Paper clip maximizer soon to gain a whole new meaning...

http://gizmodo.com/someone-wrote-erotic-fiction-about-clippy-1691377689?utm_campaign=socialflow_gizmodo_facebook&utm_source=gizmodo_facebook&utm_medium=socialflow

In American society, talking about money is a taboo. It is ok to talk about how much money someone else made when they sold their company, or how much money you would like to earn yearly if you got a raise, but in many different ways, talking about money is likely to trigger some embarrassment in the brain, and generate social discomfort. As one random example: no one dares suggest that bills should be paid according to wealth, for instance, instead people quietly assume that fair is each paying ~1/n, which of course completely fails utilitarian standards.

One more interesting thing people don't talk about, but would probably be useful to know, are money trigger action patterns. That would be a trigger action pattern that should trigger whenever you have more money than X, for varying Xs.

A trivial example is when should you stop caring about pennies, or quarters? When should you start taking cabs or Ubers everywhere? These are minor examples, but there are more interesting questions that would benefit from a money trigger action pattern.

An argument can be made for instance that one should invest in health insurance prior to cryonics, cryonics prior to painting a house and recommended charities before expensive soundsystems. But people never put numbers on those things.

When should you buy cryonics and life insurance for it? When you own $1,000? $10,000? $1,000,000? Yes of course those vary from person to person, currency to currency, environment, age group and family size. This is no reason to remain silent about them. Money is the unit of caring, but some people can care about many more things than others in virtue of having more money. Some things are worth caring about if and only if you have that many caring units to spare.

I'd like to see people talking about what one should care about after surpassing specific numeric thresholds of money, and that seems to be an extremely taboo topic. Seems that would be particularly revealing when someone who does not have a certain amount suggests a trigger action pattern and someone who does have that amount realizes that, indeed, they should purchase that thing. Some people would also calibrate better over whether they need more or less money, if they had thought about these thresholds beforehand.

Some suggested items for those who want to try numeric triggers: health insurance, cryonics, 10% donation to favorite cause, virtual assistant, personal assistant, car, house cleaner, masseuse, quitting your job, driver, boat, airplane, house, personal clinician, lawyer, body guard,  etc...

...notice also that some of these are resource satisfiable, but some may not. It may always be more worth financing your anti-aging helper than your costume designer, so you'd hire the 10 millionth scientist to find out how to keep you young before considering hiring someone to design clothes specifically for you, perhaps because you don't like unique clothes. This is my feeling about boats, it feels like there are always other things that can be done with money that precede having a boat, though outside view is that a lot of people who own a lot of money buy boats.

"The scariest moment is just before you start"

"I think timid writers like the passive voice for the same reason timid lovers like passive
partners. The passive voice is safe."

- Stephen King

2:27 PM, Mexico City, 08 July 2013

The Blog Path and the Time Dimension

Robin Hanson recently said that writing a book feels lonelier than writing blog posts. Blog posts have many features that books will never have. Not only the obvious ones such as instantaneous gratification, being able to complete a chunk of work in one sitting, and being able to show you are actually doing something, not just claiming you are. Blogs also partition time in a way that makes a primate brain comfortable, both from the reader's and the writer's perspective. But in my case the most important feature of blogs is that generate and test and trial and error are easy to do.  So after my first post here, and weeks solving many of the surrounding problems that could impede me from moving forward, I decided to go through the beaten track and blog my way into a bestseller.

The Challenges Theme

The theme of the blog is self challenges, and it envisions the public that enjoys Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, with a side of A J Jacobs. It begins by the #50: Stop Learning, Start Doing.

This is the first post, so let’s cut to the chase: In this blog we’ll be going through a series of 50 challenges. Whatever you want to do, let’s do this together. You like A. J. Jacobs and Tim Ferriss? That’s a good start. You want to deal with your big picture question too? On top of that you like Science and Philosophy? You’ve come to the right place, but don’t take a seat yet, this is not a place to rest your gaze and get your warm fuzzy feeling inside by making a comment. This is a place to do.

All you’ll need prior to reading this blog is linked below:

You want to be one of the few Self-Actualizers out there? This won’t be any easy, and though we’ll make the journey together, no one besides you can do it for you.

But before we start, there are Six things you need to know, and they’re gonna hurt like few things you (... and it continues from here)

Previous LW Post Comments (ordered by upvotes):

Omid said that if writing is like music, being a bestseller is mostly about luck. Partially (0.5) I concur, but it seems to me that randomness in music interest is mostly dominated by prestige considerations from separate domains.

Trevor Blake told his story and made clear that only writing is writing, talking about it, or even what I'm doing here, writing about it, isn't it. That seemed like an important downward spiral to keep track of. It explains why these LW posts will be less frequent than I thought before.

Gwern and Pjeby had a long discussion about book stats and likelihoods of making bestselling lists. It is clear that it is very hard. But it made me feel it is less hard than I thought before.

ChristianKI asked the words per day question. I'll respond by saying that I read+write more than six hours a day, which is Stephen King's suggested time in his "On Writing"

Michaelos and Qiaochu_Yuan suggested a mixed nagging strategy, getting someone close to me to nag me about writing while also beeminding it. This seems very important. Beeminder is set, and feel free to nag me in private messages if you are reading this far from the date it was written. I'll get a friend whom I see a lot, and a sexy lady, and an authority figure, to nag me every once in a while. So whether I'm feeling gregarious, romantically infatuated or seeking validation, there will always be a chance that writing is the emotionally correct thing to do.

Finally, and of course there will never be time to respond to every comment here, though there might in the blog itself: Viliam_Bur devised "on the fly" a strategy, which nicely coincides with what I'm doing, except in that outlining the book is something I'll do after a few blog posts, now that this new "blog post" element entered the book agenda. Viliam also mentioned humans love reading stories, and the blogs next post will be one of my stories.

Getting informed about what does and doesn't work

Last post I said this post would contain a few things, among them "(d) Gather that information" in Salamon's list of strategic things to do in a project pursuit. From the information I got uptill now, including comments, posts in LW and asking authors by email, things that influence selling odds in non-fiction in a good way are, in no particular order:

1) Being famous
2) Writing a lot
3) Luck
4) Being a professor in a prestigious university
5) Passion
6) A wide circle of influence
7) Having a 1000 true fans, who'll buy your stuff because it is yours
8) Knowing your Grammar, and when to ignore it
9) Ignoring 80% of the criticism you receive
(those would be the "If I can't have it, so can't you" kind of critics, or just naturally spiteful individuals)
10) Paying five times more attention to the remaining 20%
11) If your reader says your writing is confusing, it is, by definition, confusing
12) Dealing with topics in a way that interests many, but focusing on your idealized one reader
13) Understand that lacking the level of obsession and resources used to promote The Four Hour Workweek, the journey could be as long as writing three or four books before making it big, or five hundred blog posts. It helps that I'm riding the four hour brand.
15) Using your strengths however you can
In my case I intend to use my "sure, naked dancing in public citing horoscopes sounds ok to me" strength, and also however many stories of unbelievable days this lack of embarrassment has given me.  

Next LW  Post

Before the next LW post I intend to copy Svi's idea of using TDT for a personal hacking experience, and also do the same thing with other unusual ideas that pop up in LW frequently. Instead of taking advice from something in LW that is specifically about strategic thinking, which I'm already doing with Great Courses lectures+Salamon's post, I'll just try to see how to administer things like TDT, Everett, Timeless Physics, AIXI, Newcomb, Iterated Prisoner Dilemma and PrudentBot into effective writing - ¿or should I call it effective bestselling now that I know writing itself is but the tip of the iceberg?. I have no idea how to do that transposition, but when last here I exposed my goals, and now it doesn't seem that embarrassing to do it anymore. 

Last, I ask a favor with a story:

There is a one domain I never felt like learning more about. Seeking for truth is a noble goal, but some truths are information hazards, and I always had the impression that music, for me, was a dark terrain. It feels like the more I know - from almost nothing - about music, about structure, math, chords, composition, harmony, style, it all boils down to "unweaving the rainbow" in Dawkins' parlance. It detracts from the experience. Going to a music show for me is a torture, for the last thing I want to associate music with is a bunch of humans making coordinated physical motions in complex devices that cause the air to oscillate. I want music to be what makes my eyes teary when a Myiazaki's character finally saves the forgotten forest from the mountain spirit. Music should be a memoir of my grandma bringing me as a child to bed while Vivaldi's Spring surrounded the bed. By the same token, there are many details of people's lives we are better off unaware of, and in the case of a blogger, or a writer, you frequently just don't want to know the details, how easy or hard it was for her to write, or how long does she usually take in the shower. Most people are not hardcore epistemic rationalists, and I'd prefer that those didn't find any link, mention or pointer from the blog comments to the LW posts about it. Perhaps not so much in this community, but mystery is, and will forever remain, an important component in excitement and interest.      

I'll finish off as I did before, by mentioning what this is all about: I don't know which LW posts contain the most compact, memorable or effective techniques for winning at being strategic, but I'm hoping by the end of this process the territory is better mapped for those who'd like to follow suit. Or point and laugh.

“Find out the reason that commands you to write; see whether it has spread its roots into the very depth of your heart; confess to yourself you would have to die if you were forbidden to write.” 

- Rainer Maria Rilke

“Tomorrow may be hell, but today was a good writing day, and on the good writing days nothing else matters.”
 - Neil Gaiman

3:00 AM, Mexico City, 12 June 2013

Seven years ago I made a promise I didn't keep. I was 17 at the time, and mildly unaware of how complex and large the World is. The conversation went something like this:

Me: I could write a bestseller, come on, it is not that complicated. Just read a random bestseller, they are not even that smart anyway!

Mentor: Yeah, right, I dare you to go back home right now and write a bestseller, go!

Me: I'm busy with all this school stuff right now, so I have to do my homework and....

Mentor: Ok, ok, I'll concede we are very busy right now, how about in five years?

Me: Five years seems more than enough. Take a note, in five years time I'll have written a bestseller. I promise.

Somehow later on I got busy with cooking pasta I needn't eat and listening to gossip about people I didn't care. Not a good start. 

It's never too late to start over though, and now is as good a time as any.

But wait! Humans are not automatically strategic right?

True. Also humans are not as good at detecting their own strategic failures and dead-ends as other humans. If we can't even face more than three minutes of work, how could we ever intuitively look at our work and see where it is bad?

Which is why it seems that the rational way to do it is to find a place where people trained at being strategic can pinpoint your failures and accomplishments as you go along, rewarding you for winning and twisting your mental knobs when you fail, so that over time, either you learn how to do it right, or you learn the right thing to do was something else altogether. This is the project. I'm hoping as an exercise in self-experimentation with Lesswrong rationality techniques that it both helps others who may be undertaking writing or related projects, and inspires others into remaining as strategic as they learned to be over time, or even more. 

I won't write the book here, but I'll keep track of the writing process and everything involved around it here (killing plausible deniability of my goals), and encourage anyone who perchance might be doing something similar to keep track in the same way through commentaries or taking private notes. Starting by the checklist in Humans are not automatically strategic:

We do not automatically:

• (a) Ask ourselves what we’re trying to achieve;

Descriptive definition: The goal is to have written a book that, despite having interesting complex content, and being within my interest scope, sells enough to get me a free and clear profit of 1700 Big Mac Indexes per month. 54 Big Macs a day. Current US $7140,00 per month, for three consecutive months.

Ostensive Definition: Being the author of something that enters my cognitive intensional cluster containing Drop Dead Healthy, The Four Hour Workweek, Outliers, The Better Angels of Our Nature, Stumbling on Happiness, The Game, A Short History of Nearly Everything, The Mistery Method, Freakonomics, Flourish, The Guinea Pig Diaries, 

• (b) Ask ourselves how we could tell if we achieved it (“what does it look like to be a good comedian?”) and how we can track progress;

Achieve: The income part is easy to detect. If it has interesting content will have to depend on a fallible 'at the time judgment' and a quick consultation with a friend who knew me before the process. (Miss T, she is great)
Track: Writing here about the process. Checking for the twelfth virtue frequently. Track a long to do list with specific and impossible deadlines as soon as it makes sense to fully write one.

• (c) Find ourselves strongly, intrinsically curious about information that would help us achieve our goal;

Possible danger: It is easy to be curious about the info for the book, and much harder to be curious about how to write much better, even harder how to write aiming at selling - or whichever reflective shield needs to be looked at to stare into the eyes of the selling Medusa.

• (d) Gather that information (e.g., by asking as how folks commonly achieve our goal, or similar goals, or by tallying which strategies have and haven’t worked for us in the past);

This will be next post's topic. Here only what didn't work: (1)Writing purely for fun made me write a book but not create a product. (2)Waiting for creativity made no difference in writing quality, actually writing did. (3) Writing a book in Spanish was a terrible idea. (4)Choosing writer peers according to mild proximity helped with writing fiction movie scripts, but not non-fiction books.

• (e) Systematically test many different conjectures for how to achieve the goals, including methods that aren’t habitual for us, while tracking which ones do and don’t work;

Conjectures: (1)Trying to sell before writing may shorten the process manyfold. (2)Riding someone else's fame and marketing eases the process. (3)Writing with the purpose of causing the reader to show a friend what he has - who am I kidding, it's a guy, look at the ostensive examples - just read is the best meta-goal to keep in mind. (4) It is not that hard to get my goal, it isn't that far from a sarcastic quote: "One person in every town in Britain likes your dumb online comic. That's enough to keep you in beers (or T-shirt sales) all year." (4)There is always a third alternative, and many times I'm not the one who will see it first. Keep an attentive ear.

• (f) Focus most of the energy that *isn’t* going into systematic exploration, on the methods that work best;

I don't have a clear idea of what Salamon meant by "isn't going into systematic exploration" and I can't constrain my experience based on this line alone, if anyone feels qualified to clarify, please do. I'll deal with this on later posts.

• (g) Make sure that our "goal" is really our goal, that we coherently want it and are not constrained by fears or by uncertainty as to whether it is worth the effort, and that we have thought through any questions and decisions in advance so they won't continually sap our energies;

Fears: Having learned in Lesswrong to do things I had never considered myself able to, I don't feel any fear of trying it wrong. I do however feel anxiety and fear that peeking into my reasoning process and strategic attempt at this goal won't be motivating enough for others to want to translate by analogy my experience into theirs, which wouldn't give me the critical minimal threshold of upvotes and comments necessary to keep me motivated to write about writing. That could stymie my exposition of the shortcuts that help me, and the biases that hinder me, in hope of improving my winning ability. Because I'm opening up the goal and process before it takes place, it could also forestall a case study of an attempt at strategic goal-pursuit free of survivorship bias.

Energy Vortexes: No Vortex is like the web for me. More on that later.

• (h) Use environmental cues and social contexts to bolster our motivation, so we can keep working effectively in the face of intermittent frustrations, or temptations based in hyperbolic discounting;

My workspace is pretty optimized at this point. Nowhere under these freakishly bright lights I can look around and see anything but things that make me want to write more, make me happy, or avoid distractions, like anti-mosquitoes or earplugs.

I've just found out that writing about you goals feels like getting naked in public. The idea is for the next posts to be very similar to this one: find a set of strategic advices in Lesswrong, find out how to use them, and write about how am I implementing, or intending to implement them as much as possible in a way people can relate their own goal agenda, providing a case study of what happens as we go along. My favorite writer, AJ Jacobs, once set out to follow all 613 rules written anywhere in the Bible, literally. The idea here is to do something similar, but connotative. I will try to openly implement all of Lesswrong strategic offerings, and see how that goes. I don't know which posts contain the most compact, memorable or effective techniques for winning at being strategic, but I'm hoping by the end of this process the territory is better mapped for those who'd like to follow suit. Or point and laugh.