for me right now of course another one has to be nutrition. Here I have a problem: I still don't have a good model of how much macro manipulation matters. The scientific literature suggests it isn't very important, but the anecdotal evidence suggests it does start to matter for very lean individuals. I'm unsure as to how much effort I want to devote to this as I am continuing to have great results with a fairly loose paleo diet and intermittent fasting.

I have some data here. The waiting time between two eruptions and the duration of the eruptions for the Old Faithful geyser in Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming, USA.

The question is of course, what is the underlying math, governing the lengths of these eruptions and pauses between them?

I have found a nice approximate algorithm. In fact, I have evolved it. In fact it is still evolving, I'll give it here, when the evolution will stop giving ever nicer results - in C programming language.

I'm working on a little meta-analysis of iodine & IQ in adults/children.

I'm working on the pick-up project I mentioned on the open thread. I'm also doing a narrow AI project using constraint solvers for scheduling and researching for a main article on rationalization.

I continue to work on my converter for making Arsenal of Democracy savegames from Victoria 2 savegames. I created a webpage to store my finished converters and to record progress on this one. My immediate goal, obviously, is to finish the converter for use in the long-running multiplayer strategy game I'm playing; I also have a small hope of getting some additional cash from the donation button on the website, and perhaps from Google Ads.

Reading Learn You a Haskell. Currently on chapter 6. LYAH is humorously written, but it is not something you can read through all in one sitting. I am slowly drawing inferences to Lisp/Scheme and Forth/Retro (which is the language I've spent the most time on.

I've been running my message flasher in the background as an experimental anti-akrasia mechanism. (Apparently priming from subliminal stimuli can prime you to do what you already intended to do, though the effect is more muted than some claims that have been made.)

My tentative goal is to be employable as a programmer soon, and/or in a position to launch a startup of my own. I've been taking other steps towards that as well, such as updating my LinkedIn profile. I just added a few things, but it feels like progress.

I'm working on reaching level 60 as a Barbarian in Diablo 3. I'm currently level 58. Longer term goals include reaching level 60 with all 5 classes in Softcore, beating Inferno difficulty on at least one character, reaching level 40 in Hardcore mode and beating Normal difficulty with at least one HC character. Diablo 3 is more addictive than WoW (or perhaps I'm burnt out on the latter) because the characters feel more individually powerful, the rewards are faster and more randomized, the game can be played in smaller chunks, and solo play is viable throughout.

Currently I'm working on passing two CLEP exams for college. I recently came to the conclusion that the best way I could help with reducing Existential Risk was to make as much money as possible as quickly as possible so I could donate more to Singularity Institute. So I have to finish with college as soon as possible. I've been experimenting with different accelerated learning methods and I've found that Mind Mapping works best so far.

Not much in progress. Main thing is the planned J.G. Ballard quotes Twitter. Ballard wrote many marvellously quotable sentences, but they're mostly 180-200 characters long, not <=140. I have about 200 quotes from each of The Atrocity Exhibition and Crash and am slowly going through The Complete Short Stories, which has yielded about 80. When I have 800 total I'll run the pile past the jgb list for suggestions, then set up a simple Twitter bot. No ETA for this project.

• I am obtaining IT certifications in order to get a job as a sysadmin. I recently obtained my CompTIA A+ Certification. I am currently studying for my CompTIA Network+ Certification.

• I am launching a health services start-up with my wife. We recently got a contract to provide services for a large agency. We are trying to hire qualified employees at the moment.

• I am trying to leverage peer pressure to improve the quality of my self-experimentation by subjecting my data and analysis to public scrutiny (mostly family and friends, but Less Wrongers are welcome). I have have recently added new posts on my diet and prediction making. I am in the process of testing n-back as an intelligence enhancer.

I have created the first two levels and an outline of the Sith Academy Initiates Course and begun initiating our first students. I have had numerous Force revelations recently, which I am recording as "Meditations of Darth Imperius," through which I may have conceptualized a coherent, cosmically sound Sith ideology which can overthrow the current ethos and catalyze a Sith Singularity. I must give some credit to Eliezer Yudkowsky and the LessWrong community for inspiring me to pursue my highest aspirations: building a Galactic Empire and declaring myself its prophet and first Emperor. Thank you all, and may the Dark Energy be with you...