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Travel diary, days 28-36
May. 11th, 2010 05:33 pmDay 36... since I'll be here for, uhh, *counts* 100 days, that means that over a third of my visit has already passed. Whoa - it certainly doesn't feel like I've been here for that long.
The mind is a weird thing. For some reason, a week or so ago I just completely stopped worrying about the "what should I do with my life" issue, and got back to the old "well, I'll just find whatever to do" mindset I had previously. Weird. Ah well, I'm not complaining. Also, while I frequently keep feeling terribly homesick, the realization that it's been over a third suddenly made me feel like I don't want to leave this place. Gah.
The end of last week was busy, as most people were scrambling to write conference presentations to submit to ECAP10 before the deadline passed. I, too, managed to get something submitted, basically a shortened and rewritten version of the article that I currently have under review for Minds & Machines. (I contacted them about whether it'd be okay for them to also submit a copy to a conference, and they said it was fine.) Now I'm kinda ambivalent about whether I want M&M to accept my paper or not, for I realized that there's a lot of expanding and rewriting that I could do on the original article that I submitted... I also started working on a paper on the complexity of human values, but realized I wouldn't have the time to finish that in time for the submission deadline. I do intend to expand that to a longer paper, though.
I've been doing pretty well on the "personal projects" and "helping others" parts of my personal goals, but haven't really gotten anything done on the "personal growth and education" part. But I finally got around doing more of that yesterday, when I was again helping Eliezer with his writing. We've determined that for as long as I can still say that I've read everything he's written that day, it's fine if I do various other stuff while watching him write. So while there, I started doing what I've been wanting to do for a long time, but never got around: reading the latest articles from various scientific journals. To make sure I actually remember what they say, I also decided to briefly write down and summarize their contents. I only actually got one article summarized (about the comparative study of cognition; the summary is at the end of this post, in case anyone's interested), for the second article was interesting enough that I started hunting through its references and wasn't patient enough to stop to write a summary. With some luck, I should be able to put the time at Eliezer's to maximal use: both help him write, and make myself read up on the stuff I should've been reading up on for a while now. On the topic of helping Eliezer, yesterday he told me that half of what's been written in the book manuscript so far has been with me present. That was kinda cool, and also a little surprising - I hadn't realized we'd already gotten that much written.
Starting tomorrow, I'll start doing an interview series profiling various people in the house. So far I've only been talking about myself, briefly mentioning various other people. I figure that my readers would be interested in knowing the kinds of people that I'm living with. First up is an interview of Alicorn, a long-time Less Wrong poster. If there's anything in particular you folks want to know about the people here, leave a comment and I'll make sure to include that question in my interviews.
Below's the summary of that article I managed to read yesterday.
The mind is a weird thing. For some reason, a week or so ago I just completely stopped worrying about the "what should I do with my life" issue, and got back to the old "well, I'll just find whatever to do" mindset I had previously. Weird. Ah well, I'm not complaining. Also, while I frequently keep feeling terribly homesick, the realization that it's been over a third suddenly made me feel like I don't want to leave this place. Gah.
The end of last week was busy, as most people were scrambling to write conference presentations to submit to ECAP10 before the deadline passed. I, too, managed to get something submitted, basically a shortened and rewritten version of the article that I currently have under review for Minds & Machines. (I contacted them about whether it'd be okay for them to also submit a copy to a conference, and they said it was fine.) Now I'm kinda ambivalent about whether I want M&M to accept my paper or not, for I realized that there's a lot of expanding and rewriting that I could do on the original article that I submitted... I also started working on a paper on the complexity of human values, but realized I wouldn't have the time to finish that in time for the submission deadline. I do intend to expand that to a longer paper, though.
I've been doing pretty well on the "personal projects" and "helping others" parts of my personal goals, but haven't really gotten anything done on the "personal growth and education" part. But I finally got around doing more of that yesterday, when I was again helping Eliezer with his writing. We've determined that for as long as I can still say that I've read everything he's written that day, it's fine if I do various other stuff while watching him write. So while there, I started doing what I've been wanting to do for a long time, but never got around: reading the latest articles from various scientific journals. To make sure I actually remember what they say, I also decided to briefly write down and summarize their contents. I only actually got one article summarized (about the comparative study of cognition; the summary is at the end of this post, in case anyone's interested), for the second article was interesting enough that I started hunting through its references and wasn't patient enough to stop to write a summary. With some luck, I should be able to put the time at Eliezer's to maximal use: both help him write, and make myself read up on the stuff I should've been reading up on for a while now. On the topic of helping Eliezer, yesterday he told me that half of what's been written in the book manuscript so far has been with me present. That was kinda cool, and also a little surprising - I hadn't realized we'd already gotten that much written.
Starting tomorrow, I'll start doing an interview series profiling various people in the house. So far I've only been talking about myself, briefly mentioning various other people. I figure that my readers would be interested in knowing the kinds of people that I'm living with. First up is an interview of Alicorn, a long-time Less Wrong poster. If there's anything in particular you folks want to know about the people here, leave a comment and I'll make sure to include that question in my interviews.
Below's the summary of that article I managed to read yesterday.
( Towards a bottom-up perspective on animal and human cognition )
