I didn't leave due to burn-out.

Quixey is a great place to work, and I learned a lot working there. My main reason for leaving was that I wanted to be able to devote more time and mental energy to some of my own thoughts and projects.

Offhand, I'm guessing the very first response ought to be "Huzzah! I caught myself procrastinating!" in order to get the reverse version of the effect I mentioned. Then go on to "what would I like to do?"

Here's a theory about one of the things that causes procrastination to be so hard to beat. I'm curious what people think of it.

1. Hypothesis: Many parts of the mind are influenced by something like reinforcement learning, where the emotional valances of our thoughts function as a gross reward signal that conditions their behaviors.

2. Reinforcement learning seems to have a far more powerful effect when feedback is instant.

3. We think of procrastinating as a bad thing, and tend to internally punish ourselves when we catch ourselves doing it.

4. Therefore, the negative feedback signal might end up exerting a much more powerful training effect on the "catcher" system (aka. whatever is activating frontal override) rather than on whatever it is that triggered the procrastination in the first place.

5. This results in a simple counter-intuitive piece of advice: when you catch yourself procrastinating, it might be a very bad idea to internally berate yourself about it; Thoughts of the form "%#&%! I'm procrastinating again! I really shouldn't do that!" might actually cause more procrastinating in the long run. If I had to guess, things like meditation would be helpful for building up the skill required to catch the procrastination-berating subsystem in the act and get it to do something else.

TL;DR: It would probably be hugely helpful to try to train oneself to make the "flinch" less unpleasant.

I am going to be there.

Why do I think anthropic reasoning and consciousness are related?

In a nutshell, I think subjective anticipation requires subjectivity. We humans feel dissatisfied with a description like "well, one system running a continuation of the computation in your brain ends up in a red room and two such systems end up in green rooms" because we feel that there's this extra "me" thing, whose future we need to account for. We bother to ask how the "me" gets split up, what "I" should anticipate, because we feel that there's "something it's like to be me", and that (unless we die) there will be in future "something it will be like to be me". I suspect that the things I said in the previous sentence are at best confused and at worst nonsense. But the question of why people intuit crazy things like that is the philosophical question we label "consciousness".

However, the feeling that there will be in future "something it will be like to be me", and in particular that there will be one "something it will be like to be me"<1> if taken seriously, forces us to have subjective anticipation, that is, to write probability distribution summing to one for which copy we end up as. Once you do that, if you wake up in a green room in Eliezer's example, you are forced to update to 90% probability that the coin came up heads (provided you distributed your subjective anticipation evenly between all twenty copies in both the head and tail scenarios, which really seems like the only sane thing to do.)

<1> Or, at least, the same amount of "something it is like to be me"-ness as we started with, in some ill-defined sense.

On the other hand, if you do not feel that there is any fact of the matter as to which copy you become, then you just want all your copies to execute whatever strategy is most likely to get all of them the most money from your initial perspective of ignorance of the coinflip.

Incidentally, the optimal strategy looks like an policy selected by updateless decision theory and not like any probability of the the coin having been heads or tails. <a href="http://lesswrong.com/lw/17c/outlawing_anthropics_an_updateless_dilemma/13d7">PlaidX</a> beat me to the counter-example for p=50%. Counter-examples of like PlaidX's will work for any p<90%, and counter-examples like Eliezer's will work for any p>50%, so that pretty much covers it. So, unless we want to include ugly hacks like responsibility, or unless we let the copies reason Goldenly (using Eliezer's original TDT) about each other's actions as tranposed versions of their own actions (which does correctly handle PlaidX's counter-example, but might break in more complicated cases where no isomorphism is apparent) there simply isn't a probability-of-heads that represents the right thing for the copies to do no matter the deal offered to them.

The most effective version of this would probably be an iPhone (or similar mobile device) application that gives a dollar to charity when you push a button. If it's going to work reliably it has to be something that can be used when the beggar/cause invocation is in sight: for most people, I'm guessing that akrasia would probably prevent a physical box or paper ledger from working properly.

I recently visited Los Angeles with a friend. Whenever we got lost wandering around the city, he would find the nearest homeless person, ask them for directions and pay them a dollar. (Homeless people tend to know the street layout and bus routes of their city like the backs of their hands.)

Yes, we have a name from this, Religion

Agreed, but the fact that religion exists makes the prospect of similar things whose existence we are not aware of all the scarier. Imagine, for example, if there were something like a religion one of whose tenants is that you have to fool yourself into thinking that the religion doesn't exist most of the time.