Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality (original) (raw)

https://hpmor.comPetunia married a professor, and Harry grew up reading science and science fiction. Mon, 31 Aug 2015 23:41:01 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.9.4 Author’s Note 122: FINAL https://hpmor.com/notes/122/ Sat, 14 Mar 2015 15:45:17 +0000 http://mirihpmor.wpengine.com/?p=862 Continue reading →]]> And so it ends.

One way or another, I expect to write more, though I haven’t yet settled on Precisely Bound Djinni and their Behavior versus The College of Sunlight and various other options.

Please add yourself to this email list to be notified when I begin writing again:

If that form works for you, then you should see an “Almost finished…” page after you click. If it doesn’t work, try: http://eepurl.com/besNKX. If you haven’t been getting notices of the recent Methods chapters, you are not yet on this list or your spam filter is intercepting it.

See here for ways to find Wrap Parties.

If you’re already missing HPMOR, and you haven’t yet read Terry Pratchett, then I commend to you once more the Discworld novels, beginning with Mort.

Rationality: From AI to Zombies, a compendium of my blog post sequences on Less Wrong as slightly edited and much reorganized by Robby Bensinger, is now available as a pay-what-you-like eBook and at Amazon.com. Proceeds go to the Machine Intelligence Research Institute.

Cassandra Xia, creator of Adventures in Cognitive Biases, is today launching an Indiegogo to fund a larger and more polished game, Timmy’s Journey, that trains probabilistic reasoning. This is a promising project that aims to get started on filling a rather large hole in human civilization – we need more computer games that train good epistemology, no really.

An attempt is in progress to contact Daniel Radcliffe. Please do not randomly bother him or J. K. Rowling.

It currently looks moderately probable that I may end up able to make at least five-figure angel investments. See here for my more detailed thoughts on whether it should be possible to make an excess return over the venture sector by being better than average at judging startup ideas (it’s a lot less obvious than it sounds).

There will be a final fanart collection at some point in the future, maybe at the same time I post Omake Files #5: Collective Intelligence. I also have a series of short-short stories, mostly HP-fanfiction rather than HPMOR-fanfiction, entitled Not Your Usual Riddle Fic, which I will probably put up soon in a separate story.

I do intend to someday rewrite and post the epilogue, though not until I’ve given readers a chance to write their own continuations first. If so, I will post the epilogue as a separate story; what has been written so far is complete as it stands.

But for now… good night, all my friends, and I’ll see in you in the metaphorical morning.

]]> Author’s Note 119: Shameless Blegging https://hpmor.com/notes/119/ Tue, 10 Mar 2015 17:58:34 +0000 http://mirihpmor.wpengine.com/?p=855 Continue reading →]]> So! HPMOR is ending, and there are two things I long ago decided I would do when that occurred.

First, the following request: I would like any readers who think that HPMOR deserves it sufficiently, and who are attending or supporting the 2015, 2016, or 2017 Worldcon, to next year, nominate Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality for Best Novel in the 2016 Hugos. Whether you then actually vote for HPMOR as Best Novel is something I won’t request outright, since I don’t know what other novels will be competing in 2016. After all the nominees are announced, look over what’s there and vote for what you think is best.

I decided long ago that once HPMOR was fully written and published, I would try to get in touch with J. K. Rowling to see if HPMOR could be published in book form, maybe as HJPEV and the Methods of Rationality, with all profits accruing to a UK charity. I’m not getting my hopes up, but I do have a rule telling me to try rather than automatically giving up and assuming something can’t be done. If any reader thinks they can put me in touch with J. K. Rowling, or for that matter Daniel Radcliffe, regarding this matter, I do hereby ask them to contact me at yudkowsky@gmail.com.

And I’ll just take this chance to mention that the Machine Intelligence Research Institute is looking for at least one new executive with the capacity to initiate and manage, fully self-directed, complicated new projects. Furthermore, especially with Elon Musk’s recent commitment of $10 million to the Future of Life Institute for grants on work toward improving AI outcomes, we are very much looking for competent mathematicians who are interested in technical work on the value alignment problem for advanced agents.

Anyway! HPMOR is ending, and it’s time for me to decide What Next?

One obvious answer, from my perspective, is my ongoing work on the value alignment problem for advanced agents (the problem formerly known as Friendly AI). My current ‘real work’ project is to write an introductory minibook, or possibly an introductory wiki-style concept network, on what I think are the core parts of that problem.

Besides that, I would like to go on writing fiction and go on having other people read it – my brain definitely has a drive for that. There are two obstacles to my writing fiction, and it’s possible that some reader may be able to help with the second one.

Obstacle #1: I need a mode of writing that costs fewer spoons and does not come out of my ‘real work’ budget.

HPMOR initially went fast, with 365,000 words in 9 months while I was working on other things. My writing then slowed down enormously after Ch. 63. Looking back, I think I made the following mistakes:

The obvious lessons are that next time, I must:

Some of the primary options I’m considering:

The final thing that would be natural for me to try would be writing something that is even lower-status than Harry Potter fanfiction, like say erotic romance, so that my brain will stop trying to Take It Seriously. (I don’t think this actually comes with a penalty to writing quality; it didn’t for the first 50 chapters of HPMOR.) Sub-obstacle #1 to this is that I worry I might have actually learned the true lesson that there is no such thing as a nonserious genre. But the larger problem with this particular tactic is that…

Obstacle #2 to my writing more fiction is that my writing so far has had negative, as well as positive, consequences for public relations. My writing tends to be controversial and stomp all over certain sorts of minefields. Worse, there is some quality of it that seems to attract a certain sort of Sneer mindset – not just social-media sneertrolls, but the seething pools of corruption that are mainstream journalists. (I have theories of exactly what is happening, but it’s not worth going into here.) This has costs for the projects I’m currently associated with in the public eye. I don’t think I can write ‘safely’ without both destroying the integrity of my fiction and also destroying the satisfaction that I receive from it. A sense of joy in writing does not go along with constantly looking over your shoulder.

There is an epilogue to Methods. I plan not to publish for at least another year, so as to allow other fanfiction authors to write their own continuations of HPMOR first. And HPMOR’s epilogue was written years ago, and would need to be rewritten now; I didn’t think you would want me to delay the final chapters even longer while I did that. These are both sufficient reasons not to publish the epilogue right away… but the much more serious problem is that the epilogue takes place during the protagonists’ seventh year of Hogwarts, which means that there are now exciting new minefields that my writing automatically stomps in. I could try to rip out all those parts of the story, but it would leave a large hole in the epilogue’s plot and you wouldn’t get to see what really happened. I think you would be better served if I could, instead, get into a position where it’s possible for me to publish my real writing.

As for what I can potentially do to become able to write for you again… to say it abstractly, I have to perform some combination of (a) shifting the way that I am perceived in relation to important projects, (b) shifting the ‘role’ outsiders see me as occupying and the real status they attach to that role, and (c) locally or (d) globally ameliorating the worsening societal condition that lies at the core of the problem. This is a complicated topic and I can’t easily summarize my thinking on the subject, nor the sorts of plots I’m considering to address it; the margins of this Author’s Note are too small. (Imagine my trying to explain briefly to someone why blogging about rationality for two years was the best way to get a nonprofit into a position where it could produce mathematical progress on the value alignment problem for advanced agents, or why a Harry Potter fanfiction would be a good way to recruit International Mathematical Olympiadists for that project.)

Still, there are a few points where I could use help with projects that are relevant to Eliezer Yudkowsky being able to write more fiction in the future, though the relevance may not be obvious. The big picture here is large, and I’m still talking with my friends about it… but HPMOR is wrapping up now, so I’m going to skip over a lot of intervening steps and describe some potential or actual projects that some reader might be able to help me with. I’m not getting my hopes up, but I do have a rule telling me to at least try asking for help and seeing what happens.

First, I’ve designed an attempted successor to Wikipedia and/or Tumblr and/or peer review, and a friend of mine is working full-time on implementing it. If this project works at the upper percentiles of possible success (HPMOR-level ‘gosh that sure worked’, which happens to me no more often than a third of the time I try something), then it might help to directly address the core societal problems (he said vaguely with deliberate vagueness).

Second, if anyone knows John Paulson the hedge-fund manager, especially if they know something about his Puerto Rico development project, I’m interested in talking to him about the efficient design of cities, the coordination problems faced by the project of forming a startup hub someplace that isn’t Silicon Valley, and some ideas I’ve had about overcoming the potential energy barriers.

Third, I’m now reasonably certain that most venture capitalists and entrepreneurs are not using the style of thinking that I would use to analyze a startup, or at least they certainly don’t talk like they’re seeing what I see. I would like to test this capability that I think I might have, and see if it is real and can produce excess returns at angel investing. I also think the 2-and-20 system of traditional venture capital does not align interests well, and I would only ask 20% of excess returns over the S&P 500 or the Vanguard bond index fund VBMFX during the same period, whichever does better. Would any investor like to ascend me to angel status?

Also, if anyone is already working on any of the following projects, I would not mind being CC’d in on their email threads (especially if I can successfully ascend to angel investor):

I would not especially recommend trying to infer what I might be plotting by trying to guess how all of these things fit together. Not all the elements belong to the same potential plots.

My contact info is, as always, yudkowsky@gmail.com.

]]> Author’s Note 116: The Wrap Parties https://hpmor.com/notes/116/ Wed, 04 Mar 2015 19:54:42 +0000 http://mirihpmor.wpengine.com/?p=850 Continue reading →]]> I am running a few minutes late on this chapter owing to last-minute edits. Please don’t panic.

As of March 3rd, the current list of HPMOR Wrap Parties on Pi Day, March 14th was as follows:

  1. Phoenix, Arizona
  2. Washington DC
  3. Portland, Oregon
  4. Brussels, Belgium
  5. Colombo, Sri Lanka
  6. Berlin, Germany
  7. New Orleans, Lousiana
  8. Sarasota, Florida
  9. MIT, Massachusetts
  10. Denver, Colorado
  11. Berkeley, California
  12. Lawrence, Kansas
  13. Seattle, Washington
  14. Mountain View, California
  15. Singapore
  16. Sydney, Australia
  17. Mumbai, India
  18. Melbourne, Australia
  19. London, Great Britain
  20. Cambridge, Massachusetts

Additional resources:

A quick overview of how many people in your area are strongly interested, and who might help you with organizing an event. Not even half of the people currently RSVP’d for facebook events have added themselves to the map, so this map is the absolute minimum level of engagement in your area.

Oliver Habryka is coordinating wrap parties for HPMOR; please email him if you’re interested in having a wrap party in your city. There will at least be a major wrap party in Berkeley. Updates on this later.

If there is no specific wrap party in your city, then the fallback coordination point for meeting other HPMOR readers is any Pi Day celebration near you. (March 14th = 3.14 or Pi Day. Yes, I know that Tau Day is cooler, but I’m not going to wait until June just for that.) If a coordination time is required other than that of the Pi Day celebration, I declare it to be 6pm local time. I have no idea how well this will work, but it seems better than nothing.

I have some room for additional cameos. If you’ve created HPMOR fan art or music, and have not yet received a cameo, please email me at yudkowsky@gmail.com with a description of which cameo names will work for you. Please make sure your email contains the word ‘cameo’, and include a link to the artwork or music for which you are to receive credit. Preference may be given to those whose allowable cameo names sound more like realistic Hogwarts students.

The Center for Applied Rationality is currently conducting their annual fundraising drive ending Jan 31st. As of now, people have donated $49,342 of the $120,000 CFAR needs to continue normal operations this year. Please consider donating to them! Without CFAR, there would be no organized attempts to actually develop, test, and teach the sorts of cognitive skills that I sometimes depict fictional characters as having.

For more on the latest developments at CFAR, please see their end-of-year update on CFAR in 2014.

Ch. 104 will post on February 15th, 2015, at 5pm Pacific Time.

]]> Progress Report, Jan 2015 https://hpmor.com/notes/progress-15-01-01/ Fri, 02 Jan 2015 01:00:19 +0000 http://mirihpmor.wpengine.com/?p=804 Continue reading →]]> Ch. 118-120 remain to be written, but I am taking the tentative plunge and saying that I currently but not solidly plan to begin posting HPMOR Ch. 104 on February 15th, 2015, and conclude with Ch. 120 on March 14th, 3.14 or Pi Day, at 12PM Pacific Time. The idea of a finale celebration has been floated. I’m curious as to what readers think about declaring Pi Day celebrations as the Schelling Point for HPMOR readers to meet up if there’s no larger local meetup. I’d also like to know whether there’s any off-the-shelf software anyone would recommend for organizing meetups all over the world.

If I choose to solidify this date, I will post Ch. 103 on January 28th, 2015 at 5PM Pacific Time to announce the fact.

Speaking of finishing writing HPMOR, I’m looking for an English-speaking Chilean reader to meet me at the Santiago, Chile airport noonish on January 12th, in order to help me to get on a bus to another city (where I’ll meet up with Brienne). Since I am not a Spanish speaker, this brief guidance would make me feel significantly less nervous about my trip. Also, thanks to Exosphe.re for helping Brienne find the place where she’s staying and where I’ll be visiting her.

The 13-essay sequence forming my abridged guide to writing intelligent characters in fiction is now complete.

I highly recommend to everyone that they read the most recent newsletter of the Center for Applied Rationality:

CFAR in 2014: Continuing to climb out of the startup pit, heading toward a full prototype.

This has important new information about what CFAR did and learned in 2014, and where they’re heading in 2015. CFAR is also currently running their annual fundraiser and I highly commend this as an effective use of charitable dollars.

I’d like to take this moment to commend to you the products of the following companies started by HPMOR readers / effective altruists:

Bellroy (owned by active Effective Altruists) makes elegant and functional slim-profile wallets. (They are recruiting for several roles including a data scientist. Interested readers should send an effortful pitch to jobs@bellroy.com.) Matt Fallshaw is one of Bellroy’s founders and is an early CFAR alum and active member of MIRI’s Board of Directors. I have many complimentary things to say about Matt that this margin is too narrow to contain.

General Biotics is a recent startup that is producing a pill-based probiotic that may help to replenish gut flora aka the intestinal microbiome. They intend to donate 10% of profits to effective charities. If you are currently unhappy with your digestive system, this is a quick way to test whether your gut microbes might be the cause. (If you don’t have a current pain point but are interested in trying general improvements, you might want to wait for v2.)

Either Ch. 103 will post on January 28th, 2015 at 5pm Pacific Time (yay!) followed by Ch. 104 on February 15th, or I will have been distracted by something going very wrong (boo!), in which case the next Progress Report will post on February 1st, 2015 at 5pm Pacific Time.

]]> Progress Report, Dec 2014 https://hpmor.com/notes/progress-14-12-01/ Tue, 02 Dec 2014 01:00:45 +0000 http://mirihpmor.wpengine.com/?p=797 Continue reading →]]> 76,800 words in and Ch. 117 is done. 3 chapters left to go. My current plan is to post the final arc in February, but I’m not committing to a definite start date until the first draft is complete. (Earlier chapters have also been significantly polished.)

I am currently reading Gate! Thus the JSDF Fought There, which appeared in response to my plea for manga with Level 1 Intelligent characters. Gate! Thus the JSDF so far appears to be doing well in terms of characters acting like they have inner sparks of optimization, being self-aware, and thinking the same things readers are thinking. (E.g., just as the Japanese Diet member is about to insult the Apostle of the Death God, the protagonist stands up and says, “Excuse me! There’s something you really ought to know!” just like we in the audience are thinking.) I would much appreciate recommendations for other manga of this sort – not manga with characters pretending to be exceptionally clever, because from my perspective this is never done well, but just manga with characters who think the same sorts of things we’d think in their shoes instead of being railroaded by the plot. The Worm fanfiction Weaver Nine, which I liked, is now complete.

There is now a Rational Stories community on FFNet.

The next Progress Report will appear on Jan 1st, 2015 at 5pm Pacific Time.

]]> Progress Report, Nov 2014 https://hpmor.com/notes/progress-14-11-01/ Sun, 02 Nov 2014 00:00:21 +0000 http://mirihpmor.wpengine.com/?p=785 Continue reading →]]> Not much HPMOR writing to report since October; 72,000 words in and working on Ch. 116 (of 120).

For RaNoWriMo (Rational Novel Writing Month) I have started to publish some abridged excerpts of my planned How to Write Intelligent Characters minibook. Discussion takes place on the Yudkowsky’s Essays facebook group. Consider it a Harry Potter Day gift.

Reading The Unwelcome Warlock (on Kindle Unlimited) has reminded me of how awesome Lawrence Watt-Evans’s Ethshar novels are—he just puts Level 1 Intelligent Characters into his stories and lets them run free. The F/SN fanfiction Path of the King looks to be a deadfic, but it was fun while it lasted.

The next Progress Report will be on Dec 1st, 2014 at 5pm Pacific Time.

]]> Progress Report, Oct 2014 https://hpmor.com/notes/progress-14-10-01/ Thu, 02 Oct 2014 00:00:36 +0000 http://mirihpmor.wpengine.com/?p=778 Continue reading →]]> Ch. 103-115 are written, at 66,650 words. Many of those chapters are in at least second-draft state. Ch. 116-120 remain to be written, but these will hopefully be shorter and faster—we are past what I thought of as the main hump of writing. The next three months will be on a tight schedule at MIRI, though, and I’m not currently holding out much hope for beginning to post before the end of 2014. I do hold out a lot of hope for starting to post the final arc pretty soon after that. Ch. 103 is a brief one-shot and I will post it to announce the schedule for the final arc when I have one.

I have signed up for Kindle Unlimited on Amazon, a service in which you pay a $9.99 monthly flat rate and get unlimited access to all the Kindle Unlimited books (which includes all Kindle Select books). As always, it’s hard to find books I want to read within the vast puddle of books, but at least with Kindle Unlimited there’s no marginal added penalty each time I try. Two Kindle Unlimited books that I’ve enjoyed so far were Nice Dragons Finish Last by Rachel Aaron, and The Shadow of What Was Lost by James Islington.

(I think Kindle Unlimited is the direction where I want book sales to go—I really don’t like marginal payments, for some reason. Reading on Kindle Unlimited feels a lot like trying out fanfictions. But for the system to work in the longer run, it needs a better way of showing me books I have a decent probability of enjoying. Then again, browsing for fanfiction on the Internet has a pretty sad recommendation system too.)

My significant other, Brienne, is visiting Cordoba, Argentina for four months with intent to work on a book of meditation-style exercises for cognitive self-training. Drop me a line at yudkowsky@gmail.com if you might be interested in helping her set up when she arrives, or helping her find a new place to stay after the first couple of weeks. (She was also considering Uruguay, but just could not find any sunlit, out-of-the-way places to stay that weren’t too expensive—everything in Uruguay that’s online seems to be at tourist prices. Chile remains a possibility if anyone wants to advocate for it strongly, but you don’t have much time before she buys the ticket.)

Raymond Arnold has just announced the crowdfunding campaign for the Secular Solstice 2014.

MealSquares has now opened the beta (with free shipping) of their nutritionally-complete meal-replacement muffins. Think of it as Soylent in solid form. Be warned that MealSquares are currently very dense (presumably for shipping reasons), but as with Soylent, some people report very good experiences already.

The next Progress Report will be on Nov 1st, 2014 at 5pm Pacific Time.

]]> Progress Report, Sep 12 2014 https://hpmor.com/notes/progress-2014-09-12/ Sat, 13 Sep 2014 00:00:39 +0000 http://mirihpmor.wpengine.com/?p=774 Continue reading →]]> 37,000 words into the final arc, and just starting Ch. 109. It’s a good pace, but I’m not sure I’m going to be done with the final arc by the time it’s time to fly back from North Carolina, there’s just a lot of final arc to write. (At the pace I am currently writing, I would be producing one 100,000-word novel every 40 days if I could keep it up, and not a trashy novel either. This is despite the fact that I’m typing these very words from inside the waiting room of an urgent care office. No silly complaints, please!)

There will be a meetup at Branciforte’s Brick Oven in North Wilkesboro, NC at 5pm local time on September 13th, 2014 (tomorrow).

Hitherby Dragons is… genuinely impossible for me to describe in one paragraph. Weird, interesting, weird, very poetic, and weird.

The next Progress Report will be posted at 5pm Pacific Time on October 1st, 2014.

]]> Progress Report, Sep 2014 https://hpmor.com/notes/progress-14-09-01/ Tue, 02 Sep 2014 00:00:33 +0000 http://mirihpmor.wpengine.com/?p=768 Continue reading →]]> Hi everyone! I am ensconced in North Carolina, near Wilkesboro, which is an hour from Greensboro or Charlotte. The good news is that Ch. 104 is complete at 10,331 words and I am 744 words into Ch. 105. The bad news is that things are looking very crunch-time busy at MIRI up until the end of 2014 once I get back, so I have revised significantly downward the probability that I will be able to start posting the final arc before the end of 2014. Grump grump, trust me I’m not happy about it either. Regardless, I shall still try to storm my way through the draft of the entire final arc while I am in North Carolina.

Email me if you’re reading this and would with high probability come to an HPMOR meetup near Wilkesboro, NC. I don’t know yet if that will happen, but it seems worth checking.

The next Progress Report will post on September 12th at 5PM Pacific Time. I’m putting it there (two weeks from now) to give myself an incentive to have more progress to report.

]]> Author’s Notes, Ch. 102 https://hpmor.com/notes/102/ Sat, 26 Jul 2014 02:00:02 +0000 http://mirihpmor.wpengine.com/?p=752 Continue reading →]]> The end is now in sight! Thanks to an extremely generous anonymous sponsor, and to the Machine Intelligence Research Institute which decided it was a wise use of my time, I will be spending Aug 26-Sep 25th in a remote house in North Carolina writing the first draft of the end of HPMOR. After this comes a standard seasoning / revising process so don’t get your hopes up for an instant update; but revising is more routine for me, and writing the first draft is the hard part. I can’t make solid promises upon the future, but I believe with >50% probability that we are on track for HPMOR to finish before the end of 2014.

My aforementioned employer, the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, is running its 2014 Summer Matching Challenge. There’s a lot of things going on at MIRI, now—check the link to the Summer Challenge announcement for a list.

The Center for Applied Rationality has upcoming workshops:

Nick Bostrom’s nonfiction book Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies is now available on Amazon. Nick Bostrom is the Director of the Oxford Future of Humanity Institute, and on a very short list of people I regard as research peers.

The second Effective Altruism Summit (August 2-3 in Berkeley, CA) still has a few seats open. Expect representatives from GiveWell, the Centre for Effective Altruism, the Future of Humanity Institute, the Leverage Research, the Future of Life Institute, and Founders Fund, as well as MIRI and CFAR.

The philosophy behind Effective Altruism (EA) is to quantify how much good gets done per dollar in various places, and donate some or all of one’s philanthropic dollars where they are most effective. Since there is no efficient market in philanthropy, some interventions are hundreds or thousands of times as effective as others, and those are just the ones we can solidly measure.

Not everyone in EA agrees on exactly what “the most effective thing to do per dollar” may be, or even what we’re trying to impact—are we trying to help modern-day humans? do animals also count? do we really care most about the much larger number of people who will exist in a larger future? But we share a common interest, and a common way of looking at the world, since we agree that maximizing impact per dollar is at least the correct question to ask; and that we are allowed to be calculating about it. I am honored to count as fellow travelers all effective altruists who ask that right question, even if we arrive at different conclusions for the moment; and I feel a warm sensation in my heart whenever I hear about someone who got involved with effective altruism through a pathway that included HPMOR.

Fan art:

(Reminder: HPMOR is now out of room for new cameos. I will let fan artists know if this changes.)

Recursive fanfictions:

Most awesome things I have read since Ch. 101 posted:

Somewhat unexpectedly, I realized that I have a (very) short Ch. 103 that also goes before the final arc. I am not sure what to do with it—I would have liked to post Ch. 103 with Ch. 102 but it needs heavy revision first. I’ve also been working on a small guide on How To Write Intelligent Rational Awesome Fiction, in the hope that someday people other than me will produce works that can be read by the sort of people who say they currently have nothing to read, and possibly nothing to live for, except HPMOR.

The next Progress Report will be on September 1st, 2014 at 5pm. (They’re mostly pro-forma now so far as progress goes, but will still contain interesting things I’ve been reading recently, or any sufficiently interesting short pieces I’ve written.)

]]> Progress Report, Jul 2014 https://hpmor.com/notes/progress-14-07-01/ Wed, 02 Jul 2014 00:01:04 +0000 http://mirihpmor.wpengine.com/?p=733 Continue reading →]]> The next update, a single chapter (Ch. 102), will post on July 25th, 2014 at 7PM Pacific Time.

From August 26th to September 25th, an extremely generous HPMOR reader has arranged for me to occupy a remote house in North Carolina, and I will spend that month working solely on HPMOR. I intend to try like hell to get at least the first draft of the final chapters fully written by that time. Please don’t expect an update immediately after that; there’s a seasoning process where I slowly edit and polish things and think them over once they’re written, at least if they’re meant to end up reasonably perfect, and I do want the ending to be reasonably perfect. That part, however, is much more reliable, casual, and unblocky part than writing the first draft, which is what takes unbroken concentration. So right now it looks like HPMOR is clearly on track to finish by the end of 2014.

Latest fanfiction recs: In Fire Forged and Right Moments. Also I finished reading Ra by qntm and it is excellent and everyone who keeps saying, “I liked the part where Harry was trying to figure out the laws of magic, can’t you just get back to that instead of having all this plot?” ought to go read Ra right now.

My current brilliant idea is that myself, Andrew Hussie of Homestuck, and Sam Hughes of QNTM, should all finish our respective masterworks, then coordinate with each other to start posting simultaneously, on the same days, at the same time of day, preferably late in the evening, starting just as finals begin. Because that’s the closest we can come to actually eating our readers’ souls.

(Just to be clear: That was a joke. I haven’t talked to either of them. Yet.)

]]> Progress Report, Jun 2014 https://hpmor.com/notes/progress-14-06-01/ Mon, 02 Jun 2014 00:00:07 +0000 http://mirihpmor.wpengine.com/?p=723 Continue reading →]]> No writing progress to report. May was one crazy month—well, you don’t care about that.

Question to the general readership: Does anyone have a quiet vacation home, not necessarily somewhere with good Internet access or more than 1x speed on Verizon, where I and my SO could spend 3-4 weeks while I just work on nothing but the final arc of HPMOR? Maybe during September, say? If so, please drop me a call at yudkowsky@gmail.com. You will get one of the last remaining cameo opportunities, and the eternal gratitude of many HPMOR readers. For optimal productivity I’m looking for a quiet location, AC if the weather goes over 80 degrees, a shower stall at least the size of a bathtub, 2 bedrooms, and solitude. Can take a plane trip in the US or Canada as required. Will pay utilities. And again, good Internet access is definitely not needed. (EDIT: I have an excellent offer! Thanks, readers!)

If you’ve been dying to have something like a MIRI technical workshop with you and some of your friends trying to make progress on our open problems, we’re now sponsoring those at other universities. Read up on MIRIx independent workshops for more info.

Upcoming CFAR workshops: Jun 6-9 (Bay Area), Jul 25-28 (Bay Area), Sep 11-14 (Bay Area), Apr 23-26 2015 (Boston).

Things I am reading: Carpetbaggers by cofax is a marvelously original-flavor continuation of the first Narnia book – what Peter, Susan, Edmund, and Lucy went through to establish their reign over Narnia. It’s complete, though I haven’t yet finished reading. Alexanderwales continues to produce interesting rational fics, including A Bluer Shade of White (Frozen, complete) and Metropolitan Man (Superman, updating once/week). I’ve very slowly started to read Ra at QNTM (I’m on Ch. 3). And I’m sloowly making my way through the legendary Homestuck which is… Homestuck. That thing is not going to be everyone’s cuppa tea and darn me if I have any idea how to describe it; besides that it’s best read on a 10″ Android tablet using the Dolphin browser so you can read the Flash parts.

I estimate a >50% probability that the one-chapter short update, Ch. 102, will appear in July. I… hope people don’t get too worked up about this, because it’s just one chapter. But I know that far too many of you have nothing else to hope for.

Next Progress Report on July 1st, 2014, at 5pm Pacific Time.

]]> Progress Report, May 2014 https://hpmor.com/notes/progress-14-05-01/ Fri, 02 May 2014 00:00:42 +0000 http://mirihpmor.wpengine.com/?p=716 Continue reading →]]> No new writing progress to report; moving to Berkeley ate everything. I’ve been trying to write up a small guide to writing fiction with intelligent characters and other rare vitamins of HPMOR, but that’s not done yet and may not be done soon. Next month is a MIRI workshop, but after May the pace of other imminent priorities should slow down a bit once more.

Recent good reads: I am currently in progress on the non-fanfiction Sunshine by Robin McKinley and it seems quite good so far. Back in the world of fanfiction, the Toasterverse, and particularly the first story In Which Tony Stark Builds Himself Some Friends, receives the honor of being the first fanfiction so hysterically funny that I read it even though it’s M/M slash, skipping the sexy parts so I could read more about the things Iron Man builds when he’s sleep-deprived. The non-funny parts are nothing special yet; the humor is already Terry Pratchett level. Also on the pretty-good list is the LOTR fanfiction Back Again by Waugh, featuring PeggySue!Bilbo.

There’s a large online fundraiser on May 6th for many different charities, in which the Machine Intelligence Research Institute is participating, featuring up to 250,000inmatchingfundingfromsourcesthatwouldnotordinarilygivetoeffectivealtruistcauses.Thegotchaisthatthisis250,000 in matching funding from sources that would not ordinarily give to effective altruist causes. The gotcha is that this is 250,000inmatchingfundingfromsourcesthatwouldnotordinarilygivetoeffectivealtruistcauses.Thegotchaisthatthisis250K total, not per institution, and the rules for which charity gets it seem to be complicated. If you’re interested in giving $500 or more on May 6th in a coordinated fashion, please contact Malo at malo@intelligence.org, and see this blog post.

That’s it for now. Next Progress Report as usual on June 1st, 2014 at 5pm Pacific Time.

]]> Progress Report, Apr 2014 https://hpmor.com/notes/progress-report-14-04-01/ Wed, 02 Apr 2014 00:01:41 +0000 http://mirihpmor.wpengine.com/?p=711 Continue reading →]]> 3,000 words into Ch. 103. MIRI has just hired Benja Fallenstein and Nate Soares as the second and third full-time researchers, and I expect to spent most of April working with them. While I do think that making some steady progress on HPMOR is important, I also think the main plan is going to be to spend some time with Benja and Nate, write up existing progress to a suitable tutorial quality for bringing in other minds, finish the Open Problems in Friendly AI writeups, and then, with something like a clear conscience because all important things are already in progress and moving forward, set aside a huge block of time to finish HPMOR.

This day I have written and published “The Confession of Eliezer Yudkowsky“. Since this is April Fools’ Day, nothing in it is true. Remember that if you find yourself tempted to take it seriously, because you shouldn’t take it seriously, because nothing in it is true.

At the top of my list of fanfiction recommendations is the Worm fanfiction Cenotaph, by ‘notes’. You must have read Worm first, but if you have, Cenotaph is the most original-flavor thing I can ever remember reading. Also on the pretty-good list are the warning incomplete Worm/Exalted fanfics Memoirs of a Human Flashlight, She Who Skitters in Darkness, and Goblin Queen; the Worm/Lovecraft Starry Eyes; and the Worm fanfics Tale of Transmigration and Bug on a Wire. I’ve been on something of a binge.

Jonah Sinick (formerly at Givewell) and Vipul Naik (silver medalist, International Mathematical Olympiad) have started Cognito Mentoring. This is targeted at gifted slash highly intelligent students, and tries to provide them with counseling to make the best of their lives. Mentoring, help in selecting good places and ways to learn, help in locating the right online resources to get started on calculus or whatever, statistics about which college careers have which expected outcomes financial and otherwise, etcetera. I have heard sufficiently good things about them to advertise Cognito Mentoring here, where it may be of some interest to certain HPMOR readers. Sinick and Naik say that they’ve recently been shifting some focus away from additional tutoring to writing up (for free) the info that previous students have found most useful, which appears on the Cognito Mentoring Wiki.

As always, further Progress Reports will arrive on the 1st of each month at 5pm Pacific Time.

]]> Progress Report, Mar 2014 https://hpmor.com/notes/progress-14-03-01/ Sun, 02 Mar 2014 01:00:24 +0000 http://mirihpmor.wpengine.com/?p=705 Continue reading →]]> Ch. 102 is finished and mostly polished at 3,874 words; and I’m 358 words into Ch. 103, meaning that I’m now beginning work on the Last Arc. I used to think that the important thing was to begin things, because then they could continue. Today I think the more important thing is to be able to find solid uninterrupted weeks in which to work on things, which I obviously haven’t been able to do so far, just a couple of hours here and there. But nonetheless, I’ve begun writing the Last Arc.

Although I expect a certain amount of dissent to this decision, even though Ch. 102 is complete and is a standalone chapter I am not releasing it immediately, because, as hundreds of you have already begun to type upon your keyboards, I am pure evil and have no intentions in this decision other than to cause as much reader suffering as possible. Actually, my reasoning is that it may be a while before the Last Arc is complete, Ch. 102 is kinda short, and hence I’m going to save it to release it during summer, in what will hopefully be the middle of the interregnum, if I can really finish up this year. Go ahead and hate me. I suppose I’ve earned it.

Fiction recommendations: Have you seen BBC’s Sherlock? Imagine that he’s Lord Voldemort, John Watson is Harry Potter, and the two of them meet after time stops just before a nuclear war starts. That’s How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love Lord Voldemort, by cheryl bites. And another word to the ever-growing MLP Loops, which contains by far the best confrontation I’ve ever seen between Fluttershy and 40K’s God-Emperor of Humankind, and is now up to 69 chapters and 638K words. If your tastes run to seeing Louise de la Valliere summon Napoleon Bonaparte, Emperor of Zero by Nietzschian is surely the best work in that particular category.

In sadder news, we, his readers, all mourn the passing of Brian Randall, author of the now-forever-unfinished “Kyon: Big Damn Hero“.

As always, further Progress Reports will arrive on the 1st of each month at 5pm Pacific Time.

]]> Progress Report, Feb 2014 https://hpmor.com/notes/progress-14-02-01/ Sun, 02 Feb 2014 01:00:45 +0000 http://mirihpmor.wpengine.com/?p=700 Continue reading →]]> I did not have time to work on HPMOR during January, due to life hecticness. With any luck my life will be less hectic during February. So still 3,341 words into Ch. 102.

On the other-reading front, I recommend the short but amazing The Last Christmas (original) by alexanderwales, and the slightly longer Branches on the Tree of Time (Terminator) by the same author. Both of these were brought to my attention by /r/rational, a small nascent subreddit devoted to collecting the Internet’s tiny supply of rationalist fiction, as well as attempting to produce it, and also posting a number of links whose rationality might well be disputed. But if you know of any fiction that you consider great rational reading, do go and post it there!

Further Progress Reports will arrive on the 1st of each month at 5pm Pacific Time, as always.

]]> Progress Report, Jan 2014 https://hpmor.com/notes/progress-14-01-01/ Thu, 02 Jan 2014 00:59:47 +0000 http://mirihpmor.wpengine.com/?p=690 Continue reading →]]> Currently 3,341 words into Ch. 102. I don’t know if I’ll post this chapter immediately upon its completion; after that starts the Final Arc which may take a while to write, so I may save 102 as a brief interlude during that long drought. (Ch. 102 is shaping up to be short. But not boring, rest assured.)

Among the guilty pleasures of my recent reading is MLP Loops (an endless series of one-shot stories about increasing numbers of Equestrians in a Groundhog Day Loop; this idea really should not have worked for 445,000 words, but I’m still reading). If you don’t know the series, don’t try to start with this story. I’ve also been working my way through City of Angles (non-fanfic, original world).

The Center for Applied Rationality is now at 47,840outof47,840 out of 47,840outof150,000 in its matching fundraiser, and your donations will be greatly appreciated. Please read this post (which went up a few days ago)for a more detailed account of what CFAR did in 2013, and what it hopes to do in 2014. In particular they hope to focus more on epistemic rationality training (better modeling the world); and more formal experimentation, including some potential academic collaborations, to verify what works. (Also good news for scaling up: yesterday the Wall Street Journal published a positive article on CFAR.) CFAR’s workshops are net-cash-positive and subsidize CFAR’s ongoing research and non-revenue endeavors, but not completely; CFAR still needs your donations to keep going. We can live in a saner tomorrow – if we all pitch in.

The next Progress Report will be on Feb 1st, 2014 at 5pm Pacific Time. (Sorry for forgetting to mention that previously!)

]]> Author’s Note, Ch. 99-101 https://hpmor.com/notes/101/ Thu, 12 Dec 2013 03:00:06 +0000 http://mirihpmor.wpengine.com/?p=672 Continue reading →]]> So – I begin by stating that I know Ch. 99 might be a tad controversial. I apologize for any norms it may have violated and observe that you received 8,500 words immediately after. (Yes, I wrote that before I read Worm 27b.)

One more one-shot arc (probably one shorter chapter) remains to be written before I start work on the Last Arc of HPMOR which will wrap up all dangling threads and close all open parentheses. This is not impossible when you have planned everything out in advance.

Meanwhile, I commend to you (for those who haven’t yet read the recommendation in previous Progress Reports) the just-completed story Worm, which is roughly 1.75 million words in 30 volumes. The characters in Worm use their powers so intelligently I didn’t even notice until something like the 10th volume that the alleged geniuses were behaving like actual geniuses and that the flying bricks who would be the primary protagonists and villains of lesser tales were properly playing second fiddle to characters with cognitive, informational, or probability-based powers. There are stories which are better than Worm, and stories which were written faster than Worm, but I don’t know of any epic which was ever written faster and better than Worm.

Fan art update:

Alongside the cameos from more recent fan art (I managed to squeeze a few more in than I was expecting) is a cameo for Alicorn, author of Luminosity, who donated this piece of fanart a long, long time ago, around the time Ch. 22 was written. “What do you want for your cameo?” I asked her. “I want to be a unicorn, or a unicorn’s horn,” she replied. “I can do that,” said I, “but it’s going to take a really long time for the story to get there.” “Okay,” she said. So here’s your cameo, finally.

Please let me know if you got the incredibly obscure and awful math pun in Ch. 100 about the proof-theoretic ordinal of ID<ω so that I’ll know whether at least one reader got it. (I was uncertain about whether to include it, until I remembered that I was writing this story for fun.)

The Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI) has been challenged with $250,000 of matching funds from Peter Thiel. This match applies threefold to any new major donors – if you give more than 5,000andhaveneverdonatedmorethan5,000 and have never donated more than 5,000andhaveneverdonatedmorethan5,000 to MIRI before, your entire donation will be matched three times over! If your employer matches donations, and you tell us so, the match or new-major-donor match will apply to employee-matched portion as well. This means that a new 2,500donortoMIRIwithemployermatchresultsinusreceivingatotalof2,500 donor to MIRI with employer match results in us receiving a total of 2,500donortoMIRIwithemployermatchresultsinusreceivingatotalof20,000!

MIRI can accept donations of Bitcoin (BTC), and now also Ripple (XRP). If you’ve seen recent vast appreciation in your Bitcoin assets, we note that this is a fun thing to do with Bitcoins. These donations will also be matched.

See here for an overview of what MIRI has done in the second of half 2013. See here for an overview of the first half. Neither of these really conveys the excitement of all the workshops we’ve been running, and I can’t convey it either. Progress is starting to be routine. Now we have to keep going and speed up.

The Center for Applied Rationality will have up to $150,000 of donations matched by Matthew Wage, Peter McCluskey, Benjamin Hoffman, Janos Kramar & Victoria Krakovna, Liron Shapira, Satvik Beri, Kevin Harrington, and Jonathan Weissman. (CFAR’s website doesn’t currently show a way to donate via BTC or XRP, but I’m pretty sure that if you wanted to make a large donation they’d quickly set it up.) CFAR’s fundraising page gives an overview of what they’ve accomplished during 2013, systematizing training in some basic cognitive skills into something repeatable (for, you know, the first time ever); and an overview of what CFAR hopes to do in 2014. CFAR is near the beginning of its growth curve, and your donations make a tremendous difference in accelerating that growth curve.

The Center for Applied Rationality is also looking for a Director of Operations, though the title should probably be more like God of Operations, Bringer of Workshop Order. By the way, that’s probably the best-written job ad I’ve ever seen, and anyone else who writes job ads should read it to find out how it’s done.

And remember: To be a PC, you’ve got to involve yourself in the Plot of the Story. Which from the standpoint of a hundred million years from now, is much more likely to involve the creation of Artificial Intelligence or the next great advance in human rationality (e.g. Science) than… than all that other stuff. Sometimes I don’t really understand why so few people try to get involved in the Plot. But if there’s one thing I’ve learned in life, it’s that the important things are accomplished not by those best suited to do them, or by those who ought to be responsible for doing them, but by whoever actually shows up.

The next Progress Report (not a story update, a report on writing progress) will appear on Jan 1st, 2014 at 5PM Pacific Time.

]]> Progress Report, Dec 1st https://hpmor.com/notes/progress-report-2013-12-01/ Mon, 02 Dec 2013 01:00:05 +0000 http://mirihpmor.wpengine.com/?p=651 Continue reading →]]> Good news! I shall be brief. My employer has allocated some time for me to work on producing the next (1-2 chapter) update of HPMOR! I can’t make promises because there could always be some immense unanticipated story roadblock, but check for a story update on either Saturday the 7th at 5pm Pacific, or more likely Wednesday the 11th at 7pm. If I don’t make the 11th I shall at least post a Note to keep you updated. Look to my coming, at last light, on either the seventh or the eleventh day; at evening look to the West!

My stay in Oxford has been extended by a couple of days, allowing me to appear unto OxTET (Oxford Transhumanism and Emerging Technologies) upon Dec 2nd at 7pm London time, at Keble college, in the Pusey Room. This shall be open to the public and I shall be speaking on effective altruism and key ideas in Friendly AI.

]]>