739 words into the next update. I’m feeling fairly burned after the last few months (it’s been hectic and won’t slow down for me until after Oct 17th). I shall continue to endeavor to work on HPMOR at least once per month so as to have some Progress to Report. And the next update should work out to 1 or 2 chapters, so progress counts for a fair amount here.
Currently working on a talk at MIT on October 17th. The talk is titled “Recursion in Rational Agents”, will be mostly or entirely technical, and will be given Oct 17th 4pm-5:30pm at CSAIL in the Kirsch Auditorium (32-123). Building 32 at MIT will be the most awesome human construction I have ever physically entered, let alone given a talk in.
Also at MIT on Oct 18th (Friday) there will be an HPMOR meetup, at 7pm in 6-120.
Also at Harvard on Oct 15th, my coauthor Paul Christiano will be talking on “Probabilistic metamathematics and the definability of truth”. Science Center 507, 4:30pm – 5:30pm.
The Center for Applied Rationality is ramping up their attempts to more formally test interventions for improving thought processes. (Example.) I cannot begin to describe how important this is (at least not in a reasonable amount of writing time in the middle of a short note). They need more test subjects, including online test subjects. If you are willing to give it a shot For Science, please sign up here.
New York readers and others take note: There is an ongoing Kickstarter for Brighter Than Today: A Secular Solstice by Raymond Arnold (cameo in Ch. 78). If it succeeds they will be able to, among other things, rent the Society for Ethical Culture’s auditorium for their secular solstice festival on Dec. 14.
Apologies to everyone who hasn’t received their T-Shirts yet. As of a couple days ago we’ve shipped the domestic shirts of the World Optimisation and Bayesian Conspiracy shirts; international orders and the Optimize Everything shirts are in progress. There was supposed to be an online super-easy turnkey solution for creating and shipping those shirts. Instead the online solution completely failed to do anything whatsoever except take our money, followed by no response to any emails; but thankfully their physical offices were in the Bay Area and they were responsive once Katie personally went there and requested the money be returned. The upshot is that Michael and Katie ended up printing the shirts at a local printer and shipping them by hand. Everyone will get their T-Shirts, just delayed.
On the other-fiction-to-keep-you-reading side, I am currently beginning to read the online original story Worm, and it’s looking promising.
That’s it for now. Next Progress Report on Nov. 1st, 2013 at 5pm Pacific Time.