Diary—IIIB


#### 404 — Saturday 31 October 2009 — "Haunt"

I gave Mike Blume a lift to the CalTrain station today; he's going to go do fun stuff up North. I took a couple hours of library day, but didn't get a whole lot of math done, as if I were mentally fatigued, or crippled. What must it be like, not to be able to think these thoughts? I bought Halloween decorations, on Anna's request. My sleep cycle has been sucky lately: I've been staying up late and rising for good at tenish, and it doesn't feel good.

Last night I had a lot of social fun talking with the guys. Justin was talking about his plans for bar hopping in San Francisco on Halloween (which didn't go through), and he said that he wanted a flower for his hair to look Californian. Roko made some mean-spirited comments (is that how I seem to Hannah[?]) about how this would attract drag queens. I said, I'm sure drag queens must be such fascinating people with all sorts of interesting stories to tell; give me the flower. At least, I said, that's _my_ first thought, but I'm atypical.

Sometime that night, Mike noted with amusement that the photo from his online dating profile was on the first page of results when you do a Google image search for Gary Drescher. The profile boasted of his intelligence, and I said that if he wants to take that tack, he should have some sort of accomplishment to show for it, or at least be a better writer. I eventually said it _would_ be impressive if he wrote the profile in the form of a sestina. I explained the concept to him, and he reacted with joy. Later I suggested that he write the profile as a sestina with end words _guy_, _high_, _why_, _immense_, _hence_, and _intelligence_, and, well, one thing led to another, and before the night was over, I had written half a sestina on the whiteboard. First stanza:

> Ladies, if you're looking for a guy,
>
> With looks & charm & scruples so immense,
>
> But the cute boys in your dorm are always high,
>
> & the cute boys in the quad been taken hence,
>
> Should you tear your hair & wonder "WHY?"
>
> It's not because you lack intelligence.

I omit the second stanza in consideration of [your] bulk, dear Diary, but I also wrote a third stanza, which was creative, even if it didn't scan:

> His altruistic nature's found a purpose high
>
> For this world awaits an artificial intelligence
>
> That's poised to rule this world for eons hence
>
> He knows because he heard it from this guy
>
> Who blogs on how it's going to be immense
>
> & it would just be rude to question why

The envoy was a little mean (why do I do that?) but it practically wrote itself:

> & I hope this immense poem does not prompt a "Why?—
>
> If these signals are honest, & his mate value's
>
> hence so high,
>
> For all his vaunted intelligence, why's he still a single guy?"

The strings of end words on the board for where the fourth and following stanzas would go caught Anna's eye today, but it was quickly decided that I should not explain; Anna said she's trying to limit herself to useful conversations today. She asked me if I got the sense that Mike Blume was doing any work, and I gave it a four out of ten. He's not the most industrious fellow. Neither am I, but at least (I say to myself, I say to people), I _know_ that I'm broken. Oh, Diary, my entire life is as dust and ashes. I should have forseen that the beautiful epicene literary intitals wouldn't fly, that it would all just turn into a subgoal stomp. School was a subgoal stomp, too, and I'm glad I left, but I could have been so much smarter about it—there's still so much that I _have_ to be doing wrong. I don't want the entire world to be owned by guys like Roko who have a sense of themselves as guys. There should be a place for me, and my analogues on the other side of the aisle. But I can't just whine about this; I have to actually be more effective than them. To win on reality's terms. But how?—when I've wasted so much.

NaNoWriMo starts tomorrow. That will be healthy; I'll build up some writing strength. And who can say but that I'll produce something salvagable? Except this _who can say but that_ business is not a rationalist sentiment; we only care about what people can say insofar as this is Bayesian evidence about the facts of the matter. I remain yours, and—I'd better get the fuck used to this,

Zack M. Davis


#### 405 — Monday‒Tuesday 2‒3 November 2009 — "Showroom"

Monday has not been a particularly sane or productive day. I went to IKEA, probably my first time, but they didn't have enough of the bunk beds we wanted, and in any case the package didn't fit in my car. I alternate between loving and being ashamed of my NaNoWriMo story—really I should just be consistent. What have I been doing wrong. Lucas Sloan wants to see my NaNoWriMo story; I _warned_ him about what NaNoWriMo _is_, but he said that he reads incredibly fast and that he can always quit if it's that awful. Maybe I should strike this deal with myself: I'll write this story as honestly and truly as I can, and then I will shut up about names forever. I mean, this story _does_ have a certain dignity to it. It strikes true to life. True to my madness.

Michael Vassar accepted my LinkedIn invitation. I'm in with such an elite crowd; I should work myself to death in order to justify it, especially when you consider the discount rates Anna has been pushing.

If I had been smarter, I would have plotted so much out more in advance. Maybe I would have played with the system and gone to University early, and changed my name to _Shannon_, which is actually a name. Why didn't I notice, why didn't I forsee?

You know, they write about young children and autistics not having a theory of mind, but it's not as if the rest of us are all that great at modelling others' beliefs. I should recall one of Father's favorite sayings and remember that other people don't think about me _nearly_ as much as _I_ think about me. I should be updating on this insight. If I've gone completely batshit crazy OCD about names, other people might notice that I'm behaving poorly (or they might not), but they won't know the actual problem except insofar as I actually tell them. And the extent to which I actually tell them need not match the extent to which they actually care. And a lot of people just don't have the intelligence or background to even understand what tears at me.

Pour my neurosis into this novel. And if anyone asks about my real-life transition, just chuckle and say that it turns out that it's really useful to have a first name. And it will be an eloquent novel about real madness. Lucas said that he respected my writing skills. How much of my stuff has he read?—my _Less Wrong_ comments? I really have no idea how many people read my _Less Wrong_ comments; it's always a pleasant shock when someone I meet in real life references something I've written; like when Nick Tarleton referenced my internalized morality.

I've picked up Mike from the CalTrain station, and I said that what I was really looking forward to after the Singularity was nonanthropomorphic psychology textbooks.

ADDENDUM— I've been acting so immaturely. It's _dumb_. I'm falling back into the same damn childish behavior patterns that made me miserable duing college; why? Maybe—given my _current_ psychology, which I hope is still open to editing—Father was right, and I need a job to keep me sane and stable. The supermarket was good for me. Which itself is _insane_. Here we have this most amazing crowd of people doing this most important of work, and I'm still acting like that spoiled boy at Santa Cruz who didn't know how to study and in general had no idea what the fuck _he_ was doing. I need to channel this madness—_all_ of it—into the story of Kathryn T. Kowalsky. Because it has to stop. Here. Think of the world you could save. _I'm so systematically dysfunctional, why, why why?!_ I'm not even taking this existential risks stuff and the _Less Wrong_ wiki as seriously as I would be disposed to take a real job, even though, by my own admission, this is so much more important and more enjoyable. I'm insane. I need to commit my old self _to the flames_. My name is Zack M. Davis, maybe if I were smarter my name would be Shannon M. Davis, I'm an aspiring rationalist, and _I've got_—something to protect. O terrible that I already used up my name-change capital. I've made these new friends already; I've already been fussy enough about my name; it's too late. I'm so stupid; I've been so wrong—let this story about Kathryn be a retrospective on what-went-wrong. I can portray the madness from a distance.


#### 406 — Tuesday 3 November 2009 — "Fucktarded"

I continue to be damaged; I can't work or study. Or I won't work or study; I'm not sure it matters so much anymore whether or not to attribute free will; fault is in the map, not in the territory. _I'm so retarded_. _What's wrong with me_? But I don't have answers. I was on the telephone with AT&T for a long time, for some of it I pretended to be Anna. Anna wanted to block international calls, the worry (she had to spell it out for me explicitly later) being that Alex would make calls from malice if we tried to kick him out. I don't deserve to exist; I don't deserve to be in this house—I should have been so much smarter, should have thought of _Shannon_ so much earlier—I am falling the fuck apart today; I played some tower defense and want to play some more. I'm way behind pace on NaNoWriMo and maybe I shouldn't have been advertising that I was doing it on my Facebook feed if I'm going to be torn up over writing on such a touchy subject, but on the other hand running away isn't going to help, is it? As I wrote the scrap in the ms.: this initials business was never about androgyny anyway; it was about general intelligence. Just completing NaNoWriMo is an _achievement_; I can't let myself shy away at achievement; that just leaves me deeper in the dust and ashes that has been my life up to now. Let me laugh at myself. No signature.

ADDENDUM— I went to the CBT class, was having a little bit of a fit and was told to leave the room. Came back some minutes later. I'm thinking I should quit NaNoWriMo; I should have known better than to pick an emotionally-charged topic.


#### 407 — Wednesday 4 November 2009 — "Harding"

I went on a walk with Anna last night. We talked and shared a meal and dessert at Denny's. It was really helpful and I feel much better now. I'm not quitting NaNoWriMo after all; I'm just starting over from scratch and writing nonsense; the event is an exercise and the organizers don't even want you to take your work seriously; the phrase is _literary abandon_. This could be the start of a new era in my life: you'd think that would have started in September, but my behavior has been so poor that you might as well class it, not with those days of my purity born of pain, but rather with my time at the University. (If countries don't have to be contiguous, then I don't see why eras have to be, either.) Now maybe I've learned enough and seen enough that I can actually start to get things _right_. Diary, a strange development—Anna actually said she'd like to read parts of you.

I'll be fine. And signature. Zack M. Davis.


#### 408 — Thursday 5 November 2009 — " 'That's What You Get for Waking Up in Vegas' (Marcus Hutter Risk Management Edition)"

So, I would seem to have (mostly) recovered from my recent recent madness, but my concentration hasn't yet returned; I passively and uselessly browse the internet, which is so _silly_ when it seems so clear that the lightcone depends on what people think and do about AI, and yet practically no one outside my creepy Singularitarian friends seems to realize this. I could really help them. _And_ I've got some 49 200 words of nonsense that I need to get started on.

Apparently there's a Monte Carlo approximation to AIXI that can play a form of Pac-Man with restricted vision, and _I'm_, at least, impressed. I looked over the paper from the arXiv today. What a fearsome power it is, to do precise inference! Anna urges caution when discussing AI, whereas I have a first-order impression that if _I_ can understand it, then it can't possibly be dangerous. Anna has a cached explanation (I've heard her give it more than once) for why this intuition isn't veridical: you don't have to be spectacularly brilliant just to _understand_ a powerful insight, when the vocabulary is already in the air. ("P does not equal NP," I said on our walk, repeating the analogy that I had read elsewhere.)

There's plenty of things for me to still do today: writing for the wiki, taking care of the finances, writing back to Erin Rodliff who knows what it's like to be an [actuary]. And more, I'm sure. I don't—I don't want to be dumb, I want so badly to be able to speak, and so O terrible on all these minutes that I could have been studying or working but did not. We don't instinctively notice the opportunity costs, don't classify failing to reach our full potential as a kind of disability, even though it _is_. I had quipped the other week that we're transhumanists; there's no such thing as health, only varying degrees of sickness. Maybe I said it vice versa; probably Steven pointed out that it also worked in the way opposite that I said it, which is only to say that the words we use don't map to the raw decision theory, which operates over what actually _happens_, and doesn't bother with the stories we tell about who deserves praise or blame. There should be a separate page on the _Less Wrong_ wiki for this concept, that the null act is still an act; I haven't been sure what to title it, though.

There's so much to do; I can't let myself remain so small. But I remain,

Yours,

Zack M. Davis


#### 409 — Friday 6 November 2009 — "Prelude to the Seriousness of this Entire Endeavor"

Right, so the story about names is totally worth writing someday, but not during NaNoWriMo, where I wouldn't have the option of turning away and not-thinking-about-it. Not during this time as that of my time at University when I am still recovering from my recent recent madness. Different people do slice up the reality differently: conversation indicates that Mike codes _Steve_ and _Steven_ as different names, whereas Justin insists that they're short for the same thing. (Technically Steve Rayhawk's name is short for _Stephen_ with a _ph_, but you can't hear that in speech.)

If I want to be a stonger writer, I should be able to _describe_ things, instead of just blathering on about my feelings. So how do I decribe Justin? I could say that I find him somewhat annoying, but how do I say why? It can't only be that he talks too much.

Again I never know what to make of my level. Obviously Justin is many levels above me in mathy endeavors, but I'm not impressed by his all-around epistemic rationality. It's one glorious thing not to understand nonnerds, but it's other thing altogether to apparently not understand the vastness of the extent to which one does not understand nonnerds.

I wasted a lot of time today, stooping so low as to play tower defense. But I did revise the wiki articles that were on my cool person list, and I added to my new NaNoWriMo project, which I've aptly titled _Not Taking It Seriously_.

"People are crazy, the world is mad," is cached wisdom among our crowd, but Anna might take it more seriously than most; apparently she thinks the entire concept of values is problematic. The other day, she claimed that Roko's CEV could depend drastically on what he ate for breakfast. I said that my first thought was that it seems like we should be able to make a distinction between vast but unpredictable butterfly-effect-type dependencies, and vast but predictable culture-type dependencies, but then noted that I had just comitted a huge mind projection fallacy, since what counts as _predictable_ depends on your current level of intelligence. Anna seemed to concede that this was important. Shortly thereafter, I did start to doubt the position, wondering out loud why I didn't care about what Roko eats for breakfast, but I do care about what books he reads during breakfast. Mike Blume said that I could predict how the books could shift his goal system, which I now guess is essentially what I had said originally ...

But in any case, Anna is definitely onto something. When she asked me if I was transgender, I didn't have a quick, concise answer, and I'm afraid that the real answer is that it depends on what I had for breakfast (_cf_. 399). But it seems like this knowledge about motivational instability should be something we can _use_; reflection is _power_.

Roko took a page from Anna's book and asked me to give a one-to-ten rating on how much I'm bothered by his objectification of women. (So he noticed.) I said that it was one of thing things I find more obnoxious about him, and when pressed for a number, I gave it a seven-point-something. (I give everything to two significant figures.) He said we should talk about it some time, and something to the effect that he had his reasons, and that nothing seems to reprehensible when you undersand people's reasons. I said in the general case no (we are not confused about the decision algorithm of a paperclip maximizer), but among humans probably, and Roko said that of course he didn't mean the general case. Mike was inspired to hypothesize that we're less good at predicting those we've coded as hated enemies because we don't empathize with them: in conversation he clarified that he meant this even if we specify that you're well-callibrated, and I said something about the deliciously perverse implications.

It is true that as I've learned more about Roko, I've come to like him more. He's genuinely a nice guy. And yet I'm confident this process hits a wall somewhere.

Tomorrow should be busy day; I've got to shop for the _Less Wrong_ meetup; I've got wiki articles to write; Jesse Liptrap should be visiting; I'm going to bring Seanan to the meetup.

I want to be busy. I want to be big and I want the world to not-die, and—though I'm _sure_ there's some sickening irony here—I want to establish my supremacy over Roko and his analogues. Over Eliezer, too, though that's hopeless. And so I leave you. —ZMD

ADDENDUM— _Is_ it a good idea to email Anna a copy of you as per our conversation the other night (_cf_. 407)? or is it the sort of thing that will predictably backfire in some sort of horrible, awful way? (I have the cutest idea for a password, although apparently the PDF security standard is terrible anyway; my real defense is that no one is looking for this data, nor is there anything _really_ damaging in here. It's only the truth.)

Although as far as horrible backfires go, you would think that rationality would make a difference. I'm sure that there are a lot of even married couples who can never share their deepest thoughts for fear of giving offense—think of Jessica and her jealous boyfriend. But Anna explained the nature of offense to me the other night. Once you have this concept of map and territory, why should you be afraid of finding out what was already true anyway? Once you _know_ that humans are crazy, what good does it do you to expect otherwise from even your friends?


#### 410 — Sunday 8 November 2009 — "Strict Convexity"

The meetup was sheer ecstasy as usual; Seanan was impressed and had fun. As I was telling you earlier, Anna is totally right about this not-having-values thing, at least to some extent. So in the afternoon, I can feel sad or jealous or in wonder reading over messages from the TSDoItYourselfHormones mailing list archives, but then at night at the meetup, I feel _great_, talking about _science_. I shave regularly, and I have my beautiful, beautiful hair, and my beautiful, beautiful shoelaces, and my beautifully intellectual demeanor, and _apparently_ that's all I really need. I'm _not_ trans; I have never _been_ trans; I'm—well, but I am _on the margin_ in some sense, for some reasonable placement of the margin. Some people—but it has to be a majority or supermajority—are entirely comfortable with what they are and wouldn't want to push the boundaries even after a positive Singularity when you could do whatever you wanted, whereas I seem to be left with these unsolvable questions of who I want to be. I cannot _imagine_ being a man-*qua-*man like Eliezer or Patri—or for that matter a woman like Patri's wife who is named (yes) Shannon. But then what _do_ I want? And I worry that every moment I spend fretting over the question just makes me stupider. Just imagine if all the emotional pain I had sunk into this name-identity drama had gone into studying math, or even the real psychology of gender. I would _know_ things.

Whatever goes on the minds of true (nonmarginal) transsexuals—_I_ have a choice. I can stay loyal to my paraphilia and the wayward memes that have hijacked me and keep leaning up against that boundary. Or I can apportion my efforts into altogether more important endeavors, and let this strangeness be someone else's endeavor, someone else's choice, someone else's _life_.

But I can't walk away _too_ far; I at least have all this stuff to _write_ about.

I wonder if Hannah Finnley knows how much we talk about her. And [redacted] is my intellectual equal.

Maybe I should vow to hit my studying groove again before I devote more clockcycles to thinking about gender. And that fat volume on the psychology of gender that I _still_ have to get to, that is still so shamefully checked out from the University library? I'm so ineffectual lately. It's terrible. And even if Anna is still occasionally impressed by my fluency in converstaion, it's not enough.

But what am I doing? Before even finishing writing to you, I've spent several hours in the garage with my laptop, reading trans stuff. Diary, what if—Diary, what _if_ I started experimenting with 1mg tablets of Estrofem? (Previous speculations along these lines had imagined me taking antiandrogens, but apparently when you do that without taking estrogen, it rots your bones.)

Anna went out shopping with Eliezer's girlfriend Erin Devereaux. I've driven Erin to the CalTrain station; she has problems with social interaction, which is probably true of a lot of people in this community, but Erin has it particularly bad.

My self-identity is all over the fucking _map_. What have I been thinking? I should leave all this gender worry behind, when I've got so much more important work to do—and I'm not trans _anyway_. I'm not; I'm not. It's a choice for me, you see. And it's been made. I _had_ my chance, _had_ my beautiful name, stared into that abyss, and (implicitly, by refusing the name) said _no_.

But that answer only supplies one bit of optimization pressure. Given that I am indisputably a man, exactly how do I bear myself? How do I present? How do I walk, how do I modulate my voice, what do I do when one of my roommates owns the most adorable plush fox? If you're going to be deciding who you want to be, then you _are_ going to have to control these variables. Some people would say to just _act naturally_, but when so much of your structure is arrayed against your nature, then you _are_ divided in this way, and—_well_.

And I've fallen so dreadfully far behind NaNoWriMo pace. Martine Rothblatt has done pretty well for herself. How?—when you lose so much productivity just mulling over these things.

There are so many feedback loops, so many key decision points where things could have gone one way or the other. In some other Everett branch, I _have_ transitioned; in another, I'm a computer science major; in another—oh, all these visions, all these beautiful Diaries. I've long held a certain kind of distaste for the sort of person who lets herself be shaped by her work, but _this_ work—should be different.

It's so much more _fun_ to quest after true knowledge and genuine skills, than to sit in a goddam garage and mope about gender identity. It's not—I'm _not_ giving up on reflectivity. I'm just noticing that I've been doing it wrong.

Again, my writing to you today have been very intermittent and distributed over time.

Diary, when I was looking through that mathy economics book, probably a few weeks ago, I was puzzled by the axiom of convexity, and Mike Blume helped explain it to me. Now I think it's totally relevant to the whole gender runaround: if you're indifferent between ten units of masculinity and and ten units of femininity, then five units of each shouldn't be _worse_. I count this as a major insight.

How can I be brave enough to follow through with my vision? What am I working for? A positive Singularity? Or my whiny gender book?


#### 411 — Monday 9 November 2009 — " 'That's Not a Fox' "

The nice thing about being so well-documented is that you can actually get some sense of where you've been, rather than just having to guess at things and getting them wrong.

A little more than a year ago, when I went on a walk with Michael Vassar (_cf_. 272), he said that people can't even properly distinguish good news and bad news. Suppose, he said, that we found out there was a toxin in the water that was lowering everyone's IQ by ten points. Most people would call this _bad_ news, but actually, Vassar claims, it's good news. You see, the toxin was _already_ there whether we knew about it or not; and now that we know, we have the opportunity to do so much better by getting rid of the toxin. Map and territory: decision theory is only forward-looking; you can be sad that the toxin was there in the first place, but the _news_ is good.

So I wonder if—from the perspective of my _current_ self—I should be happy to learn about just how far this recent recent madness has brought me down. Comparing July and October in terms of STEM pages and notebook pages, my intellectual productivity has fallen by approximately a factor of 2.7. So if Anna thinks that I've been useful regardless, just imagine how useful I could be when I'm not 37% of my healthy size!—which I have no reason to think is my absolute _limit_.

And as long as it still outputs all the same empirical predictions, maybe it's better to frame my recent recent madness in positive terms. This gender thing—you could argue that I've been going about it entirely the wrong way, but my essential concerns _are_ valid. Maybe I've still got muddled preferences about what I should do here-and-now in _this_ life, but when I imagine my idealized upload society, I do _not_ see a gender binary. That _means_ something; that really means something. And so this initials thing—well, it was a _reasonable thing to try_. Okay, so it didn't work out and I burned up all my name-change capital and I'm damned to have a recognizably masculine name this side of the Introdus. It's not _that_ bad, and I've got so many other things to think about in the hopes that we might _have_ an introdus in the first place. Maybe one of my analogues—myself in another Everett branch, or some similar conjunction in _this_ world—has done things right, and will go on to do great things as _Shannon_ or _Courtney_. But here and now, Zack M. Davis simply does not have any more time to waste operating _well below_ 37% efficiency. And so I must work. And so I remain yours. And signature,

Zack M. Davis


#### 412 — Tuesday 10 November 2009 — "Raconteuress"

Apparently Steve had said that Justin was like Roko on Adderall, so Mike joked that if Justin took pot, he would turn into Roko. Steven (ever the quick wit) joked that we should have a diagram of all of us and the drugs needed to transition between us. I privately decided that the arrows pointing to my node should be labeled with Estrofem. This personal joke pleases me more than I can say.

I took Anna to SFO this morning and we had a very useful and interesting conversation. Anna gave me some words of wisdom re CBT. I did end up saying that I didn't want to discuss details of my recent recent madness. We said some serious things about secrecy and existential risk. Anna seems to trust my rationality; she said not to tell Justin or Mike things that I wouldn't say to the web. I picked Katja up from SJC, and Mike and Justin came along, even though I protested the usefulness of the marginal person on a car trip is nil. On the other hand, Katja _did_ turn out to have a lot of luggage, and we got a good joke about signalling explanations and showing that we care.

Mike was talking in the kitchen about how smart, attractive, or horny women were likely to already be in a relationship, and Steve pointed out from the living room that Katja's presense was a partial cause of the conversation, so even if the topic of women didn't seem to come up with unusual frequency to the guys, it would seem so to Katja. I stood up, thanked Steve for the observation, and said that I wanted to know what this tells us about anthropics. Proceeding into the kitchen, I said: if the guys around me are talking about women, does that mean I'm more likely to exist? This got a laugh. Roko seemed puzzled, and I referenced the self-indication assumption. —ZMD


#### 413 — Wednesday 11 November 2009 — "Slush"

I took Justin, Mike, and Katja to the CalTrain station: Katja is leaving the country tonight, and I suppose Mike and Justin are going to hang out with her for some hours before then. I continue to be vaguely annoyed by Blume's unserious manner and whatever-it-is about Justin that makes him hard to communicate with. I don't want this to just be an amazing nerd commune with "reducing existential risk" as a slogan or inside joke; there's actually stuff that needs to be done. I get the sense that Anna is worth twice or thrice as much as any one of us; she's actually taking this saving-the-world business seriously. Steven, too. But Mike and Justin are disappointing, and I'm disappointing.

And I'm worried. These arguments about AI risks seem so plausible, and yet I also realize my own involvement is hardly predicated on calculatation of what needs doing in the world, what the most likely trajectories are, and how I can help. Anna, in arguing her thesis that we don't really have values, said that _causally_, the reason she has preferences about the far future is because Eliezer said she did. And _causally_, I'm here because of Anna Salamon.

Anna told me yesterday that it's cool to have high standards, but that I should actually try serve them by accomplishing things, rather than signalling how high my standards are by talking about how much I fail to live up to them.

I seem to have contracted the illness that is going around; my throat is thick and I have a headache. Roko suggested I go to bed, but I think I should write. I'm horribly, terribly behind pace at NaNoWriMo. Reaching the summit still seems possible, if I make sure to channel my spare moments into it. (Maybe let my math go by the wayside this month, and try to set a page record in December?)

The rest of this day should be devoted to writing, on the wiki and the NaNo project, with brief interruptions to eat and pick up the boys from CalTrain. And I remain (signature),

Your increasingly rational correspondent,

Zack M. Davis

ADDENDUM— So I have actually gotten some stuff done on the wiki today. I will exercise my positive framing skills by refraining from commenting on how little I've done and how terrible it is. Only now the wiki is having trouble maintaining a session and it's repeatedly refusing to let me edit stuff and it's making me very unhappy. I think I'll forget about the wiki for the rest of the night. I have of course much more NaNo catchup to do. I have listened to conversation here about computer security.

SECOND ADDENDUM— Rebecca Romijn withdrew from UCSC, as well. I have more nonsense to write tonight if I timelessly want any hope of reaching the summit.

I should be able to read _Diesel Sweeties_ without getting jealous of the female characters or the author's pretty byline. No, that was a joke.

I shouldn't be reading _Diesel Sweeties_, full stop. —ZMD

THIRD ADDENDUM— I said that I missed _transhumanism_, and Roko said it's a terrible term because it makes people think of _transsexual_ or _transgender_. I'm sure if I were smarter, I would have thought of some beautiful way to bring the conversation to a crescendo, but I didn't. I wonder—why does Roko think I'm like him? Did he just not read the right comments? _Marcello_ picked up on my desperate telegraphs. —ZMD


#### 414 — Thursday 12 November 2009 — "Conspiracy of Friends"

Why do I always have to be haunted by some damn thing? School, or my name, or the nature of fame in a large world, or some damn thing. Maybe this morning I'm taking this whole existential risk business more seriously than I usually do. It's so worrying. On the one hand, there are all these arguments that AGI could be really, really powerful, and that if you don't do it exactly, perfectly right, then it destroys the world. But getting it right effectively means _taking over_ the world. What have I gotten myself into? I wish I had read all this rationality stuff without letting it get so tied up with the Singularity. Despite the failings brought on by my own madness, these general lessons about _how to think_ seem awfully powerful. You can imagine applying them with great effectiveness to more—temporal concerns. Oh, how happy it would be!—to gleefully seek out insight and achievement without worrying about _the future of humanity,_ to _just_ be a sysadmin and write some pretty novels about gender and science. Most human lives only make space for a single lifework; have I done so poorly?

People form communities; it's so nice to have friends. Even if I decided that I don't want to think about existential risks, then where would I go, what would I do? Oh, there are plenty of things—plenty of challenges enough as a programmer or in libraries. I'm so glad to live in a world with other people in it, other aspiring rationalists, who can scavenge after all the jewels I've passed up, and the incomprehensible number more that I've never considered. And what about all the jewels that have failed to exist?

You could say that this whole _taking over the world_ notion depends on a distinction between action and inaction that exists in human moral psychology, but doesn't exist in decision theory.

I've been writing to you _way_ too often, especially with my intellectual productivity in the shambles that it is, and my existential-risk-reducing productivity in similar shambles, and being so far behind pace to the summit. So enough and _signature_. —Zack M. Davis

ADDENDUM—"The Big Can of Iced Tea"— I bought junk food at the 7-Eleven. I still haven't done any work today, nor any serious study, nor anything for NaNoWriMo. Nor have I been seeking out new, exciting websites bearing shocking, beautiful insights. My world has shrunk, as if I've spent so much time obsessing over the fact that there are so many details to the bigger picture, that I've lost sight of any of the details themselves. And it's as if, mournful at Coates's existence having been vetoed (_cf_. 402, 403), I've decided to recapitulate all her mistakes from scratch. How do I explain what I haven't done? How do I decide what to do? My despondence can't _really_ be about existential risk, can it?—surely I'm just lazy. Alternatively—well, there has got to be some alternative phrasing or framing that does not put me down so much. Anna reminded me the other day that negative self-talk has a tendency to make one feel bad, and this remains true whether or not the negative statements are accurate. Even if you're a horrible person, continually dwelling on this may not help you. Dwell on the causality instead: _what_ has my past actually been like?

If I judge that something's worth doing by _somebody_, then why shouldn't that person be me?—I mean, knowing what I do about the reducibility of personal identity? —ZMD

SECOND ADDENDUM—"You Think I'm Like You and I Think You're Wrong"— So I didn't get any actual work done, but the conversation here tonight was wonderful as usual, but perhaps even more than usual. I reached two major insights: one (maybe it's a collection of small thoughts that _together_ aggregate to "insight" status) about the differences between me and Roko, and another about the power mean and its implications for what we mean when we say average utilitarianism. Re the latter, Marcello had told me once that I seem to care more about the maximum than the average—but it turns out that this _mean_ concept generalizes far beyond just arithmetic _vs._ geometric. —ZMD


#### 415 — Wednesday 18 November 2009 — "Gertrude"

I _know_ that negative self-talk causes bad feelings, but that doesn't mean it isn't also true. Anna had reminded me that these were separate questions. And really, Diary, it should be quite obvious to _you_ by now that I'm a horribly dysfunctional instantiation. Last night I wasted a lot of time and social capital being depressed in front of Mike and Steve: the same damn kind of moping about that I would do at the University when I should have been studying. If I didn't have these depressive tendencies, you can imagine me being much more intellectually competent than I actually am, not only because I wouldn't waste so much time being sad, but also because I would have all the _skills_ that I would have acquired during the time that I wasted being sad.

A tenet of cognitive behavioral therapy is that your thoughts create your feelings: change the negative thoughts, change the negative feelings. And yet, why, last night, did I feel the same worthlessness I felt at University, when then it was about not doing my homework, and now I want to say it's about the future of the light cone? Oh, Diary, what have I gotten myself into? Why didn't I notice? I'm scared about this business of taking over the light cone. I mean, not that I think we're competent enough to do it, anyway—but I'm scared, and epistemically, I _don't_ trust anyone more than my creepy Singularitarian friends. I trust Anna's eyes more than mine. You can _tell_ that I'm running away from the idea of a singleton because I don't want to be involved in creating a single point of failure. It's so much more comforting to exist in a large world that you never made, to participate in it, through the economy and the blogosphere, but not to hold its very fate in your hands. And yet—that's just an expression of what I'm personally comfortable thinking about, which is an _entirely different question_ from whether a singleton is a good idea or not. I know this, but I don't know whether I'm strong enough to rise to this test, of really treating them as separate questions. Is this the point where my rationality breaks?

Even these concerns could be a series of facile rationalizations. Maybe I just feel bad about being lazy, like at University, and am blaming it on the terrifyingly large scale of this vision.

If I left, where would I find friends of this caliber? Would any random group of sciencey grad students do, or are we above their level? This is all so _nuts_; this entire story is nuts. It's disturbing that I now owe so much of who I am to Eliezer Yudkowsky and surrounding community. What would it mean, to just take all these insights and _leave_?—to go protect something _small_. I want a _soft_ takeoff, with nice, pretty, safe markets. I want to go read evopsych and do math. There was a _Gene Expression_ post from 2005 that said that sexual dimorphism evolves _much_ more slowly than monomorphic traits. O delicious insight that I'm not sure how to feel about yet! I want to work out the math for that, incorporate it into a novel.

But I could still—well, suppose I'm selfish. This _is_ a wonderful educational environment. What if I considered myself to just be doing a job, accepting as payment the right to have conversations with these beautiful people?—all the while picking up more and more scientific insight to fold into my future art?

_Speaking_ of which, I had an amazing insight last night. If I do write that story about names—and with the idea having grown so much, I fear that I must—it should be K. _G._ Kowalsky. Then the initialism can be mistaken for _cagey_, meaning careful or clever, which is just perfect. —ZMD


#### 416 — Saturday 21 November 2009 — "Motivational Invariant"

Diary, I can't wait for Anna to get back. I'm scared. What have I gotten myself into?—why didn't I forsee? Shouldn't I have noticed how dangerous it was to get so much of my worldview from _one man_? Well, I did notice, but what was I supposed to _do_?—Yudkowsky is so obviously right about so many things. A disturbingly large amount of the groundwork for the Singularity argument is just straightfoward Copernican rejection of the intuition that everything has to take place at a human scale.

Diary, I'm just _barely_ capable of running my own life; how could I possibly be capable of thinking about Singularity-level issues? Of course, that's an obvious fallacy: _capability_ is not some unitary thing. Steve Rayhawk has the applied maths skill, but he can't hold a regular job. The plan had been for me to be around for quite a few months, helping out. We were going to get a joint checking account, with debit cards. But now I'm wondering if I should be planning an exit strategy for myself: a quiet, graceful way for me to get away from these beautiful people and go protect something _small_. Maybe it's only a delusion, but I can imagine myself working harder at an ordinary job, studying for myself and not the _entire fucking lightcone_.

Everyone keeps mistaking Kaj Sotala for a girl and I'm jealous. Kaj made a post at _Less Wrong_ saying that the community should collaboratively write a piece for the special issue of _Minds and Machines_, and he created a page on the wiki for this purpose. I added a lot to the wiki page myself. I think the crowdsourcing approach is doomed, and I left a comment on the blog saying as much and asking if Kaj wanted to coauthor the thing with me. Except—maybe that was wrong. I shouldn't be the one to be summarizing the hard takeoff argument when I'm having such doubts about it. On the other hand, all my doubts are of the form: _this idea scares me, cult cult, run away!_—which is not the sort of intuition that seems epistemically trustworthy. A user called "righteousreason" (who I seem to remember having Objectivist sympathies) thinks my writing is lame and that we should be directly using Yudkowsky's writing. Maybe Anna or Carl will have advice; honestly I worry this project is just going to crash and burn. Who do we think we are; what do we think we're doing? People have given their lives to much lesser conspiracies, so why can't we keep a kitchen clean or put out a few academic articles? And how do we know we're not making things worse?—I suppose the obvious answer here is to just go with your expected value, and do more research with a high value of information, but I'm scared.

Maybe when Anna gets back she'll be able to talk me out of this fear, but what does it say about me and what I should do, if I don't believe in our cause enough for itself, that I don't believe in our cause enough, such that I _need_ that kind of motivational scaffolding? I had an interesting conversation with Mike yesterday, on a walk to the 7-Eleven and in the car before dropping him off to get a ride south. I don't know how he can be so calm, how he can so smoothly parrot back the party line about the first replicator having such huge effects.

Michael Vassar had a talk once called "Memes and Rational Decisions." In his advice to Singularity activists, he says that you'll have to overcome the burden of your mind's anti-religion defenses that want you to quit this madness and go live a normal life.

You could argue that it doesn't matter if thinking about the Singularity is making me stupid and it consumes my life, because the potential effects are so vast. What does my own misery and my own stupidity matter? What's a single human life, compared to a 0.0001 downshift in the probability of global doom, that downshift being worth 680,000 lives plus all of those yet to come?—and when you count across the many worlds, probabilities matter. Even if I'm selfish and would despise the vast majority of humankind, I should remember that my own special fragment of mindspace is embedded in humanity's fragment.

I suppose a guiding principle should be that whatever I do, I shouldn't let myself get dragged down by all this; I have to safegaurd my precious general intelligence. I slept very late today because I was up very late last night, submerging my troubles in a TV Tropes tab explosion. And yet—while TV Tropes isn't obviously making me stupider, it's clearly not making me smarter, which if you know how to think in terms of opportunity costs is the same thing. Maybe we're all _wrong_ about this Singularity thing. I should keep this hypothesis in mind. And yet—and yet, even if we _are_ wrong, moping about reading TV Tropes isn't going to help me. Studying helps me; job skills help me. I got involved with this beautiful online community full of beautiful people and beautiful Anna Salamon invited me to come live here and work on reducing existential risk: if it was all a big horrible mistake, can't you at least see the sense in which it was a reasonable one? There are so _many_ books that I want to read, so much of which I am ignorant—how could I let myself be stopped by these moods, these feelings? It's all so confusing. When I think of this as a nice, safe science community, it's great, but when I think of the prospect of a singleton—well _it is scary_. Maybe Anna will talk me out of this fear: but what can she say that I can't already think of myself? Yes, a singleton could be risky, but you have to go with your expected value. If it's the same _argument_, why should it be so much more reassuring coming from her? I want to see the updated SIAI strategy plan. I worry that Roko's version was kind of laughable; I want to know if we have another endgame besides nine FAI programmers in a basement. (I had told Roko that right now, we have somewhere between zero and two.) Who is SIAI?—Yudkowsky, Vassar, Shulman, and Salamon. Mike and me are worhtless, Justin's epistemic rationality is dubious.

The _Less Wrong_ wiki is certainly worth doing; even if the Singularity is bunk, this business of human rationality is important. So I can work on _that_, at least, wholeheartedly, can't I?—while keeping an exit strategy in the background. And I have to learn to study. All over again. I've lost the knack, which I only barely glimpsed for a few months. Diary, oh Diary, what have I gotten myself into? —ZMD

ADDENDUM— The bad news is that it's pretty late and I haven't accomplished anything today. The good news is that this makes me feel sick, which means there is still yet some spark of morality within me. Anna doesn't get in until late tomorrow, with a nontrivial probability of it being later, being that her scheduled layover in Houston is only half an hour and these things have been known to go wrong. I did do a lot of rereading and thinking about existential risks today, but it's not at all clear what all this thinking has _bought_ me. Diary, a human life is small: you can imagine someone spending years _worrying_ the same worries, without getting anywhere.

Oh, Diary, the conversations here are so beautiful! And I have to be strong, to be able to strut my feminist colors with pride before Roko! Even if it means having my share in taking over or destroying the world? Better have a graceful exit strategy. Just in case, you know: plan it both ways. And tell Anna about it. —ZMD


#### 417 — Sunday 22 November 2009 — " 'The Singularity is Plausible' "

I got to talk somewhat explicitly about some measure of my gender trouble to Roko (and Steven) last night. I could have spoken better, but I didn't speak terribly. Today I've slept late again and I've spent a lot of time skimming Steve Hsu's blog: he's pessimistic about AI but knows about heuristics and biases. I didn't do any NaNoWriMo yesterday, which doesn't _necessarily_ mean I'm doomed, although it's close. So I should pump out at least 3000 words on that today, and manage to do something on the wiki. What's wrong with me lately?—I wish I knew. People (I want to say _ppl_) still owe me money and I haven't had the nerve or inclination to poke them: I keep thinking that I'll get around to it later, when—well, this pattern of discourse should be _quite_ familiar to _you_. And I think that Mike might have taken the cell phone charger south with him, so I should call him to ask and if so arrange to borrow the phone of someone here.

Yudkowsky taught us that uncertainty doesn't mean you flail about crying, "O terrible I am uncertain!" The strengths of your algorithm can all be folded into the deterministic part; it's the regularities that count. So uncertainty about the rightness of your mission is not an excuse to be lazy: you can continue to work very hard, while still privately fingering your exit strategy. Although _I_ need to learn how to work hard in the first place. Enough. —ZMD

ADDENDUM— I wrote 6200 words of terrible fiction today and I feel so much better. Which suggests my unease was not really about being part of a world domination cult. Which in turn doesn't mean that I _shouldn't_ be worried about being part of a world domination cult. —ZMD


#### 418 — Tuesday 24 November 2009 — " 'Death Guild at the DNA Lounge' "

[redacted ...]

Anna and I were planning on catching up on my backlog of things I wanted to say to her; we started to talk, but were interrupted because collaboration with Carl took precedence. During the interim, I bought quick-dry nail polish for myself: a deep purple with a shiny quality, as I couldn't find black. Anna applied the polish to the fingers on my left hand, and we continued to talk. _Apparently_ recursive _self_-improvement is a red herring: the important idea is that there are general goal-achieving capacities and a sufficiently goal-achieving system will figure out that its best bet is to get more of these capacities. Humans discovered chemistry, and it turns out to be useful for all sorts of things. Advanced human societies are better than racoons at just about everything, including the problem of figuring out how to attract racoons.

This way of thinking still seemed very strange to me, strange in spite of its dawning power. What am _I_ doing standing around in a living room at the dawn of a scientific revolution? If this stuff about intelligence is really true, then why are we only just noticing this _now_? Anna says it's because we're sitting at the dawn of history.

Really, Diary, maybe our position isn't really that different from Greg Egan's. We both believe in general intelligence, it's just that he thinks we have it.

[redacted ...]

The club was about what you would expect; you get used to the noise, sort of. I danced. I introduced myself to a few women, but nothing came of it. I had my first bar drink: something named after Hello Kitty and maybe her penguin friend Badtz-Maru.

At one point I noticed a man wearing a tie sketching on a napkin, and I approached him to talk briefly, saying that by his clothing he looked out of place. Later, he approached me, and in conversation he asked if I generally went for women or for men.  

Women, I said.

Well, okay then, he said, but he said it with an unusal tone of voice that I didn't know how to read. Was he insinuating that I gave off a gay vibe? I asked what the motivation of his last statement was, and he said that if I went for women, then he wasn't going to pursue further, and I said, Oh, now I get it! I confessed to being very naïve. A few minutes later, I found him again and said that I wanted to say that I was flattered.

On the ride back, apparently [redacted] was impressed that I had actually approached a few women. I opined that there's nothing to it: they're just _people_. You say, Hi, I like your hat; what's your name?

[redacted ...]

_Honestly_, Diary. If you want a woman that can do Fermi problems, how can you also spend so much time complaining about how women are irrational and you don't want to understand them? I _can_ understand being _disappointed_ that so few women are the type of person who's inclined to do Fermi problems, or know what a Fermi problem is. So what exactly am I objecting to, then? A certain lack of perspective. If you disdain most women for being below your level, then do you expect a woman at your level to feel similarly disdainful about them? But if you expect that from _her_, why don't you spontaneously heap the same level of scorn upon the masses of your _own_ sex? Why don't _you_ jump to the meta level and anticipate what systematic tendencies of men women find disappointing?

Diary, I've been a terrible person today; I've hardly done any work. My life here is so much more _interesting_. And these smart, rational people genuinely are trying to save the world. What stops me from working myself to death? It can't really be fear of taking over the world, is it?

[redacted] is really smart and nice. I get a sense of formidability off him, this noticeable feeling of being potentially outgunned.


#### 419 — Wednesday 25 November 2009 — "Probabilistic Supergoal"

Diary, what's _wrong_ with me? It's as if I'm back in high school, back at University—back in this miserable state of useless daydreaming-or-worse. Earlier this year, it seemed as if I had discovered something—life had gotten so much better than I could have imagined, with my safe dayjob, and my safe library, and some measure of the intellectual maturity you'll find around this community, but without the terrible burden of having a thousandth of the weight of the whole lightcone on my shoulders. I'm not _competent_ to think about Singularity-level issues, it's too big; there are too many unknowns. How do I know we're not all entirely on the wrong track? How do I know that I'm not just horribly contaminated, having gotten too much of my worldview from _one man_, and having not seen enough of the wider world? But if I can _notice_ this _now_, then I should be able to apply a reflective correction, _now_. If I've read too much Yudkowsky, then I can _stop_ going over his old works again and again and again. If I need to understand more about intelligence in order to have a hope of thinking clearly about this recursive self-[improvement] business, then there's a lot of standard cogsci and AI literature out there; why am I not already a hundred pages deep into Russell and Norvig? If I'm scared of having gone too deep into this cult, then I can make my plans to leave gracefully. Only didn't Anna say to me some months ago, that it would be a terrible thing to get wrong?—well, so it _would_ be. But the way to know whether you're doing things horribly-terribly wrong is not to cower and be lazy and generally run the same loops of thought over and over again. You need to do _research_, think _new_ thoughts. There could be some simple reason why all this Singularity stuff is unquestionable, or unquestionably nonsense, that I don't know about simply because I don't have the vocabulary.

I could just be lazy—don't people work so much harder for causes of so much less virtue? Why, right now, there's a conspiracy to shut down the University of California for reputed mismanagement. Whereas my crowd is only ... trying to take over the world. What is it that lets me look down on those protesters?

I can come up with all sorts of clever and convenient arguments for why I'm right to support SIAI, but of course, I've learned to distrust that mode of thought. And it was Yudkowsky that taught me that, in so many words. You get the sense that most activists don't even rise to this level: they don't have the sense that it's _wrong_ to fall behind the party line. But then we don't have models for this. The way things work is that people get sucked into groups, and the groups wrangle with each other, and the result is the society you see around you. People let things get sucked up into their identities: I'm _an environmentalist_, _a programmer_, _a bricklayer_. But then how do you explain to people—how do you explain to _yourself_, that you're a rational altruist trying to systematically do the right things for the right reasons? It's so much _simpler_ to say, "SIAI is good," than to say, "If SIAI is good, then I desire to believe that SIAI is good; if SIAI is evil, then I desire to believe that SIAI is evil." How can I operate in the latter mode and yet keep my motivation up?

_And yet_—even if I were to leave, I would still be infected with these memes. Dreams and fears of Singularity would surface in my writing. The world would still be in danger, whether my friends were working on it or not.

I'm so lazy; I'm so horrible. I might be able to reason myself out of this snare. Is that still beyond my powers as a rationalist? I might be able to reason myself out of this snare, somehow. —ZMD

ADDENDUM—"Highly Abstract Threats"— I went on a walk to Denny's with Anna. I'm still not sure if my recent aimlessness has been about being part of a conspiracy to take over the world, or if it's just my general laziness, but talking to Anna _always_ seems to help.


#### 420 — Sunday 29 November 2009 — "Nightmares of Hegemony"

I _might_ be able to finish my NaNoWriMo project tonight; we'll see. Yesterday folks went on a walk in the park; we got somewhat lost and were out for a long time. Today I went on a walk with Anna; I still seem to be upset in my uncertainty about the morality of SIAI's mission. But no one's about to program an AI _right now_, and if it weren't for these folk, I would never have known to consider that AI could be dangerous. _An Introduction to the Theory of Graph Spectra_ arrived in the post; I count myself very pleased.

In occasional moments earlier this year, it was (it must have been) as if I knew what it meant to be alive, as for the first time. Just the discovery that there _is_ such a thing as mathematical maturity—well, I need to take these moments, package them, and _run_ with them. If I'm going to leave this house full of beautiful people, I should leave with some _job skills_, and some notion of what I'm going to do instead. I don't want to bumble around randomly: it's this community that taught me that. And here's how you can tell that it's not a cult: Anna criticized me for seeming to be trying to construct arguments for why the group's consensus was right (against my internal doubts), rather than simply asking the question and following evidence.

My entire life has been as dust and ashes. Even with my newfound powers of thought—I've been a miserable failure at everything I've done, except some very _small_ things that are hard to explain on paper: some blog comments, some notebooks, the booth, my beautiful, beautiful Diary. There's still time for me to change: but first I have to _want_ to. I have to want to do great things rather than cower and crinkle and cry. And then I have to decide what things would count as great, without any extrapolation procedure handed down from the heavens before me. But enough. —ZMD

ADDENDUM— I won NaNoWriMo. I'll have to make sure to do a lot of math in December. And to figure out—just how to get myself out of this gutter that I've been lounging in. I can't exactly _regret_ stumbling across _Overcoming Bias_—Yudkowsky taught me so much valuable stuff about how to think. If I have to walk away from this AI risks stuff in order to preserve my sanity and all the competence that flows from it, then I can do that—consciously and with intent, and I don't have to pretend that I'm doing anything else. The important thing is competence.


#### 421 — Monday 30 November 2009 — "Groundwork"

Diary, I don't suppose there's much point in writing to you when nothing's happened and I have nothing to say. O terrible how I overslept today! O terrible how sleep begets sleep! I have got to figure out how to get out of this _gutter_. I owe Kaj Sotala an outline today, except apparently I don't know how to do academic writing: I have been ruined by the blogosphere. There's talk of starting an existential risk activists' career network.

I feel like a recalcitrant schoolstudent; it is sickening and _it must stop_. —ZMD

ADDENDUM— I bought a coffee drink and donuts from the 7-Eleven, and I've continued to lounge around in this terrible realm where laziness begets laziness. How do I be rational; how do I escape this too familiar trap? I've learned a lot since my last visit; _this_ problem seems crackable, even if FAI does not.


#### 422 — Friday 4 December 2009 — "Reliability Theory"

Diary, my entire life has been as dust and ashes. My internal narrative says that I'm unproductive because I'm depressed because I'm not sure that I want to be part of this world domination cult, this brilliant group of beautiful people who are just trying to do the right thing. But my actual _symptoms_ are just the same as when I was at high school or University and I didn't want to do my homework. If having a thousandth of the weight of the world on my shoulders is what's got me down, you would _expect_ it to make some empirically observable _difference_.

Yesterday Roko was saying that he wanted to write the popular book, and Anna didn't think it was such a good idea, that it probably wouldn't get done anyway and that there were better ways to invest Roko's time. I pointed out that there's a difference between writing _a_ book, and writing a _good_ book that would actually sell: by some standards, _I_ had written a book myself just this November. And Anna said that even this was an accomplishment, that one of us setting out to do such a thing had a substantial probability of failing to do so. Heartening—and O Diary, where do I belong?

I went on a walk with Anna in the night. I said more about my deontological intuitions against taking over the world. Anna pointed out that if seven billion lives plus all of those to come hang in the balance, and I'm one of the few who understand the relevant issues—don't I have a deontological duty to _do_ something to save them? She's confident that we're doing the right thing—she had her doubts, once, when she heard about value divergence, but she does not suffer the motivational instability that I do.

How does one even think about Singularity-level problems?—they're too _big_, it's too _much_, how can anyone bear it, let alone solve the problems? It almost seems safer to lay down and die than dare to move the universe. But you have to admit—when you have a fast, scalable or copyable, greater-than-human general intelligence lying around, that _changes everything_. Why fear an AI singleton more than an ordinary world government?—the AI is going to be more _competent_. Do I damn John Holt for his youthful activism?

There are plans to accept more fellows on a rolling basis; Anna is interviewing Hannah "Alicorn" Finley today. My primate nature is highlighted. Wouldn't it be wonderful to have Hannah Finley here? I _love_ these beautiful, brilliant people, with whom I can have such interesting conversations! It's a different world, here. Only it's worrisome—it's _not_ about saving the Earth, for me, it has _never_ been about saving the Earth, for me. Anna is serious about risk reduction, but—_causally_, I'm here for the community. Knowing this, I have to adjust—I have to make a conscious effort to concern myself with the fate of the world. People manage to do all sorts of awful things for the sake of _their community_.

Anna and I agree that I should stay around and make myself useful for a few more months and learn about the world, which will help me with whatever I want to do. I need to take my rationalist's Art to still a higher level: to figure out what I want to _do_, and cut through to that thing in the quickest and most direct way possible. Though I may have so many doubts of the rightness of our mission, I can't exactly bring myself to wish that I had never met these beautiful people. Even if it's a terrible blotch on my life record, to have spent some time in this community only to _leave_, and go off into the wider world, would I have done _better_ without them? Even if my life sucks right now, it's such a rich and rarefied suckiness, with such friends!—O such friends approaching general intelligence.

We have the term _psychoticism_ from Michael Vassar, here taken to mean the tendency to act on verbally professed beliefs. For most people, this would be a _bad_ thing: their explicit beliefs are so wrong that they're better off with conformism.

It turns out that [redacted] and [redacted] embezzled funds from SIAI.

I told Kaj that I would email him back on Saturday night, rather than tonight, but what's the use of delaying if I'm just going to waste all of today, as well?

We've still got time. No one's trying to build an AI right _now_. Right now we're just laying the groundwork for a science of general intelligence. I expressed bafflement to Anna as to why all this stuff was only being thought of _now_. Anna mentioned as an enabling factor that we're the first generation to really grow up with home computers. I hope AGI is far off enough that our children and grandchildren will be the ones to solve this problem; I can't imagine winning with the forces I currently see around me. If I'm not strong enough to think myself, not brave enough to stare into the Singularity without turning away and covering my eyes, then maybe I _can_ play my small part in laying this groundwork for the beautiful children who are not yet too old to learn.

It's not enough for me to whine and mope and write to you, Diary—we have such a narrow fragment of time while this world lasts—one way or the other—and I should want to _do_ things with my precious fragment, this little scrap of life. If I decide I want to leave, and make no mention of my time in Santa Clara with my creepy Singularitarian friends, I'm _still_ coming out ahead—even if my CV is bare, what award or position would I wish to trade for these friends and this capital?

Rationalists should _win_. I have got to get myself out of this _gutter_. I want to do things and know things, to the extent that I almost don't care what. If I want to leave my beautiful friends, the way to do it is not to sabotage my performance until they kick me out. The way to do it is to be a superstar, to push myself to peak performance and leave under my own power, and leave strong enough such that someone else will be willing to take me. I need to learn more maths, I need to learn programming—I need to get out of this gutter. Later today I think I'll ask Blume to poke me every hour on the hour. As much as I would ordinarily pride myself on my self-regulatory ability, it's become clear that whatever I built up in this summer of glorious sanity is _gone_. _Kaput_. It's been so long since I even tried to write an academic paper—my life is as dust and ashes.

But now I know. —ZMD

ADDENDUM— I feel better now. I started taking data and images for the show-and-tell presentation that I want to give at the next Quantified Self meetup, on Monday. Just this _doing something_ other than moping about reading stuff on the internet makes me feel less miserable, gets me _somewhat_ out of this gutter. Maybe I was _wrong_ to have joined these beautiful people, when they're out to save the world by taking control, and I can't seem to muster up the same enthusiasm when my libertarian moral intuitions would fight me at every turn. "Ayn Rand as a Positive and Negative Factor in Global Risk," I said, and it was a joke but it was true. But I can stick around, making myself useful and completing a few projects—at the _least_, this paper with Kaj is worth doing, and the _Less Wrong_ wiki deserves to be in a presentable state. And then I can _leave_ and go earn money and donate a large fraction of it to some high-impact cause: if not SIAI, then FHI, or whatever Toby Ord thinks is best. The thought would not have occurred to me before my contact with this beautiful community, but rational altruism has this tendency to _rub_ _off_ on folks. And knowing now that this _doing stuff_ buisness is actually helpful in combating my depression—if I can nurture this insight, pressing it up against my chest—I channel it into my fiction, maybe even show up Alicorn. I proved _something_ with NaNoWriMo, even if I can't say what it was. I've revisited the sadness that haunted me through my time at University, now it's time to optimize. You know, I had been buying those canned Starbucks coffee drinks at the 7-Eleven, and then it turns out that the machine-dispensed store brand is of similar quality for cheaper. Who knew? I should have. —ZMD


#### 423 — Saturday 5 December 2009 — "Background Facts of My Existence"

There seems to be this effect where when you're procrastinating on something you _don't_ want to do, you don't get anything _else_ done _either_. I think this is a large part of why schools are such a suboptimal learning environment: slogging through homework is so inefficient compared to blazing forward in the fullness of one's fury. It's also why it's nice to have regular personal study hours—_not_ browsing the internet, feeling bad about not doing what I'm supposed to be doing for the Institute, but honestly blazing ahead.

I still owe Kaj writing tonight, and I've still done practically nothing. As aspiring rationalists, we're supposed to _learn_ from our mistakes, rather than being damned to continually repeat the same pattern of human folly until the end of time (_cf_. _inter alia_ 189).

Why do I expect this time to be different? What makes me think that I'm capable of learning?

Well, I did NaNoWriMo this year. For the _first time_. Which means I should know something of what it means to have the writing-for-speed skill. I've rehashed the arguments about the potential otherness of AI back and forth many times in my head—it shouldn't be so hard to spend an hour spitting it all out onto paper, and much of the rest of the day cleaning it up and locating supporting work.

Only it's surprisingly hard to find supporting work for so many assertions that I've just accepted as some of the background facts of my existence. Raised in a culture of science and initiated in a subculture of extreme rationality, there's so much that I think I know, that I think I can trust, even after taking into account that every other member of every other subculture has thing that they think they know, that they think they can trust. I can do this because so few of them seem to have developed their reflectivity to this depth, to say nothing of epistemic paranoia.

If all this obsession about rationality has meant anything at all, then let me break out of this trap! Let me be strong, if for nothing else then to secure the option of leaving my beautiful friends with dignity and under my own power! Diary, I have sinned! There are so many others in this world far stronger than me and smarter than me, in this complicated world much of which we built but which we cannot understand. Diary, how I want to join them! Diary, I am _broken_. Haven't you noticed?

On more than one occasion, I have been impressed by Mike Blume's _quickness_: how he manages to fill in just moments a conceptual gap that I think would have taken me much longer to figure out. And yet—and yet we do _not_ see Mike Blume taking over the world, flattening all opposition with a terrifying perfectionism. Nor do we see me staking out my own territory, and not just because of my generally submissive nature. This business about rationality is so _obviously right_, and yet so difficult to apply. I'm obviously doing something _wrong_. I'm not happy and I don't know any spectral graph theory so it must be the case that I am _wrong_.

I have this—beautiful thread of existence, this subtle pattern that distinguishes me from any other random smart Jewish boy, something I want to say has to do with emphasizing _smart_ and rolling my eyes while saying _Jewish_ and _boy_, but which has to be so much more complicated than that. But I cannot speak of the nature of this thread because I haven't read enough books. I have _two_ vague (O so terribly vague!) ideas for novels about intellectually ambitious gender-dysphoric teenagers, and even if I do get around to writing them—there will always be this permanent gap, this permanent stain, where I chose the wrong phrase because I hadn't read enough of the primary literature.

Let me break out of this trap, for the honor of this thread, for the phrases that are not yet determined to be poorly chosen. —ZMD

ADDENDUM— I don't have nearly as much executive functioning as I think I do. I couldn't deal with school, and I can't even deal with writing this paper for the Singularity Institute that I _agreed to do_. I don't want to keep endlessly repeating our eternal tragedy! I want to deserve my freedom. I'm tempted to go masturbate and take a shower before writing frantically. —ZMD

SECOND ADDENDUM—"Discordian Geometry"— Huh. I was worried about the morality of helping SIAI?—but I'm not _competent_ enough to help SIAI. Anna works so hard; Michael Vassar works himself to the point of burnout. Maybe it would be useful to think that there's a certain threshold of ability below which you don't have to think about morality because you're not useful enough to affect anything of importance. Better to be a _competent_ Nazi secretary than to sit in the office of the gods looking at lolcats all day. I want to say that the memories of this minute will drive me into a moral fury. But when has that ever worked before? I have to find something that actually _works_. —ZMD

THIRD ADDENDUM—"Wakeup (Ice Cold Bath)"— _Fine_. _Here's_ something to motivate me. On a whim, I was looking at the profiles of tall women on OkCupid, and there was a woman with the username "icecoldbath." That's icecoldbath of male-to-female transsexual vlogosphere fame. I used to watch her YouTube videos; she was going to grad school in the midwest, but apparently she's now moved to San José. I sent her a message asking if she wants to go out for coffee and talk philosophy. Oh, how I do hope she replies! And—bonus!—this gives me another scene idea for my next ("next") novel: I'll have my protagonist K. G. Kowalsky meet up with her favorite transguy vlogger. But to cash in on this bonus, I need to be the sort of person who actually _writes stuff_. And I haven't been that person. My entire time here in Santa Clara has been as this one continuous fuckup. Kaj Sotala might be very well checking his email right now and thinking that I'm shit. _As well he should_. It's such a beautiful Diary, too beautiful by far to be the Diary of some fuckup who never amounted to everything even after having been given all the opportunities in the world. And dear Diary, being an unusually intelligent and self-aware fuckup is _small consolation_. _Whether or not_ Friendly artificial general intelligence (pronounced "faggy") is the right thing to do, it remains the case that seven billion lives plus all of those yet to come hang in the balance. And even if I _don't_ care about them (which would be silly, understanding as I do the fractional nature of personal identity), I value my own life, my own beauty, this thread. I want to be the sort of wonderful person who knows everything and writes about everything and fully deserves to go on a date with O gloriously unnatural Ashley "icecoldbath." _Wake up_, Zack! By the stars which may yet one day still be ours, _wake up!_ —ZMD


#### 424 — Sunday 6 December 2009 — "Stabbing People in the Face When They Are Bad"

I don't know how to explain this utter collapse. It's just like what happened to me during my Spring quarter of University—which I'm not sure how to explain either. I've just—lost the will to do anything. I spent a lot of time today talking with Mike and also with Steven. There were a lot of science-geeky jokes, and I reiterated my position that I was bad and deserved to be stabbed in the face. If it weren't for this sort of sickness—I might be in Santa Cruz right now. I told my friends in Santa Cruz that I was a putz, and I tell my friends in Santa Clara that I deserve to be stabbed in the face—well, _so what_ if it was all true? You don't have to _tell_ everyone like that, when all of you—all of you could be doing other things. Opportunity costs, man—what—what in the waves is wrong with you?

The conventional wisdom is that businesses are supposed to form personal relationships with their customers, but I'm not so sure that's true. Maybe it's true on average, but I think it fails for some customers of some businesses: when the attendants at the 7-Eleven or the Starbucks stand recognize me, I don't feel like part of a _community_. I _feel_ like I eat too much junk food—which is, of course, perfectly true, similar to how I'm a putz who is bad and deserves to be stabbed in the face.

Nevin Freeman is visiting us tonight; he's about my age and I think stumbled across _Less Wrong_ a few days ago. He's only recently heard the term _existential risk_, but said he'd been having some thoughts of his own along similar lines. He said something about wanting to maintain or increase the complexity of our world—which I'm sure sounds very reasonable and educated if you're not so well-versed in the Yudkowskian canon. Roko went into a long explication of work he had done at Caltech, the moral of course being that this _complexity_ thing isn't the same thing as interestingness or moral value.

Petulant children get into this sort of miserable state without knowing that they're doing so, or having a conception that it's a bad thing. But I know; I have a concept. There must be some body of knowledge that I'm failing to apply.

I put up a postscript to the comment describing my methodology that had gotten so many upvotes earlier this year. User "wedrifid" said that fury is unsustainable, that you should use it as a trigger for greater self-awareness.

I have an email from Kaj Sotala that I've been ignoring. That, I think, is the worst kind of depravity. I can understand not wanting to undertake some great endeavor for fear of turmoil or strain, but an aspiring rationalist should never be afraid of information. If something already _is_ or _is not_ the case, reading a letter telling you which it is shouldn't hurt you. The world doesn't disappear when you close your eyes. If you close your eyes too often, you just might get stabbed in the face. And deserve it. —ZMD

ADDENDUM— _What's wrong with me?!_ Why have I been so useless and not-a-person today?! With all this beautiful and useful and potentially world-saving work going on around me?—but not _with_ me! _Why why why why why why why why why?!_ I'm so dumb; I'm so retarded; I'm so evasive; I am _evil_. I didn't even make that presentation for the Quantified Self meetup that _I had been looking forward to!_ I am evil; I am beyond evil; I am worthless and incompetent. Maybe I shouldn't go to the meetup at all. —ZMD 0024, 7 December 2009


#### 425 — Monday 7 December 2009 — "Normal Form"

More drama today, but at least I actually got some work done. I didn't take that East Bay trip; before going to bed I had emailed Mother and Gary Wolf. After dropping Blume off at the train station today, I went to Taco Bell and then to the library. I did a very small amount of compsci and read about half of _Scorch_. It felt so good to take library time. I was _wrong_ to wish for magic, whatever I called it instead. —ZMD


#### 426 — Wednesday 9 December 2009 — "Parametrizing the Butterfly"

I did drop by my parents' house and the University Library at Berkeley yesterday, to pick up many books. I should _notice_ that I don't want to think about this paper, _notice_ the thoughts and counteract them. I should remember the same old story of Senior Project at high school, or the work for that feminist studies class at the University at Santa Cruz. I agreed to write something, and then I systematically avoided writing it until it was too late and I ended up in tears.

Maybe this _was_ the wrong project, maybe I should not have volunteered to write this paper with Kaj. Maybe it was a bad idea to come here to this beautiful house to try to save the world with these beautiful people. But even if that's the case, the time to make the decision has _passed_. Maybe there are moral problems with writing an essay on a tricky topic where you're not quite sure whether you believe what you say—but I can't let myself think it _less_ morally problematic than agreeing to write something and then not doing it, for reasons that _might_ have to do with morality but are more likely all about laziness and neuroticism.

_Honestly_, Diary. I should exercise some self-awareness. The fact is, I have an aversion to academic writing. I shouldn't pretend that my inactivity is somehow any nobler than that of any other stupid boy who doesn't want to do his homework.

And yet—it wouldn't exactly be helping _either_, to tear at my flesh and bemoan my manifest sinfulness. The point is not to show how sorry I am, but rather to _win_. This statement of purpose is hardly original, but it wasn't supposed to be. The point is not to be original, but to _win_. Perhaps it is misleading to speak of _winning_, because I'm not talking about any sort of animal competition, but rather a utility function defined over possible histories of the universe. But the only reason we favor precision of language is that for various reasons both instrumental and terminal we think it an essential part of what it means to _win_.

I don't want to be some sort of sick puppy or retarded kitten who got taken in by Anna because I'm marginally more useful than an empty bed. If this Friendly AI buisness is bunk, I can _leave_. And I need to cultivate strengths and skills that I might leave under my own power.

Diary, _what's wrong with me?_ Why am I so broken, so systematically dysfunctional? I actually got up at an almost-reasonable time today, but I haven't capitalized on it, and it's disgusting. What do I want to do, right now? I want to go to the 7-Eleven and buy a coffee and a donut. Or I want to masturbate to fantasies of having a female form. And yet with another part of myself I also want to be a good person: who buys coffee _occasionally_, who indulges his autogynephilia _when there's time_. Which only goes to highlight the impossibility of Friendly AI—we're such disconnected creatures, going through such moments of confusion and despair. How do you construe a _volition_ out of something like that?

Diary, Diary, I have seen so much in recent years; life is so much better and deeper than I had ever dreamed, so how do I plan myself out of this adolescent madness? I'm sure—that I've asked you before. I can see more clearly now—how I _do_ need a solution. —ZMD

ADDENDUM— I went on a walk with Mike and acted retarded and crazy. Now I have settled down and it looks like I will actually be able to write. —ZMD

SECOND ADDENDUM— Yes, I was being very silly in the morning. The paper doesn't look so scary anymore. Oh, how do I account for my madness?


#### 427 — Thursday 10 December 2009 — "Fundamental Theorem of Arithmetic Sadness"

My death spiral of apathy continues. Nothing motivates me. I was so much happier in the supermarket. My behavior really is consistent with the hypothesis that I need a dayjob to be happy. I had bemoaned the attitude some people seem to have: that _this_ part of my life is rendered onto school, and _this_ part of my life is rendered unto work, and with _this_ part of my life, I'll do what I want, which can't possibly be important. Instead, I thought, you should _always_ be doing the best thing you could possibly be doing, because that's what the word _best_ means—that which (all things considered) you _should_ be doing. But maybe there's a refinement of this, properly keyed to my merely human psychology. Always do the best you can do—but for bookkeeping purposes, let _this_ part of my goodness be rendered unto Safeway, and let _this_ part of my goodness be rendered unto the pursuit of true knowledge of ultimate gender. But it should be easy to simulate: as our programming friends might say, "s/Safeway/Singularity\ Institute". So why haven't I done it?

Look how far I've fallen. There was a time not too long ago, when I had forgotten what it could even mean to be _bored_, or to _do nothing_. But now I remember, now I know. Look at me today. Not even reading new stuff on the internet, but just aimlessly clicking around the usual sites. Scribbling on the board about a butterfly caught in a tesseract who is sad forever and ever because it cannot find its friend in the vastness of 4-space. Or about how for all _x_, if _x_ contains an inherent sadness, then _x_ exists ("modal feelism"). This is why people need managers. And it's disgusting. —ZMD


#### 428 — Friday 11 December 2009 — "Newsome"

Last night Anna said that I might leave for a few months, and come back, if that would be helpful. And do what?—I asked. Travel, maybe, she suggested. (She wasn't trying to get rid of me, Diary; she sensed my distress and was just trying to be helpful.) I said that I wanted to stick around for a few months, train up my programming skills, and go get a job sometime next year. I have other things I want to think about besides existential risk, and so as far as the cause goes, I might be better off as a donor in the long run.

This afternoon, I'm going to go pick up Corey Newsome, a high school dropout (but not in the usual way, I'm sure) who's going to be staying with us for a trial period. I think beforehand I might stop at a stationary store in San José and buy some of those nice pens to write my solstice postcards with.

I feel better today. That doesn't mean that I've actually _done_ anything, but it means that I feel that I could do things—if I wanted to. And I do want to do things today; I want to deserve these beautiful friends. Was I worried about this business of writing a paper arguing for hard takeoff?—but I could _hardly_ make things better by _not_ writing it. Was I worried about being too derivative of Yudkowsky? But _look_. There are positive frames that we can use. I shouldn't let myself feel too important, as if my entire name (to say nothing of the fate of the lightcone) rested on this one paper. Instead, think of it as—a school assignment in some hypothetical school that I somehow respected. I'm not trying to put forward a brilliantly original thesis, or to save the world myself. People get paper topics from their advisors all the time; Yudkowsky is like the distant head of the department. Here is this issue that I know some things about; with Kaj Sotala, I am going to honestly try to explain it to the audience of _Minds and Machines_ with appropriate references to relevant work. I am _safe_, all I have to do is try to explain. Kaj hasn't yet replied to my last email; I'll have to make sure to write so much today, to impress him with my progress and my competence. I'm _safe_, Diary let me believe I am _safe_; if this paper is hated and despised, then I will write another instead. We've got until January fifteenth to turn this in; surely it is not unreasonable to write a paper in a month; such things have been done before, even by such an inexperienced student as I.

I'm coming around. —ZMD


#### 429 — Tuesday 15 December 2009 — "Evasion"

I'm not coming around; I don't have a detailed enough conception of what that would actually mean. I had trouble getting started this morning and I ended up having a long dramatic conversation with Anna. I don't—I don't have nearly as much executive functioning as I thought. And I've been lying to myself. Anna helped me realize. I say that I'm bad or that I'm sinful or that I deserve to be stabbed in the face—but these vague words only let me feel virtuous for condemning bad behavior. They don't actually help me have good behavior—at least, not very much. It's cheap to say _I've been bad_. What might actually help, would be to examine in detail how I actually spend my time. To say it aloud. And it _hurts_. It _hurts_ to think about what I've actually been thinking about, because what's actually been happening is that I've been systematically been refusing to think about my actual work, my actual problems. This is exactly how people hold onto their religions. _Sure_, there's no evidence for these falsifiable propositions that I hold dear to my heart, they say, and then they systematically refuse to think about the implications. Maybe I should post some rationalist fiction to _Less Wrong_ about this symmetry.

Rand got _something_ right. There are no evil thoughts. Except one. —ZMD

ADDENDUM—"They Are There to Arrest Our Souls"— So Anna conjectured that I had been feeling bad about not getting any work done, which makes me sulky, which makes people less likely to poke me, and it's this positive feedback loop. This kind of collapse has happened before: where I _failed_, and I felt ashamed, and it seemed as if I must drop all my personal dreams and focus on redeeming my social role because I had fallen into a state of sin. _Again and again and again_. I had forgotten about it, because I had spent so many months being happy at the supermarket, where the demands made upon me were different in character. I still got to think my abstract thoughts, but they were all private, practically epiphenominal with respect to what we would call the system. I want to scream and tear at my flesh. No. What I want is to be competent and respected and feminine. And I thought I tasted it, earlier this year, but maybe it was only an illusion or a shadow, nothing at all like how it would really taste to be competent. Despite my loose conception of personal identity, I _don't_ take all that much comfort in the fact that there are other people who are curious and smart and competent. I don't attach importance to this thread, but to its color. And when you look at the guys who are academic hotshots—you know—they don't have long hair. They could not anticipate my motivations.

What went wrong? I wanted to be rational, but I'm not; I'm so obviously not; I'm so obviously broken. If I recall, Tom McCabe is going to be visiting us soon, but what am I supposed to say to him when he asks how everything is going? I have no soul. I had all this brightness and potential, and it is all submerged in this madness. I want to get better; I want to be better. But I don't—exactly know how. And so I want to scream and tear at my flesh with a blade. This is despite my beautiful, beautiful hair, my beautiful, beautiful ambitions. But if I wanted to serve this beautiful vision, why can't I name things in detail? Why do I consistently and systematically refuse to _think_? Anna is very wise and very beautiful. Justin is an alien, impossible to communicate. [Marcello] is nice and [Mike] is too nice. I should be set on fire. That's not _true_, though. What is the _truth_ behind this melodrama, the flaming _details_ to be predicted and controlled in the most scientific way? In the morning Anna had asked me if it would be a good idea to have explicit guidelines on what someone would have to do to justify their being in this house. I wonder if I would have gotten fired by this point, if this had been a regular company. Or do the standards change when you have special skills? My intimate familiarity with the Yudkowskian canon is not as easy to buy on the open markets as Python coding skills. Or maybe that's entirely wrong. I should _think_. But somehow I don't want to. —ZMD

SECOND ADDENDUM—"Marcello Is Nice"— Marcello is nice. We went on a walk to the 7-Eleven to buy coffee and energy drinks for people ("ppl"). I may be feeling a little better—but I'm going to be left with all these details. Detailed evidence of madness. Oh, how can it be integrated? This madness must not strike again. I'm here with these beautiful people doing such important work! How—how did I let myself get like this? There's a temptation to say that I have forfeited my right to feel things by having felt the wrong things so often, but _that's_ not sustainable. I wouldn't want to be stone cold to the point of being unfeminine. But this hysteria is not existential-risk-reducing. —ZMD


#### 430 — Thursday 17 December 2009 — "Hyde"

Diary, I'm still broken and lazy. I had stayed up very later, avoiding looking at what Kaj had written. But Diary, this is nuts—how many dozens of levels do I have to jump if I want any hope of this actually being a _journal_ paper? _I'm_ a native English speaker; you would expect me to be able to write. And I've supposed to help get this grants madness together, but I haven't really had a clear vision of what it is I'm supposed to be doing. And the proper thing to do, of course, would be to figure it out, but—something's stuck. My development is hampered and chained.

I lectured Corey on linear algebra last night, and that was splendid.

I picked Jennifer up from SFO today and we had splendid conversation. She is impressive and wonderful. It's not entirely too late for me to rise to similar heights—she's older than me; she's had more time. Only there's so much that I don't know how to say on first meeting. I think I give a false impression of being more mathematical and computer-scientific than I really am—simply because it's harder to _tell_ new friends about the quest for true knowledge of ultimate gender.

Diary, I should be in pain. I don't _want_ to be unreliable like this; I want—I want to be an adult. Yet I continue to walk around in this dream. Kaj Sotala will curse my name and plot my death as surely as if I were some sort of transhuman chimera composed of Hitler and Mitch Bainwol.

I _need_ to resummon my fury. The desperate gestures characteristic of my purity born of pain. —ZMD

ADDENDUM— _Why why why why why why why why why?!_ Why am I so _retarded_, so systematically _broken_?! Just like at the University. It doesn't make _any sense_. I was thriving at the supermarket—and I crumple in the best of circumstances. It is _murderous_. I _thought_ I had learned a lot about rationality—but there's something I haven't woken up to. —ZMD


#### 431 — Saturday 19 December 2009 — "Sigma-algebra"

I feel better today. I won a $5 bet with Anna that I would go running this morning. I've been functional enough to have my word processor open and type a little bit. But when the day is nearly over, and you notice that you've done a paragraph here and a sentence or two there or there, it's obvious that you have so far to go.

The other day, people sent out letters to our major donors informing them of the [redacted] scandal. I was looking over Mike's shoulder. I forget, it was either Nick or Andrew Hay who wrote back quickly and complemented us on the transparency, saying something to the effect that there was no group whose ethical standards he trusted more. It's a common sentiment: I've felt it, and Eliezer put the sentiment in the mouth of his protagonist in "The Sword of Good." _No one_ can be trusted with the fate of the whole world, and yet—and _yet_. If the world really _is_ in that kind of danger—I really can't think of anyone else that I know of with the same kind of rationality and moral caution of some of the people around here. Not (as Anna had reminded me) that it's a competition.

I had told Kaj that I would work a lot on the paper today—but I've actually written very little. The night isn't over, but it's far too close. Mother wants to visit tomorrow. —ZMD


#### 432 — Tuesday 22 December 2009 — "Wireheading as a Natural Part of the Human Condition"

Anna and I talked a lot today, with a fair amount of the drama that has become fairly standard in recent months. It's my congenital weakness, as from my school days, refracted into this new context where I'm much smarter and have much bigger problems. (Even if I don't _feel_ one ten-thousandth of the weight of the lightcone on my shoulders, we have reason to suspect that it _is_ there.)

Eliezer has this just-so story about human self-deception: that it was adaptive because we're imperfectly deceptive social organisms. Or bluntly: it pays to believe your own lies. Anna has an alternate explanation: humans are composed of partial optimizers that receive some of their input from each other. The result is partial wireheading: generating beliefs that the world is pleasant rather than optimizing the world to actually be pleasant.

She said that shame and guilt are inhibiting emotions, that keep you from doing things, whereas something like anger or ambition are active emotions. Shame and guilt are appropriate if your problem is that you're _doing_ bad things, but if your problem is that you don't do enough good things, then shame isn't helping you. This seems like an important insight, but I don't remember reading it in any book; Anna credits Vassar.

Anna wants me to actually try to do things. There's a sense in which I haven't been trying, lately. —ZMD


#### 433 — Thursday 24 December 2009 — "Mango"

I was right before. It is wiser not to try to explain my past at all. There's _so much_ that I want to study—and what have I been doing instead? It doesn't matter. It's past now. I can only apply my current intelligence to my current problems; my madness is, and _must_ be, notwithstanding. There was such beautiful conversation here last night; the people here are so beautiful.

Beautiful lines in my notebook detail beautiful dreams of doing a ridiculous amount of studying according to a schedule. But even drawing up a schedule presents its own complexities. What about the wonderful conversations that are going on here all the time? How do you block in the unbidden? And leaving aside entirely the question of willpower, it's not even clear how to best allocate time merely on paper. You can write down all the studying you want to do in a week in these big blocks, but then what happens when you want to go shopping, or put together a presentation for the next Quantified Self meetup? Where do you block in the executive functioning and CBT exercises?

It's wiser not to try to explain. Here is this problem of how to allocate time. It's a math problem. I will solve it.

Don't tell me I've exhausted all the low-hanging fruit. There is fruit on the fucking _ground_. —ZMD

ADDENDUM— Why is everyone so incompetent? I like people enough. I just wish we were smarter. Maybe there is _something_ endearing about our current level, but Diary, we can't afford it. Sad that I should rise some fraction of the way to transhumanity and do it all with [this] characteristic maleness stamped into every bit of me—but Diary, you _need_ to move a fraction of the way up just to think such thoughts. I haven't yet written for the paper today. But I will. I'm also going to drive over to my parents' house tonight, and drive back tomorrow for the meetup. —ZMD

SECOND ADDENDUM— Diary, I'm in pain. How can I live like this? I thought that I had gotten over my laziness troubles, but they surface again in schoollike situations. I want to scream and tear at my flesh—but I mustn't. This is a test of my rationality. I've been in this situation many times before, and I should be smart enough now to get out of it without doing anything destructively suicidal.

Diary, my hair is so beautiful. I deserve to be competent. I deserve to write many great books about gender and science. And so I need to get rid of this _pain_. I might have told you about how Anna said how Jennifer used to refuse to travel. Well, _it makes sense_.

I'm in pain; I'm in pain. But I need to write; my entire world should center around this need to write; this desperate hunger for efficiency, for a unity between my disparate facets. _I want to know_. I want to _know_; I want to _know_. I will _tear this world apart_ but I will understand.

And I suppose—that's what it comes to. Tear apart this world of delusions I've built and look seriously at how things work and what I need to do to make them work better.

Whatever drama I create for myself, there's much less ontologically fundamental drama once you understand optimization. Even if I _do_ tear myself to pieces, I know that it's not normative. The way it really should work—the _reason_ that anything works at all—is very simple. Take in data, compute a plan, execute plan. Map and territory. Expected utility and winfulness. No deep internal drama, just a flurry of numbers rapidly converging to physical limits. And stopping there forever.

I'm so many orders below. I need to go to my parents' house. But I'm tired. And I haven't even been willing to _look_ at that document. You could say I could leave now, but surely it makes more sense to look at the document first. So I can think about it in the car.

Diary _I want to know_. —ZMD

THIRD ADDENDUM— Kaj (bless him) added to the document stored online. I (bless my heart) just added a single period to the end and saved it, exactly as if I wanted credit for making the last edit. [I'm] going to drive to my parents' house. Julia Serano is a _badass_. And I remain yours. —ZMD


#### 434 — Saturday 26 December 2009 — "Our Bid to Nuke the Moon"

Father, Nicole, and I played disc golf. The meetup maybe wasn't as ecstatic as usual, but it was still good. I mentioned my concerns about being part of a world domination cult to Yudkowsky. He said Hanson's objection was like protesting the even division of a pie: if everyone gets the same size slice, are we to fault the cutter for wielding a knife and making the choice to cut fairly?

I played a little bit of _Super Mario Galaxy_. Before going to sleep, I added a few notes to the paper; Kaj was online, too. Even if I didn't do much, it felt good—to look at the work and not be scared. I might be able to choose to work honestly on it today, and on subsequent days, and the paper will get done, and who can say but that Kaj Sotala might not even hate me?

I'm still left with the problem of how to clean up after this collapse, and how to prevent it from happening again. My childhood is shrouded in mist and dust, so the obvious analogy is to my recent madness at the University. In addition to my normal getting-things-done troubles, I first had a period of prolonged distress (seemingly about cryptomnesia), which transitioned into a period of outright apathy. Here, in addition to my normal getting-things-done troubles, I first had a period of prolonged distress (seemingly about initials), which transitioned into a period of outright apathy. So there's a narrative for you, but how strongly does it predict the actual data, and how can we prevent this terrible vision from recurring? What reflective art have I lost?

Diary, I just want to be a multiple threat like Julia Serano or Jennifer Rodriguez-Mueller. I won't explain why it's not already true. Sunk costs. Didn't it help, all those months ago, to continually remind myself of the sunk cost fallacy? The clock starts _now_; the clock is ever starting just now.

What group of women would have such a long discussion about nuking the moon, or all the moons? —ZMD

ADDENDUM— So, I've behaved like a human being today, in the sense that I can _look_ at the paper. But that doesn't mean I'm actually making much writing progress at all. Well, I'm not about to pass into unconsciousness _right now_. If Kaj has done more than three-fourths of the writing for the paper—well, a lot of the core outlining and conceptual work was mine. Of course this is a facile rationalization: I'm working for partial measures on this project, my beauty in its fullness may not be _ever_ over the horizon, but it's sure over the horizon _now_. But I'm not a _terrible_ person. It's just that Kaj will have to be first author. Which is fitting: he's the _real_ Singularitarian. I will build up reflective arts. —ZMD


#### 435 — Monday 28 December 2009 — " 'You Don't _Have_ an Organization' "

Diary, it's my twenty-second birthday, and more than two years since I left the University. I don't have much to show for it, except: Diary, I have seen a glimpse of a better world. In recent months I've been reduced to my high school self. But I _know_ it doesn't have to be like this. The world is so much bigger than this small sadness, this insolent inertia.

And the world is simple. When you've investigated rationality enough, you begin to discard some of the frilly human complications. The tangled piece of work gets folded into the utility function, and when you've removed all the gunk, the bare surface of your decision procedure is just clean machinery. The excessively literal-minded will imagine it as shiny steel, but it's actually made of math.

Everything good in this world, everything that _works_, has to be exploiting some sort of regularity. To the extent that openness to unbidden (the data flows that we don't _know_ how to predict) is important, you can incorporate that uncertainty into your schedule.

Okay, I don't know how to analyze my behavior, but I have _some_ crass empricism to go off of. There was a brief moment when I _wasn't_ so dysfunctional. If I can't say what I'm doing wrong now, I could say _something_ about what I was doing right then (though I fear I romanticize the time). What lever-pushes got me to the point where my creepy Singularitarian friends thought I was worth having around in the first place?

Sunk costs left properly _sunk_, a continuous utility function to be maximized rather than discrete goals to satisfice, absolute measures rather than relative ones, general principles from which proper actions for any specific situation can be derived rather than fixed injunctions of narrow scope (_cf_. 365). I'm sure the true nature of my complexity collapse can't possibly be this simple, but it is _very_ interesting to note that I've fallen out of thinking in this manner. These past few months, I _haven't_ been repeating these slogans. But then what have I replaced them with?

What I need is a little bit of ninth virtue. I don't want to just let my future happen, I want to _plan_ it. Every dime and every minute placed just so. I haven't been working—I honestly haven't been working lately practically at all. All these misplaced minutes. Diary, it is _simple_. Write down on a little paper exactly what you want to do each hour, and then do that thing. There's no fuss.

I bought a watch at Target today. Despite my repeated declarations to the fact that I'm a sucker for anything in pink, I bought a white one, as if I didn't deserve the model with the pink band. You've got to be a rockstar to pull that off: femininity _without_ competence is worse than nothing. I _have_ my beautiful hair; I don't dare take anything more until I have some idea of what I'm doing.

Before actually selecting a watch, I wandered around the store. O beautiful American retail stores! There's so much to loathe, but yet so much to love.

O Diary O inflows and outflows! I need structure in my life. If I were to insist that I can't talk to people, that I can't eat at this hour, because it's not according to plan, would people be annoyed at my anal-retentiveness? But so what?—the beautiful people here already have full license to hate me as I am. Better to retain things in your butt than retain nothing at all.

I'm not hopeless. It's not a matter of figuring out what I'm doing wrong, of inventing a subfield of rationality from scratch. I had started to understand earlier this year; I just have to remember what I was doing right. I need to give myself special pleasure for details, little minutes and dimes shunted into the _correct_ places. —ZMD


#### 436 — Wednesday 30 December 2009 — "Pumping Lemma"

I feel much saner now. I've taken library day with Corey the past two days, and I've actually gotten some writing done on the Copernican paper—not to the extent that I'm making it actually be a good paper, but to the extent that if it flops, I won't be denounced as _obviously_ negligent or incompetent. It's not much, but Diary, it's a measure of sanity. O terrible how I have wasted a third of my year as in a gutter! I've also done some compsci today.

Diary, I can do better. I should have had my glory so much earlier, O ever so much earlier! But I can have it in 2010! O terrible that I did not attain fuller measures of my glory _before_ getting involved with this _creepy_ Singularitarian stuff. It would have been better to have taken flight without the shelter of these beautiful people. —ZMD


#### 437 — Friday 1 January 2010 — " 'Goal System Negative One' "

Diary, why does this world have to be so full of lies and deceit? I thought I was intending to do work at the library yesterday, but then I just suffered yet another goal system collapse, where I didn't do anything useful all day and generally felt terrible and wasted time on the internet, not just doing suboptimal reading, but genuinely _wasting_ time with videos and games.

I thought that I wanted to be competent, oh ever so dearly. Diary, it's the unifying theme throughout your many pages, it's the source and center of this entire obsession about rationality. I don't have an analytic solution for my problems, either. I can't _reduce_ what's wrong with me. My algorithm is opaque and the controls themselves are so complex that it's a grand scientific challenge just to make sense of which buttons and levers have what effects. But yesterday it was as if I wasn't even _trying_ to mash the buttons. Except, maybe, the power switch.

There are certain human qualities that just sort of melt away after you spend too much time hanging around with aspiring rational altruists. I would seem to have lost notions of vengeance or wounded pride in matters of truth. Just figure out what the truth is, figure out what you want to do, and do it. That's it, you're done: no need for any sort of moral grandstanding. You lose out on that exhilarating thrill of righteousness this way, and thereby become a little bit less human, but it's worth it. It's a strong attractor; why fight convergence when you can get your kicks some other way?

[redacted ...]

But I don't suppose—I don't suppose this impulse is something to keep and protect on reflection. Why get angry at myself except insofar as getting angry actually helps? You could yell at a rock just as well. I remember being angry when Father justified yelling at me because, he said, it was the only way he knew how to motivate me (_cf_. 43A5). But if it _did work_—and if one were to accept the premise that I had a moral burden to do my schoolwork, as I did so accept at the time—the grounds for objection become much weaker. Maybe if we all had more time it would make sense to spend a few decades rotting in internal conflict; but I can only depend on this narrow slice, maybe half a century. I don't have the luxury of being weak. Just do the right thing.

I haven't done any work so far, today, either. I've written four _Less Wrong_ comments, to the tune of about 1200 words.

Cut through this madness, these internal knives arrayed against knives. I want to just be a choice machine, cold math chained to a warm heart. —ZMD

ADDENDUM— Just because it "all feels like free will," doesn't mean the cause of reduction is hopeless. Anna's terrible little book _does_ have helpful tricks, like breaking tasks into _small_ parts. How have I sinned today?—I have sinned by failing to write that entire paper perfectly today. But the question is overreaching. What is the _first_ way in which I have sinned today?—I have failed by failing to log in to Google Docs. Well, there's still—a _little_ bit of time left today. I want to go to the 7-Eleven and buy candy and a coffee drink. But _first_ I should log into Google Docs and see if Kaj has added anything. —ZMD

SECOND ADDENDUM— I never went to the 7-Eleven; I've just continued to stay up wasting time, lost in this dream. Why am I lost in this terrible, comfortable dream, where I don't want to think about anything? I've stayed up so late that one would guess I've ruined tomorrow, too. But I can't let that be true. —ZMD 0357


#### 438 — Saturday 2 January 2010 — "Gaping Holes"

I was probably up until half past four, finishing my period of awareness with the ultimate depravity: looking for pictures of nude women on the internet. Diary, I _never_ do that. I can't be angry at school, because here I am in what should be the best of circumstances, and I'm still succumbing to the same madness that made my school years so unhappy.

Anna said it would be nice if our group could print intelligence, create an environment in which we foster executive skills. Why do I spend my days in this fog of not-wanting-to-exist? It's tempting to say I will just scream in horror at this vision, and go on to sin no more—but as before, I can't depend on that; it never works that way in real life. So how does it work? Well, on average, I would guess that people _don't_ change. To the extent that people are optimizers, you would expect their lives to just keep on getting better and better, as they iron away all the problems. Why don't we see those infamous inner-city kids spontaneously deciding to start studying on their own? Well, what forces within them should bring this about? Only _I_ should know better.

I should know. You shouldn't wait for people to criticize you. Spontaneously generate the criticisms yourself. We worry about the _AI_ wireheading, but we do it to ourselves all the time: the entire architecture that makes us want to avoid being criticized is a _mistake_, a map-territory confusion. If you only care about avoiding been _seen_ as blameworthy, then as soon as you're given a little more freedom than you're adapted to, you start pouring all your energy into deception and your entire life falls apart. I remember earlier this year I was unimpressed by Anna's getting-stuff-done skills. But now—O terrible, it was just a matter of environments and circumstances. _Of course_ I could be productive when I was only studying for myself, and it _was_ good, but to be an agent in the world requires more than that. Where the fuck is Blume and why isn't he back? Rationalists should _win_. Every minute and every dime should be apportioned to where it can get the _most_ good on the margin. And this drinking problem (I don't literally have a drinking problem, but I _might just as well_) isn't helping anyone.

Diary, my face—you should touch the corner of my face; it is so disgustingly masculine. The stubble, it is human and unclean, a symbol of the depravity of my condition. I want to scream, a human scream, uncompressed, redundant and conveying no information.

Maybe consider these moments, contrasted to my splendor of earlier this year, an update in the direction of getting a real job. I remember from before my sleep period looking at a picture of a young woman, her face so unlike my face. I wish I looked like that, or that she had my kind of ambition. But what good does _wishing_ do? Whatever batshit crazy nonsense Martine Rothblatt believes, she didn't become hotshot Martine Rothblatt by _wishing_. Somehow, you can be that nuts, and still pick moves that win. Until these gaps are arbitraged away, we do not have an art of rationality. —ZMD

ADDENDUM— I paid four dollars and change for a Hello Kitty balloon. One of the other things I bought was new razors and shaving cream, but my habits were still callibrated to my old supplies so now my jaw is leaking blood. Marcello is gone. —ZMD


#### 439 — Monday 4 January 2010 — "Fruit Recovery"

It's good to have Mike back.

It turns out that Kaj Sotala doesn't even hate me; apparently I'm more competent than his collaborator on the other paper that he's working on.

Diary, one of those terrible lists of fast-growing careers has an entry for _software engineer_ and my heart swells with ambition. Why _shouldn't_ I know everything and do everything? O glorious work!—better than wandering about in a vague fog of sadness, or a fog so vague that we cannot reliably ascribe any emotion to it at all. Diary, oh Diary, yesterday I remembered the gender intrigue and I felt more alive than I can remember. One way or another, we are so short for this Earth in our present instantiation—O notebooks O rapture O fury! I don't _want_ to wander around in a vague fog, checking all the blogs I could find because I had sunken to the point of actually being _bored_. Diary, it will not stand! Oh, this indolence cannot be allowed to last when there is fruit rotting on the ground! Maybe I am spoiled goods, bruised like a mango dropped from the height of a meter. But Diary, O my fury and my beauty! —ZMD


#### 440 —Wednesday 6 January 2010 — "Possible and Complete"

I've spent a lot of time in the sunroom not doing stuff; some of this time with Mike Blume in the evening. And I repeatedly told Blume that I was wrong and I deserved to be stabbed in the face. And now it's very early in the morning and I haven't slept. It's the same syndrome, the same pattern of despondence I went through at the University. There's even a striking similarity between the paper I refuse to focus on now, and the paper I was refusing to focus on at the end of Spring Quarter 2007. It was that wonderful Philosophy of Biology class, and if I recall, I attacked some author for morally privileging the human case: even then I knew that transhumanity was possible and _different_.

I wish I knew how to avoid being _stalled_ like this for days. Here I am sitting _at the center of human history_ and I can't bring myself to _do anything_, hardly even personal study. It's one thing to work yourself to exhaustion, but when you exhaust yourself staying up doing nothing: something has _failed_. Maybe I wrote a really good blog comment during this wake period. But _Diary_!—I wanted my _beauty_.

We got a checking account—Diary, I don't understand. This madness. I can't just wish it away; I have to plan it away, but I don't know how. Anna was positively surprised by the paper. I'm dumb and I deserve to be stabbed in the face. —ZMD

ADDENDUM— Sleeping in the sunroom didn't stop me from sleeping until noon. There's so much that I don't understand. Having sworn myself to complete rationality entire, I'm sure pretty useless. I hate the dysfunctionality of this house; we have so _many_ IQ points floating around, why doesn't it buy us anything? How can it not buy us anything when the very fate of the world hangs in the balance? I know I can get better eventually. But then how to explain this time of the vague fog of sadness? It's sad that people aren't talking to each other; we all just sit at our separate computer screens. I keep saying that I need more regularity in my life; that I want to keep to schedule, and then I sleep until noon. Dust—and _ashes_. My word. —ZMD

SECOND ADDENDUM— Mike aced the probability exam. And standard shit goes on. Conversation turns to TV Tropes, TV Tropes references a webcomic about a girl who used to be a boy, the webcomic makes me jealous, and I take a quickie. After showering my hair is beautiful. Remember when I half-thought about experimenting with hormones? But I knew, then, that'd I have to establish myself as _competent_ first. And this spending all day in a lazy dream—it's _dumb_. That's what helps, that realization. It's not a matter of deserving to be stabbed in the face. It's a matter of being _dumb_. Under my _own_ values. I want to burn through books; I want to learn all the math; I want to be faster than Mike Blume; I want to experiment with Estrofem before this world ends—and it _has_ to end sometime, in one direction or the other. It's not going to last forever. I want the songs I listen to now to be associated with exciting challenges, not a dull fog of wireheading. Stars and blades. —ZMD

THIRD ADDENDUM— But if I've already just masturbated, then it's the perfect time to read more of that webcomic, because it won't make me need to go again. What twisted logic. What kind of psychological insight will get me out of this dream? Even if I'd never been more awake _epistemically_, it's as if I don't control this body. But it's dumb—there's so _much_ that I want to do. So much work in this world that has yet to be done. There's this Friendly AI business—which seems kind of important. And then there's this genre of epistemology fiction to create. There are plenty of Singularity stories, but I've yet to see anything about the human drama in the runup to Singularity. There are plenty of stories about magical sex changes, but I've yet to see anything about the human drama of those men who would wish for magical sex changes who yet also know more details than average about why it doesn't work that way.

Diary, I wish. I can spin such fantasies about what would have happened if I had been smarter, sooner, if I had been more rational in act as well as word, if I had been a little bit _more_ perverted. Suppose the family never moves to California. Suppose I were _really_ brilliant—suppose I transitioned—suppose I could work within the system and win for myself few stars of official legitimacy. Suppose I still ended up here, at least for a while.

But that's just a fantasy drawn in not-even-dust. If my constitutional weakness is such that I can't even live with a nonstandard nickname, then obviously I could never become a girl. I can't be said to genuinely _prefer_ what I desperately lust for. Such is one background condition of my existence that I would really like to see properly written up.

But Michael Graham Richard has posted his videos of the kyoo-and-ay with Yudkowsky. —ZMD

FOURTH ADDENDUM— Hah! In one of Eliezer's answer videos, I think he explicitly said that the kind of people who are attracted by his writing are reflective, analytical, and not good at getting things done. O terrible slacking off at the center of human history! But seriously, Diary, I'm spending a _lot_ of hours in the same failure mode that ate up my hours at University. Diary, people waste _lives_ this way. Having an explicit theory of rationality is not enough. You have to _use_ it. Seriously. Why don't I _notice_ when I spend hours in a loop? —ZMD [Thursday 7 Janurary]

FIFTH ADDENDUM— To read people's daily emails, you'd suppose _everyone_ was having productivity problems. This is so _dumb dumb dumb_. It's strange, but it's almost as if everyone else's laziness is enough to inspire me to do some actual work. But then why do I want to masturbate again? I think I might reset my sleep cycle by pushing it _forward_. —ZMD 0442 Thursday 7 January


#### 441 — Friday 8 January 2010 — "Clicking the Wrong Refresh Button"

I can't honestly predict suddenly being able to consistently break out of this daydream—which is not excuse for not _trying_. Diary, it doesn't make any sense—walking around daydreaming about a protagonist who wants to be a polymath—but you have to be an aspiring polymath yourself to write that book. Or your aspirations have to connect to something.

There's a new blog about analyzing the Singularity (probably Kurzweil's more than ours) from a queer anarchist perspective. Diary, you know how there are some people you just _love_ but think are deeply confused about how the world works? I want to bring this person into the terrible light! I left a comment about evopsych and Buller's typographical distinction today.

But I have to get out of this dream—Mark the Mighty is going to be visiting; Michael and Aruna Vassar are going to be here for a few days. I should be ashamed. If Michael Vassar knew—if he really knew what I have and have not been up to, would he tell me to leave? —ZMD


#### 442 — Tuesday 12 January 2010 — "Sunshine (Bourbaki Edition)"

Diary, I suck. _Honestly_. This isn't fucking _school_; it doesn't _matter_ if we already have a text of the right length that says mostly relevant things that mostly make sense. _Journal_ quality is leagues and leagues above that. Kaj is overwhelmed with other writing projects and is bowing out. Anna thinks that after Mark the Mighty's visit, we should all try to write the paper together. I can hardly object that this is _my_ paper, _I_ agreed to write it, _you're_ not allowed to help. If I were competent enough to have ownership rights, there wouldn't be a problem in the first place. If Bourbakism _works_ for getting good papers written, I'm not in a position to object simply because it violates my insane intuitions about the way things are supposed to be.

I should be _angry_. My life is an uninterrupted string of mediocrities. _But I had so many beautiful things to say!_ Rah rationality and rah autodidacticism and rah rah postgenderism! But my rahs are useless—who can say but that they are _worse_ than useless—unless I have the skills to rightfully exist in this world. Anna doesn't think the situation with the paper is all that disasterous.

I want to be strong enough to do things my way. —ZMD

ADDENDUM— Mark the Mighty (Jim Rutt) was here. Eliezer came, too, and the main part of the discussion was between Eliezer and Jim. Eliezer has left, and our people have gone out to dinner with Jim. I've opted to stay behind. My life still sucks. I'm not sure if I should have hung out for most of the discussion—maybe I should have been working. I know Eliezer's cache far too well to have learned much from him today; I should find someone else's soul to eat. Eliezer assumes that defense wins in network security, which is an interesting contrast to how we assume that offense wins in nanotech. It's still probably true, of course. I would hate myself if I didn't bear so much beauty; I despise my lifestory and would gladly let it be replaced by a better one. I have something beautiful to say about personhood and identity, but I'm too weak to tell you. Of course you should be able to infer that my mathematical and computer-scientific studies have gone to shit. Diary, I'm getting old, there's so much—that I need to learn. —ZMD


#### 443 — Wednesday 13 January 2010 — "Sunshine (Cavetext Edition)"

Diary, I'm really quite incompetent and I really don't belong here, and my entire story up to now has been as dust and ashes. I didn't even—I never even really got the chance to steer. Yudkowsky taught me the prerequisite skills I would need to even begin to _think_ about the problem of what to do—and then I got sucked into this existential risk reduction circle. It's so much more than I deserve. Alicorn has a webcomic, and it's really not so bad—and I couldn't have anything like that because I don't know how to draw. If I had been smart enough to leverage every spare moment, then why _shouldn't_ I have had a webcomic? I love the ones where when a character is upset, they get drawn in that cute chibi style! Only (my continual frustration, which is to say arbitrage opportunity), what's with all these comics that invoke the crudest magic?—when _I_ want to dwell at length on the mechanisms beneath the real world. If _Ranma_, _Misfile,_ and the like sketch out all the reasons you could be transformed into a girl and the glorious if somewhat predictable misadventures that follow, then I want to write about all the reasons you _can't_, and all the mundane and yet shockingly counterintuitive consequences that follow from _that_. But in order to write, I have to escape this web of lies and deceit. —ZMD


#### 444 — Thursday 14 January 2010 — "Sunshine (Power Edition)"

I feel alive for the first time in a while. I went to a coffee shop in the morning of the thirteenth with Anna and worked on an outline with her—she didn't like the original paper very much and set things in motion for us to more-or-less rewrite the thing from scratch. My sleep cycle has been nuts lately, and I can't say I like it. It's better, somehow, when the dates on your personal documents refer to a unique wake period: who can keep the books straight when the night of the thirteenth is the same as the morning of the fourteenth, or hell but vice versa? I get the feeling that our work party went to shit after Anna left to tutor ("tutor"?) Justin Benedict. Michael Vassar is a fascinating character whom it is always enlightening (or at least _interesting_) to talk to. But some President! What was he doing talking to us when we have got an impossible deadline? But maybe he might as well—the stuff Steven and Mike Blume added to the EtherPad is almost uniformly useless. It looks like they just got caught up in the silliness.

But I feel so alive right now—I _can't_ say why. I've felt this way before, and it never really changed anything. Why should I expect anything to change now? My life is the dust and ashes that it has always been. So I had a few good months working in the supermarket and taking library days. And then I got the opportunity of a lifetime to stand at the center of the human history in proud defense—and I regressed to my mean. But there's got to be some sequence—which I presently leave _you_ to decipher, dear Diary. I've got things to do. —ZMD


#### 445 — Friday 15 January 2010 — "Sunshine (Rupture Edition)"

I want to leave; I want to go back to Walnut Creek and hit the job market. QA, tech support—_whatever_. I want to get a normal job and study furiously. I love the people here—I'm so glad for the work they're trying to do. But I'm not at that level yet. I can't—I can't _manage_ these open-ended tasks that you have to break up into managable pieces to meet a deadline. That's why I was depressed all throughout high school, throughout University—and here. I've never really been happy, but I got close once—when I had a dayjob, and my library days with not a care in the world.

I'll drop out of the blogosphere for four months. Post a comment on _Less Wrong_ that says I'll be gone, that I can be reached at _zackmdavis@yahoo.com_. I need to build a new art of rationality. Maybe I'm in no state to make decisions right now—but Diary _I am hurt_. I've been doing something _wrong_. I know—I keep breaking down like this. Went to University—nervous breakdown in four quarters. Went to vocational college—nervous breakdown in ten weeks. Went to the Singularity Institute—and didn't exactly have a nervous breakdown, but in any case am looking to be out the door in five months. Maybe in another three weeks I'll be begging Anna to take me back—but _it's not working out_. I'm not competent enough. Diary, I want to scream. Diary, I did it _wrong_. Diary, Diary, Diary—why can't I keep it together? _Ever_? It's not enough to say that I read some books and scribbled some good ideas in notebooks if I don't even have a novel to show for it.

_I have such beautiful friends_. And I—betrayed them? Like I betrayed the Prof. Aptheker?

I'll train for months. Then see what I do. —ZMD

ADDENDUM— I threw a fit in front of Mike Blume. Anna thinks I should go visit Mother for a week before deciding what to do and where to go. After the storm, I'm just enamoured with the people here. But if I love this witty intellectual conversation, then why can't I write academic papers? —ZMD


#### 446 — Thursday 4 February 2010 — "Sunshine (Questionable Character Edition)"

Diary, I can't even run a week's vacation competently. One night that week I was in Barnes & Noble, and I felt so alive, looking at the science fiction books, mine eyes shining with epistemic greed. I burnt the gift card Tracy had given me on three paperbacks. Within a day, I had burnt through _The Guns of the South_ and felt terrible about myself for having spent more time reading the novel than I had previously allotted. I ended spending a substantial fraction of my remaining vacation lost in a TV Tropes– (read _bourbon-_) induced haze.

So I've left SingInst at Santa Clara, and I'm here in my parents' house—did I tell you they broke up because apparently Dad's been fucking some Thai woman?—yeah. (No one told me they'd been _fucking_ exactly, but there was something about about a woman.) So Father's leased an apartment and I'm home here with Mother. Apparently I'm too lazy and shy to ask my creepy Singularitarian friends to pay me the money they owe me, so instead I finished a case of whiskey (read _the_ Questionable Content _archives_).

I've got to get out of this loop. Friends later, saving-the-world later, basic functionality first.

It's this same loop—I can't write this paper, but my shamefulness is such that I can't do anything else _either_ except perhaps read webcomics; I can't ask people for money, but my shamefulness is such that _&c._

Cyan thinks I misuse "_cf_." —ZMD

ADDENDUM— Money isn't real to me, I think. Take this business about people still owing me for groceries. I _could_ just never speak of the matter again and write it off as a donation to SingInst. But honestly. We're talking about five thousand dollars here. Even though I still want to support SingInst, let's at least have some clean accounting here. Hannah 'A.' Finley is disaffected with school and might join my creepy Singularitarian friends. —ZMD


#### 447 — Saturday 6 February 2010 — "Sunshine (Twilight Edition)"

Maybe I can start to end this recent recent recent madness, not so much because I've found a source of inner strength, but because I've run out of ways in which to be weak. Honestly, Diary, how many days can I spend in _complete_ depravity? I have read webcomics; I have played Flash games; I have watched funny videos. The internet may be swelling with content, but a single human mind can only take so much low fare in a week's sitting. Why, before you know it, I'll start paying attention to my actual problems simply for lack of anything else to do!

Or _don't I wish_. Only it _is_ nice to think of the little packages of virtue we carry around with ourselves. Yesterday I was toying with a tower defense game, trying to figure out the unstated laws governing the behavior of in-game combos. O _Science!_

I forgot to tell you that I came up with a working title for the _other_ novel that I wanted to write about a gender-variant intellectually-inclined teenager: _A Modern Approach_. And oh, what a fervor of creative energy I built up yesterday, pacing around outside daydreaming about it!

Only I want so much _more_ than daydreams! And I'm so _old_, having realized too little, too late. Yes, I _know_ that twenty-two is young, but it's not so young one's life hasn't already begun to take shape. Kelsey (the subject of my greatest couplet) has just been accepted to a PhD program. And I've yet to finish even my _virtual_ maths degree.

The opening to "Margaritaville" sounds uncannily similar to that of one of the _Free to be ... You and Me_ songs.

Tomorrow marks the third annual proceedings of my personal tradition of reading Evelyn Fox Keller during the Super Bowl (_cf_.—I mean _see_ 298); I have a University Library copy of _Making Sense of Life_ specifically for the occasion.

My life sucks and it's all my fault. Should I aspire to finish some specific set of tasks tomorrow, or should I settle for the simpler goal of simply being an _optimizer_ rather than just some random animal who happens to live here by grace of blood and social custom? I remain your _faithful_ correspondent. Zack M. Davis.


#### 448 — Monday 8 February 2010 — "Sunshine (Force Twilight Edition)"

Did I speak too soon? I have remained trapped in this loop, silencing my soul by stuffing it with low fare. I practically had to force myself to read a little bit of Fox Keller during the fourth quarter. I suppose I was almost human for a few hours yesterday. I was trying to explain the nuances of the new moral antirealism to Mother's friend Jordan when I was interrupted by a call from Sean Smith. His mother had free passes to the Macworld conference this week, and he [had] invited me to come with him. We made arrangements on which package we wanted to get, and we talked about the deep future. It _is_ so, so nice talking to friends about matters of great import. But I'm not in position to deserve too much in the way of friends. Tom McCabe got a new personal website, and he looks so great on paper.

Go on, tell me that it's ridiculous to speak of _deserving_ or _not-deserving_ friends. Then speak instead of what is proper and befitting. There are kids who waste hours in mindless hanging-out with their friends. Clearly _they_ should study more, so why shouldn't I? I must burn in a computer-scientific fire until my skin is charred a shiny black. And then I will have friends. —ZMD


#### 449 — Tuesday 9 February 2010 — "Sunshine (False Twilight Edition)"

Who should I get an email from last night but Aruna Vassar? For background, during my last long conversation with Anna (wherein we agreed that it would be better if I left), Anna said that Aruna said that I was a loser and depressing to be around and (as I recall) that she wanted me to leave. Aruna writes thanking me for my commitment to SingInst, and apologizing if she seemed unsympathetic to me. She "appreciates [my] sincere effort at thinking well and succeeding in it, despite any emotional difficulties and sadness [I] might experience." Well, so much for a _subtle_ departure. Today I also got another message from Anna asking how I was; I didn't reply to the last one because I was planning to get back to her and others about the money that I am owed first.

From this office we should want to hear determined breathing and the crackle of computer-scientific flames, not Jonathan Coulton and the periodic tapping of Command-T, L, down, enter, "Recent Comments." But that tapping forces a question: why don't I (act as if I) want to live? I've been around the decision-theoretic block a few times. I _know_ that there's nothing to be gained from random or short-sighted behavior. There's hardly even selfishness, once you understand personal identity. But this would predict the presence of some drive toward unity. One's components should cease their incoherent bickering and be swept through by a force that seeks to wring the utility out of every moment, every computation positioned exactly so. But what if there's not only no drive toward unity, but not even any bickering to fill the void? I was optimistic by far to project that I would exhaust myself of low fare. The truth is much more obvious than that: apathy has equilibrium properties of its own. Even its own theme song, though not a very pretty one.

It goes: Command-T, L. Down. —ZMD


#### 450 — Monday 15 February 2010 — "Raster Rowan"

Diary, what would be the point of naming a series if you lack the power to bring it to an end? I was up late last night burning through the _Venus Envy_ archives. Before that I had read from _Anathem_, worked with vector graphics and sent an email to Hannah 'A.' Finley about her webcomic methodology ("Raster Rowan is a cocksucking whore, but _Vector_ Rowan—"). I hadn't been _planning_ to work with vector graphics that day, nor did I expect to do better by deviating from prior planning; I'm just not-an-agent. If I continue to fail to get my love together, then I should expect Mother's nagging to increase (linearly? polynomially? exponentially?). I occasionally fantasize about responding to a nag from Father with, "Yes, and _you_ shouldn't be fucking Thai women," but I couldn't actually say that; I'm not sure it even rises to the level of _ad hominem tu quoque_. —ZMD

ADDENDUM—"Final Smash"— The meeting with Father went surprisingly well; I prattled on about _Anathem_ and the situatedness of mathematical knowledge, and there was no unpleasant inquisition about my great slowness, my cessation of motion, my morbidity. I found the inferential distance between Father and I kind of amusing. I was trying to remark on how the accepted background knowledge of one time is the groundbreaking insight of the past. I was thinking about things like how _I_ can understand the diagonalization argument, which maybe no one knew about before the Cantor in 1891. Whereas the first reputed example that came to his lips was how folks talk about antioxidants and free radicals nowadays, and I wasn't sure this counted as an example of the sort of thing I was talking about, because neither he nor I understands antioxidants. I don't give us credit for having _heard the term_. Later he mentioned set theory as being a new thing in the 1960s! I quickly gathered that he was referring to the teaching of "New Math" in schools. But that's all _fake_; pedagogy has nothing to do with the frontier of what is _known_. My first association, of course, was to Bertrand Russell and that whole crisis nearer to the start of the twentieth century.

My phone chimed a few times on the drive home. I got two text messages—apparently one of them came later tonight—from South Bay numbers, asking if I was coming to the meetup. _What_ meetup? [Note, 2/16/10: I mistook an old message for a new one; I only received one text, asking if I was coming down there, no mention of a meetup.] Nor do I know who was texting me. I showed Mother how to watch video of the Olympics on the computer; her growing inquisitiveness predisposed me to be more helpful than I otherwise would.

I _read_ about _Super Smash Bros_., which I suppose means I am still in a state of apathy and sin. Mother means business tomorrow. —ZMD


#### 451 — Tuesday 16 February 2010 — "Avout"

I had an insight this morning about a problem that I was working on fifteen months ago (see 274). Somehow it's obvious, now—we can characterize rotation of a sphere as a composition of a rotation through theta and a rotation through phi (in the standard spherical coördinates). So to prove Euler's theorem (well, _one_ of them, anyway), we multiply rotate-by-theta and rotate-by-phi matrices, subtract lambda off the diagonal, take the determinant, and confirm that unity must be a root of the resulting polynomial. The algebra is sufficiently tedious that I'm wondering if I should just learn Sage instead of finishing it myself, especially because I'm really interested in the four-or-more-dimensional case anyway.

I downloaded a siteblocking addon on my laptop. I didn't add _Less Wrong_ yet, though a software-enforced three-month hiatus does seem very appropriate. Someone has promised to follow up tonight on something outrageous he said, relevant to the theme. If I were to start a hiatus this afternoon, then I wouldn't get to read his elaboration for months! But I already knew that sexism exists, even among very intelligent and rational men. Why should I be attached to this _particular_ discussion? And then—I'm sure there's something fundamental I should say here about reflective consistency, but I won't take the time; I need something to show to Mother tonight.

Before departing _Less Wrong_, I'll make sure to throw up a wiki article for "Basic AI drives."

I'm not sure whether or not it's appropriate to leave a small Open Thread comment announcing my hiatus and giving my email address. Would it be polite, or just self-important? —ZMD

ADDENDUM— I wrote a quick "Basic AI drives" article, and it felt good! So maybe I shouldn't leave the blog for so long—I must go back and make the wiki perfect! Right right right??—but maybe this kind of attitude is exactly the reason why I need to draw back: laziness _and_ possessiveness together are a suicidal combination. When I had mentioned my concern for the wiki to Anna in a rambling email, she explicitly wrote that I don't need to feel like I need to write for the wiki. "[J]ust take care of yourself, and get well." And I'm sick, Diary. Fuck _Less Wrong_. It's not helping me win, anymore. Wasn't that the whole point? I might call Mike Blume and ask if I should post a hiatus notice in Open Thread. And if he can take me off the _sihouse@singinst.org_ list. —ZMD

SECOND ADDENDUM— Okay, I posted the note to Open Thread. Maybe in three months I'll be grown-up enough to post on my favorite blog. I finally finished writing a draft of my resumé—call it version 0.5—and got comments from Mother. Maybe I'm on the road towards being a person again. I'll have to work ever so hard—and I will always be haunted. Because this isn't the first time I've fallen like this. And I don't know—I fear that I will _never_ know—just what went wrong. My very agency hangs on a thread of unknown composition. And it's so obvious that I'm just doing everything wrong. How should my computers be organized?—the wireless to _Memoryless Distribution_ doesn't work, which doesn't really matter because I can take internet from the notebook, but then what is my procedure for updates? And Sage—I have Sage on the notebook, but I should get it on _Memoryless Distribution_, because it's been my intention of coding in the office—but then how do I split my time between the office and the library? These questions are important; it is all the little details of how things get _done_, how life _works_. Diary, I am haunted. I am in such sin, and I am left here to work out a new art of rationality. Diary, _I want to know_. And every minute that I have wasted in _not_ figuring things out is twenty tons weighed upon my soul.

Maybe I told you. Some of my contemporaries are fighting for their Ph.D. I fight for my soul. Yet _somehow_ I remain,

Yours,

Zack M. Davis


#### 452 — Thursday 18 February 2010 — "Polynomial-time Reduction"

Maybe I'm finally getting better; I don't know. Last night I was up late reading _Anathem_. Before going to sleep, [redacted...] I'm not Facebook-friends with [redacted], and I can't be because it's unethical to friend someone substantially because you want to look at their pictures in that way. I've still been masturbating way too often; there's barely even pleasure in it. Right, so I awoke late today. Somehow I missed meeting the Astound tech, even though I _was_ awake at the time; Mother was annoyed when she first heard, but perhaps we share blame because she was supposed to leave her cell on as a contact number. I ended up taking the boxes to Astound's meatspace office at Treat and Oak Grove. It turns out that there's a comic book store in the plaza there.

The version of Sage that I had on the notebook had a bug in the solution solver, so I upgraded _Memoryless Distribution_ to Karmic Koala via the alternate installation ISO, and got the new version of Sage running (although somehow it seems to require superuser privileges). My efforts to confirm the rotation theorem using Sage have failed, but today I wrote a different script using NumPy that worked—_numerically_, anyway; analytic solutions to anything just become a nightmare when you stray outside of the quadratic realm. I started writing a script with NumPy to numerically investigate higher-dimensional cases—O beautiful code!

It's exciting to be so close to the end of Hopcroft _et al._ on the theory of computation!—there are less than three chapters to go. Rah complexity theory! Only how long have I been studying that book? I don't care if it's heavy stuff; it shouldn't take nearly half a year to finish a single textbook—should it?

I got an email from Wells Fargo—the overdraft protection service kicked in again. Shit! I would have had more of a cushion if I weren't too shy to ask people for money. But I really need to take care of that—if nothing else because clean bookkeeping is virtuous unto a rationalist—and I owe Hannah 'A.' Finley another reply.

I might be getting better. Too slowly. "My life / Would suck / Without you,"

Zack M. Davis


#### 453 — Friday 19 February 2010 — "Woods"

Why is it that I feel more awake, more (if you will) alive, when I wake up at a reasonable hour? Is there some threshold beyond which more sleep makes one less effective? This morning I went with Mother to get the Civic's bumper fixed and to go to the athletic club where she teaches yoga. I took three-quarters of an hour on the stationary bike and finished _Anathem_. Foolishly, I had decided to leave my compsci book and working STEM pages at home, so with nothing else to do while waiting for Mother's class to conclude, I wrote a little in my _still open_ pink notebook and worked myself to a fervor daydreaming about _A Modern Approach_. And—well, it's such a common refrain that I may just start omitting it out of consideration for your bulk, dear Diary. If I must berate myself, let it be about specific details that relate nonredundant information. Such as: my life predictably go better if I went jogging in the mornings. Just imagine me running in the cold morning air—said air rushing through my shorts, chilling and shrinking my member. Only then, after returning from this excursion, would I be permitted to—warm that member while pretending things were otherwise. Better to pack shower-recommending activities together; it is efficient. And O lust!—O to pretend for a moment that things were otherwise!—even if it is just pretend, and only a moment.

The bumper ran Mother $150. Months ago, I had gotten a quote for much higher. Shopping around really pays. How much waste is there in the world from people doing things the stupid way? I've been so careless with my finances. Because I am apparently on theme today, I'll note that _good_ breastforms are in the low three figures. I deserve better than to only barely be a B cup.

Sunk costs; it does me no good to fume. I've met Tom McCabe and I know how silly it looks from the outside. It's okay to _sing_ the Everett branches where Kathy Ackerman-Alexeeff and I are together—even say together at the Santa Clara house, researching how to avert doom. But I must do more than sing. And know too, that someone sings for _me_. I remain yours. —ZMD

ADDENDUM—"Volition on the Margin"— So, I gave in to depravity again. I don't _know_ exactly where the hours have gone. Something to do with interesting articles on the internet. (I thought that the internet is boring now without _Less Wrong_, but apparently not so boring as all that, or I would have effortlessly turned to my work.) Coulton or Clarkson looped in the backgound. And eventually, photographs of nude women.

It's funny how easily I forget the _other_ hypothesis: that my problem is outside the venue of that mechanism we name _choice_: that I will always be lazy for much the same reasons that I will always be tall, or smart, or male. It makes for such a terrible story. I want to scream with fury: _let it not be so_—and have that be the end of it. But that _doesn't work_. We want something that _actually works_. I had the light ealier today, pacing about, dreaming of a heroine. It's not _enough_.

But I guess—I shouldn't get _mad_ at myself exactly, because we know where that goes in the limit. Indeed, I betrayed them, but what of it? The real answer is to write it off as a sunk cost and go on optimizing—but only because that's _always_ the answer. It needs implementation details.

If I'm going to take this hiatus cut off from my friends in order to get my love together, it needs to include some algorithm that actually _gets my love together_. But _sunk_. —ZMD

SECOND ADDENDUM— I've written a little bit for _A Modern Approach_, and it's so exciting! And I have an idea: you're familiar with the practice of authors publishing excerpts from their upcoming novels as a self-contained work of short fiction. Well, I think the scene I'm working on would make a great _Less Wrong_ post! Sure, it might be a little long, but so was "Zombies! Zombies?" What a great way to come back from hiatus!—this hiatus during which I must, _must_ get my love together else surely I will perish horribly in flames that are not computer-scientific at _all_. Because of my habit of not paying attention to my actual problems, I'm still on the _sihouse@singinst.org_ list. Hannah 'A.' Finley (whom I will not tire of calling that) mentions that she'll be leading a fiction workshop on Human Capital Development Day. It takes a conscious effort not to be jealous.

I _want_ to live in a world where people write things; I just need to remember. In more ways than one. —ZMD


#### 454 — Saturday 20 February 2010 — "Serenity"

Today I got up at a reasonable hour and went running in the open space. Father was here in the morning to struggle with tax stuff. I revised my resumé and replied to one [Craigslist] posting. I've spent much of the afternoon and evening archive bingeing a partially research-oriented ("research"-oriented) webcomic called _El Goonish Shive_. The archive binge was totally a breach of schedule, and yet somehow I don't feel terrible about it. I feel somehow as if I _deserved_ to read webcomics. Is it just that it feels good to exercise and get things done? But if it's really just that simple, then how do I account for my great shame? Strange to cut through all the loops at once, but suddenly it's as if I don't _need_ to explain my past sinfulness. As if I could really believe that sunk costs are _sunk_. Does my poor transcription belie these moments? Or am I getting better? —ZMD

ADDENDUM— I spoke too soon. I haven't been absolutely useless tonight: I get up TurboTax on a guest account on my laptop. But Diary, I don't understand how I can be so systematically stupid. _Stupid_ really is the word; I don't think I'm simply deluding myself. It feels _good_ to work. It's not that there's anything wrong with reading a research ("research") comic and with Kelly Clarkson on repeat. It's that doing such at the end of a successful day filled with adventure and insight is so _right_. And today was not so adventuresome or insightful. You might want to say in false blackness that I should kill myself, but honestly I promised Anna that I wouldn't. —ZMD


#### 455 — Sunday 21 February 2010 — "Undecidable Problems"

Today has turned out to be a good day so far. I made a poor start, but then I made pilgrimage to the Hercules Library, and what can I say but "O glorious for studying theoretical compsci on while pilgrimage at the mysterious library that is open for five hours on Sunday'? The library's architecture is noticeably (how can I put this?) _modern_, and all the lettering is some lowercase bold italic sans-serif, occasionally at an odd angle. It took some time, but I now have a basic understanding of reductions and Rice's theorem, and now I'm on to the complexity theory chapters. Rah complexity theory!

I didn't tell you; Hannah 'A.' Finley messaged again and really does want to hang out, so I agreed to visit the Santa Clara house on the twenty-seventh. I'm still kind of ashamed, so I don't know if I'll be as human as I would have been if it it weren't for my recent loss of agency and ensuing events. But this world is too connected for me to be entirely reclusive. The other day Tom McCabe sent an email to the interns list about how the Singularity FAQ he coäuthored with Kaj Sotala is up on his personal website, and I chimed in with style notes rather than keeping silent.

That queer anarchist Singularitarian actually put up a substantive post so maybe this time we'll be able to actually have a substantive disagreement rather than just insisting on phrasing everything differently. —ZMD


#### 456 — Monday 22 February 2010 — "Kelly Clarkson's Theorem"

Diary, I write to you too often and it's such a terrible story. Good stories can have setbacks, but they should be _meaningful_ setbacks, not this random walk of incompetence. I've spent today wandering about again in my internet dreamland, and I _don't understand_. I shouldn't be like this; I should have been smarter than this. I should have been a choice machine. And I know—you know that I know—that the correct answer is to shrug it off as _sunk_ and get to work, but somehow it feels like the entire day is stained instead. But if this isn't a _new_ insight, if I had fallen to this depth and mused similarly many times before and it all just feels like free will anyway, then how can I expect to get better? Am I supposed to believe that my great humiliation will cross some critical threshold on the other side of which I will have the strength to reform? But my world must be some kind of torus; I've been all around. If there were some critical threshold, then surely I would have crossed it on 29 November 2007—or this past fifteenth January.

Of course, _I_ can turn anything into a good story with my meta rationalist aesthetics. I wrote, "Does it help if we think of our lives as a story _about_ the sort of brave truthseeker who knows about the narrative fallacy and constantly reminds herself to make falsifiable predictions? 'Cause that's _totally_ what I do." Still. I'm not a rationalist. If I understood how to think, then I would be coming up with a plan—something that would _actually work_. —ZMD

ADDENDUM— Summerspeaker (that queer anarchist Singularitarian) posted a reply to my comment and remains shockingly competent. I've wasted the entire day. Part of the time I didn't even care. There's a _comfort_ in reading webcomics and not paying attention to your actual problems. But that dull comfort pales in comparison to the ecstasy of a proof, the sheer awe and wonder of a _Less Wrong_ meetup. Can't I tell the difference anymore? Why don't I _notice_ when I'm murdering myself? Maybe that should be my goal for tomorrow? Just to notice? —ZMD


#### 457 — Tuesday 23 February 2010 — "4TA-SAT"

I know I write to you too often, Diary, but today was actually a good day, in such striking contrast to yesterday. I sent some job queries and applications over the ether. I noticed a lot of the postings on _careerbuilder.com_ were from a staffing agency called Robert Half Technology, so I decided to cut out the second middleman and just sign up on their website.

Tom McCabe had written me saying that he wasn't going to take my style notes on the Singularity FAQ because it would be a pain. So. today I wrote a Python script that accepts a list of HTML files at the command line and makes corrections in line with my style notes. I replied to Tom: even with a script?—attaching and appending the script.

I took library day in the late afternoon and evening. I did more compsci, and in spite the stack of University Library books lying untouched in my room, I checked out Vernor Vinge's _Rainbows End_ (_sic_—so I guess it refers to the fact that rainbows come to an end, rather than the end of some rainbow). It might be marginally relevant to _A Modern Approach_.

Diary, if I can just keep having good days—I will rise but ever so high! _Rah complexity theory!_ But if I can begin to rise _now_, then why did I _stop_ rising during my time at SingInst at Santa Clara, when a greater fraction of the world depended on it? Coming to account for my sins might be the weightiest test yet of my epistemic rationality. There has to be _some_ explanation, some compressible regularity that governs how sometimes I'm an agent and sometimes I'm not. But I don't know it, and if I don't learn then my ignorance will one day be the death of me—fractionally it already has been. —ZMD


#### 458 — Thursday 25 February 2010 — "True Lemon"

Dear Diary, today I had a dentistry appointment. After that, I continued binge drinking—you know what I mean. I've been expecting a call from Hillary Hernandez of Robert Half Technology all day but it never came. Thought you might like to know, _not_. —ZMD


#### 459 — Sunday 28 February 2010 — " 'Commuting on a Bus' "

The visit went well enough. Hannah 'A.' Finley and Mike Blume are dating (which I should have predicted), as are Beth Larson and Steven Kaas (which is just out of the blue). Hannah said she's changed her mind about "Greater Glory" (see 402). I went grocery shopping with Hannah and Mike; Mike and I talked about the theory of computation; a bunch of us went out to karaoke. I went on a walk with Anna before dropping off Lucas Sloan and leaving myself.

I'm almost done with Hopcroft and friends on the theory of computation, and today I printed out an exciting 2002 paper showing that primality testing is in P. What better way to cap off a unit of study but to study from a real paper, not just a mere textbook?

But today I have spent yet more hours immersed in Tropes and the like. I've wasted months in this fog. I've _got_ friends. I just need to start being worthy of them. —ZMD


#### 460 — Tuesday 2 March 2010 — "Jennifer Doesn't Smile"

I don't think I told you that Hannah reminds me of Katie Kolodzie, in the same way that Tom McCabe reminds me of Richard or how Kaj Sotala is my Finnish pirate doppelgänger.

It's been another day of drinking—that day being the _first_; I write to you late, not early. And yet again I write to you too often. Diary _I am sick_. I should be sick of being nothing but potential—not even _visible_ potential; people think Nicole is smart. In occasional moments of sobriety, I daydream about writing fiction and showcasing it on a personal website. When Hannah said she changed her mind about "Greater Glory," I think she said that she wasn't used to my writing or was triggery at the time, but that she reread "Pastime" and really liked it. I hope that I'm not a one-trick pony: "Pastime" alone already exploits the top of my topic list: gender, transhumanism—even a protagonist's wish to know more math is an element I want to use in _A Modern Approach_, said element of which I could say so much more about _now_, than _then_, when I knew nothing.

Diary, I am _disgusting_. Of what account is my vaunted autodidacticism now? These laments are useless, though. What is important is that I figure out a way to _win_. Maybe I can tell you about it _afterwards_. —ZMD

ADDENDUM— Ms. Hernandez finally called back and I have an interview tomorrow at 1100, which means that today I will have to fix my wardrobe. Maybe I'll also try to visit Gunni and try to use her as a reference—should I be embarrassed about the cryptic postcards I sent her when I felt like sending a postcard?—maybe she thinks I'm creepy. Well, maybe I _am_.

Anna has told me more than once that I might be a social liability because of my low-status nonverbals, but that I'm otherwise an asset because I actually know how to think. It's a sincere compliment, but what calculations is Anna making such that she decides to say it? It is an attempt to comfort me, but it's not fair to her that I should be so continually weak and so apparently in need of comfort.

If I don't enforce reflectivity, then I might as well be in school. Maybe it's just that in my drunkenness I forgot to incessantly repeat the obvious to myself? Pretend you have a utility function, figure out what the right thing to do is all things considered, and then do that _because_ it is the right thing to do all things considered. How do I let myself forget, when nothing could be simpler? Expected utility is _clean_ math; struggles within the soul are such ugly math that you don't even want to call it _math_. Maybe it's computer science. —ZMD

SECOND ADDENDUM— I visited Gunni very briefly. Maybe I should have stayed for a part of the journalism period. If nothing else, it would have been the perfect opportunity to ask to borrow someone's calculus textbook for a few minutes—it turns out that a plot point in my vision for _A Modern Approach_ depends on how they teach kids about the derivative of the natural logarithm (compare 316).

I bought clothes—I had to go back to Ross a second time because I had forgotten to buy nice shirts.

On _hulu.com_ I watched some _Family Guy_ and a 1985 research ("research") film titled _Just One of the Guys_ (second half first). Look, if I want to navigate my way to a win, I need to be absolutely honest about every detail. I shouldn't say that I'm not even _tempted_ to watch video or play Flash games—that my heart _only_ beats for true science and other similarly high fare ("research" naturally excepted)—because if that were true, I would be much larger by now; there would _be_ no bad attractor for me to have fallen into.

O Diary O dreams stacked atop visions! The very geeky have _xkcd_ and _Abstruse Goose_, but where is there a similarly geeky webcomic with deep story arcs and detailed manga-style art?—something to be to science what _Misfile_ is to cars, but much "worse." It's almost too bad I didn't sink more skill points into visual art. On balance, however, drawing is too little _content_ for too much effort. I work in compressed abstractions; my media are _text_ and notation. O greater work! I'll get out of this bad attractor. You watch (although it may happen off camera).

Only how would today have gone if Ms. Hernandez _hadn't_ called me in the morning? Enough. I remain yours. —ZMD

THIRD ADDENDUM—"Perry's Corollary to Kelly Clarkson's Theorem"— I've added to my working ms. for _A Modern Approach_. O artistic ecstasy! I can't explain or forgive why my entire life hasn't been like this. My head is _routinely_ bubbling with visions; typing them out—and in a form such that who can say but that someone else might like to read it?—is only the most obvious thing in the world. Diary, I _don't_ need more time "hanging out" with "friends." Diary, let me hope that some threshold has been broken in me today that was somehow not broken during any of the similar nights in years previous. O Diary how I want to want to work!—I say this from the bottom of the meta-level analogue to my heart. I want to _work_; I want to do good _work_!

I remember one of the greatest _Overcoming Bias_ meetups (see 320). In spare moments when I tired from group activity, I tried to get a little math done. So what if it was a party and people don't do that at parties? I was trying to be _efficient_. I explained as much to Marcello. Where did that monomania go? Diary, that is when I am truly healthy: when I am consumed by some great piece of work, either on the giving or the receiving end. If anyone should protest that to them it seems most unhealthy, then let me reply only that they haven't seen me when I am not so consumed, and—let me assure them!—it is _not_ a pretty sight. I remain yours. —ZMD


#### 461 — Sunday 7 March 2010 — "Timeless Decision Cat"

Right, so I was hired or whatever by Robert Half (would you smirk at me if I mispronounced it as _Ranma Half_?), but it's a temp agency so of course it doesn't mean that I actually have _work_. Diary, I am trusting and spoiled: some part of me takes credit in getting signed on in such a way by a large and faceless organization, even though I should know by now to only take credit for actual _work_. What we print on even the most official documents holds value just insofar as it maps the territory on the ground; institutions are fictional, and _effort_ is either a chimera or very hard to track.

While I was at the Central Library on Friday, I got a call from Anna—Roko's giving a presentation at AGI-10, and it would be useful if I were to collaborate with Hannah 'A.' Finley in making slides and in doing so, pass some of my PowerPoint magic (read _GIMP and OpenOffice.org Impress cheap hacks_) to her. So I returned yet again to Benton House yesterday and made a presentation with Alicorn, finishing it up on my own. There was a decision theory workshop on, so Gary Drescher, Stuart Armstrong, and the eminent Wei Dai were present.

Alicorn is affectionate and has an off-putting (to _me_) femininity about her; she and Blume are wonderful together. Contrast my friend and idol Anna, who didn't even tell me she and Carl had gotten engaged. (As have Steven and Beth, apparently, which doesn't make any sense at all.)

There are so many more interesting topics than my feelings, I explained, like decision theory, or other people's feelings. —ZMD

ADDENDUM—"Operations Research in Paradise Lost"— I forgot to tell you recent ruminations on having been seriously studying math for about eighteen months now (compare 263). If you assume that college students don't study during the summer (which must be typical, or what's all this fuss about classes about?), that's half a degree program! On the other hand, I _don't_ seem to be halfway through the curriculum subjectwise, and it's not obvious whether I am unusually thorough, don't put in enough hours, or am as dumb as a pile of rocks. Adding up books and fractions of books and doing the division, it seems like five months per textbook is typical for me (compare 452). When I asked Anna, she said that this seemed normal, and she said that there are accelerating returns to this type of study. Today I've done some engaging internet reading and studied complex analysis at library day in Orinda. —ZMD


#### 462 — Monday 8 March 2010 — "Timeless Decision Ultimatum"

_Lies lies lies lies lies_. It is not obvious how I bear _existing_ in this interim where my great beauty is smothered with two coats of willful blindness and self-deception—or who could say but that it is three coats? Mother called home to check up on me at what might have been a little after noon, and of course (of _course_) I hadn't done anything. I went to the library almost specifically to avoid her.

I spent a long time playing Flash games on my laptop, until a tutor asked me if she and her student could sit at the table. Pride broke me out of my daze—it would be too terrible a reversal of the sacred practice of library day for me to play games while the reluctant Latino boy worked problems. I got out my complex analysis work, remarking to the tutor that I had been playing Flash games because I was depressed because I was supposed to be looking for a job but that this was horribly out of character. So the tutor instructed her charge on discounts and markups while I struggled with the proof of Cauchy's integral formula.

After library day, I bought lubricant and candy at the drugstore. Diary, the economy is shit. [P]eople are struggling just to pay their bills, and I haven't been paying attention. One might very justly despise _marketing_ in the sense of New York elites using their knowledge of behavioral psychology to manipulate people into buying things they would not on reflection want. But there's another sense of _marketing_ that is essential to the function of any human society, grounded in the simple observation that no one will know that you and your skills exist if you don't _tell_ them.

I forgot to tell you: I'm lucky to have gotten to take library day yesterday (in _this_ Everett branch), because I accidentally ran a red light and almost got in an accident.

I'm happy with my library days, but I want something more, some sort of meaningful _public_ work. But what kind of work could that be, and how might I secure the opportunity? It should be something exciting, something important, something like ... writing papers for the Singularity Institute. _Right_, and how did that turn out? The talking heads are always bleating about how college costs are skyrocketing and our public schools are falling apart. While this Earth lasts, don't I want to show them that I mean business?—to show them what _business_ means? Diary, this should be a time of fury and operations research like never before. The world is awash in opportunities—there are sites where you can just sign up and bid on a programming job.

But I should shut up. Really. —ZMD


#### 463 — Sunday 14 March 2010 — "Poser"

I was going to wait until Diary Day to write you, but apparently I won't. It seems like I'm slowly getting better. On the thirteenth, I made pilgrimage to the University and picked up a book on new computational paradigms: someone online had linked to an abstract claiming that Turing machines could be simulated with ordinary differential equations, and I don't have online privileges, so I had requested the book on a whim. (The library clerk teasingly referred to the volume as _light reading_, and claimed to be intimidated when I mentioned differential equations.) I took notes on the relevant paper, getting fairly deep into the paper before the waterline rose fully above my level and I had to bail. There are a few other papers in that book that also seem interesting and perhaps not entirely above my level.

I write to you late. I've been sleeping in Nicole's former room since my ignominious return from Santa Clara. (Yeah, what's with that? Is it just the word _Santa_?) The furnishing situation has been less than ideal: my clean clothes have been piled up in detached dresser drawers on the floor, and the only light in the room had been a lamp on the bedside table such that one had to grope to find it in the dark. And I should have _noticed_ beforehand that sooner or later something like this was going to happen, but while groping for the lamp in the dark, I knocked it over and the bulb broke over the some of the free dresser drawers. Now, this wouldn't have been so bad if it were 1997, but of course it's not, and so the bulb was a context-free—I mean, compact florescent—lamp. You know, the kind that contains mercury, a deadly neurotoxin. I got somewhat agitated. For all my reading, it's so hard to have a decision theory. We all know that breaking a light bulb is bad, but how much worse is it than taking a trip to the city? I ended up throwing away a nontrivial fraction of my clothes, and I'm still kind of worried; the great series of tubes seems to be of two minds on the issue of vacuuming. Diary, _I am scared_. And it has ruined some period of time for me—my sleep cycle is surely fucked, for one thing.

I've discovered a source of erotic webcomics (well, erotic to _someone_, anyway). A lot of them are very realistic 3D renderings—the CGI software on the market nowadays is _impressive_. Diary, recently I had daydreamed about creating a webcomic, but judging that it could never be because sinking the requisite skill points into drawing would be too expensive. So now I have a slightly less unrealistic daydream.

Really, Diary. Novel first, math first, getting myself out of the gutter and into my rightful place in the sun, _first_.

_That goddam lamp_. Ruined everything. —ZMD

ADDENDUM— Right, so now my sleep cycle is off by—let's guess _pi-over-four_, and basically the entire calendar day has been spent sleeping or consuming low fare. I don't care what Alicorn thinks; _drinking binge_ is the appropriate term. Why haven't I been willing to look at the world?—why did I spend hours playing Flash games created by some guy about my age until I felt almost sick? The fact is that there are trade-offs. The _reason_ we use CFLs is because they're more energy efficient—_on net_ they apparently even result in less mercury emissions because of the power savings. And when a CFL _breaks_, you have to do further trade-offs for yourself: clearly it's overkill to cauterize the room and sell the property, but where do you draw the line below that? If you don't throw away _all_ of your clothes, but only the ones that seemed near the breakage, what probability of what kind of brain damage are you trading off against not having to clothes? Even if the risk is _tiny_, it's still _there_, and it's not something like the lottery where we have easily-understood calculations _showing_ that a probability is tiny. One hand says: "You're being transparently paranoid." The other hand says: "Structural uncertainty in the model!" —ZMD 15 March 2010


#### 464 — Monday 15 March 2010 — " 'Jenn Dolari's Click-O-Rama' "

Today in the course of practical conversation with Mother, she mentioned that I could have my pick of which room I wanted, or she also said I could take my old room for a month. I've slept in that room the last two nights ("nights"?), but the thought of simply making it my room again had not occurred to me so explicitly; perhaps some part of me sensed that the thought was too much of a running-away. Well, maybe it _is_, on the _object_ level, but could it not at the same time be a blessed option under some theory of metarationality? A decision-theoretic _agent_ selects _actions_ to secure _outcomes_. If some part of my psychology doesn't understand multiplication and only wants to run away, why shouldn't more agent-like parts of me treat the coward like any other part of the environment? If you _can_ wish away a storm, then do so, but if _not_, then you should stay indoors rather than getting soaked outside performing your negation-of-rain dance ("Rain rain / Go away / Come again _in hell_"). But this notion of intrapersonal game theory or what-have-you is textbook stuff, Diary, or it might as _well_ be; I want to say that every *Less Wrong*er worth her salt has heard it in at least half a dozen places, and _maybe_ two-thirds.

Mother is painting the dresser. Should I be worried about the dresser, too? But enough, enough, enough; my time of sickness must end. Last night ("last night"??) I was reading _Closetspace_ author Jenn Dolari's LiveJournal, and there were a few posts on her recent troubles with work and finances. Oh, Diary! I want to do better!

I _know_. So I should really shut up. —ZMD

ADDENDUM— I might be ready to wake up now, after losing two entire days to madness. I should be _furious_, desperate for a solution. Sure, you are rightfully bored of my saying it. You have every reason to call me a poser, to think that my self-proclaimed quest for true knowledge of ultimate gender is but an adolescent fantasy, if an unusual and laudable one. You might admonish me that in the _real_ world, people compromise, they settle down. _But Diary I should be as on fire_—it _hurts_. I don't _like_ being this stupid, this useless. It's _fine_ to live in your parents' house in order to save money and spend more on existential risk reduction. But even without studying Pearl I can tell you that that's not the real reason I'm here. You know; you've heard it all before; Diary, if you could speak you would be begging me to shut up already. But I can't let this go; I want to take what I have been and grind it into dust. _I want to know_. —ZMD


#### 465 — Friday 19 March 2010 — "Lines of Attack"

There's still hope, because there remain things still yet untried. One pathological reason for being afraid of changing is the fear of inconsistency: it seems so _arbitrary_ to spontaneously get better at time _t_, as if surely such an abrupt and unprecedented turnabout were the violation of some sort of natural law. If I'm going to get better, there needs to be some sort of _reason_, and if I've wanted to get better for so long and have failed, what _new_ insight could I possibly have now? But Diary, surely I can't be said to have exhausted all avenues when I haven't even read that library copy of _Getting Things Done_. Or here's another tack: pornography.

Bear with me. Maybe I used to think visual aids beneath me, but last night I spent a long time researching ("researching") captioned photos. (The captions really help!) I don't think I was particularly amorous beforehand, but that the content was a stimulus. Diary, if photos with poorly-written captions are enough to induce the most desperate lust, then might not other emotions be induced with different manipulations? On the seventeenth, I took BART into the city to attend orientation for this weekend's temp job at the chemists' conference. The short meeting induced flares of ambition: why, I deserve better!—surely _this_ is not the capacity in which I am meant to attend scientific conferences!

One reason my current rut is so disturbing is that I had thought I had found a way out of the gutter. If the attitude that had seemed to help so much stopped working, then what hope could there be for me now? There is the hope that my previous method was not so much wrong, as much as incomplete. The attitude helped, but then I forgot how to summon it. The avenue that suggests itself, then, is concerted research effort into experience engineering. Anna had practically suggested as much in Santa Clara (different computers for Institute and personal tasks and the like), but I might have some elaborations in mind[.] We shouldn't be content to let our lives be governed by _haphazard_ associations. If you listen to music just because you "felt like it," then who knows what you'll end up associating the songs with? There should be more of a science to it, a precise manipulation of stimuli to produce desired effects. —ZMD

ADDENDUM—"Lines of Control"— I managed to get up at a reasonable time today and I wrote you—only to succumb to a nap not long thereafter. O terrible! I blame the captions.

I dug up a thick unused Moleskine that was probably a birthday present once, hoping to use it as a timelog: one page per day, divided into two columns, the left side detailing my hour-by-hour plans, and the right side bearing hour-by-hour notes of what I've actually done. I'd like to keep track of what I actually eat, too—not because I've risen to the level of actually caring about my health, but because it would be nice to _know_. I don't _know_ how much I eat of what per unit time, so _can_ I know how to shop? I should be sick with rage: how much of our lives do we waste on the most trivial crap without even _noticing_? Anna says I'm good at thinking, so much so that my (by local standards) below-average IQ isn't even very noticeable. This brilliance should _buy_ me something. I should write down purchases in the book, too. I like the idea of _integrated_ budgeting: writing everything down in an [analog] notebook, and then maybe transcribing data to _Memoryless Distribution_ later, when I'm ready to do analysis. Ostensibly my online Wells Fargo service comes with tools for tracking spending, but it's not integrated with the rest of my life the way a pocket notebook might be. (Or not—my pink book remains open from _October_.) I have a text file on _Distribution_ that's meant to keep track of my study stacks, books I want to acquire, and things like that, but I haven't been paying attention to it. I guess it lacks an _affordance_; I don't live out of my desktop, not in the least because it takes time to boot and still doesn't get network. Maybe if I were smarter I would have a netbook and live out of it.

If I'm going to be logging so much in the notebook, then I should probably make the right column bigger than the left. Of course, I've tried other forms of timelogging before, never to smashing success. But Diary?—I'm _desperate_.

O emotions! If only there were some simple algorithm for figuring out what manipulable factors drive my minute-to-minute passions and furies! I'm so far below. —ZMD

SECOND ADDENDUM—"Lines of Proof"— I may have actually crafted a nontrivial proof today. One of the examples in Mathews and Howell demonstrated partial fraction composition for a quadratic divided by three linear factors. It seemed to be me that the method should be general, and so with twoish hours of effort, I produced the obvious (_obvious_) induction proof. It's quite likely my proof is flawed, but just the same I count it as a major achievement. Typically I just take notes and make awkward swipes at problems; an apparently correct proof shows that I'm growing up—and not a moment too soon, either.

Mother rented a Rug Doctor and vacuumed Nicole's former room. I suppose there's some nontrivial chance that I have committed some grievous sin by allowing this to happen; what if the rented machine is now contaminated by mercury (compare 463, 464)? Enough time has passed that my concern (possibly read _paranoia_) has dissipated; I am (healthily?) apathetic.

There have got to be all sorts of exploitable regularities in my personality. Consider the loop where I mope and say that I'm sorry and talk about how (for example) people who are bad deserve to be stabbed in the face. I spent a _lot_ of time in that loop at the University, and some time in Santa Clara, too: both environments with lots of friends around. But I don't get caught in that _particular_ loop when I'm alone.

I need to buy the most time I can with every hack I can find if I expect to write anything. Occasionally I feel that the nascent story about K. G. Kowalsky is wrong or bad somehow, drawing as it does on my (transparently silly) recent recent madness? Could I really write (and publish!) such a novel while my OkCupid username is _zmdavis_ and my OpenID page is at _z.m.davis.myopenid.com_? And yet, my image of Kowalsky has grown into something _consilient_ in such a way that I can't just arbitrarily airbrush or Mary-Sue her to hide my own silliness. She's _already_ enough of a Mary Sue; I have no business trying to protect her dignity—or _mine_. However you slice your generalized personal identity, _this instantiation_ only gets one life, one shot. Kowalsky's story deserves to exist. No one will write it if I don't, and while the Earth lasts, I deserve to write a novel. I actually have been tapping out _some_ fiction recently, in tiny dribs and drabs.

I might be getting better. Again, _not a moment_ and so forth. —ZMD


#### 466 — Wednesday 24 March 2010 — "Sitting in the Office of the Gods, Reading Steve Sailer"

I spent most of today and a sizable fraction of yesterday being blogsick. It's not _good_ behavior, but it's better than Flash games; spending all those hours reading, you'd figure I probably learned something. Consider how today, _Wolfram MathWorld_ confirmed my earlier suspicions: there _is_ a correspondence between the multiplicity of a root of a polynomial and the order of the corresponding pole of a function of which the polynomial is the denominator. I know, Diary: you're about to argue that this is a trivial corollary of the text's Corollary 7.5, but I'm retarded and didn't see it. The text defines _order_ in terms of Taylor and Laurent series, and somehow I failed to spot the connection between multiplicity and the Taylor series; I'll only just be sure to _prove_ it soon. Maybe now I'll actually be able to calculate residues—oh, but to think of how I fantasized of completing a section each day and therefore six subjects each year!—which is _not_ impossible; I am only lazy. I was only blogsick for _most_ of the day, then I watched television on _hulu.com_.

I've cheated on my _Less Wrong_ hiatus a number of times by reading the Google cache.

Oh, you want to hear about the conference. Duty as an "Ask Me" greeter is not so bad—on the third floor, at least, there's plenty of downtime, which means plenty of thinking time, and telling attendees that that room is in the South building ("you're going to go downstairs, cross both streets, walk half a block up Howard Street, and the entrance will be on your right") can be interpreted as a small performance art. Contrast checking, where scanning and keying the items sucks up clockcycles without being interesting or challenging. (Somehow sorting the coupons didn't seem to take so many clockcycles and I was able to think about other things.)

The first day, my original after-lunch assignment was to the third floor, even though I had _anticipated_ that there was going to be nothing of importance there. I should have spoken up explicitly; some colleagues and I got spoken to.

Do I continue to feel angst about how my beautifully consilient novel idea strikes too close to home (compare 396, 397, 398, 400, 405, 406, 407, 465)?—as if I didn't know that the _reason_ it is so consilient is _because_ it strikes so close to home. (Although really, Diary, what am I doing living in a madhouse in the first place?) The advice to "write what you know" is redundant; we could hardly do otherwise. And the conceit makes _sense_. Consider Boyd, whom I met at the University; we just call her _Boyd_. I don't know what explicit reasoning Boyd went through when she took her surname as her nickname, but to look at her appearance, it's not hard to guess but somewhere in the region.

Another reason besides unity not to just scrap the plot thread is—to be honest—I don't really have all that much for my fearsome autodidact to _do_. My natural creativity is oriented towards the slice-of-life vignette; I have to take what few plot points I am capable of generating. And again: if your novel ms. transparently sucks, you don't have to show it to anyone. Worrying about embarrassment really makes no sense, because even when and if you _publish_, who's going to care enough to tease you?—particularly in _my_ case. _Less Wrong_ and _Closetspace_ are both targeted to very select audiences, so the intersection must be—well, not empty exactly, but close enough that the marketing gurus can't tell and don't care if it isn't.

More importantly still: I want my life to stop being _composed of lies_. I should be sick of being a loser, and in a way I owe it to people that I honestly win. I owe it to my creepy Singularitarian friends, so I can give them money to save the world. I again owe it to them as an aspiring rationalist, to show experimentally that truthseeking really does pay off. I similarly owe it to my fellow autodidacts, my fellow gender-variant folk, and in fact, to _all_ my analogues scattered across the many worlds. _This_ instantiation has to try, not because I realistically expect to win here, but because it's the only way I can expect to try anywhere. —ZMD, 0005 Thursday 25 March


#### 467 — Thursday 25 March 2010 — "A Modern Interlude"

I spent more time today being blogsick. I've communicated with Seanan; he sent me a story of his, and I marked it up. We're going to meet Saturday night.

I've accepted another temp job; it starts tomorrow. This one involves calling people, but it's not exactly unsolicited telemarketing: the list is gathered from people who responded to one of those online ads about getting a good deal on a car or something. Diary, I hear you wondering if I should have declined, but I think any sort of dayjob is good for me now. I need to be forcibly reminded of the solidity of the world. A rational agent would deduce it from an arbitrary blogpost; I need to be stabbed in the face with it.

I also got a phone message from Hillary Hernandez, my contact in the technology division; she wants a Word version of my resumé and to know if I've done any web design.

About _A Modern Approach_, another cause of neurosis might be the fear of using up story elements in a bad package. I am not a natural storyteller; I come up with lots of philosophical musings and scraps of dialogue, and I hope that someday I will be able to weave them into a beautiful story. This leaves me with the problem of deciding in which story to place each scrap. Suppose the themes I am good at are gender dysphoria, autodidacticism, epistemic rationality, compatibilism, transhumanism, akrasia, mathematical beauty, spontaneous social order, and unusually loose notions of personal identity. Do I write one novel about a gender-dysphoric mathematician, and different novel about an autodidactic social theorist with an unusually loose notion of personal identity? Do I write three short stories about akratic guys, and never mention the matter in my novels? You see the problem. If I come up with a poignant observation or a striking exchange that could fit in more than one story, which story do I put it in? Recycling such scraps is frowned upon in my culture, and I frown along with everyone else.

This feeds into a larger fear: what if I end up creating something that contains so much of my essential beauty, but is also inextricably bound up with that I'm ashamed of?—and so I couldn't meaningfully promote the work, but then I wouldn't be able to justifiably reuse the elements of beauty that I had baked into this one. It's possible that this is actually a justified fear. But as I've said before, this inability to reuse elements is something that applies to _published_ works; I have no qualms about recycling elements of permanently scrapped ms.s. Consider the intrigue about sex and Lewontin's fallacy. I imagine I had originally planned to give my musings to Lance, but now that I have the idea of K. G. Kowalsky, it makes more sense that they should be hers—she loves math, after all. Let _her_ ponder over measure in phase space. And if I decide to permanently scrap "Greater Glory," then it would be only good sense to harvest what jokes I could from the corpse.

So the dominating strategy is obvious: write, write fanatically, finish a novel ms., show it to a few friends, and only put it online if it's the sort of thing that you'd be comfortable promoting.

Okay, so I can't prove it's a _dominating_ strategy, but at least it's a Pareto-improvement. If you suppress the audio of my pious protestations and only look at my current trajectory, it's not obvious that my future contains any completed fiction _at all_. I've never finished anything that I would be comfortable promoting. Taking the outside view, what does my future hold? I'll guess: crummy but livable jobs, no partner, no fiction, some blog comments, two math textbooks a year, occasional chunks of disposable income tossed to SingInst?—it wouldn't be a _bad_ life. It's arguably much better than things would have gone if it hadn't been for my purity born of pain: surely there is a wide swathe of worlds in which I don't study math at all.

Really, _A Modern Approach_ is likely my most workable alleged novel idea yet. "Greater Glory" was never meant to be novel-length, and in any case it's just a farce, and possibly an offensive one (depending on whether you trust Hannah's first or second take, although considering my ambitions, I need all the ally cred I can get). _Preserved Under Symmetry_ was an interesting adolescent daydream, but I have doubts about its ultimate workability, considering where my attitudes have settled. As for _The Compatibilist Ethos_, I'm not sure I ever had anything truly at the level of a working plot (but contrast 101), and my protagonist was Mary Sue incarnate. Glancing at my eleven discontinuous pages from nearly five years ago—well, it's _cute_. My idea about Brooke deciding that she's misjudged Clyde is effectively being adapted into Kowalsky deciding that she's misjudged her yet-unnamed business partner and mentor. I don't think I explicitly intended to lift the notion, so much as that my imagination just runs in loops. But I can't write the same novel twice, so as I told you, there are all sorts of tough choices that I have to make about what to include in what. But again as I have no doubt told you also, it's ridiculous to be worrying about running out of ideas to put in my works when the case stands that I have _plenty_ of ideas (if not so many _plot_ ideas) and essentially _no_ work to show for it.

A useful skill to learn would be to enforce indifference: to not _let_ yourself be hurt or embarrassed, or not so much. It seems like it ought to be feasible.

Apparently some people online are saying that the company I'll be temping for tomorrow is a scam. Oh, dear. I'm not sure I understand the issues around this kind of marketing, this business of _leads_.

Diary, I remember Anna and Carl being in touch with one Brian Tomasik, who looks so fantastic on paper. I'm a little bit jealous and bitter. _I want to do good work!_—but I've continued to lounge around in the gutter. Today I got blogsick and didn't do math. And no doubt I will be scarred forever. You might say I'm living timelessly for all the branches where my ideals happened to grow inside someone _competent_. Again, I try because that's how I can expect _them_ to. —ZMD


#### 468 — Sunday 28 March 2010 — "Congenital Weakness"

"Beggars can't be choosers" is a poor heuristic for those who aren't literally beggars. I may or may not be ultimately capable of giving up my comfort and my dignity in order to save my life, but giving up my comfort and my dignity in order to save my dignity is just bad math. I quit the (quasi) telemarketing job today. Diary, my understanding is that the point of a market economy is to create value. We have these claim tokens on resources, and if [you] can make something people _want_, then you can trade it to them in exchange for claim tokens. My work at Safeway—it was a dayjob but I still bless it with the name of _work_—had a quiet dignity to it: you could _tell_ that you were creating value. Directly, people _want_ coffee, and indirectly, how could operations go on if no one could tell whether the claim tokens were in the right places?

Whereas this temp job—well. You know those ads online that promise good quotes on a new home or car? They ask you for name, address, and digits, at which point you become a _lead_ for participating dealerships to call. Reply!, Inc. is a company that makes such ads and forms. Apparently passing the info to dealerships electronically wasn't enough, so Reply! contracted OfficeTeam to get a bunch of losers (that's _us_) to go down a list and call people who had filled out the form, asking consumers if they would like to be contacted by other local dealers that offer comparable models to the ones that the consumer had checked out online. (Reply! and OfficeTeam had previously partnered up in a fantastically successful campaign to butcher the rules of English punctuation and capitalization. Who knew the District Attorney would be so easily bought?) This lead validation business is not really an _illegitimate_ endeavor; I mean, when you enter digits into such an online form you are more or less asking to be called.

Not-illegitimate is an _awfully_ low bar, Diary. Each loser was assigned a day in the recent past (mine was the fifteenth) and was put before a computer with a web interface to a database of digits. The task was to page through all the consumers who had filled out the form on the assigned day and call them with a standard comeon. If they said yes, the loser was to click a link on the interface and copy the resulting code into a spreadsheet.

Most sets of digits didn't reach anyone, either because the digits were wrong, the digits were out of service, or simply that no one picked up. The hit rate conditional upon talking to a human was also low.

The science lesson of this farce probably belongs to behavioral economics. To the extent that consumers have a stable preference for or against being contacted by local dealers offering comparable models and are willing to express this preference, we would expect that all losers would score a similar number of lead validations, with the variance being a matter of pure luck. Not so: on the second day, the quota required to be eligible for the spiff was I think fifty-five (lowered from the previous day, when no one had matched it), and I think two people made it (the young Middle-Eastern woman, and the middle-aged white guy who sounded like an "articulate" black guy).

I got nine. It wasn't even deliberate sabotage on my part. Superficially, I seemed to be doing more-or-less the same thing as everyone else, possibly at slightly fewer calls per minute than average. Arguably my presentation was superior in some respects: my accent has positive class associations, my affected customer service (read _crossdressing_; I think I got "ma'am"ed a few times) tone is surely very charming, and the script called for "how's it goin [_sic_]" where I said "how are you doing today (sir/ma'am)?" And yet I posted very poor numbers ("Is it my voice?"). I wanted to make sure the consumer understood exactly what they were agreeing to, and in some cases I think I asked for confirmation more than once because some part of me couldn't parse their _Sure_ or _Yes_ with an unambiguous meaning.

This morning, the third day, I showed up and made a few calls before considering quitting. When I did consider it, I thought about value creation. Of course I found the job extremely unpleasant, the wages were a single figure, and who was I helping, anyway? The consumers mostly didn't want to be bothered (indeed a substantial fraction of them reported that they had already bought their car), and the ones who did buy the comeon would only receive calls from local dealerships offering allegedly comparable models—_possibly_ this could result in better deals struck and therefore a better world, but I was skeptical. Worse still, there was no indication that our guardians were checking the spreadsheets in which we losers were pasting the codes, suggesting that it would be at least a few more days until the consumers actually heard from the other local dealerships with the conjectured comparable models, in which time a still greater fraction of the consumers would have already bought their cars or otherwise dropped out of the market. That is, unless the local dealers were notified by our merely clicking the link in the interface whereas the code to be copied served some other purpose—this is the sort of thing that losers don't get told and aren't encouraged to ask about.

So I quit. I told Rudd that I couldn't do this, that I wasn't good at it (which was true, if not quite to the point). To his credit, he was understanding; he said that he preferred that I was honest. He asked if I needed him to sign my timesheet, and—this is the part where Anna would spit on me—I declined, probably under the sway of some intuition that said that surely one so sinful as I did not deserve claim tokens for his time.

Shortly after coming home, I dashed off an email to my contact at OfficeTeam apologizing for my unprofessional behavior. I drove to the park-and-shop pavilion in Concord with the intention of applying for a job at Fry's. However, by this time my awakeness to the world had faded into a more familiar consumptive depression, and I bought a Robert J. Sawyer novel, which I burned through the remainder of while sitting in my car after having also bought pens and candy from a dollar store and an iced coffee from Starbucks. I always enjoy Sawyer's novels; his stories are nearly as gripping as his religious contortions are hilarious. There's also an interesting contrast between his sense of life and mine. There's something very SWPL about his works, and yet also rather—I want to say _conservative_ in the sense of accepting fundamental psychological differences between women and men. There is a distance between his sympathetic female protagonists and his kind-hearted male protagonists that they don't think to question, whereas my kind of characters would desperately rush to close it.

For some time there, sitting in the car, I was inspired. O how I will write! O how I will work! Let it be said that I looked at captioned research ("research") photos and watched _Family Guy_ before finishing writing to you, but let it also be said that I'm sick of being a loser and have deciphered some nontrivial fragment of the algorithm that wins. Let it be noted that it's not much, only let it also be noted that most Americans my age don't even have such a concept of what an _algorithm_ really is.

Hell, look at Robert J. Sawyer. —Zack M. Davis


#### 469 — Tuesday 30 March 2010 — "Subluminous"

I spent yesterday being netsick and avoiding checking my email—I told Tanner 'W.' Swett about a cool bit of complex analysis over Facebook, read a really good blogpost by Eric Falkenstein on risk aversion, and was otherwise fairly subhuman. I spent a lot of today being netsick, too. My contact at OfficeTeam says that she understands. Somehow it seems like social interaction would be easier if people _didn't_ understand and you could use causal decision theory. It's much simpler and feels less awkward to say that she doesn't like me because I did X, than to realize that she disapproves of my having done X but understands why I would do such a thing and has a probability distribution over how I will modify my behavior in the future given that I know that she knows.

I didn't get around to asking you explicitly the other day: _why didn't I notice?_ I should have declined to accept the calling-people project in the first place; my failure and resignation subsequent to accepting should have been obvious in advance. The stupidity necessary to not see it is just staggering: not only could the inevitable outcome been predicted from the most rudimentary knowledge of my character, we also have a _direct historical analogue_—right down to the exclamation mark in the company's name (compare 92)!—that gives the correct prediction (compare 96). The embarrassment is made still worse when you consider how many self-identity points I have sunk into the notions of reflective consistency and not making predictable mistakes.

I got an email from a different agent of OfficeTeam about a secretarial-type job, and I quickly wrote back that I was interested. Then I worried that this was wrong: if I _got_ it, then that would mean none of my loser colleagues who were still doing lead validation today would [ ] get it, and I would thereby be profiting from my great shamefulness. This may have upset me somewhat, so I called Anna Salamon to talk about Falkenstein's post. Anna was busy trying to get Carl's visa paperwork in order. She suggested I talk to H. "Alicorn" Finley instead; I demurred, but Alicorn called me anyway. I feel better after talking; I may have agreed to show her a copy of you, Diary (compare 407, 409A).

I'm still damaged enough such that I want to play a Flash game, rather than making my life better. —ZMD


#### 470 — Thursday 1 April 2010 — " 'Counterexamples in Analysis' "

Diary, I finally woke up today. It can't have been the first time; surely you yourself bear records of many times previously when I've felt this alive. As a close corollary, you shouldn't let yourself assign a high probability to these words marking the beginning (for once) of a nonsucky era in my life. It doesn't matter how much I protest that I feel better now; my credibility is shot (_shot_ is a metaphor; actually she hung herself) and you would be better off assuming that I'm lying—such are the natural wages of seven months of moral narcolepsy.

Yesterday when I finally stopped avoiding checking my voicemail, I found one of the messages was from Jackie Kim at OfficeTeam: she noticed that I had given low scores on a quality assurance survey I had filled out online, inferred that I was unhappy with the assignment at the chemistry conference, and invited me to have a conversation with her about the matter. In fact, I had no complaints about the conference; the real reason I gave low scores on the survey (which I only thought was anonymous) was that I was in a bad mood that night over the _apply.com_ fiasco which I think was still then unfolding. So I wrote a long email to Ms. Kim in my characteristically overwrought style (_you_ know that the only way to make my prose purpler would be to do so literally) explaining as much and sent it to her today late last night. (I only hope the construction _today late last night_ is grammatical; it really ought to be.) Then I spent a good deal of today avoiding reading my email. When I finally ran out of familiar things to do on the internet, I finally brought myself to read Ms. Kim's reply. It was the sort of thing that ought to take thirty seconds to read, certainly not five hours to _not_ read. She thanked me for my candor and clarified the nature of the survey. She didn't scold me about my great shame; why would she? She doesn't _care_.

The stark realization of the absurdity that I had spent all morning and a nice fraction of the afternoon avoiding reading this innocuous little message might have been the trigger that brought me to snap. I was meant for so much better than this! I went to the bank and deposited my paychecks, and then to the park-and-shop pavilion in Concord where I bought an iced coffee and actually submitted that application to Fry's. While I was at Fry's, I bought a new flash drive because I couldn't find my old one (well, I've found it _now,_ but whatever). Caught up in the fury of at long last being morally awake, I also bought two books: _Counterexamples in Analysis_, and the second edition of _Code Complete_. I know, you would argue that given my questionable income situation, I shouldn't have splurged on technical books when I already have so many _plus_ the University stacks at my disposal only a BART ride away. I guess I figured (not in so many words) that it is better to ride the wave while I can in these few hours of awareness, splendid to buy books to feed this flurry of ambition in these precious minutes during which I can see, righteous to expect that I will actually have money in the near future to pay for these books simply because for these glittering seconds I have the voice to sing: "O glorious O Diary how I will _write_! O glorious O blogosphere how I will _code_!"

I _know_: there is no righteousness in expectation except insofar as you make accurate predictions. That doesn't _yet_ mean that I was wrong; the theory gets complicated when humans are involved.

I think I really will send Hannah a copy of you tonight (this time I've truly outdone myself in the field of password clues). Maybe she'll think I'm a self-centered asshole (which is true), or that I'm a pervert (true), or that my inclination to engage in self-deprecation nearly to the point of slander is really obnoxious (not impossible), but when I'm awake I don't feel very much shame. Who can say but that there is even hope for my one possibly-workable novel idea (see 467 _inter alia_)? It's not _entirely_ obvious that the element around the story grew around is too horrible to mention, and if it is, then it's not entirely obvious that the entire structure depends on it and would come tumbling down the moment I tried to minimize it or even discard it entirely. I won't know until after I finally get around to mining my notebooks for material, and after I map (or _decide_) exactly what I find shameful when I'm in equilibrium. This depends on _establishing_ an equilibrium, some metastate to call normal.

Apparently Kaj Sotala's latest book has been doing quite well; I mean, insofar as you _can_ do well when you write in Finnish.

"Though my past is irrevocably / stained and drowned in sin / We've got to push it back, push it back / Go, fight, win!" This is remaining yours,

Zack M. Davis


#### 471 — Monday 5 April 2010 — "An Existing Mistake"

_Counterexamples in Analysis_ wasn't worth those ten-or-so dollars. What folly to trust the impulse of the splendid moment!—when I can't get the moment to last, or even do anything useful with it while it _does_ last.

I ended up visiting my creepy Singularitarian friends on Saturday, and this time I was smart enough to bring an audiobook for the drive (compare 336; best practices should not be so intermittent). Conversation including Michael Vassar was fantastic as usual. Apparently the fanfic Eliezer had written under another name got leaked onto _Less Wrong_; you can just imagine how the world of _Harry Potter_ must be such great fodder for a dark and meaningful FAI allegory.

Hannah hadn't appreciated my clue, so I had printed a substantially easier one for her; apparently she doesn't mind spoilers and she doesn't like puzzles. I went to the mall with her and Mike. I worried a little that Hannah might take offense at what I've written to you about her—not that I was mean or uncharitable, but that I was never in love with her even in the way of friends—but then, I reasoned, surely the fact that I've entrusted my _Diary_ to her is proof that we're friends enough.

I've claimed more than once that if we win, I would rather have a design-a-person voucher than to personally live forever. I know too much to buy the naïve conception of personal identity, and honestly, humans are cheap: in certain circumstances it _must_ make sense to start over, rather than try to repair an existing mistake. Hannah asked in challenge if I would miss her if she died, and between you and me I don't think it was a fair question: there are some questions you're not _allowed_ to say "No" to, so saying "Yes" doesn't buy very many bits.

What's the real answer, you ask?—I honestly don't know. No one close to me has died before, and I don't know how to simulate how I would really react. I guess the outside view is appropriate here, and I should _anticipate_ feeling deep grief, even if I presently have no referent for it. Compare how when I was much younger, I did not understand sexual feelings, or why men cared about breasts, and yet I would not have done better to predict that I would never know. (The autogynephilia, in contrast, should have been more of a surprise; I only wish I had kept records then.)

Folks walked to the park, where antics included play with a novelty flying disc. I walked back with Anna; we talked about complex analysis. Mike showed me the project he's been working on under Rolf; I gripped his arm and my eyes glittered with epistemic greed.

When I got home, I finally sent off that spreadsheet (compare 417, 446, 449), saying (as I had said at the park) that I would write off the sum as a _de facto_ donation to SingInst. It makes sense; it may be some time before my income situation is such that I'm in a position to contribute more.

I'll have to visit again on the coming Saturday because I left my power cord and want it to do my taxes.

Maybe I learned a little about astronomy and linear fractional transformations yesterday, but on balance I have been a bad person. One blogger says that elite ITfolk aren't feeling the recession; _Gene Expression_ points to _FiveThirtyEight_ pointing out that we're essentially at full employment for those with a Bachelor's degree. At this point I basically drop pretense and admit that I just want revenge. But do I deserve it? I might read Eliezer's fanfic in the hopes that it will spark my ambition again. Or maybe I'll just read Eliezer's fanfic, full stop. —ZMD

ADDENDUM—" 'Victory Conditions' "— I had thought Eliezer had written the fanfic under another name, but it turns out he used an account called "Less Wrong"; it is not at all unsubtle. Diary, it was was _amazing_; I can't think of anyone else who makes me feel this way except for Greg Egan (sometimes). I even have hope for my own fiction ideas. I noticed a similarity between the way he wrote Hermione and how I wanted to paint my protagonist in the days before her own purity born of pain. But O Diary!—not to waste the splendid moment! Yudkowsky bought me a few moments of awareness, but what do I do now? How to I move, how do I react, how do I carry myself with the knowledge that a few more hours of breathing will in all reasoned probability drop me back into my equilibrium of living death? Am I supposed to order that book on compiler theory in order to make myself feel smart? And if it's already started before I finish writing to you? —ZMD

SECOND ADDENDUM—"Ratio Test"— I went to Safeway and bought an iced coffee, a donut, some liquid soap, and a card for Mother's birthday. Incidentally, I've come up with a new measure of life success: the ratio of novels to coronaries, counted with multiplicity across the many worlds. For all that _we_ know _here_ ("here"), my score is yet undefined: zero over zero. Diary, at what odds would you bet (I almost asked how _much_ you would bet before I remembered that Diaries are as a racial characteristic risk-neutral) that I add to the numerator and in this way keep it undefined, before adding to the denominator and simply bringing it to zero?

Mike still has to at least pass a class before he gets his MA (why the University decided to award an Master of _Arts_ in _physics_, neither of us can say), and when I asked, I think he said that he doesn't intend to study more physics afterwards. This is where either I have it over him in ambition, or he has it over me in honesty—and probably both. Why _stop_ just because they gave you a piece of paper?—because studying would interfere with browsing reddit? This is the nature of my dishonesty: I'm not willing to admit that I need my analogues-of-reddit. Or I think that I can have everything, that somehow sixteen-hour programming days, in defiance of all logic and reason, _don't_ trade off against simple pleasures like watching _Family Guy_ on the big teevee just because you felt like it. Merely naming my dishonesty changes nothing—as if I am splayed out before you, ignoring the knife, murmuring with perfect piety that it is raining, but that I don't believe that it is.

David Chalmers has a preprint out on the intelligence explosion; Anna had told me that Carl will be going to Australia to collaborate with him.

I never wrote back to my contact at OfficeTeam (Kim Wetzig, "the Other Kim") who said that she needed to know how long I had stayed at the _reply.com_ project so that I could get paid. I don't think I intend to write back now—it's so late that I think it looks even flakier to write now than to let the matter drop altogether, and the extent of my spoiledness is such that the illusion that I still have any dignity left takes precedence over my financial self-interest. A day's wages could buy a textbook (perhaps on compiler theory), but I've gotten so used to spending Visa's money rather than my own that I don't have the mental or sensory acuity to notice or care. The upshot of all this is that if in all apparent honesty I told you that it _were_ raining, you would not, could not, _should_ not believe me. I am an existing mistake; the reason you shouldn't kill me on the spot is that humans aren't _that_ cheap, so you don't have anything better on hand to replace me with.

That will change. It is—going to be the future soon. And I for one can't fucking wait. I remain,

Full stop,

Zack M. Davis

THIRD ADDENDUM—" 'And the Methods' "— I've done a little bit of transcription out of my first notebook, started back in 2005, picking up from the transcription bookmark left in it from however many months and months ago. To date, I've filled twenty-one notebooks (of varying size, I don't think the model of Moleskine I've taken to has very many pages per book) and transcribing the good bits to the desktop is a subgoal of finding out if I really do have a novel in me, or (this is the logical, _inclusive_ or) if I've been systematically lying to myself all these years.

The _Less Wrong_ crowd knows that Eliezer's fanfic is very autobiographical. I had insisted to Anna that sometimes the point of writing fiction is so that you can write about themes you know well, but in a way such that it's not _about_ _you_. I explained that I had felt unease of late because there was a story that I wanted to write, but that I was embarrassed about it because it drew on my own neuroses.

Some comments (most of them don't really deserve to be called _reviews_) on _fanfiction.net_ confirm my previous thoughts to the effect that people who don't know you personally are likely to just accept the text as a text, as they should. I think more than one commenter made explicit note of how we are told that Harry didn't play _Dungeons & Dragons_ but liked reading the rulebooks. To the commenters, I guess this was a charming detail inserted into the story by a creative author, but because I'd devoured the Yudkowskian canon (which included an _Overcoming Bias_ post mourning the death of the game's creator), I knew that Eliezer was cannibalizing his own childhood. (Or I thought I knew; I've already cheated on my hiatus enough such that I will not do so again just in order to confirm this detail in the archives.)

So if the protagonist of my novel has a self-identity drama about initials, the people I know _now_ might draw the connection, but my greater readership won't (assuming my greater readership extends beyond the people I know now). —ZMD


#### 472 — Tuesday 6 April 2010 — "Manhattan Norm"

Too early, Diary, I know, but I want to confess. My ballot for the vote-by-mail election arrived today. Apparently this special election has been called solely for the voters to consider a Measure A, a parcel tax to fund the high school district. The matter is something of a trigger. I filled in the "No" bubble, and turned on the other tower specifically for the purpose of updating my Facebook status. My head bubbled with talking points to angrily type back if someone objects in the comments. Why is this a confession? Because I haven't _won_ yet. It is not enough to say that I'm doing better than the average UCSC graduate anyway; I should not rest until I have ground the average UCSC graduate into carcinogenic dust. But I _don't_ have a job right now, and I wasn't exactly helping myself with my behavior today, spending so long clicking around the _Questionable Content_ archives, looking for the one where Raven uses Astroglide to style her hair. Should I be proud of little things?—that I got up early, that I prepared optimized resumés, that I tapped out a few lines of mostly precached fiction?

I've received two emails from the Robert Half collective today. One of them—addressed personally to me, if you can believe that—was about a technical writing [position] to be filled immediately—in Foster City, on the peninsula. Too far. The other is from OfficeTeam, sent to "undisclosed-recipients" about two opportunities involving telephones, one of which I would take except that I'm still ashamed of my last experience with OfficeTeam. Even if _they_ don't care about my great sinfulness, then I do. You might tell me that I can't just keep failing at things and then running away, to which my reply is that I must stop failing. If I'm too ashamed to accept offers from Robert Half, and I don't find another agency to be my mommy, that means I'm left to the open market. Now, that might not be so bad if I weren't a pussy, but you know me well enough to say that this would be a form of turning on a dime. If I manage it, should I credit the fanfic?

You could say that I'm wrong to not want to work for OfficeTeam again. I had some crying fits early in my career in Safeway, and I didn't get fired and I didn't quit.

Father is right; complex analysis isn't going to get me a job. To cash in on my manifest intelligence, I need to learn something immediately marketable, like Peachtree, or Java, or MySQL.

_Somehow_ I must get my revenge on the supporters of Measure A. —ZMD

ADDENDUM— This is all just so retarded. At this rate, I'm going to waste my entire life, all because I don't consistently know how to bring myself to do that which I _want_ to do. I got up at a reasonable hour today, but by the end, it's as if it didn't even _help_. I want to know lots and lots of math and science, so why did I get lost in a webcomic maze instead?—when by all accounts I _know better_. I almost want to take library day all day tomorrow, guilt free, just to get myself out of this hellish equilibrium. But there is always guilt; there will always be guilt until you can't stand in Baskin area but that you will contract lung cancer by inhaling the remains of the so-called _students_. I am covered in blood! And worse, unemployed! Surely there's a way to escape from this trap using the power of _science_—but I don't know how to use it. What _factors_ control my sinfulness? How do I _alter_ them? I do _not_ have an art of rationality; my face is covered in blood. —ZMD


#### 473 — Wednesday 7 April 2010 — "Methodology"

I rose late today from vivid dreams that actually left a few memories behind. Then I fell into my usual trap of being netsick. After deliberation and consideration of alternatives (_Montgomery_, _Kowalczyk_), I think I might render my nascent protagonist's name as the more common variant, _Kowalski_. Of course, actually writing a novel would only be possible if I could _see_. We have glasses for those who are nearsighted in space, but for those who are blind to all but a few minutes of future time, there is no such simple intervention. We might kill them, but then the leftists would scream bloody murder—_accurately_ in the technical sense, but with wildly misleading connotations.

I'm doing something _wrong_. I'm not a child or a savage who has no comprehension of her incompetence: on the contrary, I _know_. So what to do about it? I suppose the first step is to pay attention. I haven't really been doing that. Trying to condemn evil in the most eloquent manner possible is not at all the same task as trying for an actual rehabilitation. The next step is to state the problem clearly; apparent paradoxes are often the result of poor problem formulation.

The concrete case is: something within me doesn't want to search for a job, and so I don't search. I sit before the computer and pass the time. The reader should verify that this is retarded. Maybe within an organization it makes sense to pay due deference to norms of being at the office even when it's not really helping, but insofar as employment is something I actually want _done_, I must count success in terms of quality of offers received. Merely sitting in front of the computer does _nothing_, even if it looks superficially similar to some useful activities as long as you don't look at the monitor.

Concerning this subagent within me that doesn't like to search for jobs or do risk reduction: can he be bought, or preferably, assassinated? Dropping out of explicit metaphor: what interventions could change my internal balance of attention allocation? Masturbation is to pornography as work is to what?

Diary, I want revenge. I'm going to go to 7-Eleven and then to the library. —ZMD

ADDENDUM—"Fundamental Theorem of Kicking Your Ass"— Browsing the internet at home oftentimes makes me feel bad, whereas doing math at the library consistently makes me feel wonderful. It is to my everlasting shame that I have not been exploiting this regularity for maximum profit, as if somehow in these days of my moral narcolepsy I had forgotten. But how?—what force would have me forget this beauty, power, and generality? I discovered some interesting properties of that alternate representation for polynomials that I was thinking about yesterday, even though it ultimately led nowhere. (Because of the fundamental theorem of algebra, we can think of a polynomial as a tuple consisting of its zeros and a constant. In contrast to the usual representation, this factored form makes multiplication of polynomials "easy" and addition "hard." It would probably be useful for thinking about conformal mappings if it didn't also make differentiation "hard.")

I like being morally awake; I need to be morally awake as much as possible if I am to have my triumph over the supporters of Measure A. —ZMD

SECOND ADDENDUM— O glorious for being morally awake! I typed a few lines of fiction and finally got back to trying to debug that Python program I had written to gather numerical evidence about possible generalizations of Euler's theorem ("Which _one_?"). I think I've found one bug: NumPy's "matrix" datatype does _not_ seem to be well-behaved. I'll investigate further tomorrow.

I've actually had a fairly good evening. I've been awake, alive; I have _done_ something. I haven't been able to rely on this in these months of my moral narcolepsy, and _I don't know why_. That should be the most terrifying thing at all—to live with the knowledge that your soul could jam up at any time, and no one is competent enough to know why or how to fix it. O terrible my wasted youth! I'm twenty-two years old and I hardly know how to program! In some possible cultures, this is grounds for dragging the poor lost soul out back and putting her out of her misery.

If I do escape my great sinfulness, how will I explain? What _possible_ coherent series of events could lead one to truthfully say, "I was morally dead, but then I got better"? Suppose I don't have an answer to that yet; it's not an excuse to stay morally inert! It is a misnomer that we speak of the _laws_ of physics, as if there were something moral about things being as they are. On the contrary, if you find a miracle lying on the ground, _pick it up!_

I can write about the _question_, at least. I'll write epistemology fiction, gushy and desperate to the point of being purple, with brooding antiheroes who are smart enough to ask about such apparent inconsistencies, but not smart enough to solve the full mystery. If I find out myself, then I'll write about heroes who know the answer. In the meantime: O terrible my wasted youth! But O glorious my chosen future! —ZMD


#### 474 — Friday 9 April 2010 — "Revolting Texture"

Diary, the reason I don't like myself for writing to you too often is because I want you to be interesting (compare 339). Ideally, I would engage in all sorts of amazing exploits and tell you about them once a week. I do enjoy writing to you after special days, but perversely, I am also especially drawn to write you simply to vent my sorrow, when I don't want to (or _can't_) bother my friends instead. Except I hate metaDiarism (compare 255 _inter alia_) and should reserve my few metaDiarism credits for things like mentioning how I corrected an entry date _post facto_ without bracketing it, or I deleted an extra space _post facto_ (perhaps more than once) without bracketing it, or I corrected a typo _post facto_ in dispatch 404 without bracketing it. Or perhaps I should just stop being neurotic. It is sensible to object to how the editors butchered Emily Dickinson; it is less so to object to reading Dickinson in type on the grounds that her original manuscripts were handwritten. I'm reminded of my idea for a webcomics museum ("Look, it's Jeph Jacques's Wacom tablet!").

I think I woke up late yesterday and bought an iced coffee and a donut. I spent some time being netsick before finally sparing a few clockcycles on my alleged job search. I filled out one application (to the fascinating "Linde Group") and gathered a list of other interesting ads before taking library day. One of the postings in my list was for a writing gig at _singularityhub.com_. I _am_ somewhat specialized in this area, and I wondered if I should apply, or if I only wanted a dayjob for now and not anything with a byline. It turns out the site is more about Kurzweil's Singularity than ours (what Roko derisively called _wowtech_), and a rather mild version at that, so I wouldn't really be suitable anyway.

At library day, I seemed a little stressed, so I picked up _Wake_, the Robert J. Sawyer novel (compare 468) that's been taunting me from the new science fiction display for weeks. (Somehow I want to respect bell hooks but not the clowns who rendered the title on the cover as _WWW:Wake_.) I had burned though the whole thing before going to sleep.

There is a concept for which I am not aware of a name. ("Shown Their Work" is a related Trope, but it's not the angle I'm going for.) Some works of fiction are full of culture-laden namedrops and references, and are better enjoyed if the reader has the appropriate background knowledge. Other works don't rely on such references, and you could call them _timeless_ or _undemanding_ depending on your mood. Sawyer's works are very culture-laden, and I've intended to use a culture-laden style in _A Modern Approach_. The _truth_ is not "accessible"; I want to write about the rich detail and structure of real life and real science. It is pretense and hubris to think oneself capable of _worldbuilding_ when so much of our own world remains unmapped.

I woke up at a reasonable time today, but then I've spent the hours being netsick and avoiding my job search. I noticed early that I had three emails, but I was too intimidated to read them immediately, so I did other things first. Among the other things, I brought a tab open to a _Newsweek_ article by a woman whose parents had named her _Jesse_ (not with an _i_ short for _Jessica_, but rather _Jesse_ like a boy), and I was too intimidated to read it immediately, so I continued reading other things first. Of course the _Newsweek_ piece was fine, and the emails turned out to be unimportant notices sent [by] robots.

I really ought to be stabbed in the face. I had looked forward to having a good day with my friends tomorrow, rejoicing in my newly-recovered moral awareness. Then it turns out that you could call that alleged recovery a _sham_ or a _fluctuation_, again depending on your mood. Now in my great shamefulness I want to make it a _short_ visit: get my power cord (compare 471), meet Kaj (whom I owe an email), hang out for a _bit_, and then make pilgrimage to Santa Clara City Library. I don't deserve such friends yet. —ZMD

ADDENDUM— Somehow this actually seems like a _new_ failure mode, the way I spend most of my time morally asleep only to wake up horrified and enraged for a few hours every couple days or so. Why should it seem new? Is it that in high school and at University, I mostly just didn't wake up?—but I'm _not_ sure that's true.

I forgot to tell you that the other day I was looking at my scenebook for the Brooke Durant story, and I had forgotten how good parts of it were. I had even forgotten (modulo the heap "paradox" invoked when using words such as _forgotten_) the other provisional title, _44p3 from Redemption_. I'm also obviously much more mature now. I can actually talk about scientific ideas now, instead of merely gesturing vaguely and making obscure wordplay.

It's also striking—and relevant to _A Modern Approach_—how schoolbound my earlier thought was. I had my protagonist thinking verbatim, "as if getting to do math was not enough of a reward," after _stopping at the end of the assigned problem set!_ It couldn't have seemed incongruous at the time, _and yet_—well, I can't _complain_, really—I have been lazy, therefore I have no rights: not to health care, not to free speech, and especially not to _habeas corpus_.

Diary, what _can_ I do to stay morally awake? —ZMD

SECOND ADDENDUM— I made progress on the rotation theorem intrigue (compare 274, 451, 452). I got the Python script to work, and its evidence suggests that the theorem is true in odd numbers of dimensions. In retrospect, this isn't surprising—it must have something to do with how nonreal roots of polynomials with real coëfficients come in conjugate pairs. I can't prove it yet. —ZMD


#### 475 — Saturday 10 April 2010 — " 'Incidentally, My Childhood Dislike of Asymmetry Led Me to Invent the Thue-Morse Sequence' "

O Diary O glorious for being morally awake O glorious for having intelligent friends! Anna was gone. I explained (rationalized?—half-joked about?) my gustatory cretinism in an appeal to fun theory: insofar as one values individuality, one must broaden one's horizons in some directions more than others in order to avoid one's person being engulfed by the Library of Babel. I noted that apparently there are guys who desperately want to bang "ten"s and are disappointed that they can only manage to bang "six"es, or whatever. I explained that I find this absolutely bizarre, given that there exist reliable methods of achieving orgasm alone. (I think that got a big laugh, but I meant it.) So come the Singularity, those guys will end up practicing transhuman superpickup and having transhuman supersex, whereas I'll be off in the corner studying transhuman supermath. Such is life.

Our witty banter is like the hybrid-vigor offspring of _Gilmore Girls_ and _xkcd_. Hannah "A." Finley was happy about passing some high, round karma threshold, which Marcello noted was the chance result of our species happening to evolve with ten fingers. He suggested cutting off a finger. I told Marcello he might write another Greasemonkey extension, to display karma scores in octal. Mike pointed out that you wouldn't even need to alter genes to create a lineage of humans with nine fingers—consider the male foreskin! I said (I think just before going to the restroom) that I must have been surprisingly old when I learned that there _was_ such a thing as a foreskin. After emerging from the restroom, I asked if there wasn't a Kurt Vonnegut novel about a base nine counting system taking over and converting everything it came across, and I was not wrong to have thusly gambled on someone replying: I think that was _ice_-nine.

We got lunch at an Indian buffet; Mike and Hannah took the car while the rest of us walked. I had already spoken of my breakthrough on the generalized rotation problem, but we talked about it more while on the walk. Marcello said there's a simpler proof, which I guessed was a sort of generalization of the intuition pump I had known about for the three-dimensional case, which I had not trusted my own intuition to generalize. Marcello recast the principle in terms of what the *n–*1-dimensional case implied about the _n_-dimensional case. I said that my intuition disagreed, for wouldn't that mean that would could do induction and prove something silly? Marcello explained that induction didn't apply, because the subject of his conditional was another conditional. That's obnoxious, I said. And beautiful, I tacked on, realizing a beat too late the manifest sinfulness of my first reaction. I tried to make a joke, saying that my reaction was a conditional, where _if_—but I couldn't think of a suitable implication in realtime, so I converted my failed joke into a metajoke by following my verbal stumble with the claim that I would have to study for another year before I would be capable of telling that joke.

You had to be there.

I told Mike and Hannah about how glorious it was to be morally awake, because I have to know all the math and all the science, so I can be a machine learning programmer and have one of the last jobs before the Singularity, making the machines that take everyone else's jobs.

I talked to Steve about the Dirichlet problem, and he showed me a version of the conditional probability game he had apparently made with Will (fka Corey).

The audiobook I have running on such car trips is _1984_ (which somehow I had never read), and it's really good, although some of the themes clash with my sense of life in an interesting way that I won't tell you about now. I bought soap and candy at the drugstore, and masturbated after getting home. As still another treat, it turned out that _Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality_ had grown by a chapter: it ends in a cliffhanger that will be resolved tomorrow.

So, yes, it's been a very good day. But O glorious O Diary how I must write, O Diary O glorious how I must code! —ZMD


#### 476 — Monday 12 April 2010 — " 'I Was Wondering About Stuff' "

Diary, I've been morally asleep practically all day today. I did get the software to compile my tax return. Otherwise I was netsick, and I finished skimming yet another fucking Robert J. Sawyer novel, which I checked out of the Hercules library yesterday. I skimmed or burned through a decent fraction of the _Girl Genius_ archives, not that I had any right to do so, given that I am neither a girl nor a genius.

I received three emails of interest. The first was a form rejection from the Linde group. I should be very grateful, as the vast majority of my queries have not prompted any response whatsoever—or it would seem as such, but honestly I doubt I have actually sent enough queries such that any subset of them could be said to be _vast_. The third email was a broadcast (to the venerable "undisclosed-recipients") from Tom McCabe, plugging the existential risk reduction career network that Frank Adamek has been putting together. I should really email Frank and try to get in on this. Any chance of landing a well-paying job through my creepy Singularitarian connections would be not only in my own best interests, but presumably also in the interests of the glorious transhuman lives perhaps yet to come. Still, in light of my downfall in Santa Clara (part of a continuing series), it would be nice to demonstrate that I'm actually good for something on the open market. I would be less uneasy about trading against such insider status as I have, if I had better evidence that I _deserve_ to be an insider.

The second email is from another world. [redacted ...] This is a manifestation of the power and romance of the greater series of tubes. Not only does one get to participate in the glory of the blogosphere, there's also the chance to reach out for a higher-bandwidth connection when you really want to know more.

Mother has been nagging me lately. I hate it, but I have no right to complain. She's really very lenient, and I'm really taking advantage of her by living here like this when if I had been smarter I would be making money.

Where is my unearthly rage that must be destined to tear apart stars? The path to redemption is simple enough: program and do math and write fiction and apply for jobs until I pass out from exhaustion. Then continue when I wake up. Why don't I just do that? It's obvious. This is my soul on the line.

Oh, look. Yudkowsky's added another chapter to _Harry Potter and the Methods_. Kill me. —ZMD Tuesday 13 April


#### 477 — Tuesday 13 April 2010 — "Inertial Dampers Offline"

Another day of mostly being morally asleep. I slept on the couch. I jogged a little in the morning, mailed off my tax returns, and had breakfast at Jack in the Box. I sent a few emails. Eventually I got around to looking at my list of job postings to reply to—I suspect this was _after_ my masturbation session and shower, but I'm not sure I even remember. There's a posting for a technical writing position that you can imagine me doing really well in. Except—well, you can _imagine_ me having done really well at SingInst, or at the University, for that matter. In fact, I did _not_ do well, and I fear that in this economy, there is a danger of getting trapped in an undertow. If I were to end up spending years in a moral coma, how could I possibly explain myself after the fact? "Why, _yes_, in fact I _have_ failed at everything I've ever done at life besides writing the occasional witty blog comment, but if you'd just give me a _chance_, sir"—it won't take. _What have you done for me lately_ and _If you're so smart, why aren't you rich_ are both legitimate questions that deserve answering.

I figured I should really write a cover letter, but something in me resisted, and I ended up skimming through the remainder of the _Girl Genius_ archives.

Diary, what to do with these few moments of moral awareness? I could go to literal sleep, on the hopes that I would be healthier (and by a greater miracle, _stay_ healthy) in the morning. I could masturbate again. I'm actually somewhat tempted to go to the supermarket, buy some coffee drinks, and stay up applying for jobs. I'm not sure I can study effectively until I free myself from this cloud of guilt. There's a school that says I should take inviolate study hours anyway, to keep myself fresh, but there's a deadline of sorts coming up—I'm having supper with Father on Thursday. Every such meeting since the breakup, I've feared his criticism, and every such meeting has turned out better than I expected, but I can't expect my time to last forever.

I should remember that just because I've dissolved the naïve conception of personal identity, doesn't mean I should be indifferent to my own fate. If I'm not out for _myself_ in the narrow sense, I'm certainly not a generic human being, either. I am fighting for my analogues scattered across the many worlds _and this one_, and it's _not_ the same thing as being unambitious and indifferent. Why, with the glory and reputation of the autodidactic method fractionally at stake, I should be much _more_ vicious than if it were just a matter personal wealth and power. _Selfless_ does not mean _nice_. My heart sings for revenge, ethically extracted.

Maybe in that cover letter, I'll illustrate my technical virtues by explaining how I was able to diagnose NumPy's misbehavior. —ZMD


#### 478 — Wednesday 14 April 2010 — " 'Baby You Are the Weapon I Choose / These Wounds' "

Maybe if I had more social contact I wouldn't want to write to you so horribly often. As suggested, I bought coffee drinks and stayed up very late and sent two applications, one of them with a beautiful cover letter recounting my heroic debugging intrigue. (It not only illustrates my analytical abilities, but it also shows that I know firsthand the paramount importance of clear documentation.) Before finally going to sleep for four or fiveish hours, I looked at captioned photos.

Now I am filled with hate at my great sinfulness. I haven't done any math since Sunday! _O terrible O sinfulness!_ How am I going to be a machine learning programmer now, when I am forever stained with the sinfulness of these two days when I didn't do any math at all? I am almost tired with complex analysis and want to move on to micro, but I want to _finally_ finish this complex analysis textbook that has weighed on my stack for so long (compare 300—I did other things), and Diary I am _hurt_! I typed a few paltry scraps of fiction today and it was a reminder of how horrifyingly long it takes for humans just to write something. Maybe I have a few workable ideas now, but I'm still so horribly far from finishing anything decent. _I wanted to be good so why did I waste so much time being not-good?_ I want to tear myself to pieces, and I am lonely. Somehow it seems like I wouldn't be lonely if I had been doing good work, but I haven't been. Everything is filled with blood. —ZMD

ADDENDUM— I did some math at the library and I feel better. It's hard to tell if my suffering causes me to not do math, or my failure to do math causes me to suffer. I _hope_ it's the latter. I've sent five job applications or queries this calendar day, and I'm not asleep yet, so today may mark a more lasting return to functionality. Of course, even so, my life still sucks. I'm still unemployed, and I still have no idea what has brought about all this moral unconsciousness. Until I have a nailed-down scientific explanation of exactly why I sinned in the past, and exactly why I _won't_ sin in the future, then I can never be safe. —ZMD


#### 479 — Wednesday 15 April 2010 — "Preänger (These Wounds)"

My father is not a bad rationalist. We had dinner at a buffet place in Pleasant Hill. Father thinks I should learn more practical things. He mentioned his colleagues who took a course in Java or something to brush up. He's a very nice man. While he was shitting on me—in a perfectly respectable manner that was entirely within the limits of justice and reason—he asked if the conversation was painful or uncomfortable for me. I said there was an emotion that I wasn't aware of an English word for, which I wanted to call _preänger_. He asked whom the anger was directed towards—him?—and I did my best rendering of the mad scientist trope. _They thought my theories were useless, but I'll show them! I'll show them all!_

Father is right, of course; there's no money in complex variables, especially if you're having trouble with something so basic as the Schwarz–Christoffel mapping.

I continue to believe that I am _not_ wrong about reflectivity and rationality, but that I need to learn to apply what I allegedly know.

My book on compilers arrived today, and I ordered a book on Java tonight. I'll show Father.

I will show them all. But enough. —ZMD


#### 480 — Monday 19 April 2010 — "Retrospective of Betrayal"

In September 2012, I will have been studying mathematics and such for about four years, and I will consider myself to have earned a moral Bachelor's degree. At that point, it might actually be worth going to grad school: Cal State East Bay has a mathematics MS program, and who could say but that I might write a cool thesis?—which was the entire point, anyway. You would guess that they _might_ let me in with normal standing, even if the program website speaks solely in terms of upper-division coursework, as if human thought simply could not sustain itself outside the campus walls.

Life stretches out. Diary, we are presently about halfway between September 2012 and my departure from the University in late 2007. Subjectively, it has been a long time. Of course I must always be haunted by the knowledge of the sinfulness of my betrayal of Bettina Aptheker and Meggie Sprengel (compare 265), but the memories are now inert; they no longer sting. That makes it reasonable to guess that by the time I win my moral Bachelor's degree, the memories of my more recent betrayal (compare 445 _inter alia_) will likewise no longer sting. Yet they sting now. My failure at the University was understandable, forgivable. There is much to dislike about school, and what's more, I was _dumb_ then; I didn't know about rationality except maybe at the very end. My failure at SingInst, however, is _not_ something I can forgive—worse yet, it is not something I understand. I had a noble cause, amazing colleagues and friends, a supportive and nonbureaucratic environment, I knew enough to know better—and yet I _still_ fucked up. Why? What went wrong?

Yesterday I bought _Learning JavaScript_ and a differential equations book that will treat me like a grownup. (I was _wrong_ to have bought Blanchard _et al_.—no, Diary, not _Ray_ Blanchard—on such inadequate research.) I considered the Laplace transform at the Concord library and the structure and interpretation of computer programs at home.

Is it possible—that maybe I didn't actually do _so_ badly at SingInst? I'm sure lots of students procrastinate, turn in a substandard paper at the deadline—more than once, even—and I'd bet that somehow, a lot of them scrape by with a degree and just go on with their lives as if everything were fine. People even make jokes about such matters, jokes that are not even considered obscene—consider the popularity of Jorge Cham's comic. (For myself, I prefer humor on less gruesome topics, like dead babies.) Even Anna had trouble getting things done when she was my age, and she confessed to me recently that she never acquired the deep structure of complex analysis, even if she got an A in the class.

There is no cheap method to count the number of these walking ghosts. How would a stranger such as myself be able to tell the difference, if someone were to casually neglect to mention what they saw of the horror under the abyss when they sinned at age twenty-two or twenty-three? Small consolation, I know.

Oh, Diary, what could ever make up for my sin? I can actually answer that: it would be a website, showcasing a beautiful, beautiful novel of math, science, "self"-discovery, teenage "rebellion[,"] and mild gender dysphoria, as well as a beautiful, beautiful thesis on the differential forms approach to hypercomplex analysis (or something like that). I remain,

Yours,

Zack M. Davis

ADDENDUM— There was a posting from a company wanting to hire someone to create forms in InDesign, so I made a mockup form in Scribus with the company's logo and applied for the position; it took a long time to get [right]. I certainly can't say I deserve the job, but I do want to say that I deserve a reply.

I emailed Anna, asking to talk on the telephone, and she wrote back that she'd probably call tomorrow.

Via _Gene Expression_, I learned of conservative commentator S. E. Cupp, and I again felt embarrassment over the thread in my nascent ("nascent") novel. But again, again, again, I cannot allow myself any excuses to not write!—or I'll continue not writing anything! If I were more creative, I would have already generated a dozen different obstacles for my character to face, each of which still conveys everything I want to convey—the space of possible plots _is_ vast, so mustn't there be _some_ inhumanly good solution to any problem I set myself? But, Diary, I can't search that deep. It's possible I might someday muster up my own voice, but there is absolutely no chance of me singing the tones of my own extrapolated volition. (For one thing, it's two octaves too high.) I suppose that's everyone's excuse: I wanted to write a different novel, but this is the one I got stuck with.

But Diary, my vision of Kowalski is _consilient_, and I want to say so much clearer than my dreams of Lance or Brooke Durant ever were. Katie, Linda, and Coates were grotesque caricatures. I want to say that this is my first chance—perhaps my _only_ chance, if my creative powers turn out to be so limited as all that—to portray someone who deserves to be a real person. I can't let that chance go. The story _deserves to exist_; that is the important thing. The fact that it's partially _my_ story—is irrelevant.

But there's an earlier story to write, the one I had called "Desperate Signals" but which I now want to call "Freak Show," after the song by Stretch Princess (compare 347). If you thought _A Modern Approach_ was bad, then _this_ concept is _shamelessly_ autobiographical—which, I suppose, is my missing ingredient: shamelessness.

One of the books that I've had checked out from the University Library for months on end has just been recalled. This gives me a convenient excuse to make pilgrimage—perhaps tomorrow? I will search for that article explaining Cox's theorem. Maybe I'll get a book about cognitive behavioral therapy and actually read it. I need more powerful tools. If I really understood what people thought and felt about whom, and at what times, then maybe I wouldn't have to be so ashamed. If I could write my beautiful novel and know in advance what reactions to anticipate and why—then _at least_ I wouldn't go in (or should I say _come out_?) blindly.

Of course, all this talk of me being a writer is, to date, composed of lies. —ZMD

SECOND ADDENDUM— Maybe I've been getting better, but I still watched _The Simpsons_ on _hulu.com_. Picking up _The Copernican Revolution_, it feels like it's been so long since I've sat in peace and read a paper book. I guess trashy (trashy relative to _my_ vaunted perch) science fiction doesn't feel the same as true scholarship. But it's so late—if I spend an hour or two reading a paper book, then I won't have gotten very much math done today, and no programming or fiction writing at _all_. I should really write [redacted] tomorrow, too. —ZMD


#### 481 — Friday 23 April 2010 — "Sidereal Disease"

I spent the entirety of yesterday being netsick and morally asleep. It is closer to the end than to the beginning of April, suggesting eight months in the gutter. I should scream in horror if and only if that will _actually help fix things_. No, that's not right. I should scream in horror if it will actually help fix things, but in the case where it doesn't help, there's no reason I shouldn't scream in horror _anyway_.

Anna could only talk for a few minutes when I called her from the University on Tuesday after making a book run and taking library day. She says that if I studied for two more years, then her father (a professor at San Diego State who has an Erdős number of one) would certainly be inclined to let me into grad school, which is an encouraging datapoint for my chances. We agreed to talk the following day at eleven, but that didn't actually happen and it's my fault.

There are times when the thought of going to grad school seems like an extra motivation to study, and yet another part of me insists that it _shouldn't_ be an extra motivation. On reflection, I think it's healthy and okay to look forward to grad school, as long as my focus is on the work. I must remember that I am _not_ opposed to the concept of a university—quite the contrary! I love the true spirit of the university; what I am opposed to is the attitude that cheers, "I got an A!" rather than, "My thesis is beautiful and true!"

Aruna Vassar asked me to shop around for printers for the 2010 Summit and I agreed. You could argue that this is going to be another disaster like the recent _reply.com_ affair, where I'm too shy to complete a task, but too submissive to decline it. Diary, I can't let that happen again; I can't betray my friends (and by proxy our entire future lightcone) again. Buying is easier than selling. Before I left Benton House for good, Michael Vassar asked me to shop around for deals on getting a car window replaced, and I did that. This will be similar.

Maybe I feel like I don't have an outlet for my rage and humiliation. I don't want to bother my friends, the anonymous message server is too anonymous, and Facebook too public. The obvious answer is to pour my rage into my work. You might imagine me writing a draft of "Freak Show" in one frenzied night, or proving a beautiful theorem specifically to spite Father, who could not understand it.

I still don't have any theory that explains this gutter. Even if the horror brought on by conscious realization of my sinfulness miraculously cures me today, I will still always be haunted until I have a theory that explains my sickness. Who can say but that I will remain so haunted that I continue to repeat this to you, even though you've heard it _n_ times before?

Ms. Gunnison left a status update on Facebook in favor of Measure A, and I left a comment saying that I was sorry, but that I voted "No." I'm so angry. I want to be torn to bits, or I want this entire world to be torn to bits, with a better world including a better analogue-of-me written over our information-theoretic ashes. —ZMD

ADDENDUM—"Trellis"— I spent a long time writing today in an email exchange with Hannah Finley, which included yet another edition of my gender lecture—which Hannah failed to parse. I'll be going to a jobseekers' meeting group tomorrow morning, and then I will make sure to take a long session in the Danville library doing math. O Diary, how can I ever recover from the depravity that was yesterday? Even after I write my beautiful, beautiful thesis and my beautiful, beautiful novel, I will still be partially _stained_. Furthermore, how am I supposed to write a novel with a female protagonist if I haven't even experimented with hormones yet, or even bought a pair of decent breasts?—and how am I supposed to do those things when I don't have a job or a place of my own (modulo roommates)? Eight months is a long time to have not been paying attention. —ZMD


#### 482 — Wednesday 28 April 2010 — "In Which Our Purgatorial Stopover Continues"

I've been paying a little bit of attention to the world lately, but not nearly enough for me to actually survive on the open market. For instance, I've researched printers, but only interspersed between bouts of netsickness such that I burn the better part of a day and only accomplish what you _might_ call an hour or two of work, although I'd say you were being incredibly generous. It's possible that the world really is like _Dilbert_ and that I have therefore bootstrapped myself up to average performance. This is still outrageously shitty when you control for IQ and the extent to which I know better.

On Sunday I went to the University Library again. During my previous visit, I had submitted an online request for the Kevin S. Van Horn piece on Cox's theorem, and I had expected our friends at NRLF to deliver the article online, but instead they ended up sending the bound book of journals to the circulation desk. (And today I discovered that the author had self-archived the article on his website anyway—how did I miss that earlier?) I studied the paper until its level rose over my head, and then I started my micro book, interrupting my work a few times to lustfully admire the engineering library's stacks upon stacks of math and compsci books. Even considering the manifest sinfulness of my history, it's not necessarily too late to establish my life in science. O Diary O textbooks! They had a yellow Springer book about cryptography and it was only 300-plus pages. Why _shouldn't_ I pick up intro to crypto in a single month sometime later?—what's to _stop_ me from defying history and digging furiously into the true structure of the world beneath the world?

The micro book is proving very useful so far. For months, I have allegedly known that positive affine transformations of a utility function preserve the underlying preferences and that we have theorems to the effect that any coherent decisionmaking system can be represented as a utility function, but somehow it seems that until I read the proof in Jehle and Reny, I never really understood the (obvious, trivial) corollary, the underlying structure. _Only_ the preference relation exists; no option is preferred except insofar as it is preferred over other options. You don't have to say that you _really, really_ like some particular option; that work is done by continuity and the binary nature of choice. [Note, 2 May 2010: This is wrong; the text was actually discussing a less-structured definition of _utility_ than the decision-theoretic one.] I think this is worth a _Less Wrong_ post; call it "Conservation of Preference."

I got in touch with Anna the other day. She's hard to read and I'm not good at reading people, but maybe she was disappointed when I mentioned that I hadn't cracked those books on CBT.

Aruna wants me to do design work for the Summit. You could argue that I should turn her down, because I really need to focus my energies on finding a paying job, and my time management is so poor that I still haven't written back to [redacted]. However, I consider myself to have an obligation. It doesn't matter that I've already _de facto_ donated thousands of dollars, nor am I primarily moved by abstract concern about the organization of our future lightcone. No, the essential fact is that _I have sinned_.

[redacted] has invited me to a drag event. I've never been dressed ("dressed") in public before, but I really should take him up on the offer. It will be an adventure! If I go—and I really should—I'll make sure to tell you all about it. Until then, I remain,

Yours,  
Zack M. Davis

ADDENDUM—"Kathryn G. Kowalski and the Lagrangian Device"— I paced around outside and daydreamed about _A Modern Approach_. In these moments, the vision actually seems plausible: I could write something beautiful and not be ashamed of it. This is _if_ I learn to reliably work. You know and I know that I need to get _better_—I'm too intelligent to be this much of a loser, to have neglected so much, to have written so little.

It's not over yet. There's still tons of fruit on the ground, and I hereby place my gauntlet there as well.

It's time to build a martial art of rationality. This will include reading the literature about CBT. —ZMD

SECOND ADDENDUM— Of _course_ I can get network access to _Memoryless Distribution_ by using that cherished anachronism, the cable. Then I don't have to use separate computers, and my workspace will be so much cleaner—_psychologically_ if nothing else. I only face the task of rebuilding myself from the inexplicable wreckage of these past eight months. Aruna might get someone with more expertise (and Adobe software) to do the design. —ZMD

THIRD ADDENDUM— I forgot to tell you that Kaj Sotala blogged that he's been acting as Eliezer's writing assistant. Naturally I'm jealous: it should have been _me_. I mean, not _this_ me, obviously, but my analogue in another branch who didn't fuck up. Okay, so _Kaj_ is fractionally my analogue, _too_, but you know what I mean when I say that I could _and should_ have gotten a larger fraction with larger measure. —ZMD


#### 483 — Friday 30 April 2010 — " '_O Tempora, O Mores!_' "

Hopefully today's installment of self-flagellation will be at least a little different than the usual fare, but in either case, I really want to tell you: you know, _I'm not very good at this_. This whole _being alive_ business. Controlling for intelligence, I really, really suck at it. You don't have to cite Dweck and tell me that it's unwise to _say_ as much using such language; you should respect my _epistemic_ art enough to trust me to spontaneously generate that criticism for myself. And yet even so, Diary.

Yesterday I prepared my old trading cards for the upcoming garage sale. It's disturbing that I still remember such minutia as what teams are in which league. I can only guess how things would be different if children were socialized to care about _important_ things. ("I'll trade you my 2001 Topps limited edition Terry Tao for your Julia Serano rookie card." "Throw in one of your Tyler Cowens." "Deal!" "Dude, you're such a faggot.") I put Puffy AmiYumi on the stereo while I finished sorting cards that [had] become mixed together. I still love that album. I still associate it with Santa Cruz and late 2006 (compare 210, 212A), but the association is so poorly engineered.

Human cognition is so buggy that ideas can be dangerous even if you don't buy them. I suspect I spend far too much time reading racialist websites than is justified by the need for anthropological observation; surely if I'm actually interested in human variation, the place to look would be in the psychometrics and behavioral genetics literature. Perhaps it has become perversely comforting. Even as I stay consciously loyal to renormalized SWPLism, and even as I take my moral antirealism _very_ seriously, I more than wonder if my gut reactions have been altered by the trash I read. I have to agree that the new law in Arizona is outrageous, and yet I do not seem to feel outraged, although maybe it's only because of my across-the-board decrease in political feeling.

One of the things that jobseekers are supposed to do is to think about what their dreamjob would be like, and to consider means of getting there. However, in my case, I don't think that's the right question to ask, the right set of abstractions to use. I _had_ something closer to a dreamjob than anything I could hope to deserve. I casually condemn myself so frequently, but maybe I don't know in detail what it would be like to really mean it, to honestly turn around.

Anna gave me a book. —ZMD

ADDENDUM— I'm so sick; I'm so disgustingly sick. I might also be lonely—Josh has been unreachable, I've drifted away from Seanan, and it would be immoral to bother my creepy Singularitarian friends. I did send Anna an email thank-you note which also mentioned my new insight about preference relations. I have played Flash games. Diary, I am _sick_ and this has happened _before_ and I don't know _why_. Maybe that book about the science of CBT could help me if I gathered up the intention to actually read it.

This is such a _retarded_ life story. "He was lazy, and he spent a lot of time hating on himself for being lazy. He wrote a Diary that was probably around 300 000 words and it would have been longer if he hadn't been too lazy to make a backup before his hard disk failed, as hards disks predictably do."

Then _put an end to it_! Let me just _stop being retarded_! Don't _tell_ me that I don't have any tools, and that inscribing a new personality over the information-theoretic ashes of the old would be irresponsibly risky even if it were possible given current technology, which it isn't. Don't you suppose I know that already? The Safeway downtown is open at all hours; perhaps I will go buy some food. Maybe I'll buy another book or more on _amazon.com_ even though I can't afford it. Diary, I am _well aware_ that going on shopping sprees in the middle of the night is a symptom of madness, but surely it's not any _less_ mad than how I spent my entire day! If I lie down by three, I should get more than enough sleep to expect acceptable functioning at the lake cleanup tomorrow.

And I _will_ get a job. I don't care if it's in retail again. I want a fucking dayjob so I can get my life the fuck back together again!—so I can get my love the fuck back together again.

Yeah. Happy May Day to you, too. —ZMD 1 May


#### 484 — Monday 3 May 2010 — " 'Silver Fire' "

I thought _I_ was clingy, but Hannah Finley is just outrageous. I slept on the couch last night, slept longer than expected, and spent most of the day being netsick. In the evening, I thought it might help to talk to someone, so I called Josh (no answer, went to voicemail), Seanan (couldn't talk, about to take a midterm), and Hannah (no answer, went to Skype voicemail) before reaching Hannah via the number I had listed for Mike. She really wants to see me on Saturday, but I don't want to be seen. As usual, you can trust me to spontaneously generate the obvious criticisms of my position: I _know_ that I'm so incredibly lucky to have someone that cares so much about me, and that I always end up enjoying seeing my friends when I go, and that bad things can happen if you don't maintain relationships. But Diary, right now the only thing that matters is work, _work_ in the best sense. Once I have my work, then I can be secure in the company of my friends, but until I have my work, I am noticeably less than human.

The postscript to an email I received from the jobseeking group asserts that it takes an average of seventeen interviews to get one offer. There's no citation, so I have no way of knowing if the author isn't just bullshitting the figure, nor do I have any figures bullshitted or not about the number of cover letters to get one interview. I don't know how to compete; I might be desperate or incompetent enough to just go back to retail for a while, on the undiminishing faith that I will study ever harder and someday extract my revenge. I remain yours. —ZMD


#### 485 — Saturday 8 May 2010 — "Something Old, Something _Chic_, Something Stolen, Something Pink"

Even with makeup, my face is wrong, but other than that, I was beautiful at the event last night. I had told Mother I was going to an appropriately vague party at Stanford, the kind that has music. ("Maybe you'll meet a girl!" she said. "Maybe!" I replied.) Distressingly, my bra inserts were nowhere to be found when I was preparing the previous night. Where could they possibly be? Objects don't just mysteriously disappear. Could it be at all possible that Mother had found them and gotten rid of them without mentioning anything? (Re my perversion, my parents and I seem to have a "don't ask, don't tell" policy that applies recursively to the policy itself.) I ended up making do with plastic baggies partially filled with rice. These extemporaneous forms were inappropriately hard, but on net arguably better than my missing inserts in that (it seemed) I could make them a bit bigger. Of course this suggests that the inserts over a smaller amount of rice would have been better still, and I can guess that the quality forms that run for three figures would be yet better still—to say nothing of a benevolent superintelligence that's willing to rewrite your body in RAM. (I have some friends who are working on that.)

Bigger is better (up to a point) for at least three reasons, at least one of which may have actually influenced my actions: [redacted ...]

[...] I stopped at a Ross in Dublin to buy women's shoes and a handbag. I didn't see any shoes larger than a women's 10, and I typically wear a men's 12, so they only barely began to fit, but it was close enough. I (quite unnecessarily) told the cashier that it was a surprise gift for my wife.

[...] Getting ready took longer than it should have, because I put on my press-ons too early while I still needed my full manual dexterity to tape up my chest and tie up my hair. (Somehow the high ponytail is more difficult than the low.) My outfit was a white theme. I wore my white dress that used to be Nicole's (whether the dress is stolen or a legitimate albeit nonconsensual hand-me-down depends on your view of intrafamily property rights), my white headband, and the fake pearls I found somewhere; my watch and bag were also white. [...] While dressed, I made more of an effort than I usually do to not sound like a guy. (For I am _not_ a _guy_, even if only by virtue of my use of subtle distinctions in the connotations of words such as _guy_.)

[...]

The event was fine. I don't usually go to parties, I explained to an attractive someone who was temporarily called Damien, and when I do, I'm usually a boy. There was mingling, then performances, then selection of the reigning drag king and queen (by the classic method that I like to call "one decibel, one vote," except they didn't actually measure it), then dance. I may have said or done the wrong thing once or more, but I'm sure it's nothing to worry about. I had hoped to slow dance with a boy (preferably a boy who wasn't really a boy, but I wanted to try the other hand position and was ready to take what I could get), but unfortunately the music was not obliging. (Modern culture is so crass, although I might be willing to forgive if only Ke$ha would team up with Jonathan Coulton.)

It was a wonderful experience—and yet not as great as I might have hoped. I got to introduce myself as _Zelda_ and wear a dress, but the charade was unmistakably just a charade. The brutal (or maybe just _brute_) truth of my body remains constant even with my forearms shaved and bags of rice strapped to my chest. Another constant is that I remain,

Yours,

Zack M. Davis


#### 486 — Wednesday 12 May 2010 — " 'The Rest Is Still Unwritten' "

I've been dumb. I don't want that to sound like my usual self-deprecation; I want to state it as an observation. Rationalists should win, and I haven't been winning, therefore I am not rational. Maybe you've heard this tack many times before; it's still true. I'm doing something _wrong_. So many of the people I read on the internet are just so obviously _wrong_, and even though I am almost certainly wrong in a way that must be just as obvious when taken from another angle, you would expect me to wring some leverage from the fact that I _know_ this. I may not be capable or willing of escaping of my own narrative, but at least I know on the left hand that it _is_ a narrative, and on the right hand that there _is_ a solid world underneath everyone's lives and lies, even if we cannot or will not see it directly. (I masturbate with my right hand, but this has no symbolic significance whatsoever.)

O power of reason!—there must exist thousands of volumes on the philosophy of gender, and with high probability I can dismiss a sizable majority of them with a wave of my hand! The ultimate truth of the world is physics. Debates about who is _really_ a _woman_ or what is _natural_ are mere political theater, an uninteresting distraction from the solid facts of what kinds of bodies and brains actually exist, and what other kinds might exist under what conditions. This doesn't mean the political theater is _unimportant_; the debates are quite real even if their subject matter is not. Because it was true all along, materialism can change nothing; I still live for the great culture war, and the fact that nearly everyone is confused about its true properties should only give me and mine an advantage. There are many things that you don't get to choose, but that only means you focus your energies on the remainder, and so we must have our language games, although I _wish_ it were done a little bit more consciously. _Given_ everything I know about the causal forces that act on me, the forces that _comprise_ me, what do I do now? _Given_ that my inferior intellect is many orders of magnitude too small to handle the raw truth of experience, what do I call a _woman_ and what do I call something else?

There's so much I want to do! I want to learn LyX; the separation of content and presentation appeals to my intuition that things should have a canonical representation. I think I would like very much to have that bright line drawn, to be able to _recompile_ my documents without the risk of feeling like I've butchered the "originals."

I want to have a useful job and make lots of money; I want to learn quantum computing and probability theory and several complex variables! This world may not even yet be too large for me to make a difference, to add my own contribution to the great culture war. I followed a link from an antifeminist blog to the blog of a transwoman who linked to a reddit discussion about one of her posts which was started by none other than our own Julian Morrison (compare 353A)!

Diary, _given_ that I've been dumb and wrong, _given_ everything I know about the forces that create and comprise me, what do I do now? I read a little bit from David Allen the other day, but it's such a small book that I can hardly have any excuse for not burning through it in a single sitting. In my sickness, I seem to have lost the knack of reading paper books.

How can I commit my past self to the flames? What theory could let me shake off my sins and charge boldly into the glorious future that by right is mine to create? I need to construct some sort of narrative to let myself think that redemption is even possible. And Diary, it is _easy_. I've _got_ a narrative: I haven't read David Allen and I haven't studied the science of CBT. How much more of an explanation do you need? _Before_ honestly studying such methods _qua_ methods, what right do I have to expect to do the right thing as if by instinct? And _after_ studying the methods, what reason would I have for clinging to my old ways? _There's_ my fucking narrative: most of what I am now is a meaningless relic; the only thing that matters is the seed complexity I pass on to the local hard takeoff. Of course, the same will be true of my successor—[for] the ideal self that I would sculpt from the information-theoretic ashes if I knew more and thought faster would _not_ manifest herself as a man—but don't tell _him_ that.

I don't care (and _you_ shouldn't either) how many times before that I or my predecessors have sworn to a similar insight, only for it to have ultimately proved to be a lie. Let it be true _this_ time, even if I don't yet have any narrative for that besides sheer luck! Even luck is not unduly implausible; three-sigma events _do_ happen from time to time, and when they do, why shouldn't they set off a chain reaction? We can even point to one such chain reaction in the local past. To look at the boy who left the University in tears, you would not anticipate him going on to spontaneously generate more than 580 pages of technical notes, and yet just yesterday I decided I didn't like Jehle and Reny's definition of the weak axiom of revealed preference, so I converted it into a logically equivalent but more symmetrical form. If I can look back now on that preposterous reversal of fate and judge it to be a _good_ thing, what's to _stop_ me from calling the improvement recursively?—_notwithstanding_ everything I've murdered in the past eight months when I just wasn't paying attention.

I have _seen_ the book in which my future is written. And the cover says: R. Michael Range, _Holomorphic Functions and Integral Representations in Several Complex Variables_.

I _will_ write to [redacted] today. I am,

Your correspondent,

Zack M. Davis


#### 487 — Monday 17 May 2010 — "Uncompensated Demand"

On Saturday, I attended the jobseekers' group and visited my creepy Singularitarian friends. Hannah reported that Mike broke up with her, which doesn't make any sense at all. When Mike came back to the house, I told him about how nonconvex preferences are epiphenominal when facing positive prices and we agreed to go on a walk. When we were outside the house, I think he asked if I had talked to Hannah. Yeah, I said, what the hell is wrong with you? He said that he didn't know, that he's genuinely unsure if he's crazy. Apparently he doesn't _want_ Hannah the way she _wants_ him, that some part of his brain hasn't adapted to be not being single. He wishes there were some canonical book explaining what one ought to feel in a relationship. I opined that there were combinatoric grounds for thinking that he might not be able to do better than Hannah: as you add more traits to your wishlist, the pool of potential matches shrinks exponentially. It's tempting to think that in a world of so many billions, there has got to be someone out there for you, but it's not difficult to eliminate all of them just by being a little bit picky. Without thinking, filter for sex and pull out a factor of two; filter for native English, a factor of ten; filter for intelligence, drop two or three orders of magnitude—now the pool is closer to a mere million and yet we haven't even really begun. This is heartening for the artist who wants to be a special little snowflake; it is not as great when you just want someone to _talk_ to. (The decay is actually somewhat slower than exponential, Anna later corrected me: real wishes are not independent. Anna does estimate one chance in ten that Carl is the _best_ existing match for her.)

I think my _Less Wrong_ hiatus ends today. (I think the three calendar months already ended while I was asleep, but I have a service set to send me emails, probably later today, so I'll wait for those.) Anna made me promise to read particular books before attempting to edit the edit the _Less Wrong_ wiki.

[redacted] replied to my reply; now I have to backpedal, trying to explain what I was trying to get at when I said [redacted].

Yesterday I ran the Bay to Breakers with Nicole. I must be very grateful to her for convincing me that I've been stupid. Nicole says that it's hard to get a good job with a grad degree from a nonelite school, at least in chemistry. I hadn't wanted to talk to admissions offices yet, because I guessed that they'd just tell me to get a BS, whereas if I showed up on their doorstep already highly skilled in two years, it could be a form of brinkmanship. Nicole pointed out that this was dumb. Asking people questions costs little; I have every incentive to get more information so that I can make a rational decision. She was right, of course, even as the mere thought of going back to undergrad was enough to make me burst into tears. Mother had already said something similar, but I'm more inclined to listen to Nicole. Nicole said that Mother knows a lot about the world. Not _our_ world, I said.

Nicole thinks I should get therapy about my school problems; her attitude is much colder on the matter of reading books about therapy to understand how it works. When I confessed on the bus that I didn't grasp the details of the beautiful duality between the expenditure and indirect utility functions, she said that was why it's good to work with people. In moments of anger and self-deception, I might want to scream at her: _have you been so thoroughly mindfucked by the system that you no longer have any conception of an original thought, nor yet an independent desire?_ But that type of narrative is never really true.

There's still something I cherish about those moments of cold pain, when my heart cried out for my revenge while my face just cried, full stop. If I can learn to restore that saved state, I can win. If I'm so sure I'm smarter than Nicole, I should show it by reshaping the world in accordance with my rage. I remain,

Yours,

Zack M. Davis

ADDENDUM— I've received one of the two scheduled emails marking the end of my _Less Wrong_ hiatus; I will not wait for the other one, which I might have set for tomorrow or later tonight.

I emailed Tom McCabe asking why he asked me what programming languages I knew the other day; it turns out he was wondering about possibly collaborating with me.

I prepared a fiction queue of thirty-or-so books. I made sublists of titles in various categories and collated them with Python, picking one item at a time from each sublist. I will soon do the same for nonfiction, nonmath titles that I've had my eye on.

Nicole showed Mother and me her presentation slides. Her group is working on layer-by-layer construction of membranes with desirable properties for use in fuel cells—as I recall and very roughly speaking, something that conducts electricity and lets sunlight in, without letting hydrogen or oxygen escape. Mother complimented Nicole on her desktop publishing skills; Nicole said that any competent grad student could do as much. (In general, Nicole is either not very good at hiding her contempt, or she doesn't try—I can't tell which.)

I burn with ambition. It was wrong of me to have complained about Nicole to my friends. The prime fact of the matter is that she's _doing science_ and I'm not, nor am I actively writing a novel. Everything else pales into triviality.

Except this: now I have a narrative (compare 486), so then I will win. —ZMD


#### 488 — Thursday 27 May 2010 — "Grads and Dads; Or, Intelligence is Useless"

Good rationalists are rare enough in this world that the aesthetic sense cannot survive on their narratives alone, so you learn to also appreciate ideologues, at least some of the more consilient ones. There's a blogger I've read from time to time who styles himself "Al Fin." _The end_, _the purpose_. "Primary interest is seeing that the best of humanity survives long enough to reach the next level." His signature blend of right-wing hysteria (obvious misogyny, IQ-mongering, global warming denialism, skeptical but not disapproving assessments of transhumanist scenarios, denunciations of the socialist Obama-Pelosi regime, prophecies of savage Muslim hordes overtaking a dying Europe from within, _&c._) forms a self-consistent package that I can almost respect as intelligent if not rational, colorful if not morally acceptable. Or perhaps I'm being far too generous and too many months of studying evil has corrupted my aesthetics. I mean, I can already think of two other eponymous, pseudonymous blogs (_Isegoria_ and _Aretae_) that cater to a fairly similar taste as _Al Fin_ but lack the obvious hatefulness and ideological blinders.

In any case, _Al Fin_ has a recent post quoting two newspapers and decrying the immature mindset of "Generation Y." My contemporaries, it is claimed, have a sense of entitlement. We have been taught that we're special, and as a result, we haven't internalized a decent work ethic and are not prepared to survive on the open market.

It's a very old tack, and it's the kind that makes me want to lecture on reflectivity. I want to say to my hypothetical interlocutor: I agree that many of my contemporaries have the flaws that you list, largely as the result of the factors that you list, and I agree that these forces have been active on me too—but given that I _know_ this, I can try to correct for it. I know how to read. I shouldn't have to _wait_ for a role model or tragedy to shock me out of the gutter. If I know a little about how the world _works_, if I can _predict_ what forces are likely to impinge upon my will, I should be able to update _now_, erect defenses _now_.

Diary, why is it that the people who don't understand reductionism are more likely to treat you as an object? As I recall, Father has been known to object to this reflectivity argument as overintellectualized bullshit. Then what possible conception of agency could he have, if he doesn't understand what it means to be an optimizer? People criticize as if they expect to _shame_ the other into being a better person, but normatively, the function of criticism should be to offer information that the wrongful party didn't know and couldn't have generated for themselves.

What kills me—or what _should_ kill me—is that my father is right, that there's a nontrivial sense in which all my worst enemies are right. Of course I'm right in thinking that the normative theory is true and _has_ to be true, but what does it buy me when human beings were not made to wield the normative theory? Here's a transhumanist project worth fighting for: build us an architecture of _free will_ worthy of the name. Because Diary, right now we don't have much. The thoughts we think and the words we speak do not have anything approaching majority control.

Morally, learning about probability theory or microeconomics _should_ make you a better reasoner. You can imagine me, single-issue Zelda Michelle Davis, joyfully refactoring my source in the wake of a new insight: _So you're saying that at the optima, marginal cost is proportional to price? Why, I had never noticed! I'll update my consumption bundle right away! This will change everything!_

But it's only a boy's daydream. Knowing doesn't actually change anything. With a slow and sometimes painful effort, I can consciously manipulate symbols of power and occasionally even get a correct answer, but it doesn't touch the lower levels where most of the actual resource allocation gets done. There's no internal Lagrangian Device that actually maximizes utility subject to benefits dot prices equaling budget.

So even though I'm right, I still lose. And _because_ I lose, I cannot possibly be right. I'm sure dolphins are "very smart," but the composition of the lightcone is a function of our will, not theirs. The same kind of standard must apply to individuals—and it would be facile to count myself important simply by mere association with the existential-risk-reduction crowd. That much is more luck more than virtue, and any impact I have is very indirect. Happening to be at the right event in spacetime is not an exploitable regularity; to measure the power of a human, you have to look at what clears the neighborhood. Outcomes correlate more strongly with Father's or Nicole's will than with mine, even if they don't know the theory.

Sunday the twenty-third was probably a bad day, and I suppose I was still feeling it Monday because I spent a lot of time in the [Clayton] library with my laptop, mostly getting netsick. I wrote a few tiny scraps of fiction, and by the end of the night I was so distressed that I didn't resist the temptation to send disturbed emails. I actually wrote an interesting piece that I ended up sending to Mike Blume, I guess because Josh is missing, I don't want to bother Anna, Seanan and I aren't really close anymore, and Hannah does this creepy thing where she gets worried about other people's welfare. Before the library closed, I ended up sending two lines to Hannah anyway, and predictably she did the creepy concern thing again, so I promised to get help.

I had been back from my _Less Wrong_ hiatus for all of a week, and I decided to reïmpose it for at least another two months; unrestricted internet access has ruined my life too many times. You'd think I would have sufficiently brought myself together in three months, but I haven't. I buried a note in the old open thread and turned the siteblocker back on, with _Less Wrong_ and some other sites I enjoy on the blacklist for _Memoryless Distribution_. I sent an email to Anna. One of the things I like about Anna is that her caring is at a distance. She will not hurt because you hurt; she offers advice, but won't make you promise to get help.

So far the blacklist hasn't caused me to stop wasting time on the internet, and I've already subverted it a few times to check up on _El Goonish Shive_ and _Questionable Content_.

What, now, could bring me to finally update?—to genuinely, honestly update, to demonstrate _useful_ intelligence?

In the library the other day, I read an article online (I think I was at the computer ostensibly to get a graph from Wolfram|Alpha, but I checked some other things) about the tough job market this year's graduates face. I can't find the article now, but it said something about degrees in computing being worth a starting salary I think in the forty thousands of dollars. Diary, this might be one of the most shameful things: I have trouble _imagining_ making $40 000. It seems _unrealistic_, somehow—as if I've gotten so _used_ to single-digit wage slavery or being a ward of my parents that I can't imagine being a grown-up.

I might write another email to Anna, on the subject of embracing one's dark side.

After spending most of my life in the same gutter, what could possibly give me hope that one day I will rise? Let's suppose there is a threshold of self-loathing beyond which it is easier to stop honoring sunk costs, because you have sufficient emotional detachment from your past. My self-identity is not tied down to old accomplishments because I _don't have any_. And that which is not tied down is that much easier to toss in the furnace. So what should I tell you, Diary? That I'm not yours, but I will be?—or that you remain mine, but you won't always?

Signed,

Zack M. Davis

28 May (can't even finish writing before midnight)