IsaacL

- cure for cancer

- cure for malaria

- cure for aging

- cheap fossil fuel extraction from low-quality deposits

- safer nuclear fission

- nuclear fusion

- lower-cost space travel

- space elevator

- space colonisation

- intelligence augmentation

- safe artificial intelligence

- desktop nanofactories

- nano-machines

If I was in your position I'd book a flight to somewhere like Chiang Mai in Thailand (cheap, traveller-friendly, lots of English spoken, way more comfortable than you might expect).

With your budget, AirBnB if you can find somewhere cheap, otherwise bunk in a hostel dorm (hostelworld.com).

Check out Punspace (or whatever local co-working space is available where you are), go to meetups there, you'll meet several other "digital nomads". Tell everyone you meet that you can code and you're looking for remote freelance jobs. Best bet is to meet successful remote freelancers, they will almost always have clients or know clients who need more work.

To clarify: when people feel "anxious and depressed for no discernible reason", it might be because of a neurological disorder in their brain. Even happy times feel empty and meaningless. Or, it might be because of an actual issue in their lives, but one they haven't fully discerned. It's hard to tell which group you might be in.

At the time I found doing volunteering did give me some genuine happiness. Another activity I found very meaningful was deep reading of philosophy and literature. Over time the reading became less and less rewarding though (the volunteering stopped because of logistical issues). I had a feeling that there was some process that was sucking meaning out of everything good in my life, which was pretty scary, and made me wonder if I was developing clinical depression.

In my case, I've come to the conclusion that my unhappiness was caused by unacknowledged issues with my life situation, not neurochemistry. You mention "I had all of my dreams in life shattered" - my situation was not so drastic, but still a bit similar. I'd been reading about startups all throughout university, and was accepted into a prestigious new accelerator on graduating (more of a pre-accelerator, actually, so ideas and teams were in a bit of flux). It was intense but I felt on top of the world. My problem was I "pivoted" three times while looking for the right team + idea, until the accelerator programme had ended and I had no serious traction with anything. So I found myself working in Starbucks on crappy PHP code for a freelance client. Then that dried up and I found another short-term gig basically doing monkey work with Excel. I went through a hairy few weeks after a late invoice where I almost ran out of cash. So I was trying to figure out my life direction while also struggling to survive.

Looking back, I had a combination of a) over-ambition ("I need to be working on a potentially huge startup before I turn 24") and b) lack of understanding of the effort required to create something halfway-decent (and the experience required to create something actually good).

Over time I managed to tune down the over-ambition through a combination of introspection, CBT, self-acceptance and observation of how difficult even very smart people have obtaining moderate success. The work ethic I improved by taking a couple of standard web development jobs and learning to do things the right way. Still, this existential depression has waxed and waned over the last two years, and (I now believe) it's because at least part of my psyche never stopped believing that I could and should be doing something greater.

It's like - as we grow up we get used to the fact that our younger dreams often aren't worth sticking to. Lots of people wanted to be astronauts as kids, but they probably don't despair that they never became astronauts, just because it's such an unlikely thing to become. But the minor character in Fight Club who secretly wanted to become a veterinarian - well, it was a challenge to become a veterinarian but not an impossible challenge, so why didn't he do it?

So my small suggestion to you is: take a look at your "shattered dreams" and rationally evaluate which still seem achievable and worthwhile.

Avoid the twin emotional traps of grandiosity and helplessness ("yes, this is the idea, I'm going to work on becoming the next Elon Musk for 18 hours a day and get VC money and Techcrunch coverage and everyone will love me forever" vs "why do I want to work on a new project, just summoning up the effort will add more strife to my existence in the valley of tears, I should just find a safe spot and stop moving"). A good perspective is one of balance, clarity and equanimity: "my life is OK, there are things that I can improve and I will patiently work on plans to improve them, and try and build relationships with people who I can help or who can help me".

A. Notice that someone could improve their behaviour.

B. Notice that you could give them useful advice to improve their behaviour.

Now, on to step C!

C. Don't be a condescending dick when dispensing said advice.

I've seen tons of founders quibble over a few percent, and none of them were successful. Successful founders get past those issues and execute."

Really? You only get 100% to give away. Every 1% you give away now dilutes what you give to attract future employees, investors, etc. OK, maybe the accelerator asking for 10% is better overall than the one asking for 5% for the same amount of funding - still, you want to be aware of that tradeoff, no? You don't want to be completely laissez-faire about it. It's like millionaires from traditional industries who'll split a restaurant bill to the penny - cultivating a mindset to be really, really careful with key resources.

"Successful founders get past those issues and execute." It might just be the wording, but this sounded weird on first reading. Like saying "only losers care about their own interest when entering a business deal - what are you, a loser?!?"

The bootstrapper crowd (Amy Hoy, patio11, etc) often level this as a criticism of VC-backed startups -- that they are a gameable system, a series of hurdles from accelerator to series A to series B to acquihire. Whereas (they say) bootstrapping isn't gameable, it relies on making something users want, and it teaches you to deal with raw reality head-on. [1]

Maybe they are only looking at a dysfunctional subset of VC-backed startups though? One common pattern seems to be that a person enters a particular field, notices that many people around them are unimpressive and focused on perception, "networking" and system-gaming -- and concludes that the field is corrupt.

But in actuality, they'd only seen the bottom tier of the field, and the higher tiers have more genuine talents who also despise bullshitters.[2]

[1] http://unicornfree.com/2012/why-blacksmiths-are-better-at-st...

[2] I'm thinking specifically of academia as another example of this pattern. Since bullshitters do manage to reach the higher tiers of both startups and academia, there's a genuine question as to whether the bullshitters will someday come to dominate both of these areas, and whether this has already happened. By definition, a field that has been taken over by bullshitters is not going to let you know that this has happened.

http://www.crestfallen.us/download.html

The world of the way is not a sphere or a disk, but a singular path. All humans are nomadic wanderers who travel the Way, though some choose to settle down and build towns and cities; however, the 'rolling mists' eventually come crashing down on stragglers. The protagonist, Rhue, at first appears to fit some standard RPG tropes (he has amnesia and is looking for his lost girlfriend), but as the series progresses, more and more layers of mysteries are revealed.

I think the fact the game was mostly created by one guy gives the story a creative coherence you don't quite find even in FFVI or Chrono Trigger.

^ This isn't just my definition, it's a rough approximation of AIXI, "a mathematical formalism for a hypothetical (super)intelligent agent". (http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/AIXI)

The difference between the intelligence of different creatures is one of degree, and it's interesting to speculate why some animals did end up so much more intelligent than others.

Another interesting evolutionary tidbit is that it for a while after the Cambrian explosion there was a vast diversity of different animal phyla in the oceans. Supposedly for some time there was an arms race of different invertebrate species (octopodes being one surviving example) evolving competitive strategies and counter-strategies, and thereby growing more intelligent.

But then fish evolved, and it turns out the fish design is highly efficient (think sharks) and fish could dominate the oceans - and later their descendant vertebrates could dominate the land - without needing as much intelligence. Again, it's interesting to speculate whether, in an alternative history where fish did not evolve, advanced invertebrate civilisations could have arisen long before dinosaurs appeared in our timeline.

So don't hold too dearly to the model that "I'm an introvert therefore I'm at a disadvantage in my career". Leverage your introvert skills by, e.g., analysing a topic in-depth and preparing your thoughts about it before a meeting. You might find the other participants are only debating at a shallow level and that you can steer the conversation towards your deeper insights.

Also, I believe that "introvert vs extrovert" is a false dichotomy. They are both skillsets that you can develop independently. Read this: http://joshuaspodek.com/introversion-opposite-extroversion

She sounds like a competent founder but one who started out with almost no knowledge of managing developers. No-one is born knowing how to manage developers and it does sound like she is learning. I think she expressed herself ineloquently in this article, which makes her sound like a bit of a slave-driver, but I think it's misleading to draw that conclusion.

I can empathise with devs who find themselves stuck on projects with clueless managers, but I can also empathise with passionate product founders who see their vision and savings wasted on crappy contract developers. Hard to say which situation this is.

Different people would indeed have different value systems and also give different degrees of credence to different sources. So the goal would be to end up with a crowdsourced tree of moral & factual claims, and individual users could then decide which claims they agreed or disagreed with to come to their own conclusion on the topic.

(Look up 'argument mapping' for academic exploration of the concept).

My thinking now is that most online political arguments online are really about tribalism, not finding the truth. If you did have users who cared about the truth (and who could consider other viewpoints), you wouldn't need a fancy product: a simple web forum would suffice.

But do drop me an email at isaac@i.saac.me if you'd like to chat more.

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Our goal is to improve decision-making at the boards of the world's largest companies.

Most corporate boards are run ineffectively. Think how effective they could be, and think how much that could improve the ways companies are run. (Not just in terms of profitability, but also in terms of ethics and long-term value).

BI has a successful consulting business and now aims to become a high-growth tech business. Our app is used by CEOs and directors of some of the UK's largest companies, and we're now expanding internationally.

Culture: despite our corporate target market, we're a young, small team (~15 people, 4 on the tech team, most employees in their 20s). Many of the non-tech team members have an interest in visual design or data visualisation, so there's a strong product focus. Oh, and if you enjoyed Kahneman's Thinking Fast and Slow, you'd probably fit right in. (About half the team has read it and it ties in closely with our work).

Site: http://boardintelligence.co.uk

Email: Isaac.Lewis@boardintelligence.co.uk

MIRI (formally the Singularity Institute) has a mixed reputation around these parts, but after reading fairly widely over the last year I think they have the deepest thinking on the topic of AI. Here's a concise summary of their worldview: http://intelligence.org/2013/05/05/five-theses-two-lemmas-an...

As I see it, their argument goes:

1. It's tempting to think of AIs becoming either our willing servants or integrating nicely with human society. In actuality, AIs will likely be able to bootstrap themselves to superintelligence extremely rapidly; we'll soon be dealing with alien minds that we fundamentally can't understand, and there will be little stopping the AI/AIs from doing whatever they want.

2. It's tempting to think, from analogy to the smartest human beings, that superintelligent AIs would be wise and benevolent. In actuality, a superintelligent AI could easily have strange or bizarre goals. I find this makes more sense if you think of AIs as "hyperefficient optimisers", as the word "intelligence" has some misleading connotations.

3. OK, well surely we can leave the AIs with weird goals to do their thing, and build other AIs to do useful things, like cure cancer or research nuclear fusion? The trouble is that even an innocuous goal, when given to an alien superintelligence, will very likely end badly. An AI programmed to compute PI would realise that it could compute PI more efficiently by hacking all available computer systems on the planet and installing copies of itself. Or developing nanotechnology and converting all matter in the solar system into extra computational capacity. You have to explicitly the program the AI to not do this, and defining the set of things the AI should not do is a hard problem. (Remember that 'common sense' and 'empathy' are human abilities, and there's no reason that an AI would have anything like them).

4./5. OK, well, we'll build an AI with the goal of maximising the happiness of humanity. But then the AI ends up building a Brave-New-World style dystopia, or kidnaps everyone and hooks them up to heroin drips to ensure they are in constant opiated bliss. It's really hard to come up with a good set of values to program into an AI that doesn't omit some important human value (like consciousness, or diversity, or novelty, or creativity, or whatever).

I'm glad that Peter Norvig (director of research at Google) is concerned about the issue of friendly AI. I'm curious to hear what other HN readers think of these ideas.

Anticipating some common objections I hear from friends:

How could a superintelligent AI have a stupid goal like computing Pi?/Wouldn't it be smart enough to break any controls we put on it?

I think this objection assumes an AI would be wired together like a typical intelligent human mind. If you think of an AI as a pure optimisation process, it's clear that it would have no reason to reprogram the ultimate goals it begins with.

If they're smarter than us, we should just let the AI take over/AIs are like our children, ultimately we should leave them free to do whatever they want

Again, this assumes the AIs are like super-powered human minds and that they will do interesting things once they take over, like contemplate the deep mysteries of the universe. But it's clearly possible for the AIs to devote themselves to really trivial tasks, like calculating digits of Pi for all eternity.

Example: in the UK media right now you will read many stories about the current government's "deep, savage cuts", and all the poor people who are suffering as a result of these cold, uncaring conservatives. But after all these cuts the UK is still running at a deficit.

Of course, Plato was an old fool who lived in the days before fiat money. Why raise taxes or cut spending when you can simply borrow more?

100 years: 1. Climate change/environmental damage. This won't kill us all, I think, but could majorly lower our quality of life. 2. Overpopulation/mass migrations. Nigeria's population is predicted to be over a billion by the end of this century - an 8-fold increase. India's population growth isn't slowing down either. It does look as though humanity's population will peak at around 9/10 billion - but this will be predominantly within the most unstable regimes. Expect mass movement of refuges, further destabilising governments in advanced economies, fuelling further growth in mass surveillance, etc. 3. The singularity. This one could kill us all. Or it could become the AI philosopher-king that solves all our other problems.

I think I'm a solid frontend developer, but I'm a few years professional experience away from the level he describes here. I know my way around HTML, CSS and the various browser quirks - though I'm still learning the idiosyncrasies he describes here. I've written a ~10000-line app in Angular.js, but my Javascript code is still sloppy, and is nowhere close to my knowledge of Ruby. I'm gradually picking up the basics of design and UI as I go, but that's a whole other mountain which I could climb for years.

"That guy I offered that car to (not really) took a job at a startup and he’s the guy. He’s THE front end developer for their product which doesn’t exist yet. He gets to point to that thing, a year or two from now when it’s worth a bazillion dollars (I do wish him luck, after all) and say, “I did that.” There are people out there, right now, who get to point at Twitter, Facebook, Gmail and Google Maps, at the Iphone’s UI, at Github, at the YouTube player – stuff used by millions upon millions of people – and say, “I did that.”"

Thing is, few products are built by one superhero. I'm wondering if, rather than transform yourself into a magical-unicorn designer/hacker - it might be better to get solid at development, solid at design, but aim to only get good enough that you can manage people who are better at you in those areas?

Scenario 1 is exponential progress - the Singularity which Ray Kurzweil thinks is inevitable and which Eliezer Yudkowsky is trying to bring about. Progress feeds into progress until we enter technology heaven.

Scenario 2 is steady progress - the worldview of TED talks and most of Silicon Valley. We gradually solve social and technological problems, and the future is an improved version of the present.

Scenario 3 is stagnation. We reach a point where our ingenuity and resources are only sufficient to maintain our current level of civilisation. Peter Thiel might be a proponent of this worldview. If you think "business as usual" is taking us nowhere fast, you're likely more interested in out there ideas such as seasteading, charter cities and bitcoin which promise to open up new vistas of innovation.

Scenario 4 is steady decline. Dwindling resources lead to fraying social structures which lead to cascading problems - new problems arise faster than we can deal with them. It's not a popular viewpoint, but it's happened to many complex societies in history. Note that if scenario 2 tends to be a liberal viewpoint, and scenario 3 tends to be a somewhat libertarian viewpoint, then scenario 4 is probably a traditionalist conservative viewpoint (conservatism as in Edmund Burke, not George Bush).

Scenario 5 is sudden collapse: everything appears to be going fine until suddenly we're all killed by global warming/nuclear war/asteroids/etc. Surprisingly, scenario 5 is more popular than scenario 4, usually because certain groups believe they will live out the apocalypse and get to see the rest of decadent society destroyed.

You have to be precise when talking about the effects of biological evolution on our brains. We know our brains were initially created entirely by biological evolution; what's not clear is how direct or indirect the influence of evolution has been on our psychology. That is, does evolution hardwire relatively complex behaviour (as it does in many animals) or does it merely specify high-level learning algorithms? This appears to be the case with humans - we don't have many instinctual behaviours compared with other animals, but we do have an instinctual ability to learn new things. It's interesting to speculate how this ability might have arisen; the ability to learn new things and to spot patterns must have been useful to our distant ancestors, as they're such fundamental traits of human cognition.

This is also why the "nature vs nurture"/"biology vs culture" debate is a false dichotomy: the foundation of human culture is our ability to learn, which is itself a genetic adaptation.

There's an interesting possibility that our brain actually gives us a neurochemical "hit" every time we encounter a particularly juicy piece of insight porn. The reason for this is evolutionary: insights are basically the recognition of deep patterns that explain seemingly unrelated phenomena, which lets us "compress" our knowledge and so increase our understanding of the world. (It's not that our stone age ancestors were developing scientific theories, but they had many complex things in their environment to predict: the weather, animal behaviour, their own social networks, other hunter-gather tribes, etc).

The pleasure gained from studying mathematics, or listening to complicated pieces of music (esp classical, where complex pieces might be based on simple underlying patterns) are good examples. Humour might be a complementary reward circuit, giving us a psychological hit when we discover something that contradicts our worldview.

(I'm aware that the preceding paragraphs was themselves a piece of insight porn :)

I opened up the Hacker News homepage to see if anyone was discussing the US debt crisis. (I'm not American, and I find HN a fairly good source of commentary on US events). There's a non-negligible possibility that the world is about to be plunged into another round of financial crises. I guess from one point of view the current state of the world economy is just a temporary downswing in our epic quest from the caves to the stars. But I'm becoming more inclined to believe that industrial civilisation has already passed its apex, and is now growing increasingly unstable as it attempts to continue infinite growth on a finite world.

What's the no #2 article on HN? How our biggest problems are dealing with too much abundance!

Do you simply add some extra genders? Male-to-female transexual, female-to-male transexual, intersex? No matter how many categories you add, you'll always annoy someone for missing them out. Does 'genderqueer' and 'genderfluid' count as the same category, or different ones?

Maybe just add a free text form for people to input their gender? But then it's impossible to normalise if you want to do any analysis.

Maybe we should just be enlightened and ignore gender altogether? But sometimes knowing your user's gender is really important, and it seems weird to discard this data because some people don't fit. Maybe the best compromise is simply to have 3 categories - male/female/other - though even then you'll get complaints. "Who are you calling 'other'?"

Anyone have any other thoughts?

PS: I seem to see way more people in tech complaining about brogrammers than actual brogrammers.

Here's another interesting story I came across - basically, Amnesty sacked one of their staff because she, an outspoken feminist, criticised their cosy relationship with radical Islamists. If anyone reading this has time, follow some of the names in that article - you might discover, like I did, that the world is far more fucked up than you had previously imagined.

"In his book Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, Zen master Shunryu Suzuki approaches the question of fast and slow learners in terms of horses. “In our scriptures, it is said that there are four kinds of horses: excellent ones, good ones, poor ones, and bad ones. The best horse will run slow and fast, right and left, at the driver’s will, before it sees the shadow of the whip; the second will run as well as the first one, just before the whip reaches its skin; the third one will run when it feels pain on its body; the fourth will run after the pain penetrates to the marrow of its bones. You can imagine how difficult it is for the fourth one to learn to run.

When we hear this story, almost all of us want to be the best horse. If it is impossible to be the best one, we want to be the second best.” But this is a mistake, Master Suzuki says. When you learn too easily, you’re tempted not to work hard, not to penetrate to the marrow of a practice.

“If you study calligraphy, you will find that those who are not so clever usually become the best calligraphers. Those who are very clever with their hands often encounter great difficulty after they have reached a certain stage. This is also true in art, and in life.” The best horse, according to Suzuki, may be the worst horse. And the worst horse can be the best, for if it perseveres, it will have learned whatever it is practicing all the way to the marrow of its bones."

(Shameless self-plug - I wrote a blog post about this a while ago: http://i.saac.me/post/lurning-cearves/)