Trans-human thought experiment:

• Scenario 1: A human brain is converted to a virtual brain through a destructive process (as described in many science-fiction stories). In what sense is this virtual intelligence the same "person" as the original, organic person?
• Scenario 2: A human brain is converted to a virtual brain through a non-destructive process. The original, organic person lives on as before. In what sense is this virtual intelligence the same "person" as the original, organic person – is this the same as the answer in scenario 1?

Why this seems to matter: If a virtual version of me is not really me in the sense of being a continuation of my experience, then what does it matter to me if that virtual brain exists, as opposed to some other virtual brain? Is there actually any advantage to working out how to convert people en masse to virtual intelligences?

(I am aware that the questions of identity and "being a continuation of my experience" are vague but I anticipate that replies here will help me get clearer. )

Does anyone have any good ideas about how to be productive while commuting? I'll be starting a program soon where I'll be spending about 2 hours a day commuting, and don't want these hours to go to waste. Note: I have interests similar to a typical LessWrong reader, and am particularly interested in startups.

My brainstorming:

• Audio books and podcasts. This sounds like the most promising thing. However, the things I want to learn about are the hard sciences and those require pictures and diagrams to explain (you can't learn biology or math with an audiobook). I'm also in the process of learning web development and design, but these things also seem too visual to work as an audiobook.

• Economics audiobooks might work, idk. I could also listen to books about startups/business, but I'm at the point where I know enough about these things that diminishing returns have kicked in.

• I've read a good amount about psychology already, and feel like diminishing returns have kicked in. Although psychology seems like it'd work well with an audiobook.

• Perhaps sci-fi audiobooks would be good? Would I learn from these or would it just be entertaining? Any suggestions (I read 1984, Enders Game and Brave New World. I liked them, but didn't learn too much from them.

• I read HPMOR and loved it. Anything similar to that?

• Other than audiobooks, I could spend the time brainstorming. Startup ideas, thought experiments, stuff like that.

I'm currently a post-doc doing language technology/NLP type stuff. I'm considering quitting soon to work full time on a start-up. I'm working on three things at the moment.

• The start-up is a language learning web app: http://www.cloze.it . What sets it apart from other language-learning software is my knowledge of linguistics, proficiency with text processing, and willingness to code detailed language-specific features. Most tools want to be as language neutral as possible, which limits their scope a lot. So they tend to all have the same set of features, centred around learning basic vocab.

• Something that's always bugged me about being an academic is, we're terrible at communicating to people outside our field. This means that whenever I see a post using an NLP tool, they're using a crap tool. So I wrote a blog post explaining a simple POS tagger that was better than the stuff in e.g. nltk (nltk is crap): http://honnibal.wordpress.com/2013/09/11/a-good-part-of-speechpos-tagger-in-about-200-lines-of-python/ The POS tagger post has gotten over 15k views (mostly from reddit), so I'm writing a follow up about a concise parser implementation. The parser is 500 lines, including the tagger, and faster and more accurate than the Stanford parser (the Stanford parser is also crap).

• I'm doing minor revisions for a journal article on parsing conversational speech transcripts, and detecting disfluent words. The system gets good results when run on text transcripts. The goal is to allow speech recognition systems to produce better transcripts, with punctuation added, and stutters etc removed. I'm also working on a follow up paper to that one, with further experiments.

Overall the research is going well, and I find it very engaging. But I'm at the point where I have to start writing grant applications, and selling software seems like a much better expected-value bet.

I've been practicing stenographic typing daily for the last couple of weeks, but still am not at a point where I have a serious write-up or a better typing speed ready.

I'm working on this mostly to prove to myself that I can see long-term projects through. Sure, the promise of doubling my typing speed on English language input is promising, but it's really too far off to be that tempting. So it's mostly to show that I can keep working on a project if I keep my mind to it. That, and there are some people on this site who are rather interested in how it turns out - how much work it was, how difficult, how long it takes to get good enough at it, etc. I almost forgot the big one: if typing in steno makes a difference in the ease of writing.

When I get significantly faster than my QWERTY typing speed - 140 WPM over my original 90 - I'm doing a write-up on the experience.

Here's links with the software and learning tools I'm using: http://plover.stenoknight.com/ http://qwertysteno.com/Home/

Keyboard: Microsoft Sidewinder X4. You need a keyboard that can correctly send combinations of key presses to the system - it's called N-key rollover - and this is a $50 option that satisfies my needs.

EDIT: I realized that my write up was missing a lot of the actual strategies I used to practice. There are three skills I am working on. Steno theory, keyboard use, and brief memorization.

Steno theory is how you figure out the chords needed for an unfamiliar word. So for the word "needed", I'd type that as "TPHAOED/-D". TPH is the letter N, AOE is the long E vowel sound, and D is the final D. Then the -ed final sound is an unvoiced vowel and a D, so it's a final D. I practice this by typing things using steno - I invariably find words that I don't have memorized chords for, and then I figure it out or fail to and look it up.

The keyboard use is mostly a byproduct of use, with a little bit of http://stenoknight.com/stengrid.png for the multi-key consonants. I got started with the key drills either in qwertysteno or the typing drills at https://sites.google.com/site/ploverdoc/lesson-1-fingers-and-keys

For brief memorization, I'm using the top 100 words drill at http://qwertysteno.com/Practice/Words1.php , and limiting the range to a manageable few common words to spam out quickly (I started with ten). Once there's little thinking involved, it's time to add more words. This is really the nuts and bolts about how to type quickly with steno - the most common words are most of what you're going to be using, so it's where you get the most bang for your drilling buck. Well, if you get hung up on unfamiliar words you're better off working on that - occasionally needing twenty seconds to get a word out is a lot of time even if it's one word in sixty. But the words you want to get faster on are more common, so it's a good tool to get the most common words practiced first and most.

Question for anyone that's taking the course: is it worthwhile for the average LW'er? I assume most of us have an above-average familiarity with these topics.

I love it... but I need to make sure I get up & move during the breaks rather than sitting and chatting.

I just used it for the first time. Very valuable, but the Android Tinychat app seems unreliable.

I have upvoted your post in the hope that it will contribute to your positive feelings about having written it, so that you will continue to write intelligent and thoughtful posts in future.

Do we need a definition of "deserve"? Perhaps it does not correspond to anything in reality. I would certainly argue that it doesn't correspond to anything in politics.

For instance, should we have a council that doles out things people deserve? It just seems silly.

Politics is ideally a giant cost/benefit satisficing operation. Practically, it is an agglomeration of power plays. I don't see where "deserve" fits in.

Since no one else seems to have said this yet: I like getting responses, and even huge delays are not an issue! :)

I occasionally reply to year old posts, and occasionally get replies to year old comments/posts of mine. I enjoy both of these situations - the latter tends to prompt me to revisit a topic, and I'll often have new insights or perspective since I've only been at this 'rationality' thing for a couple years.

5-day-old responses are rarely even noticed by me - I'm used to 1-2 weeks for a reply to m personal email! Not everyone checks the internet daily, and people often vanish for weekends, vacations, or just general being-busy or low-on-spoons.

Edit: I'd also suggest that a community norm of "It's okay to reply, even 2 years later" would be cool - if the person being-replied-to doesn't want to revisit the topic, they can just ignore the reply, after all.