I've just inserted about 50 new links to my list of writings, most of which from Lesswrong, here. For convenience, I'm copying it below.

I write a lot about a variety of topics in English and until 2013 also did in Portuguese, Notice Google Chrome automatically translates texts if you need. This will someday be a compilation of all my writings, divided by Borgean topics. There are also writings I wish I had written:

The ones I really, really want you to read before you read the rest:

• 000 The Starting Gun
• 001 A sense that more is possible
• 002 Russell’s one page autobiography (Português)
• 003 De onde viemos?
• 004 10 Razões pelas quais estou indo embora
• 005 Six Harsh Truths that will make you a better person
• 006 This blog’s first post: Stop Learning, Start Doing
• 007 Altruistic Awesomeness, Your Challenge!  (O Fantástico Altruista)
• Nearly all of these above are intensely motivational in character. If you are truly allergic to motivational writings, read only 003, 004, 005 and 006.

Those that may help you save the world:

• 100 Troubles with Coherent Extrapolated Volition (CEV)
• 101 In praise of tribes that pretend to try: counter”-Critique of Effective Altruism. (critique of this)
• 102 On media and Effective Altruism. (Interacting with media distortion)
• 104 Amending the Orthogonality Thesis. (Suggests an amendment to this paper)
• 105 Share your goals (only) with who shares your goals.

Those that are very long and full of ideas:

• 010 Simulando Dennett (254 pages teaching you to think as Daniel Dennett does about biology, philosophy and AI, in portuguese)
• 011 On What Selves Are  See also Short-term selves versus rationality.
• 100 Troubles with CEV  (a genteral discussion of problems with Coherent Extrapolated Volition, our main strategic plan to save the world up to the time of writing.)
• 012 Calibrating against undetectable utilons and goal changing events  (how to actually reach your goals even if you change or they are in the far future)
• 013 Para onde vamos?

Those short:

• 020 Research is polygamous. The Importance of what you do needn’t be proportional to your awesomeness
• 021 Why is it rational to invest in retirement, I don’t get it!
• 022 Seize the maximal probability moment.
• 023 Noticing something completely absurd about yourself.
• 024 Words that don’t exist in English.

Those about how to live life to the fullest:

• 000 The Starting Gun
• 004 10 Razões pelas quais estou indo embora
• 007 Altruistic Awesomeness, Your Challenge!  (O Fantástico Altruista)
• 160 Inteligentes e audaciosos.

Those related to evolution:

• 045 Using evolution for sex and marriage. (How to use our natural mating systems and mechanisms to find partners in the time horizon of your desires.)

Those about minds:

• 030 How not to be a naïve computationalist. (The shortest way of delving in, learning from, and getting out of the field of Philosophy of Mind and Language.)
• 031 The cultural cost of Placebo. (In Oxford’s practical ethics blog)
• 032 I’ve warned you, but I shoouldn’t have. (Ethics, SSRI’s, Information Hazards)
• 033 Ciúme.
• 034 Two cognitive cases.

Those which are on Lesswrong but I think should have been read more:

• 040 “I know what she has to offer already” is almost certainly wrong
• 041 Drowning in an information ocean.
• 042 Complementing the Mega-Course for Aspiring Philosophers.
• 043 Mega-Course for Aspiring Philosophers.
• 044 Rationality versus short-term selves.
• 045 Using evolution for sex and marriage.

Those defying authority and important notions of the Status Quo:

• 060 Catching up with the present from the developing world. (An autobiographical account of growing up far from where innovation takes place, and people know what is going on)
• 061 On not getting a job as an option.
• 062 You are the average of the five people you spend most time with.
• 063 Patrimônio e felicidade, a hipótese do mergulho.
• 064 Anarco Individualismo e Transhumanismo social.

Those I currently dislike or find silly:

• 065 Good places to live as a Lesswrong member.
• 066 Incentives to make money, should we list them?
• 067 Should one be sad when an opportunity is lost?
• 068 The revenge of the nerds, humanity’s saviors.
• 069 Amor e probabilidade.

Those humorous:

• 070 Pay other species to pandemize vegetarianism for you.
• 071 How not to make money.

Those I want someone else to finish or rehash:

• 090 Let’s make a rational immortalist sequence
• 091 Absent Transhumanism and tranformative technologies, which Utopia is left?
• 092 Making the chaff invisible, and getting the wheat. (looking for alternatives to drinking from the fire hose of the web, and getting only content we actually want to see)
• 093 O segundo maior erro econômico que você vai cometer na vida.

Those in portuguese:

• 010 Simulando Dennett
• 120 Ditados populares corrigidos.
• 004 10 Razões pelas quais estou indo embora (do Brasil)
• 007 O Fantástico Altruista
• 003 De onde viemos?
• 013 Para onde vamos?
• 063 Patrimônio e felicidade, a hipótese do mergulho. (como usar seu patrimônio no tempo)
• 121 Casas em São Paulo, preço x felicidade.
• 122 Desprovando o princípio do hábito de Hume.
• 123 E se fosse possível tornar-se gay. (veja também Observações sobre ocomportamento sexual das pessoas)
• 124 Guiões do bom pensador.
• 125 Adorno, Snickers e etologia, a informavoridade como motor do homem contemporâneo.
• 126 Uma análise do conceito de racionalidade à luz de Putnam.
• 127 Os principais obstáculos ao conhecimento racional.
• 128 Sujeito e poderes da palavra falada e escrita: Uma ficção gravitando Derrida, Dennett e Pinker.
• 129 O mundo é grande! (tipos de multiverso)

Those not above:

• 150 Is the blood thicker near the tropics? Trade offs of living in the cold
• 151 Is there a way to stop liking sugar? (spoiler, no, there isn’t)
• 152 The unforbidden beauty of Islamic aesthetics.
• 153 Utopia, the hidden design. Part 1
• 154 Utopia, the hidden design. Part 2
• 155 Ética, herança, propriedade, há alternativa?
• 156 Teachings of Mount Qassioun (reflections at the top of Damascus’ only mountain)

Granted, writing is not very effective. But some of us just love writing...

Earning to Give Writing: Which are the places that pay 1USD or more dollars per word?

Mind Changing Writing: What books need being written that can actually help people effectively change the world?

Clarification Writing: What needs being written because it is only through writing that these ideas will emerge in the first place?

Writing About Efficacy: Maybe nothing else needs to be written on this.

What should we be writing about if we have already been, for very long, training the craft? What has not yet been written, what is the new thing?

The world surely won't save itself through writing, but it surely won't write itself either.

Your job, should you choose to accept it, is to comment on this thread explaining the most awesome thing you've done this since June 1st. You may be as blatantly proud of yourself as you feel. You may unabashedly consider yourself the coolest freaking person ever because of that awesome thing you're dying to tell everyone about. This is the place to do just that.

Remember, however, that this isn't any kind of progress thread. Nor is it any kind of proposal thread. This thread is solely for people to talk about the awesome things they have done. Not "will do". Not "are working on". Have already done. This is to cultivate an environment of object level productivity rather than meta-productivity methods.

So, what's the coolest thing you've done this month?

Kurzweil calls sugar the great white Devil. 

Seinfeld contends that cookies should be called chocolate-sons-of-bitches. 

Once upon a time I was paleo, and didn't feel carb cravings. But being paleo all the time is nearly as hard as being polyphasic. 

There must be a final solution. The lone star tick equivalent for sugar. 

Is there any effective way to stop liking sugar, chocolate, cheesecake etc??? Medidation, allergy, neural training, traumatizing, association learning, operant conditioning, transcranial stimulation. Anything that will stop my hands from eating those damn, evil, malignant objects? 

I just don't want to have my Cryo-Lapid saying "Here lies he who was born with one or two standard deviation greater desire for the set CnH2nOn (n is between 3 and 7) than the other members of his species, and whose IQ, many standard deviations above was not able to contain such desire".

I know dozens of others here face the same problem. Can't we solve this? It appears much simpler than world domination, moral uncertainty, FAI and CEV. 

Edit: I know this is unusual, but I'll try to compress my responses to the suggestions given to me in particular (thanks by the way) here:

On inducing nausea and vomit along with sugar:  I tried totally didn't work. Feel free to laugh at me. http://lesswrong.com/lw/h9b/post_ridiculous_munchkin_ideas/8ykn

On noticing what it feels like later: I totally feel ok after gorging 200 grams of white chocolate. I mean it. I feel nothing. I'll have it with mountain dew and cinnamon if you prefer.

On overeating to get traumatized: When I was 18 I decided to stop eating sugar, I bought about 5 kilos of ultra sugary stuff of all sorts, and I eat them over the course of a few days. I stopped for a bit, but soon regained my strength and desire.

On increasing desire for bitterness instead of decreasing for sweets: Bitter things taste terrible. I hate coffee, beer alcoholic drinks, arugula, scotch, anything that people call acquired tastes. I kind of commit the mind projection fallacy, and somewhere deep down, I alieve that people also hate all that stuff, but they pretend they like it for the same reason they pretend they like suits and ties.

On forgetting system one and just using the classic system two avoidance (not going hungry to supermarkets etc): I do this, but it is insufficient (It's sufficient to avoid making me fat, not to avoid making me unhealthy).

On making deals so that those around you don't expose sugar to you: Yes, I make those deals, and they help.

On munchin and spitting what you want to hate one at a time: Will try, will post results later.

On changing your sense of identity into "I don't like sugar": I do that with other stuff, and it is very effective. I don't want it to fail with sugar and therefore cause me to trust my overall identity less, so I'm not trying it with something with such high likelihood of failure, but others who like sugar less should try.

On having more Sex and Sport: Tried, helps to keep healthy and looking good, makes no difference whatsoever in my desire for the high octane devil.

Slowly progressing to dark chocolate: I don't love chocolate, I love sugar. I tolerate milk chocolate so that I can get that fuzzy sugar deep down my tongue. If all the cocoa in the world disappeared tomorrow, my life would be worse, because on fewer occasions other people would be eating chocolate that is too bitter for me (like chocolate cakes and such) and thus I would have even more occasions to infect myself with the disease agent.  Thank goodness for other (crazy) people liking dark chocolate.

My overall take is, thanks everyone, I'll try the spitting thing, I had already tried nearly all strategies suggested here, and I thoroughly ask for recommendations besides those above.

Thiel plays with the concept of last mover advantage when talking about what is valuable about Google and Facebook. His claim is that being the first social network (who knows what that was) is not, contra intuition, what matters, instead, if you are the last search engine or the last social network you win. 

Bitcoin is the first real cryptocurrency. But will it be among the last ones? 

Darkcoin, as Louie, Kevin and others told us a few days ago it would, has exploded. (Thanks for the money guys!)

I don't understand much about the properties that differentiate cryptocurrencies, but a few of Darkcoin's features seem very desirable. 

It has early incentive to increase because it is good for illegal markets and international transactions. This incentive is robust and absolute, non-traceability is binary, you can't be less traceable than untraceable. 

This is equivalent to Facebook starting off within the highest status social humans in the planet, young, healthy, wealthy and brilliant Harvard college students (compare to Orkut, which failed in great part because it spread worldwide too soon, allowing a lower social class (Brazilians, Persians) to overtake it, disincentivizing the elites to remain there).  

It has convention status. Its market cap has surpassed all altcoins besides Litecoin. 

This advantage was originally Orkut's (which is Bitcoin in the analogy). It is what MSN stole from ICQ, and facebook from MSN, and Whatsapp from all platforms. 

Effective altruists in particular should consider buying Darkcoin because the EA part of you should be less loss averse than the non-EA part of you, and Darkcoin is obviously a gamble to the extend the reasons I'm laying out here are false or insufficient.

Finally Darkcoin has a complex bootstrap reward system for owners of many Darkcoin, who can own masternodes,  and that is how Dropbox won, by creating a university level (copying Facebook's serendipitous "strategy") contest which would dramatically increase data storage of winning universities. Mine won and I have 30 Giga for free forever, for instance. 

There are other features that caused Facebook to win, or MSN to win. Are there features we want from a cryptocurrency that have yet not been captured by Darkcoin? Or are we witnessing a real last mover advantage in real time? 

Continuation of: Spend Money on Ergonomics, by Kevin

Three years have elapsed since Kevin wisely told us to spend money on treating our bodies well. It may be time to check for new gadgets, to verify what has worked and what has not etc... 

If you have purchased an item for this purpose, or intend to buy one and don't know which, tell here, ask here. 

Nick Bostrom uses a mouse that looks like a plane controller joystick. 

I've seen keyboards that bend sideways, that are concave, that are convex, and that look like a sphere. 

At FHI, dozens of books are used so that computer screens stay at eye level or above. 

But I am no expert and I have not looked myself, nor would know how to. So please share in the comments the best knowledge about:

Keyboards

Mice

Chairs

Balls to sit on

Pillows

Beds/Matresses etc.. 

Screens - Size, position, brightness etc... 

Other household office items - Stairs, Handles, Shower etc... 

There's been somewhat frequent coverage of Daniel Dennett on Lesswrong:

How not to be a Naïve Computationalist

Dennett's "Consciousness Explained": Prelude

"Where Am I?", by Daniel Dennett

Dennett's heterophenomenology

My personal favorite: Zombies: The Movie

I've written a book called Simulating Dennett nearly five years ago now (if you are considering an academic career, keep that slow paced speed in mind, for good or ill). It summarizes Dennett's philosophy  while trying to make the reader able to think like Dennett. It seemed to me at the time, and still does now, that Dennett's kind of mind is very interesting and we should have more of those, so I tried my best to create a Dennett installer in book form.

Simulating Dennett: Tools and Constructions of a Naturalist

Is the 244 pages that ensued. Portuguese or Spanish reading skills advised. Or use it to learn Portuguese prior to your trip to Rio, Pantanal, Iguaçu Falls and the Amazon Forest. (for legal reasons I've chopped out the second half of the file, but there are instructions on how to get it when you get to the end of the first half)

Abstract

This dissertation intends to provide the reader with an inner simulation of Daniel Dennett’s form of reasoning, spreading over his whole philosophy, emphasizing his treatment of patterns, the evolutionary algorithm, consciousness, and his use of illata, abstracta, semantic, and syntax, to carve nature at its joints, especially biology and the human mind. It recasts, in a new light, great part of his most important ideas, and reverse engineers what made him think in particular ways, walking the reader through similar pathways, fostering an active learning of a thinking style, above and beyond a mere exposition of the results obtained by this thinking style over the years.

Keywords: Daniel Dennett, Consciousness, Memetics, Intentional stance, Evolution,

Algorithm.

This Wednesday 2013-03-19 at 14:00 I’ll be presenting it as thesis in the University of São Paulo. Lesswrongers passing by Brazil, or the 20 of us who actually live here are welcome to join.

Here is the Facebook event.

This was originally a comment to VipulNaik's recent indagations about the academic lifestyle versus the job lifestyle. Instead of calling it lifestyle he called them career options, but I'm taking a different emphasis here on purpose.

Due to information hazards risks, I recommend that Effective Altruists who are still wavering back and forth do not read this. Spoiler EA alert. 

I'd just like to provide a cultural difference information that I have consistently noted between Americans and Brazilians which seems relevant here. 

To have a job and work in the US is taken as a *de facto* biological need. It is as abnormal for an American, in my experience, to consider not working, as it is to consider not breathing, or not eating.  It just doesn't cross people's minds. 

If anyone has insight above and beyond "Protestant ethics and the spirit of capitalism" let me know about it, I've been waiting for the "why?" for years. 

So yeah, let me remind people that you can spend years and years not working. that not getting a job isn't going to kill you or make you less healthy, that ultravagabonding is possible and feasible and many do it for over six months a year, that I have a friend who lives as the boyfriend of his sponsor's wife in a triad and somehow never worked a day in his life (the husband of the triad pays it all, both men are straight). That I've hosted an Argentinian who left graduate economics for two years to randomly travel the world, ended up in Rome and passed by here in his way back, through couchsurfing.  That Puneet Sahani has been well over two years travelling the world with no money and an Indian passport now. I've also hosted a lovely estonian gentleman who works on computers 4 months a year in London to earn pounds, and spends eight months a year getting to know countries while learning their culture etc... Brazil was his third country. 

Oh, and never forget the Uruguay couple I just met at a dance festival who have been travelling as hippies around and around South America for 5 years now, and showed no sign of owning more than 500 dollars worth of stuff. 

Also in case you'd like to live in a paradise valley taking Santo Daime (a religious ritual with DMT) about twice a week, you can do it with a salary of aproximatelly 500 dollars per month in Vale do Gamarra, where I just spent carnival, that is what the guy who drove us back did.  Given Brazilian or Turkish returns on investment, that would cost you 50 000 bucks in case you refused to work within the land itself for the 500. 

Oh, I forgot to mention that though it certainly makes you unable to do expensive stuff, thus removing the paradox of choice and part of your existential angst from you (uhuu less choices!), there is nearly no detraction in status from not having a job. In fact, during these years in which I was either being an EA and directing an NGO, or studying on my own, or doing a Masters (which, let's agree is not very time consuming) my status has increased steadily, and many opportunities would have been lost if I had a job that wouldn't let me move freely. Things like being invited as Visiting Scholar to Singularity Institute, like giving a TED talk, like directing IERFH, and like spending a month working at FHI with Bostrom, Sandberg, and the classic Lesswrong poster Stuart Armstrong. 

So when thinking about what to do with you future my dear fellow Americans, please, at least consider not getting a job. At least admit what everyone knows from the bottom of their hearts, that jobs are abundant for high IQ people (specially you my programmer lurker readers.... I know you are there...and you native English speakers, I can see you there, unnecessarily worrying about your earning potential). 

A job is truly an instrumental goal, and your terminal goals certainly do have chains of causation leading to them that do not contain a job for 330 days a year.  Unless you are a workaholic who experiences flow in virtue of pursuing instrumental goals. Then please, work all day long, donate as much as you can, and may your life be awesome! 

There are many ways to tackle this question, but I mean this in a homo economicus, not biased perspective. If we were great optimizers of some things (experiences, states of the world, utility in the emotional sense), should we be sad upon hearing we lost an opportunity?

The intuitive answer, to me, is yes. But for many things, for most things I have begun to believe otherwise. This is because we combine two distinct meanings of opportunity

Opportunity₁ = Something good in the future that is uncertain at the moment and could happen to you, frequently depending on environmental factors outside of your control and some factors within your control in the time between now and the opportunity taking place. Ex: 

• Getting a promotion
• Finding a romantic partner
• Having a really good friendship
• Having a large H index (for scientific publications)

Opportunity₂ = Something good in the future that is uncertain at the moment and could happen to you, but all the actions you could have personally taken that could influence this are in the past, and now only time and chance will determine if it will be the case. Ex:

• Being approved at Google after the entire interview process has happened
• Being accepted at Harvard
• Avoiding wine in your clothing after it has been dropped
• Being accepted to work with CEA after filling in the entire application. 

I think it is very reasonable to be sad when you lose opportunites₁ but completely pointless to be sad over the loss of the second kind, opporunities₂. It feels obvious to me, but in case it isn't I'll try to make it explicit:

When you lose opportunities₁, you change the course of your future actions, each of your actions, your time and your effort has become less valuable, since you have to do more to get the same odds or even less. 

When you lose opportunities₂ you are only being notified of an indexical property, you learn in which of the possible universes you could be you happen to be. You have gained knowledge, you can tailor your future actions regarding other things accordingly. Nothing has become pricier for your efforts, in fact, now you have a better map, and can navigate with ease. 

So let us be neutral or happy with the loss of oportunities₂, and gain strenght from the loss of opportunities₁. It seems right to allocate emotional and psychological resources to things you can act on, when you are not in flow. Otherwise, you may end up in the hardest death spiral to overcome, learned helplessness.

For political reasons related to my prospective adviser's academic history, all applicants who wanted to study with him didn't make it to Berkeley University.  But hey, I didn't care... That just means I'm in the fun universe in which I actually have to do all the crazy stuff like moving into the unknown, that is a universe of adventure right?

Loss aversion be damned! 

Paul Christiano speaks about cause priorization within Effective Altruism. Melbourne.

Cause Prioritization: Many effective altruists place a high degree of importance on working out what the most important cause to support is. This is one way that effective altruism is distinguishable from other traditional altruism or charity.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uAloUCRVa5I