Who is the composer of Singularity?

The link provided just sends me to Myspace's home page, with no mention of any Singularity.

"Every day, with no excuses, I went to the gym and did fifty pull-downs on one of the machines."

This is not the most efficient means to get towards doing a pull-up. High reps with low weights activates different muscle fibers than low reps with high weight. I would recommend increasing the amount of weight and reducing the number of reps on your lat pulldown. You should also skip a day in between doing this exercise each time. You could do 50% of your body weight as a warm-up, then try 75% of your body weight and see how many reps you can do. If you manage more than 5, you don't have enough weight on there. Incorporate this into a circuit routine to minimize down time. A warm-up set followed by 3 sets of 3 reps is one way of doing this. By 3 reps, I mean your goal is to reach complete fatigue after only 3 reps. You should still try to complete as many reps as you can. Your circuit would include at least 3 other exercises in between that don't target your back so you have time to rest. On your skip day, just do cardio. Another thing to try is to use different variations of the lat pulldown, so you target as wide a variety of muscles as possible. Be careful about your form.

I imagine this may be the TDT post you were thinking of: http://lesswrong.com/lw/4sh/how_i_lost_100_pounds_using_tdt/

It would not work for me. The whole idea of going to some gym alone and doing training that develops skills such as strength I do not actually need to use feels very demotivating. It feels useless and sterile.

My method: I wrote about it elsewhere, but in nutshell, I needed a real sport, such as martial arts. Without a sport goal, simply being healthier and sexier is not motivating enough, and it feels silly to get stronger or more flexible without ever having anything to actually use that for. It feels silly to get strong and then go back to the computer and not use it. I also needed the motivation a martial arts trainer yelling commands is giving. On my own I would get bored after maybe 10 mins of cardio, while with a trainer I can do an 1.5 hours long martial arts training without even getting tired, and it offers me a whole package of strength, technique, flexibility, speed, courage, all kinds of trainings, while the whole session doubles as a cardio with actual bouts of HIIT (such as heavy sandbag stuff). So I get a nice overall package there (boxing, but now more drifting towards the kick-boxing class as the trainer is simply better, generally it is better to choose the best trainer you can find, not the "best" martial art).

The only issue is that it is suboptimal on the strength training, 4 x 20 push-ups during a training won't make anyone buff, but once I signed up to an actual sport, such as trying to get a yellow kick-box belt, I feel way more motivated to also do bodyweight progressions at home. This is where being kinda fat is actually helpful. I intend to impress the guys at the martial arts training by doing one-handed push-ups (Pavel Tstatsouline: Naked Warrior book) and given that I am like 106kg (233 lbs, not as horrible as it sounds as I am fairly tall, 189cm) I will probably have scary big arms by the time I get there. Well, either that, or seriously damaged wrists. I think I need to tread careful there...

In short, my view is that I need a real sport, a structured sport training with a trainer, a real goal to use strength or other skills for, which also gives an extra motivation to do exercises outside the training times as well. It is hard for people to motivate themselves to acquire skills they don't need to.

I am not saying I need to have competition as a goal. For example, people can choose to be hobby rock climbers, it gives them a motivation to be strong, yet light, not fat and so on as they can now actually use it.

I chose martial arts not because I am interested in them. I am not actually interested in any sports. But I simply figured fighting is a very basic part of animal life, like feeding or fu... making love, it is simply a very very basic biological experience that must be on your "bucket list", because it is a huge part of life as an animal in general. So I figured if you have no special attraction to any sport, then just fighting makes a good general jolly joker.

My issue with your method, I mean, why I don't think it is generalizable enough is that for example in the modern world you don't need the ability to do a pull-up. You won't use it for work. It just makes you sexier and healthier and this may not be a strong enough motivator, and it is also a mismatch (muscle mass may correlate to sexiness and health but the ability to do a pull-up doesn't, as much of it is in the nerves, not muscle size). So IMHO what is needed is find a sport goal that makes it worthwhile to have the ability to do that pull-up, such as rock climbing or parkour. So you have a real reason for wanting that ability. This would be contribution to your method. (Even better: if there is such a thing as "belts", some form of a certification of rock climbers or parkour traceours, so that you have a really clear goal to work towards, a pride based goal.)

EDIT: I missed the sentence " I initially started exercising because I wanted more upper body strength to be better at climbing". That is exactly my point, my only issue now is the relative importance of it. If I was you, I would have written this article as "Step 1: I decided to find an activity, sport, hobby where fitness can actually be used. In my case climbing." IMHO this decision was the single most important in your chain of decisions and I think you are not emphasizing it enough. If you would not have a goal like climbing, but only the usual be sexier / be healthier goals, the whole thing would work differently. This is why I think a huge amount of emphasis must be put on this, recommending people to first find a hobby, a sport, where fitness can actually be used.

My goal is “become able to do at least one pull up, or more if possible”

So, 20 months later, did you succeed in this, and if so, how did you modify your goal in time?

Only a pantheist would claim that evolution is a personal being, and so it can't "try to" do anything. It is, however, a directed process, serving to favor individuals that can better further the species.

But I agree that we shouldn't rely on machine learning to find the right utility function.

How would you suggest we find the right utility function without using machine learning?

I never claimed that evolution did a good job, but I would argue that it gave us a primary directive; to further the human species. All of our desires are part of our programming; they should perfectly align with desires which would optimize the primary goal, but they don't. Simply put, mistakes were made. As the most effective way of developing optimizing programs we have seen is through machine learning, which is very similar to evolution; we should be very careful of the desires of any singleton created by this method.

I'm not sure of your assertion that the best advances in AI so far came from mimicking the brain.

Mimicking the human brain is fundamental to most AI research; on DeepMind's website, they say that they employ computational neuroscientists and companies such as IBM are very interested in whole brain emulation.

To me it seems like you have no idea where you want to go that's more specific than "I don't want to be depressed."

Well, yes, basically. I said as much to my psychotherapist as well.

To get positive effects you indeed have to allow change.

My question is, change in what? There's little I can change about my beliefs that would improve my mood, aside from becoming implausibly optimistic about my future. Change in baseline happiness? For one, that seems genetically determined; for another, when I don't get my heart broken I'm in a stable, content, neutral disposition, so it's not that. Change in goals? I've considered that, but it's just the kind of thing to make me more depressed, seeing as I'm not bloody asking for much if I want to have one relationship with a person of my choosing (a hypothetical someone in my future, not the lost cause I've been pursuing) in which nobody's deceiving anybody; it feels a lot like admitting defeat.

On the other hand everybody has the right to suffer as much as the want. You are allowed to have "being happy" not on top of your list of priorities.

Please don't.

I don't have a lot to add except to say, I can't think of a single reason why not to do it. Which makes me just a bit confused, because it's unlikely that this is the only time that society has generated a widespread taboo against a thing for literally no reason.

In my experience hostels are a lot more like the fictional bars you describe.