College Selection

Pushing more of my thinking about what I'm trying to do with my life into near mode. I'm trying to choose between Harvey Mudd and Harvard in order to figure out which best places/prepares me to have a positive influence on the future.

To this end, I'm visiting both colleges and talking to people in the Cambridge and HMC rationalist communities.

If there's interest, I can talk more about my current opinions on the subject.

FIRST Robotics

• Finish up competition season (Done, seeded 1st at NC, team won spirit award, I won Dean's List Finalist)

• Prepare my successors by handing down what I know about the team, what I did, why I did it, and things I've noticed. Throw in some basic rationality techniques for engineers and managers (going to start writing this up, and finish it over the summer.)

• Make team 449 into an organization which trains rationalists (emphasize rationality stuff in end of the year speech, talk about them with various younger members)

• Leverage credentials to try and get high level FIRST people to be more interested in x-rationality, transhumanism, or existential risk? <- Less likely to work, have less of an idea of how to do this.

Less Wrong

• Start a sequence on Heuristics and Biases (I bought the book! Expect the first post in early May, need to finish the college stuff by then)

• Start a DC meetup group. Almost done. There's already a meetup planned. Last steps for another are to pick a venue for May 1st, and post.

• Spread rationalist memes in my Origins of Science class. Kind of successful so far, will comment about more if there's interest.