A bit of an aside, but for me the reference to "If" is a turn off. I read it as promoting a fairly-arbitrary code of stoicism rather than effectiveness. The main message I get is keep cool, don't complain, don't show that you're affected by the world, and now you've achieved your goal, which is apparently was to live up to Imperial Britain's ideal of masculinity.

I also see it as a recipe for disaster - don't learn how to guide and train your elephant; just push it around through brute force and your indefatigable will to hold on. It does have a message of continuing to work effectively even in bad circumstances, but for me that feels incidental to the poem's emotional content. I.E. Kipling probably thought that suffering are failure are innately good things. Someone who takes suffering and failure well but never meets their goals is more of a man than someone who consistently meets goals without tragic hardship, or meets them despite expressing their despair during setbacks.

Note: I heard the poem first a long time ago, but I didn't originally read it this way. I saw it differently after reading this: http://www.quora.com/Poems/What-is-your-view-on-the-Poem-IF-by-Rudyard-Kipling/answer/Marcus-Geduld

Short version: Make an Eckman-style micro-expression reader in a wearable computer.

Fleshed out version: You have a wearable computer (perhaps something like Google glass) which sends video from its camera (or perhaps two cameras if one camera is not enough) over to a high-powered CPU which processes the images, locates the faces, and then identifies micro expressions by matching and comparing the current image (or 3D model) to previous frames to infer which bits of the face have moved in which directions. If a strong enough micro-expression happens, the user is informed by a tone or other notification. Alternatively, one could go the more pedagogical route by showing then a still frame of the person doing the micro-expression some milliseconds prior with the relevant bits of the face highlighted.

Feasibility: We already can make computers are good at finding faces in images and creating 3D models from multiple camera perspectives. I'm pretty sure small cameras are good enough by now. We need the beefy CPU and/or GPU as a separate device for now because it's going to be a while before wearables are good enough to do this kind of heavy-duty processing on their own, but wifi is good enough to transmit very high resolution video. The foggiest bit in my model would be whether current image processing techniques are up to the challenge. Would anyone with expertise in machine vision care to comment on this?

Possible positive consequences: Group collaboration easily succumbs to politics and scheming unless a certain (large) level of trust and empathy has been established. (For example, I've seen plenty of hacker news comments confirm that having a strong friendship with one's startup cofounder is important.) A technology such as this would allow for much more rapid (and justified) trust-building between potential collaborators. This might also allow for the creation of larger groups of smart people who all trust each other. (Which would be invaluable for any project which produces information which shouldn't be leaked because it would allow such projects to be larger.) Relatedly, this might also allow one to train really excellent therapist-empaths.

Possible negative consequence: Police states where the police are now better at reading people's minds.

Is this code for "burnt out from 80 hour weeks" ?

This sounds extremely cool. I won't be leaving my current job anytime soon (hopefully), but the list of people involved is impressive! Just curious, why did Marcello and Paul leave your company?

This sounds reasonable. What sort of thought would you recommend responding with after noticing oneself procrastinating? I'm leaning towards "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.

Well, we don't want to build conscious AIs, so of course we don't want them to use anthropic reasoning.

Why is anthropic reasoning related to consciousness at all? Couldn't any kind of Bayesian reasoning system update on the observation of its own existence (assuming such updates are a good idea in the first place)?

The first thing that comes to mind is to have an "efficient charity" box that you drop money in every time you turn down a beggar or in any way invoke this excuse. If you can stick to it, it should have the effect of getting the money to the right people, and may even help you purchase "warm fuzzies" if you can convince the warm fuzzy factory that "I really did more than help that beggar, which would have felt warm and fuzzy".