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Travel diary, days 50-77
Jun. 24th, 2010 07:56 pmLong 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 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.
