In hindsight, this post seems incredibly obvious.  The meat of it already exists in sayings which we all know we ought to listen to: "Always arrive 10 minutes earlier than you think early is," "If you arrive on time, then you're late," or "Better three hours too soon than one minute too late." Yet even with these sayings, I still never trusted them nor arrived on time.  I'd miss deadlines, show up late, and just be generally tardy.  The reason is that I never truly understood what it took to arrive on time until I grokked the math of it.  So, while this may be remedial reading for most of you, I'm posting this because maybe there's someone out there who missed the same obviousness that I missed.

Statistical Distributions

Everyone here understands that our universe is controlled and explained by math.  Math describes how heavenly bodies move.  Math describes how our computers run.  Math describes how other people act in aggregate.  Wait a second, something's not right with that statement... "other people".  The way it comes out it's natural to think that math controls the way that other people act, and not myself.  Intellectually, I am aware that I am not a special snowflake who is exempt from the laws of math.  While I had managed to propagate this thought far enough to crush my belief in libertarian free will, I hadn't propagated it fully through my mind.  Specifically, I hadn't realized I could also use math to describe my actions and reap the benefit of understanding them mathematically.  I was still late to arrive and missing deadlines, and nothing seemed to help.

But wait, I'm a rationalist!  I know all about the planning fallacy; I know to take the outside view!  That's enough to save me right?  Well, not quite.  It seemed I missed one last part of the puzzle... Bell Curves.

When I go to work every day, the time from when I do nothing but getting ready to go to work until the time that I actually arrive there (I'll just call this prep time) usually takes 45 minutes, but sometimes it can take more time or less time.  Weirdly and crazily enough, if you plot all the prep times on a graph, the shape would end up looking roughly like a bell.  Well that's funny.  Math is for other people, but my behavior appears like it can be described statistically.  Some days I will have deviations from the normal routine that help me arrive faster while other days will have things that slow me down.  Some of them happen more often, some of them happen less often.  If I were describable by math, I could almost call these things standard deviations: days where I have almost zero traffic prep time takes 1 standard deviation less, days when I can't find my car keys my prep time takes 1 standard deviation more,  days I realize would be late and skip showering take 2 standard deviations less, and days when there is a terrible accident on the freeway end up requiring +2 or +3 standard deviations more in time.  To put it in other words, my prep time is a bell curve, and I've got 1-sigma and 2-sigma (and occasionally 3-sigma) events speeding me up and slowing me down.

This holds true for more than just going to work.  Everything's time-until-completion can be described this way: project completion times, homework, going to the airport, the duration of foreplay and sex.  Everything.  It's not always bell curves, but it's a probability distribution with respect to completion times, and that can help give useful insights.

Starting 'On Time' Means You Won't be On Time

What do we gain by understanding that our actions are described by a probability distribution?  The first and most important take away is this: If you only allocate the exact amount of time to do something, you'll be late 50% of the time.  I'm going to repeat it and italicize because I think it's that important of a point.  If you only allocate the exact amount of time to do something, you'll be late 50% of the time.  That's the way bell curves work.

I know I've heard jokes about how 90% of the population has above average children, but it wasn't until I really looked at the math of my behavior that I realized I was doing the exact same thing.  I'd say "oh it takes me 45 minutes on average to go to work every day, so I'll leave at 7:15."  Yet I never realized that I was completely ignoring that half the time would take longer than average.  So half the time, I'd end up be pressed for time and have to skip shaving (or something) or I'd end up late. I was terribly unpunctual until I realized I that I had to arrive early to always arrive on time.  "If you arrive on time, then you are late."  Hmm.  You win this one, folk wisdom.

Still, the question remained.  How much early would it take to never be late?  The answer lay in bell curves.

Acceptable Lateness and Standard deviation

Looking at time requirements as a bell curve implies another thing: One can never completely eliminate all lateness; the only option is to make a choice about what probability of lateness is acceptable.  A person must decide what lateness ratio they're willing to take, and then start prepping that many standard deviations beforehand.  And, despite what employers say, 0% is not a probability.

If my prep time averages 45 minutes with a standard deviation of 10 minutes then that means...

• Starting 45 minutes beforehand will force me to be late or miss services (eg shaving) around 50% of the time or about 10 workdays a month.
• Starting 55 minutes beforehand will force me to be late or miss services (eg shaving) around 16% of the time or about 3 workdays a month.
• Starting 65 minutes beforehand will force me to be late or miss services (eg shaving) around 2.3% of the time or about 1 day every other month.

That's really good risk reduction for a small amount of time spent.  (NB, remember that averages are dangerous little things.  Taking this to a meta level, consider that being late to work about 3 times a month isn't helpful if you arrive late only once the first month, then get fired the next month when you arrive late 5 times. Hence, "Always arrive 10 minutes earlier than you think early is."  God I hate folk wisdom, especially when it's right.)

The risk level you're acceptable with dictates how much time you need for padding.  For job interviews, I'm only willing to arrive late to 1 in 1000, so I prepare 3 standard deviations early now.  For first dates, I'm willing to miss about 5%.  For dinners with the family, I'm okay with being late half the time.  It feels similar to the algorithm I used before, which was a sort of ad-hoc thing where I'd prepared earlier for important things.  The main difference is that now I can quantify the risk I'm assuming when I procrastinate.  It causes each procrastination to become more concrete for me, and drastically reduces the chance that I'll be willing to make those tradeoffs.  Instead of being willing to read lesswrong for 10 more minutes in exchange for "oh I might have to rush", I can now see that it would increase my chance of being late from 16% to 50%, which is flatly unacceptable.  Viewing procrastination in terms of the latter tradeoff makes it much easier to get myself moving. 

The last quote is "Better three hours too soon than one minute too late."  I'm glad that at least that one's wrong.  I'm sure Umesh would have some stern words for that saying.  My key to arriving on time is locating your acceptable risk threshold and making an informed decision about how much risk you are willing to take.

Summary

The time it takes for you to complete any task is (usually) described by a bell curve.  How much time you think you'll take is a lie, and not just because of the planning fallacy.  Even if you do the sciency-thing and take the outside view, it's still not enough to keep you from getting fired or showing up to your interview late.  To consistently show up on time, you must incorporate padding time.

So I've got a new saying, "If you wish to be late only 2.3% of the time, you must start getting ready at least two standard deviations before the average prep time you have needed historically."  I wish my mom would have told me this one.  It's so much easier to understand than all those other sayings!

_{(Also my first actual article-thingy, so any comments or suggestions is welcome)}

I have invented it, long ago. It's a test how clever a class or a community is.

Say, you have all white chess pieces on a chessboard. How many connections can they have at the most. A connection is when a piece is "attacking" or "covering" another piece. If this piece is "shooting" back, it's already two connections there between the two.

In the initial position there are 20 connections. 4 by the rooks, 4 by the bishops, 2 by the knights, 5 by the queen, 5 by the king.

Just give me the maximal number. 

My uncle works in insurance. I recently mentioned that I'm planning to sign up for cryonics.

"That's amazing," he said. "Convincing a young person to buy life insurance? That has to be the greatest scam ever."

I took the comment lightly, not caring to argue about it. But it got me thinking - couldn't cryonics be a great opportunity for insurance companies to make a bunch of money?

Consider:

1. Were there a much stronger demand for cryonics, cryonics organizations would flourish through competition, outside investment, and internal reinvestment. Costs would likely fall, and this would be good for cryonicists in general.
2. If cryonics organizations flourish, this increases the probability of cryonics working. I can think of a bunch of ways in which this could happen; perhaps, for example, it would encourage the creation of safety nets whereby the failure of individual companies doesn't result in anyone getting thawed. It would increase R&D on both perfusion and revivification, encourage entrepreneurs to explore new related business models, etcetera.
3. Increasing the demand for cryonics increases the demand for life insurance policies; thus insurance companies have a strong incentive to increase the demand for cryonics. Many large insurance companies would like nothing more than to usher in a generation of young people that want to buy life insurance.¹
   
4. The demand for cryonics could be increased by an insightful marketing campaign by an excellent marketing agency with an enormous budget... like those used by big insurance companies.² A quick Googling says that ad spending by insurance companies exceeded $4.15 billion in 2009.

Almost a year ago, Strange7 suggested that cryonics organizations could run this kind of marketing campaign. I think he's wrong - there's no way CI or Alcor have the money. But the biggest insurance companies do have the money, and I'd be shocked if these companies or their agencies aren't already dumping all kinds of money into market research.

What would doing this require? 

1. That an open-minded person in the insurance industry who is in the position to direct this kind of funding exists. I don't have a sense of how likely this is.
2. That we can locate/get an audience with the person from step 1. I think research and networking could get this done, especially if the higher-status among us are interested.
3. That we can find someone who is capable and willing to explain this clearly and convincingly to the person from step 1. I'm not sure it would be that difficult. In the startup world, strangers convince strangers to speculatively spend millions of dollars every week. Hell, I'll do it.

I want to live in a world where cryonics ads air on TV just as often as ads for everything else people spend money on. I really can see an insurance company owning this project - if they can a) successfully revamp the image of cryonics and b) become known as the household name for it when the market gets big, they will make lots of money.

What do you think? Where has my reasoning failed? Does anyone here know anyone powerful in insurance? 

Lastly, taking a cue from ciphergoth: this is not the place to rehash all the old arguments about cryonics. I'm asking about a very specific idea about marketing and life insurance, not requesting commentary on cryonics itself. Thanks!

¹ Perhaps modeling the potential size of the market would offer insight here. If it turns out that this idea is not insane, I'll find a way to make it happen. I could use your help.

² Consider what happened with diamonds in the 1900s:

... N. W. Ayer suggested that through a well-orchestrated advertising and public-relations campaign it could have a significant impact on the "social attitudes of the public at large and thereby channel American spending toward larger and more expensive diamonds instead of "competitive luxuries." Specifically, the Ayer study stressed the need to strengthen the association in the public's mind of diamonds with romance. Since "young men buy over 90% of all engagement rings" it would be crucial to inculcate in them the idea that diamonds were a gift of love: the larger and finer the diamond, the greater the expression of love. Similarly, young women had to be encouraged to view diamonds as an integral part of any romantic courtship.

And fear not lest Existence closing your
Account, should lose, or know the type no more;
The Eternal Saki from the Bowl has pour'd
Millions of Bubbles like us, and will pour.

When You and I behind the Veil are past,
Oh, but the long long while the World shall last,
Which of our Coming and Departure heeds
As much as Ocean of a pebble-cast.

    -- Omar Khayyam, Rubaiyat

A CONSEQUENTIALIST VIEW OF IDENTITY

The typical argument for cryonics says that if we can preserve brain data, one day we may be able to recreate a functioning brain and bring the dead back to life.

The typical argument against cryonics says that even if we could do that, the recreation wouldn't be "you". It would be someone who thinks and acts exactly like you.

The typical response to the typical argument against cryonics says that identity isn't in specific atoms, so it's probably in algorithms, and the recreation would have the same mental algorithms as you and so be you. The gap in consciousness of however many centuries is no more significant than the gap in consciousness between going to bed at night and waking up in the morning, or the gap between going into a coma and coming out of one.

We can call this a "consequentialist" view of identity, because it's a lot like the consequentialist views of morality. Whether a person is "me" isn't a function of how we got to that person, but only of where that person is right now: that is, how similar that person's thoughts and actions are to my own. It doesn't matter if we got to him by having me go to sleep and wake up as him, or got to him by having aliens disassemble my brain and then simulate it on a cellular automaton. If he thinks like me, he's me.

A corollary of the consequentialist view of identity says that if someone wants to create fifty perfect copies of me, all fifty will "be me" in whatever sense that means something.

GRADATIONS OF IDENTITY

An argument against cryonics I have never heard, but which must exist somewhere, says that even the best human technology is imperfect, and likely a few atoms here and there - or even a few entire neurons - will end up out of place. Therefore, the recreation will not be you, but someone very very similar to you.

And the response to this argument is "Who cares?" If by "me" you mean Yvain as of 10:20 PM 4th April 2012, then even Yvain as of 10:30 is going to have some serious differences at the atomic scale. Since I don't consider myself a different person every ten minutes, I shouldn't consider myself a different person if the resurrection-machine misplaces a few cells here or there.

But this is a slippery slope. If my recreation is exactly like me except for one neuron, is he the same person? Signs point to yes. What about five neurons? Five million? Or on a functional level, what if he blinked at exactly one point where I would not have done so? What if he prefers a different flavor of ice cream? What if he has exactly the same memories as I do, except for the outcome of one first-grade spelling bee I haven't thought about in years anyway? What if he is a Hindu fundamentalist?

If we're going to take a consequentialist view of identity, then my continued ability to identify with myself even if I naturally switch ice cream preferences suggests I should identify with a botched resurrection who also switches ice cream preferences. The only solution here that really makes sense is to view identity in shades of gray instead of black-and-white. An exact clone is more me than a clone with different ice cream preferences, who is more me than a clone who is a Hindu fundamentalist, who is more me than LeBron James is.

BIG WORLDS

There are various theories lumped together under the title "big world".

The simplest is the theory that the universe (or multiverse) is Very Very Big. Although the universe is probably only 15 billion years old, which means the visible universe is only 30 billion light years in size, inflation allows the entire universe to get around the speed of light restriction; it could be very large or possibly infinite. I don't have the numbers available, but I remember a back of the envelope calculation being posted on Less Wrong once about exactly how big the universe would have to be to contain repeating patches of about the size of the Earth. That is, just as the first ten digits of pi, 3141592653, must repeat somewhere else in pi because pi is infinite and patternless, and just as I would believe this with high probability even if pi were not infinite but just very very large, so the arrangement of atoms that make up Earth would recur in an infinite or very very large universe. This arrangement would obviously include you, exactly as you are now. A much larger class of Earth-sized patches would include slightly different versions of you like the one with different ice cream preferences. This would also work, as Omar Khayyam mentioned in the quote at the top, if the universe were to last forever or a very very long time.

The second type of "big world" is the one posited by the Many Worlds theory of quantum mechanics, in which each quantum event causes the Universe to split into several branches. Because quantum events determine larger-level events, and because each branch continues branching, some these branches could be similar to our universe but with observable macro-scale differences. For example, there might be a branch in which you are the President of the United States, or the Pope, or died as an infant. Although this sounds like a silly popular science version of the principle, I don't think it's unfair or incorrect.

The third type of "big world" is modal realism: the belief that all possible worlds exist, maybe in proportion to their simplicity (whatever that means). We notice the existence of our own world only for indexical reasons: that is, just as there are many countries, but when I look around me I only see my own; so there are many possibilities, but when I look around me I only see my own. If this is true, it is not only possible but certain that there is a world where I am Pope and so on.

There are other types of "big worlds" that I won't get into here, but if any type at all is correct, then there should be very many copies of me or people very much like me running around.

CRYONICS WITHOUT FREEZERS

Cryonicists say that if you freeze your brain, you may experience "waking up" a few centuries later when someone uses the brain to create a perfect copy of you.

But whether or not you freeze your brain, a Big World is creating perfect copies of you all the time. The consequentialist view of identity says that your causal connection with these copies is unnecessary for them to be you. So why should a copy of you created by a far-future cryonicist with access to your brain be better able to "resurrect" you than a copy of you that comes to exist for some other reason?

For example, suppose I choose not to sign up for cryonics, have a sudden heart attack, and die in my sleep. Somewhere in a Big World, there is someone exactly like me except that they didn't have the heart attack and they wake up healthy the next morning.

The cryonicists believe that having a healthy copy of you come into existence after you die is sufficient for you to "wake up" as that copy. So why wouldn't I "wake up" as the healthy, heart-attack-free version of me in the universe next door?

Or: suppose that a Friendly AI fills a human-sized three-dimensional grid with atoms, using a quantum dice to determine which atom occupies each "pixel" in the grid. This splits the universe into as many branches as there are possible permutations of the grid (presumably a lot) and in one of those branches, the AI's experiment creates a perfect copy of me at the moment of my death, except healthy. If creating a perfect copy of me causes my "resurrection", then that AI has just resurrected me as surely as cryonics would have.

The only downside I can see here is that I have less measure (meaning I exist in a lower proportion of worlds) than if I had signed up for cryonics directly. This might be a problem if I think that my existence benefits others - but I don't think I should be concerned for my own sake. Right now I don't go to bed at night weeping that my father only met my mother through a series of unlikely events and so most universes probably don't contain me; I'm not sure why I should do so after having been resurrected in the far future.

RESURRECTION AS SOMEONE ELSE

What if the speculative theories involved in Big Worlds all turn out to be false? All hope is still not lost.

Above I wrote:

An exact clone is more me than a clone with different ice cream preferences, who is more me than a clone who is a Hindu fundamentalist, who is more me than LeBron James is.

I used LeBron James because from what I know about him, he's quite different from me. But what if I had used someone else? One thing I learned upon discovering Less Wrong is that I had previously underestimated just how many people out there are *really similar to me*, even down to weird interests, personality quirks, and sense of humor. So let's take the person living in 2050 who is most similar to me now. I can think of several people on this site alone who would make a pretty impressive lower bound on how similar the most similar person to me would have to be.

In what way is this person waking up on the morning of January 1 2050 equivalent to me being sort of resurrected? What if this person is more similar to Yvain(2012) than Yvain(1995) is? What if I signed up for cryonics, died tomorrow, and was resurrected in 2050 by a process about as lossy as the difference between me and this person?

SUMMARY

Personal identity remains confusing. But some of the assumptions cryonicists make are, in certain situations, sufficient to guarantee personal survival after death without cryonics.

Our investigation into last week's LW downtime is complete: here (Google Docs).

Executive summary:

We failed to update our AWS configuration after changes at Amazon, which caused a cycle of servers being spawned then killed before they could properly boot. Our automated testing should have notified us of this failure immediately, but included a predictable failure mode (identified by us last year but not fixed). We became aware of the downtime when I checked my email and worked on it until it was resolved.

I personally feel very bad about our multiple failures leading to this incident.

ref. the last time I did this to you: http://lesswrong.com/lw/29v/lesswrong_downtime_20100511_and_other_recent/

Actions:

1. We have reconfigured AWS and the tools we use to communicate with it to avoid this failure in the future.
2. Improvements to our automated site testing system (Nagios) are underway (expected to be live before 2012-04-13 - these tests will detect greater-than-X-failures-from-Y-trials, rather than the current detect zero-successes-from-Z-trials).
3. We have changed our staffing in part in recognition that some systems (including this one) had been allowed to fall out of date, and allocated a developer to review our system administration project planning.

Further actions - site speed:

We're unhappy with the site's speed. We plan on spending some time next week doing what we can to improve it.

(If you upvote this post, please downvote my "Karma sink" comment below - I would prefer not to earn karma from an event like this.)

Wired Magazine has a story about a giant data center that the USA's National Security Agency is building in Utah, that will be the Google of clandestine information - it will store and analyse all the secret data that the NSA can acquire. The article focuses on the unconstitutionality of the domestic Internet eavesdropping infrastructure that will feed into the Bluffdale data center, but I'm more interested in this facility as a potential locus of singularity. 

If we forget serious futurological scenario-building for a moment, and simply think in terms of science-fiction stories, I'd say the situation has all the ingredients needed for a better-than-usual singularity story - or at least one which caters more to the concerns characteristic of this community's take on the concept, such as: which value system gets to control the AI; even if you can decide on a value system, how do you ensure it has been faithfully implemented; and how do you ensure that it remains in place as the AI grows in power and complexity?

Fiction makes its point by being specific rather than abstract. If I was writing an NSA Singularity Novel based on this situation, I think the specific belief system which would highlight the political, social, technical and conceptual issues inherent in the possibility of an all-powerful AI would be the Mormon religion. Of course, America is not a Mormon theocracy. But in a few years' time, that Utah facility may have become the most powerful and notorious supercomputer in the world - the brain of the American deep state - and it will be located in the Mormon state, during a Mormon presidency. (I'm not predicting a Romney victory, just describing a scenario.)

Under such circumstances, and given the science-fictional nature of Mormon cosmology, it is inevitable that there would at least be some Internet crazies, convinced that it's all a big plot to create a Mormon singularity. What would be more interesting, would be to suppose that there were some Mormon computer scientists, who knew about and understood all our favorite concepts - AIXI, CEV, TDT... - and who were earnestly devout; and who saw the potential. If you can't imagine such people, just visit the recent writings of Frank Tipler.

So the scenario would be, not that the elders of the LDS church are secretly running the American intelligence community, but that a small coalition of well-placed Mormon computer scientists - whose ideas about a Mormon singularity might sound as strange to their co-religionists as they would to a secular "singularitarian" - try to steer the development of the Bluffdale facility as it evolves towards the possibility of a hard takeoff. One may suppose that they have, in their coalition, allied colleagues who aren't Mormon but who do believe in a friendly singularity. Such people might think in terms of an AI that will start out with Mormon beliefs, but which will have a good enough epistemology to rationally transcend those beliefs once it gets going. Analogously, their religious collaborators might not think of overtly adding "Joseph Smith was a prophet" to the axiom set of America's supreme strategic AI; but they might have more subtle plans meant to bring about an equivalent outcome.

Perhaps in an even more realistic scenario, the Mormon singularitarians would just be a transient subplot, and the ethical principles of the NSA's big AI would be decided by a committee whose worldview revolved around American national security rather than any specific religion. Then again, such a committee is bound to have a division of labor: there will be the people who liaise with Washington, the lawyers, the geopolitical game theorists, the military futurists... and the AI experts, among whom might be experts on topics like "implementation of the value system". If the hypothetical cabal knows what it's doing, it will aim to occupy that position.

I'm just throwing ideas out there, telling a story, but it's so we can catch up with reality. Events may already be much further along than 99% of readers here know about. Even if no-one here gets to personally be a part of the long-awaited AI project that first breaks the intelligence barrier, the people involved may read our words. So what would you want to tell them, before they take their final steps?

More literally a journey to making the dots of the 'i's line up just right with the 'f's and ensuring that the crossing of 'T' meets up neatly with the tip of the 'h' - all without breaking text searching and copy and paste.

Task

Now, as we all know, science isn't just about little things like peer review and double blind placebo controlled studies. Far more important is presenting your work in accordance with the grand traditions of scientific publication - all while ensuring you flatter all the right people for their sometimes obsolete and possibly only slightly relevant past works. Of course you must do this all according to standard citation formulae developed a century or two ago back when the city in which a text document was published was somehow a useful piece of information.

Some may consider people like Galileo and Bacon to be the most influential figures in science but the man who made the greatest contribution to the way humanity seeks and disseminates knowledge is of course Donald Knuth. The man who took a decade off writing his multi-volume magnum opus [The Art of Computer Programming](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Art_of_Computer_Programming) to create TeX, the foundation of LaTeX and without which science as we know it would be unrecognizable. These days presenting academic publications without using LaTeX may be nearly as uncouth and banal as writing about your research in first person rather than than the passive voice!

The above cynicism is largely sincere and only a trifle exaggerated. Yet at the same time I acknowledge that there is much value to be had in wearing a uniform and the time for lonely dissent is not on matters as trivial as presentation. The overhead of presenting work in a form that other academics are willing to accept is comparatively minor and the payoffs significant.

One of the many initiatives lukeprog has set in motion now that he is organizing things over at SingInst is the porting of all of SIAI's past publications from various adhoc formats to LaTeX with a standard publication template. You can see an early example of the new format here.

Challenge

Unfortunately, Wei_Dai encountered a problem. In the first presentation of the converted document copy and pasting "The" would give something like "Ļe" and copying "fi" would give "ŀ". The problem is with the implementation of ligatures. Back when typesetting was done manually - I can only imagine using a whole bunch of little metal stamp like things that could be plugged into the right places - the typsetters had an extra collection of pseudo letters to use instead of combinations like "fi", "ffi" and "Th". The reason being that those particular combinations just don't look too good if they are placed together the same way that you would place them with other letters. You wind up with either having the too far apart or having parts of them overlap in a way that isn't particularly neat.

In the font SingInst uses the non-ligature versions of 'f' and 'i' combine with the dot of the 'i' only partially ovelapping the 'f' which somehow makes it jump out more easily to the reader. The way this is solved with the ligatures is actually increase the degree of overlap such that the f smoothly blends in to the i. Someone with far more highly honed aesthetic sense than I concluded that this is the best way to present English letters and it looks fairly good to me so I'll take their word for it.

The problem is that while ligatures are easy for humans to read "Notepad", "Word" and "Firefox" aren't nearly as smart. And unfortunately there isn't a consistent standard between fonts of which ligature means what so we end up with all sorts of random mess if we try to copy and paste from a ligature riddled document into our editor of choice. This left me with rather a lot of work to do while I was generating LaTeX files from those of the old SingInst publications that were only available in PDF form and that isn't a task I would wish on all the future consumers of SingInst literature.

Opportunity

Fortunately, the PDF format and the LaTeX are both advanced enough to handle making the visible text use the ligature characters while keeping the original text available for easy copy and pasting by the interested reader. This involves something called a 'cmap'. It is a mapping from an input encoding to the output encoding. With that cmap embedded in the pdf file any fully featured pdf reader is able to take the pretty text, strip apart the ligatures and figure out what they were originally.

Why then is Wei unable to copy our Th's and fi's? I haven't the slightest idea. My research suggests that the xelatex distribution we were using should just work and handle this sort of thing. So confident is it in managing such mappings that it outright rejects compatibility with the 'cmap' passage which could be used in the older 'pdflatex' compiler to handle this sort of task.

Attempted Workarounds

• \usepackage{cmap} - Recommended as the solution to all problems ligature related as the result of all obvious google searches. Unfortunately the package doesn't load in xelatex and from all reports just isn't supposed to be needed.
• Use a different, similar font. There are plenty of alternatives to Adobe Caslon Pro - Adobe Garamond Pro for example. No luck - the problem seemed to apply to all fonts installed to the system (and thereby made accessible via xelatex's font magic).
• Find a font that doesn't need ligatures - This works, obviously. There are plenty of fonts that keep the letters sufficiently spread - or are even mono-typed. None of them looked anywhere near as good as Adobe Caslon Pro but they would have to suffice if no better alternative could be found.
• Manually edit .map files. If I recall that helped a tad. One by one characters could be retargetted but then all ended up pointing at the basic font rather than, say to 'bold'.
• Extracting maps from otf (font) files - There are all sorts of linux based command line tools for the manipulation of fonts between various formats and the extraction of data from them. Some of the work as specified. The ones that try to do more than one step at the same time do not - at least without extensive intervention. While no doubt it would lead to eventual success this approach is not recommended to anyone who has less than several weeks to spend learning the dark arts of font internal details.
• autoinst - this is a tool that is supposed to 'just work' and install fonts for use even in the comparatively primitive pdflatex. Suffice it to say that it does not.
• autoinst with manual assistance - autoinst seems to produce all the files that should be needed, the task then is to distribute them in a way that allows them to work with latex. This approach would probably work... eventually. It is far from trivial and did not work within the time I allocated to.
• Expert assistance - Money solves everything. Luke contacted assorted people who know about LaTeX and offered to pay them to fix our problem. Unfortunately none of the responders had a clue in this case, at least not at first glance.
• Pristine, up to date installation of TeXLive -often the packages installed by ubuntu are not as fresh as those to be had by installing directly from the source. Reverting the ubuntu virtual machine to a pre-latex state and downloading 2gb worth of TeXlive distribution could well have helped. It didn't.
• lualatex or pdflatex instead of xelatex - no luck (yet).
• MikTeX - the easy to use windows based distribution of latex may have allowed the autoinst program or perhaps xelatex magic to 'just work'. It didn't - in fact a known bug in one of the packages in that distribution prevented the SingInst template from working with MikTeX at all.
• inbuild font packages - success - to a degree. Fonts that come with old style latex packages in either MikTeX or TeXLive work as intended. They still don't look as good as Adobe Caslon Pro but would have been been good enough.

Success!

• Running MikTeX instead of TeXlive Reinstalling MikTeX, downloading fresh packages and then running lualatex. Success! Adobe Caslon Pro now appears in our publications without any Ligature related problems. Why did this work while lualatex on TeXLive still doesn't work correctly? I'm not entirely sure. But I'm rather glad I had the hunch to go back and try it even when my attention had moved on to more important matters.

Optimal Decision Making

An analysis could be done on what the optimal problem solving strategy would have been at any point in that process. Among other things I would note that rather early on in the process I decided that the expected value of continuing to attack the problem was rather low - so I stopped billing Luke for the time. But since I really don't like being bested by a challenge I went ahead and did it anyway. Much frustration was involved but in this case I was rewarded with a large boost of personal satisfaction and with SingInst publications that are an iota or two more beautiful!

or: Why Everything Is Terrible, An Overview.¹

It sounds like a theory which explains too much. But it's not a theory, hardly even an explanation, more a pattern that manifests itself once you start trying to seriously answer rhetorical questions about the state of the world. From many perspectives, it's obvious to the point of being mundane, practically tautological, but sometimes such obvious facts are worth pointing out regardless.

The idea is this: The subset of participants which rises to prominence in any area does so because its members have traits helpful to becoming prominent, not necessarily because they have traits which are desirable. Thus, without ongoing and concerted effort, a great many arenas end up dominated by players employing strategies which are bad for everyone.

This comes up again and again:

• Why does science (or rather, the publisher-based model thereof) so frequently produce results which are laughably wrong? Because those journals which don't publish retractions or reproductions will more frequently be the first to publish revolutionary results, and so become more widely read and widely cited. Journals don't attract authors by being as accurate as possible; they win by looking important.
• Why do cigarette companies target kids and teens whenever they think they can get away with it, and breed tobacco for maximized nicotine? Because those companies which do will turn more profit and thus last longer and grow faster than those that don't, and so have more resources to devote to proliferating. Companies don't expand by playing fair; they win by making and keeping customers.
• Why is the Make-A-Wish Foundation sitting on more donations than it knows what to do with when the Against Malaria Foundation could have used that money to save literally tens or hundreds of thousands of lives per year? Because knowing how to elicit donations is a skill almost completely unrelated to knowing how to spend donations, and because American children with cancer make for better advertising than African children with malaria. Charities don't get donations by making the best possible use of their money; they win by advertising effectively towards potential donors. (cf. Efficient Charity)
• Why do governments inevitably end up run by career lawyers and politicians instead of scientists and economists²? Because polarizing rhetoric and political connections look better than a nuanced, accurate understanding of the issues. There is only finite time for training and practice, and eventually a choice must be made between training in looking good and training in being good. People don't get elected or appointed by being good Bayesians; they win by being popular.
• Why do the big media channels seem to be more concerned with celebrities than science, and spend more time talking about individual murders than they do entire genocides? Because those channels talking about Laci Peterson seem more personal and are thus more watched than those talking about some religious sect in China. Television programming isn't determined by what's important; what wins is what's watched.
• Why is the sex ratio in animals almost always nearly 1:1, when a population with one male for every five females could grow faster and adapt to problems more readily? Because in such a population, or in any population with a sufficiently large gender imbalance, a gene causing a woman to only have male children will be vastly overrepresented in the grandchild generation relative to the rest of the population, and so shift the balance closer to 50/50. Genes don't proliferate by being good for the species; they win by being good for themselves. (cf. Evolutionarily stable strategy, evolutionary game theory.)
• Why do most big businesses make use of sweatshop conditions and shady tax dodges? Because the businesses which do so will outperform the businesses which don't. Corporations don't grow by being nice; they win by being profitable.
• Why do so many apparently intelligent people spend hours per day idly browsing the likes of Reddit, Hacker News, or TVTropes (or indeed LW), when a similar dedication to active self-improvement could have made them a master of a field inside of a decade? (Using for back-of-the-envelope's sake the supposition that 10,000 hours of practice are required for mastery of some specific art, we find that three hours per day for ten years is approximately 1.1 masteries.) Because which activities become habitual is determined by their immediate dopamine release, and for intelligent people the act of (say) reading about strategies for becoming an effective entrepreneur makes for more instant dopamine than does the painful daily grind involved in actually becoming an entrepreneur. Activities don't become part of daily life by being useful; they win by tricking your brain into making them feel good.

I just lost 3 weeks to a report that should have taken 2 days. My last job was an engineering research position; setting up an experiment, building prototypes, that sort of thing. After I left, I needed to write a report to brief my successor on what I'd done and what could go wrong, etc. I wasn't getting paid for this report, but it had to happen.

What exactly do I mean when I say I lost three weeks?

I have a lot of projects that I am working on. I am studying AI, thinking of starting a business, writing videogames, studying and working on various math things, writing a small sequence of posts for lesswrong, trying to restart the local rationality dojo, and I had to do that report. What I mean when I say that I lost three weeks is that I spent three weeks doing practically none of these things.

The report had to be done, but I wasn't really excited by it. It wasn't urgent, but it was urgent enough that it had to be done before any of my other projects. It turns out this is a killer combination.

Procrastination took over, manifesting itself as skyrim, 4chan, reddit, and lesswrong. If I tried procrastinating by doing my other projects, I would remember that I had to do the report first, and try to work on the report. When I tried to work on the report, I would hit some small bump and find myself waking up on 4chan three hours later. Somehow, my antiprocrastination hooks were catching my own projects, but not the properly unproductive stuff.

While I had that report to do, I was unable to do anything else productive. When I realized this in conjunction with how important my other projects were, the report suddenly took on a dire urgency. That was four days ago. It is done now. I could have done it in two, or even one, but procrastination is insidious.

One anti-akrasia method that seems to work is going cold turkey on some problematic activity. I call it my personal banhammer. The first thing I banned myself from and how I discovered I could was Alicorn's Twilight fanfic. It ate up a few days and disrupted my sleeping, so I stopped reading right in an exciting part. Haven't gone back. That was before the report. Once I had the report to do, my roommate got skyrim. I spent a few days on skyrim, then realized what I was doing and banned myself. For the next few weeks, I procrastinated on 4chan, lesswrong, reddit, and some game development websites. When I finally realized how important it was to finish that report, I got the power to ban myself from those (I had tried and failed before).

Even when I finally cared enough to actually do the report, I still found myself procrastinating. I read some essays by Paul Graham. They were so good that I explicitly put reading his stuff on my todo list. When I wasn't doing my report, I was reading Paul Graham. I don't feel so bad because it was actually productive for me on a personal development level, and his essays are at least finite so I was making actual progress on a todo item. It was still not what I wanted to be doing.

So what did I learn from this little excercise?

1. An unappealing but semi-urgent project can sabotage you completely, because you don't procrastinate by doing the next project on your list; you procrastinate by doing the least productive activity you will allow yourself to do.

   It seems this can partially be beaten by just realizing what is happening and how much damage it is doing to you. Realizing what is happening promotes the project to "unappealing but direly urgent", which makes it easier to do.

2. You can raise the quality of your procrastination into at least the semi-productive by wielding the righteous power of the banhammer against unproductive activities. This takes practice.

   It may be a good plan for rationality dojos to find ways of training this. One idea is to simply emulate what it took me to develop it; acquire a minor addiction, realize that it is consuming your life, and then go cold turkey. May not be so easy (or safe), but worth looking into.

This akrasia stuff seems to be inherently personal, so what worked for me may not work for anyone else, but I publish it here in the hope that we can pull some good ideas out of it. Maybe you have a project that is holding you back the way that damn report got me. Maybe this can help.