FYI all:  The Singularity Summit 2008 is coming up, 9am-5pm October 25th, 2008 in San Jose, CA.  This is run by my host organization, the Singularity Institute.  Speakers this year include Vernor Vinge, Marvin Minsky, the CTO of Intel, and the chair of the X Prize Foundation.

Before anyone posts any angry comments: yes, the registration costs actual money this year.  The Singularity Institute has run free events before, and will run free events in the future.  But while past Singularity Summits have been media successes, they haven't been fundraising successes up to this point.  So Tyler Emerson et. al. are trying it a little differently.  TANSTAAFL.

Lots of speakers talking for short periods this year.  I'm intrigued by that format.  We'll see how it goes.

I've been feeling burned on Overcoming Bias lately, meaning that I take too long to write my posts, which decreases the amount of recovery time, making me feel more burned, etc.

So I'm taking at most a one-week break.  I'll post small units of rationality quotes each day, so as to not quite abandon you.  I may even post some actual writing, if I feel spontaneous, but definitely not for the next two days; I have to enforce this break upon myself.

When I get back, my schedule calls for me to finish up the Anthropomorphism sequence, and then talk about Marcus Hutter's AIXI, which I think is the last brain-malfunction-causing subject I need to discuss.  My posts should then hopefully go back to being shorter and easier.

Hey, at least I got through over a solid year of posts without taking a vacation.

I'm in Oxford right now, for the Global Catastrophic Risks conference.

There's a psychological impact in walking down a street where where any given building might be older than your whole country.

Toby Ord and Anders Sandberg pointed out to me an old church tower in Oxford, that is a thousand years old.

At the risk conference I heard a talk from someone talking about what the universe will look like in 10¹⁰⁰ years (barring intelligent modification thereof, which he didn't consider).

The psychological impact of seeing that old church tower was greater.  I'm not defending this reaction, only admitting it.

I haven't traveled as much as I would travel if I were free to follow my whims; I've never seen the Pyramids.  I don't think I've ever touched anything that has endured in the world for longer than that church tower.

A thousand years...  I've lived less than half of 70, and sometimes it seems like a long time to me.  What would it be like, to be as old as that tower?  To have lasted through that much of the world, that much history and that much change?

I'm going to try and produce summaries of the quantum physics series today or tomorrow.

Andrew Hay has produced a neat graph of (explicit) dependencies among my Overcoming Bias posts - an automatically generated map of the "Followup to" structure:

Eliezer's Post Dependencies (includes only posts with dependencies)
All of my posts (including posts without dependencies)

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Sometime in the next two weeks, I need to get at least one Powerpoint presentation of mine re-produced to professional standards of graphic design.  Ideally, in a form that will let me make small modifications myself.  This is likely to lead into other graphic design work on producing the ebooks, redesigning my personal website, creating Bayesian Conspiracy T-shirts, etc.

I am not looking for an unpaid volunteer.  I am looking for a professional graphic designer who can do sporadic small units of work quickly.

I appear today on Bloggingheads.tv, in "Science Saturday: Singularity Edition", speaking with John Horgan about the Singularity.  I talked too much.  This episode needed to be around two hours longer.

One question I fumbled at 62:30 was "What's the strongest opposition you've seen to Singularity ideas?"  The basic problem is that nearly everyone who attacks the Singularity is either completely unacquainted with the existing thinking, or they attack Kurzweil, and in any case it's more a collection of disconnected broadsides (often mostly ad hominem) than a coherent criticism.  There's no equivalent in Singularity studies of Richard Jones's critique of nanotechnology - which I don't agree with, but at least Jones has read Drexler.  People who don't buy the Singularity don't put in the time and hard work to criticize it properly.

What I should have done, though, was interpreted the question more charitably as "What's the strongest opposition to strong AI or transhumanism?" in which case there's Sir Roger Penrose, Jaron Lanier, Leon Kass, and many others.  None of these are good arguments - or I would have to accept them! - but at least they are painstakingly crafted arguments, and something like organized opposition.