Changes

Apr. 28th, 2011 06:14 pm
xuenay: (Default)
One of the tricky things about realizing how much you've changed is that you forget that you've ever been different. Writing your thoughts down helps. I've looked at some of my old IRC logs, back from when I was a teen, and been amazed at how different my writing and style was.

(Of course, sometimes you also think you've come up with a fantastic, new idea. Then you look at your older stuff and realize you already came up with it three years ago but forgot it in the meanwhile.)

Recently I had one of those "oh" moments, and I didn't even need to go back to my teen years. A little over a year ago I wrote:
I won't try to hide it: I'm insecure. Not so insecure that I'd let most people see it, but when it comes to the few people I'm really close to, they'll know that I'm fishing for compliments a lot.

And re-reading that, I went "huh". Yes, I can clearly remember doing that. (Fishing for compliments, that is.) I also realized that I don't remember when I'd have done it last.

I've gotten a lot happier and secure over the last year, partially due to reading various books and applying their advice. Some other factors have probably also contributed, like the fact that I finally rented my own apartment (no more sharing my home with other people), started taking regular cold showers and getting some morning exercise, making sure I get some sort of real-life social interaction regularly, et cetera. Life is good, though it could still be better. Hoping to land some job in the near future.

Today I also got an e-mail telling me I'm a Bachelor of Arts now. Was about time, it's been five years since I started my studies. Still waiting for the paper documents to arrive in the mail.
xuenay: (Default)
Nicked from #lesswrong: a superintelligent entity offers to give you 2^n dollars, with probability 1/n. What value of n would you choose?

----

Gah, reading about Stuxnet and various speculative viruses is rekindling my old passion for network security. I already have difficulty deciding what to do with my life because I have too many interests - I don't need one more passion on top of that!

On the other hand, a career in the field could be both rather enjoyable *and* well-paying, while most of my other interests are only one or the other. (For anyone wondering how something I'm interested in could not be enjoyable: I'm e.g. interested in societal issues and making the country a better place to be, but there's a lot in the actual daily life of a politician that seems off-putting. Dealing with many of the other politicians, for instance.)

----

Had a radio interview today. My interviewer was late so I went to get something to eat. As I was finishing my meal, the restaurant keeper asked for my help in assembling a new fax machine because she didn't understand the assembly instructions and needed to send an important fax today. Half an hour later I had it up and running and got thanked profusely.

---

Whenever I'm in my original hometown, Turku, I'm too impatient to spend 10 minutes waiting for a bus. So I walk instead. Which takes an hour. (No joke.)

This is a major part of the reason why I've spent in total 4½ hours walking during today and yesterday. And OUCH OUCH OUCH MY LEGS DO NOT APPROVE. Neither do my feet, for that matter.

----

Adults say the expectation of getting a new toy is better than the actual thing. This seems more true to me now, but as a kid I knew it wasn't true: true, some toys were boring when you got them, but some would give just hours and hours of endless fun, far more and longer than the expectation of getting it. To what extent does "the expectation is better" simply mean "I don't know how to have fun anymore"?

It's really hard for me to get engrossed in a computer game the way I used to get, back as a kid. Of course, one could just say that it's because they simply don't make the likes of X-Com, Civilization II or Final Fantasy VI / VII anymore or that I'm not finding them, but it seems considerably more likely that video game entertainment simply doesn't hook me the way it used to when it was all new.

On the other hand, even though I've *occasionally* thought I was getting this same effect from books, every now and then I stumble on a book that has me absolutely hooked.

----

Every year, I keep thinking I waste too much time doing pointless things online and never get any real reading done. But that's probably because I'm *way* underestimating the amount of stuff I learn "doing pointless things online", so I should stop feeling guilty about it.

Case in point: I've written three books, and have in my head rough outlines for three more that I could probably start writing right now if I felt it was worth the time investment.
xuenay: (Default)
(Prompted by Giulio Prisco's similar post.)

To whom it may concern:

I am writing this in 2010. My Gmail account has almost 2 GB of data, which contain some information about me and also some information about the persons I have exchanged email with, including some personal and private information. In addition, I have plenty of information about myself scattered across the web in various services, such as LiveJournal, Last.fm, and so forth. My hard drives also contain things such as IRC and instant message logs from at least the last five years, as well as various personal files.

I am assuming that as time goes, the amount of personal information about me stored both online and offline will only continue to grow. I am also assuming that there may come some point in time where:

1) AI-based technology is available to reconstruct copies of individual people by analyzing various sources such as the ones mentioned above, with sufficient accuracy for mind uploading via detailed personality reconstruction.
2) It is legally and technologically possible to gain access to various personal accounts (including but not limited to e-mail accounts and encrypted hard drives) in order to do this, but it may be illegal without the consent of the account owners (or their heirs).
3) Reconstructing a mind may or may not be legal without explicit permission from either the person being reconstructed or their heirs.
4) Many of the people today, including myself, may already be dead and therefore incapable of giving permission to use the data in their accounts for such a purpose.

In case of such a scenario, I hereby give permission to the relevant parties to read all the data I have stored in various places both online and offline, and use them together with other available information to reconstruct my mindfile with sufficient accuracy for mind uploading via detailed personality reconstruction. I also explicitly give permission for the actual process of rebuilding an upload copy of me, as well as for using this data for helping reconstruct other people I have been in contact with.

These permissions are given with the caveat that my uploaded copy should only be created if it will be treated in such a way that it is reasonable to assume that the currently living me would not, when presented with a description of the situation the uploaded copy ended up in, regret having given this permission. This clause is mainly intended to exclude the possibility of e.g. sadistic torture worlds, and is worded to make reference to my and not the copy's wishes to exclude possibilities such as editing the copy to not even be aware of the possibility of things being any better.

Should any of the content in this post become irrelevant or inapplicable because of future technological developments, the spirit and not the letter of the post should be adhered to.

Signed by Kaj Sotala on September 29, 2010, and witnessed by readers.

NOTE: The accuracy of the process outlined above increases with the number of persons who give their permission to do the same. You can give your permission in comments, your own blog or other public spaces.
xuenay: (Default)
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... )
xuenay: (Default)
Briefly spoke with Anna about figuring out what, exactly, I should do here. She too recommended talking with Justin about getting some kind of co-writing done, with me helping Justin introduce some concreteness to his writing. In exchange, Justin might help improve my "analytical sharpness" I think the term was, though I wasn't entirely sure of what was meant by that. I was pointed to a book on critical thinking that apparently has some stuff relating to that, though Anna couldn't find the exact chapters about it. Huh. Well, I'll skim it through. She also said we should talk about that Platzer planning project more at some point, but didn't think me simply taking charge of it would be a good idea at this point. Fair enough, we'll see if anything comes out of that. In any case, Justin and I agreed to talk about things today, maybe get some of that co-writing stuff started. (Edit: Justin said he's taking a day off today, so I guess that'll have to wait.)

That still doesn't entirely answer the question of "what should I be doing here", though. I need some kind of overarching vision of the overall purpose of me being here should be, otherwise I'll feel that I'm just doing various disconnected stuff without any greater purpose.

This is kind of related to me in general not knowing what I'd want to do with my life. The free "everyone does whatever" sort of thing here is great when you've already decided on the best way you personally can contribute to avoiding existential risks, but less so when you have no idea. On the other hand, the positive thing about this is that it's kinda forcing me to decide on what I want. I've been worrying about this before, but the workload from college courses has also been filling part of my attention so I've been able to kinda drown the issue under those. Just do school work and only worry about what I actually want later on.

So, what lifepaths do seem viable? Here are the ones I've been thinking about:

POLITICS. I may have a non-neglible possibility of getting elected to the Parliament of Finland, either during the 2011 or the 2015 election. I'm estimating the chance of this to be around a couple of percent if I do nothing more than what I've been doing now, uppable to say 25% if I were to really dedicate myself to that during this autumn and the beginning of next year. This would allow me to popularize rationality and awareness of existential risks and affect country-level issues which I feel strongly about. The pay also isn't bad, so I could donate relatively large sums to x-risk prevention.

However, I have a strong suspicion I wouldn't actually like doing politics much.

ACADEMIA. There are two variants of this: try to do academic work concentrating on Singularity/AI issues, or try to do academic work concentrating more on something else. These are naturally not mutually exclusive, it being more of a question of emphasis. For the Singularity/AI issues - well, unlike some people at SIAI, I'm no genius so I'm not sure whether this is really where my comparative advantage lies. There are probably some low-hanging fruit in the form of stuff that hasn't yet been explored in depth or converted into academic papers, which I could do.

Academic work concentrating on something else would be interesting - I've got some ambitions about studying societies and large-scale human behavior from some grand interdisciplinary point of view combining cognitive science, economics, sociology, computer science et cetera. Pay in academia is often poor, however, and the work uncertain. I'm not sure I could deal with the stress of only knowing I or my team has project funding for the next six months.

INDUSTRY RESEARCH. As above, but doing something of interest for the private sector. I don't really know very much about this side of things. I'm figuring it'd have better pay and job security, but could spend less time doing genuinely interesting things and more time doing things optimized for making the biggest $$$ for The Corporation. Which might be okay or not, depending on how interesting that stuff would end up being.

WRITING. I've written three books now, the latest of which got a bunch of positive reviews, including a fourteen-paragraph one in Finland's biggest newspaper. It was also briefly on the list of most sold books in the webstore of Suomalainen kirjakauppa, the biggest bookstore chain in Finland, though I don't know how many sales they get through their webstore and how those stats were calculated. This is something I'd probably enjoy doing, though again the pay is poor and even more uncertain in academia. If I could break into the English-speaking market, the earnings potential would go up considerably. Most Finnish authors make the majority of their income via grants given out by various private foundations as well as the state, but there's again some degree of uncertainty involved in getting those.

CODE MONKEY. Catch-all term for "whatever doesn't sound too unpleasant but nets money". Currently most likely way of doing this seems to be by obtaining more programming experience and skill and then finding work in the IT sector, hence the name. The couple of instructors I've done CS programming project courses for said I have talent, and I realized that I actually liked doing practical programming projects a lot, more than many of the more theoretical courses I've had. This would also pay at least moderately well.

If I manage to pick one of these and decide I'll want to concentrate on it, I can leverage my time here to improve my chances of making it through to that field.

Considering those various options, I find that the thing that's most emotionally important for me right now is job security. Ideally I'd prefer a job I can just do and be at least moderately sure I'm doing a good job, without needing to worry about whether or not I'm doing a good enough job to pay my rent in a month or six months or whether the job'll exist at all at that point. That means that I'm currently rather strongly drawn towards the code monkey career heading, ideally at some big company that isn't likely to go out of business any time soon. It'll also allow me to do stuff falling under the other headings at the side.

(EDIT: I've also been playing the around with the idea of some kind of a consultancy thing, as I tend to have at least moderate talent in figuring out [1] [2] reasons for disagreement and a generic consultancy gig gives a nice excuse for studying a bit of everything in the hopes of it might be applicable.)

Considering my insecurities, it might also be a good thing if I didn't have an intellectually challenging job that had my re-evaluating my self-image all the time...
xuenay: (sonictails)
After mentioning this in a Facebook comment thread, I thought it might be good to share this to a wider audience as well, as this has to be the number one productivity tip I've ever read.

It comes from a brief 2007 entry in Anders Sandberg's blog:

The Early Bird gets the Caffeine Pill

This week I have experimented with a new way of getting up in the morning. My problem is that Anders-Sleepy has different goals than Anders-Awake, and is quite adept at resetting the alarm clock. Now I, Anders-Awake, has found a way around this self:

I set my alarm to 6:00 and 8:00. At 6:00 I go up, take a 50mg caffeine pill, and go to bed again. Then I sleep and wake up rested and energetic around 8.

In my case the time for the pill to start working seems to be 1.5 hours. A dose of one pill ensures that I wake up (but still yawning) while two pills makes me start the day much more quickly. The added benefit is of course a regular sleep schedule.

I ran into the problem of a late night one of the days, where I remained awake until 3:30. In this case I adjusted the program slightly, taking the pill at 7:00 and sleeping to 8:30, this seemed to work and the rest of the day was efficient. I became tired earlier in the evening, which was fixed by going to sleep earlier.

Using caffeine to combat sleep inertia is not my idea; a study has shown that it works for naps. Music may also help.


Previously I had difficulty getting up from bed, but after adopting this practice, all of my problems have vanished. I'm far more productive this way than if I'd have to rely on an alarm clock. My personal supply is 100mg pills, which I find have a pretty fast effect (this might be partially because I don't swallow them whole, but chew them into smaller pieces first - I never learned how to swallow big pills whole). I set my alarm clock at 9 AM, take one and reset the clock at 10 AM. After taking a pill I usually don't fall back to sleep, but grow more and energetic and often get up even before the second alarm.

Roko suggested using organic honey as an alternative, apparently that has the same effect. I may try that when my current stash of caffeine runs out, though I suspect that the pills are cheaper in the long run. Of course, honey is probably healthier.

December 2018

S M T W T F S
      1
2345678
910 1112131415
16171819202122
23242526272829
3031     

Syndicate

RSS Atom

Most Popular Tags

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags
Page generated Jul. 7th, 2025 09:40 pm
Powered by Dreamwidth Studios