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:

• Anonymous: HPMOR Pumpkin
• Askspencerhill: Roles, Pt. 8 (audio, fan song for Ch. 97)
• Korn-Elia: HPMoR shrinky dinks charms
• Iron Ferrule: Let’s see what you got!
• Elspet: Harry James Potter-Evans-Verres (Youtube)
• Yariasari: MOR
• Oatmealftlotudo: Tea with Quirrell
• Cornelia: 1st Year War
• Miststrara: Expecto Patronum

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 $5,000 and have never donated more than $5,000 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 $2,500 donor to MIRI with employer match results in us receiving a total of $20,000!

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.

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.

Currently 3,004 words into Ch. 99.

I’ll be spending Nov 17-30 at Oxford, but may not have time to meet with anyone while I’m there, barring exceptional circumstances (there will be a decision theory workshop so time is already crowded).  Videos of my MIT talk are not yet online.

Though not much is yet written, I quite liked Rationalising Death, an attempt to do a rationalist rewrite of Death Note with, basically, HJPEV playing the role of Light Yagami.  It’s actually quite creepy to read this story with a villain protagonist who not only reasons more sympathetically but is literally quoting my own thoughts at some points.  Knowing how this happened by way of HPMOR influence doesn’t make it any less creepy… no, actually, I take that back, it would be way creepier if there was no obvious path for the influence.

Worm continues to be awesome (I’m up to Vol. 13).  I didn’t even notice until I was halfway through what I’ve already read that all of the characters were using their superpowers intelligently, that none of the supposed geniuses were behaving like idiots, and that the flying bricks who would be the central Powers of other tales were properly taking second place to the real movers and shakers, namely anyone with any sort of informational, cognitive, or probability-based talent.  Doing this so smoothly that I don’t even notice because my brain considers the resulting world to be ‘normal’ really ought to deserve some kind of epic bonus points.  For many readers, though not all, Worm should be a strong candidate for treating HPMOR withdrawal (the author updates very quickly and regularly).

The next Progress Report will be posted on Dec 1st, 2013 at 5pm Pacific Time.

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.

Fiction recommendations:

Saga of Soul by Ouri Maler.  About the sort of magical girl who realizes that her energy attacks aren’t anywhere near as powerful as the implied mass-energy of the objects she can apparently create, and so conjures some unbihexium (element-126, the hypothesized ‘island of stability’) in order to verify that she’s not summoning matter from elsewhere… and then gives it to some physicists to study, because Science.  As of the latest chapter, it turns out that I spotted the obvious plot but missed the less obvious plot, even though, in retrospect, there were hints.  (Original fiction.)

Murasakiiro no Qualia:  Qualia of Purple, a manga about a young girl who sees everyone else in the world as robots, and can apparently predict and act thereby.  Then things start to get odd, though still with a rationale behind it.  If 60% of Greg Egan wrote a manga, it would be like this.

+1 to the humor fics Nobody Dies: The Trials of Kirima Harasami (I think this should make sense even if you haven’t read Nobody Dies or Evangelion) and Love Lockdown (should be moderately humorous if you don’t know the Naruto!Akatsuki, and hysterically funny if you do).

I will be giving a talk at MIT in October, probably at CSAIL on October 17th.  Details are still tentative; I’ll post details in the Oct 1 Author’s Note, but wanted to give you all a heads-up now.  There will presumably be some sort of LW / HPMOR meetup around that time.

I am finally getting around to selling T-Shirts.  Thanks to Katie Hartman and Michael Keenan for setting up Rational Attire.  Shipping is $3.99 flat, and shirts are printed on American Apparel (which apparently has the best reputation as a T-Shirt substrate).

• World domination is such an ugly phrase / I prefer world optimisation ($17.99)
  
• Probably a member of the Bayesian Conspiracy ($18.99)
• Optimize Everything (with picture of galaxy) ($19.99)

Due to batch orders being much cheaper for us to process, prices may increase after the first week or first batch of orders, and these shirts might not be available indefinitely, etc.  To clarify, this is my personal store and not MIRI’s (though I intend to use any proceeds in ways which will increase my productivity, as opposed to, say, setting it on fire).

Please note that nothing from Rowling can appear on a T-Shirt – we cannot offer anything which says “Harry James Potter-Evans-Verres” or “Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality” on it.

I am auctioning off A Day Of My Time, to do with as the buyer pleases – this could include delivering a talk at your company, advising on your fiction novel in progress, applying advanced rationality skillz to a problem which is tying your brain in knots, or confiding the secret answer to the hard problem of conscious experience (it’s not as exciting as it sounds).  I retain the right to refuse bids which would violate my ethics or aesthetics.  Disposition of funds as above.

I now have a Tumblr.  I intend to use yudkowsky.tumblr.com to post essays, short fiction, and relatively more substantive thoughts.  All Tumblr posts will be mirrored to my existing Facebook account, which also includes random small thoughts and musings.  You can thus choose your level of ongoing insanity to taste.  (Note: please subscribe to my Facebook account rather than trying to friend it.)

Progress Reports will be posted on the first day of each month, starting on October 1st, 2013, to update you on progress toward the next story update.  According to my current plan for HPMOR, next up are two one-shot episodes (one or two chapters apiece), followed by the final arc of HPMOR.  Please don’t expect the final arc to arrive too soon!

Last but not least:

You know Harry’s non-24 sleep disorder?  I have that.  Normally my days are around 24 hours and 30 minutes long.

Around a year ago, some friends of mine cofounded MetaMed, intended to provide high-grade analysis of the medical literature for people with solution-resistant medical problems.  (I.e. their people know Bayesian statistics and don’t automatically believe every paper that claims to be ‘statistically significant’ – in a world where only 20-30% of studies replicate, they not only search the literature, but try to figure out what’s actually true.)  MetaMed offered to demonstrate by tackling the problem of my ever-advancing sleep cycle.

Here’s some of the things I’ve previously tried:

• Taking low-dose melatonin 1-2 hours before bedtime
• Using timed-release melatonin
• Installing red lights (blue light tells your brain not to start making melatonin)
• Using blue-blocking sunglasses after sunset
• Wearing earplugs
• Using a sleep mask
• Watching the sunrise
• Watching the sunset
• Blocking out all light from the windows in my bedroom using aluminum foil, then lining the door-edges with foam to prevent light from slipping in the cracks, so I wouldn’t have to use a sleep mask
• Spending a total of ~$2200 on three different mattresses (I cannot afford the high-end stuff, so I tried several mid-end ones)
• Trying 4 different pillows, including memory foam, and finally settling on a folded picnic blanket stuffed into a pillowcase (everything else was too thick)
• Putting 2 humidifiers in my room, a warm humidifier and a cold humidifier, in case dryness was causing my nose to stuff up and thereby diminish sleep quality
• Buying an auto-adjusting CPAP machine for $650 off Craigslist in case I had sleep apnea.  ($650 is half the price of the sleep study required to determine if you need a CPAP machine.)
• Taking modafinil and R-modafinil.
• Buying a gradual-light-intensity-increasing, sun alarm clock for ~$150

Not all of this was futile – I kept the darkened room, the humidifiers, the red lights, the earplugs, and one of the mattresses; and continued taking the low-dose  and time-release melatonin.  But that didn’t prevent my sleep cycle from advancing 3 hours per week (until my bedtime was after sunrise, whereupon I would lose several days to staying awake until sunset, after which my sleep cycle began slowly advancing again).

MetaMed produced a long summary of extant research on non-24 sleep disorder, which I skimmed, and concluded by saying that – based on how the nadir of body temperature varies for people with non-24 sleep disorder and what this implied about my circadian rhythm – their best suggestion, although it had little or no clinical backing, was that I should take my low-dose melatonin 5-7 hours before bedtime, instead of 1-2 hours, a recommendation which I’d never heard anywhere before.

And it worked.

I can’t *#&$ing believe that #*$%ing worked.

(EDIT in response to reader questions:  “Low-dose” melatonin is 200microgram (mcg) = 0.2 mg.  Currently I’m taking 0.2mg 5.5hr in advance, and taking 1mg timed-release just before closing my eyes to sleep.  However, I worked up to that over time – I started out just taking 0.3mg total, and I would recommend to anyone else that they start at 0.2mg.)

Sticker shock warning:  MetaMed’s charge for an analysis starts at $5K, or around double the cost of everything else I tried put together – it’s either for people who have money, or people who have resistant serious problems.  (Of course MetaMed dreams of eventually converting all of medicine to a saner footing, but right now they have to charge significant amounts to initial customers.)  And by the nature of MetaMed’s task, results are definitely not guaranteed – but it worked for me.

That’s all for now. See you again for a Progress Report (not a story update) on Tuesday, October 1st, 2013 at 5PM Pacific Time.

Ch. 98 is currently on track to update on Tuesday (Aug 27, 2013) at 7PM Pacific.