Normal Human Heroes

February 21st, 2010
A lot of people probably know DragonForce, among other things they’re featured with the hardest song on a Guitar Hero game. Wikipedia say’s they’re power metal, though a lot of people like them and don’t seem to like other power metal, myself included. The best way I can describe them is as ridiculously over-the-top, which is intentional and tongue-in-cheek on their part. Most of their songs are fairly similar, and tend to use a limited vocabulary focused on sword, warrior, storm, soul, stand, pain, ride, dragon, etc. Personally this just means it doesn’t really matter which song I listen to,  and I can expect the same enjoyable experience.
My experiences first hearing DragonForce followed successive stages. First I thought they were just ridiculous and out of touch, though I admired their guitar skill. Then I thought they were really funny. I still think they’re funny and ridiculous, but after going through those stages they became incredibely fantastic. I have a tentative hypothesis that enjoying them intensely becomes much more likely after first laughing at them. Perhaps simultaneously laughing about the music is signalling that one doesn’t take this that seriously, and allows one to enjoy more comfortably. I have an old fondness for fantasy and related imagery, so that might contribute as well.
I’m posting about them now as I remembered how extremely motivating they can be. I find them especially helpful when facing difficulties; comparing my own personal difficulties to their ridiculous lyrics both makes me smile and lends an invigorating, epic air to my struggles. Admittedly few people are actually working right now to prevent the extinction of humanity, and chipping in on that effort is fairly epic on it’s own. I refer more to laughing and becoming enthused when listening to them and thinking of my small, day-to-day challenges.
Give them a try and see what you think. Some very well known pieces are “Fury of the Storm” and “Through the Fire and the Flames”. In their main vein, “Black Winter Night” and “Operation Ground and Pound” are some I was just listening to, and something slightly different. My personal favorites though are the two quieter pieces I have, partially just because they stand out. I’ll include ”Dawn Over a New World” here, the other is “Starfire”.

February 1st, 2010
Posting “Shadows On The Sun” by Brother Ali. Great song, and if you can get past the theism (still a moral if not epistemic improvement over most rap), it can be very appropriate for a hard working altruist.

(We’d like to capture your minds right now)
(What you say)
(Take you a little bit higher)
(What you say) (3X)
[ VERSE 1 ]
I like the snares loud enough to make your eyes blink from it
Only male with the Holy Grail, drink from it
I keep an eye on heaven and an ear to the street
And spread a thick layer of blood, sweat and tears on the beats
My brain rest upon the hip-hop lexicon
That I acquired in the decade of work that people slept upon
I don’t rap, I recite the prayers of the inner soul
Of the slave ships’ human cargo
Seemingly meaningless rappers flood the market
With shit that make me pace in my room until I rip the carpet
I’m fit to start up this next millennium
Swingin’ the grappling hook at cackling crooks to finish ‘em
The city dweller sendin’ telegrams from Neverland
The better man kind now, kindly join the caravan
We’re like a rock band that pack contraband
And won’t hesitate to stomp a man into the rocks and sand
Brother Ali, and if you haven’t heard about me
I’m flyin’ just beneath your radar so y’all can doubt me
Stay on the sonar with crowbars to open minds
There’s a ladder you’re supposed to climb
Approach a Rhymesayer with a Buggsy Siegel sized ego
You gon’ get yourself snatched out the sky, you know the steelo
By now, where, what, why and how
We start the revolution real time, right now

[ CHORUS ]
Yes, leave it to me to create hope where there was none
The human beings shall cast shadows on the sun
Leave it to me to create hope where there was none
My inner soul shall cast shadows on the sun
Leave it to me to create hope where there was none
The human beings shall cast shadows on the sun
Leave it to me to create hope where there was none
My inner soul shall, my inner light shall..
[ VERSE 2 ]
I rhyme for cats up in the harbored lights
Prayin’ they don’t starve tonight
And stay positive in the face of a harder life
My chorus light the torch for those on whom the sun set
Verses meant to speak for the voiceless
So let us never be dismayed or afraid
The ground we’re walking on is stained
With the blood of those before us who came
Soldiers in this freedom movement are too numerous to name
Cause the human soul yearns to be free, it’s all the same
I rhyme for runaways, prayin’ that they see another day
You gotta’ make it through the winter to feel some summer days
It’s for my natives, it’s history in the way their hair is braided
Elephants never forget, that’s how they say it
Tell my man Hasim in prison keep grinnin’ because he’s innocent
And tell him that the tests we get are heaven-sent
Listen, I rap for the ones that Johnny Cash wore, the black, for
Black and white women that were turned to crackhores
And I empty everything in the bank to give for it
I empty all the days of my life to live for it
And I empty all the blood in my veins to fight for it
So I empty all the ink in this pen to write for it

[ CHORUS ]
[ VERSE 3 ]
I glance in the sky and see the same cloud configuration
That Nat Turner saw the day they hanged him
Resisted in the face of adversity with a fist and it was raised
One finger extended, meaning Allah be praised
Spent days in Heaven’s embassy
On Qu’ran pages Allah explains this legacy
Angels doubted Adam, Jacob’s brothers clapped him
And ancient Pharaohs were too brutal to fathom
If all the earth’s oceans were ink and the trees were pens
You could never write the knowledge of God, it never ends
And I know it feels like the whip wounds will never mend
But it’s the way of God makin’ the oppressed prevalent men
We standin’ with humanity at destiny’s door
Chanting the war cry, it goes, “Never no more”
So if y’all tryin’a talk about the horrors you see
Feel free to tell your stories through me
[ CHORUS ]
There’s only one God and he’s not just above
There’s only one man and there’s only one love
Till everybody gets what I instill in my seed
For that y’all, we willing to bleed
There’s only one God and he’s not just above
There’s only one woman and there’s only one love
We doin’ this till all of Adam’s children are freed
And for that y’all, we willin’ to bleed

January 12th, 2010
I’ve built up a strong habit of daydreaming, something that I’m working to reduce. I often find myself daydreaming about extremely unlikely situations. Sometimes they’re unlikely but common on a larger scale, for example being burglarized while you’re in the house. Sometimes they are patently ridiculous, such as being caught with a loved one in a sheep stampede (do they even do that?) while holding on to an old wooden fence which is slowly falling over, or resting inside a pile of sharp metal shavings while being attacked by someone with a sledgehammer. Sometimes they’re at least common in movies, along the lines of Jason Bourne or James Bond.
In these daydreams, the general train of thought is “How could I survive that?”, often paired with the objective of protecting friends and family. Being burglarized my chances are good, if I don’t try to be a hero. In an action movie situation my chances are moderate, if I already have the skills of a hero. For the ridiculous ones, it varies wildly. Underlying all this though, are movie expectations. In a movie the hero goes along, is hit with varied obstacles, and manages to pull through by being the best and keeping their head. But is this really how the world tends to work?
I’m increasingly aware that it is not, even if you have a lot of time to plan out your response under conditions of minimal stress. For one thing, your underlying proficiencies, automatic responses and reflexes may not do what you want. Perhaps it’s a good idea to fire a gun, but how many times have you fired a gun before? You’re highly unlikely to be a good shot at first. Maybe a fancy maneuver would be nice, but have you trained as an acrobat, gymnast, or martial artist? If not, pulling it off even in a safe environment is a dubious proposition. And even if you’ve got all those skills, who’s to say that’s enough? If you’re on an open field, walking along unsuspecting while a sniper has you in the sights of a high powered rifle, there is no stunning victory, no champaign room. You just die. In war, not every one who is smart and skilled survives, luck plays a huge factor. Nobody is good at surviving a mortar. In nature, if something like a cold snap or simple misfortune has resulted in malnourishment, and some predator that’s faster than you got close enough without you detecting it, it’s over already. “Nature” would say ’sorry’ if it cared, which it doesn’t.
The real world has no proclivity to providing you only with obstacles you can survive, even in a hypothetical sense. The real world plays by no rules but the rules of physics, and those are as brutal and unforgiving as landing on the solid granite rocks they make up. If we reach the point at which we’re able to create artificial general intelligence and haven’t put in the work to understand how to make it friendly, too bad. It’s lights out, with no excuses and no second chances.
The lesson of all this is to start acting now. If you care about the survival of your loved ones, if you have any desire to see 80 or 8,000, then don’t wait until the situation has grown impossible to break out your best self! The world yet allows you free time, so use it! Do all you can to ensure that we avoid the “no-possible-win” scenarios, and give ourselves at least a moderate chance of surviving the ones we can’t avoid. If you go to take the final for a class in a new subject and you’ve never studied, you’re going to fail, no ifs, ands, or buts. The test is coming, so get studying now and change those odds!
(Note: it is possible to take this too far. From my own experience, I’ve found that I require social contact to stay productive, and I might also require some occasions to kick back and stop optimizing my time for a few hours. In addition, fun is important long term, and a highly productive presingularity life can be a fun one. But be honest with yourself, which in this sort of affair is usually a nontrivial task. If you’re anywhere close to average, it’s very unlikely that you’re already optimizing your productivity, or the density of your fun and relaxation. I’m still working at it myself. )

December 18th, 2009
Two months ago I experienced some burnout and had to scale back my efforts at existential risk reduction. I was optimizing every single bit of my time towards that end, and for a possible variety of reasons I couldn’t sustain it. That was acceptable, as long as I knew I couldn’t do it. When it comes to saving billions of lives – as well as both our future and our past – I can’t accept applying anything other than my best effort. If that meant taking some more time for relaxation, so it was.
Even so, this went again my grain in a little. We are entering the single most pivotal time in the history of our civilization, species, and Earth, and as long as I can do something about it, it seems a little silly to sit around playing video games. In addition I’ve never been good at balancing really entertaining games and work, beyond getting homework in on time. Months ago I made a policy against playing any new video games, and I came back to decide that again; these days I’m most satisfied if I keep myself grounded in this world. In addition, any sort of role model I have would be fighting tooth and nail to protect the beauty of our present and the potential of our future. I could accept doing less if I had to, but it felt very off.
For about a month now I’ve been back at spending more and more time and effort on “saving the world”. I’m happier because of it, and I think I’ve got things figured out this time, I’m a little surprised I didn’t see it before. When I was going through that burnout, all the things I most wanted to do were social things. As I pointed out even then, I was doing fine until I got into a situation where my optimizations didn’t take  me on their own into proximity with others. Now I’m back to optimizing all my time towards existential risk reduction, with the one exception of occasional social events. I think I actually had tried this earlier, but by that point I was already coming down and didn’t have the time to see it work.
What’s more, I’m now an aspiring rationalist, and despite some fair assumptions by others, I did not really consider myself one before. A few readers may not fully realize what I’m talking about, which is kind of a pity. I’d suggest reading LessWrong, but even doing that I didn’t “get it” for months. Reading some good sci-fi also helped. For about a year I had been working at being maximally productive with my actions, but only recently am I working to be maximally productive with my thoughts. This is where the very significant gains lie.
If there ever was a time for us to become heroes, it is now, and it’s satisfying for me to be more directly back on that path.

December 5th, 2009

If we pull this off, it’s really going to be a great story.
(I’m referring to the challenge of surviving to – and building – a positive future)

November 3rd, 2009
While I’m confident that most of my readership also follows Michael Anissimov’s Accelerating Future blog, his posted video of a panel from the Singularity 2009 conference is so relevant to the topics of Normal Human Heroes that it would be criminal not to include it here. Really great discussion from some of the de facto leaders of the most critical and under appreciated fields.

Changing the World Panel — Singularity Summit 2009 — Peter Thiel, Eliezer Yudkowsky, Aubrey de Grey from Singularity Institute on Vimeo.

October 31st, 2009
I promised I would say more about some of my reasons for wanting to work at avoiding existential risk. Here it is, a little delayed.
There are a lot of reasons to devote time and money to reducing existential risk. I’ve talked about some of them, and they’re mostly pretty obvious: save 6,400,000,000 lives and perhaps all life on our planet, ensure the continuance of intelligence and human beings  in our section of the galaxy, and allow us to develop negligible senescence and do some cautious utopia engineering (and then reap the benefits). Most any ethical code would assign a great deal of importance to this. But there are also reasons that striving to reduce x-risk is inherently attractive.
When we were children we had all sorts of crazy preferences for our future careers. Astronauts, bank robbers, the president, horses, Ewoks, etc. As time goes by we realize many of these are unlikely, prohibited by social and market factors, sometimes by basic biology. For most of us we started to think more about careers near the end of high school, and then it was jobs like auto-mechanic, microbiologist, engineer, mathematician, teacher. A few tests told me I should be an architect; I ignored these results but sometimes I wonder. Now as I’m finishing my B.S. I’m starting to apply for full time jobs, things like microprocessor engineer, process engineer, consultant. If I hadn’t decided to work and donate, I would have pursued academic research and published papers, added my tiny little push to the nearly-inexorable advance of scientific understanding.
These are all fine careers to pursue for their own sake. They add value to the economy. They can improve lives. They can do some small part towards improving our civilization and planet. I had long planned to adopt, and I would have been able to support and nurture a human life. But then, then comes a chance to do something big. To be a part of something so monumentally huge it sounds almost stupid. “Saving the world” is like something out of a kid’s show, but there it is, along with the growing number of journal papers, academic departments, donors, summits, non-profits, people and plans. I wouldn’t mind being a researcher and I had always expected to be an engineer, but let me be frank with you: I’ve always wanted to be a hero. To go up against obstacles and against the odds, to overcome the impossible, to succeed when failure means death, and to sit back and recollect when it was all over, in a world that I had had some impact on, even a small one. When trends or disasters move the world towards destruction, to be on the other side fighting back with all I’ve got, so that even if they take down everything I love they’ll have to go through hell to do it (deliberate anthropomorphization). To work for something so much larger than myself.
I really would prefer that the world were in less danger and that intelligence were easier to design. In addition to the obvious benefit of avoiding the risk of megadeath, I would then be free to relax and wait for the Kurzweilian Age of Spiritual Machines. I was serious though when I called this a “chance”, an opportunity. Hidden in all the dangers that lie ahead of us, here is our chance to be heroes of the highest caliber, where failure is worse and success better than any story I’ve ever heard. Also, it’s convenient that we get to avoid the constant risk of death of the average hero-character. The risk of death is certainly there, and if we fail, then . . . well, everybody dies. Maybe not immediately, maybe technology is halted by a world totalitarianism, but I don’t see immortality being prevalent in that kind of future. Until such a day though, we can be heroes in relative comfort, with houses and food and medical care. That doesn’t mean it’s easy – our difficulties are just intellectual and persuasive instead of military – but if it were easy then this wouldn’t be much to talk about.
In short, working to avoid existential disaster is the coolest damn thing I could possibly do. If you put “existential risk reducer” next to being just a process engineer or consultant, it’s not really fair to call it a choice at all. This is a very direct and short-term reason for doing this, but it has a long-term corollary as well: having such a large impact on humanity’s chance for survival stands  a good chance of being one of the very few things you can’t do as a posthuman. Even if we do this right and you live for an eternity, you may never again get a chance like this to be a hero.
“This is the true joy in life — that of being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one.”
-George Bernard Shaw

October 17th, 2009
I noticed that I was often coming up with thoughts that were to me motivational and somewhat novel, and most of the reason for this blog is presenting those thoughts in case anyone else can get some use out of them. This post isn’t really one of those, it’s a personal account but something that might also be helpful. On a side note, looking back on some earlier work, my writing here isn’t quite at the standard I’d envisioned; I think I’m aiming for the emotional climaxes without the necessary development. Hopefully my future posts will improve as I remain mindful of this. Though my earlier work was also a lot longer and I’m trying to keep these posts on the short side. Which, BTW, is something this post probably can’t be.
In the past couple weeks my extreme drive to save the world started to falter, was partially repaired several times, and eventually ground to a halt. It didn’t die; saving the world and working to extend my lifespan by thousands or millions of years are way too important. But I let it sit there on the ground while I’ve been gathering my strength and regaining my original motivations. The reasons for this breakdown/burnout aren’t entirely clear, maybe it was a “perfect storm” of events. Maybe it wasn’t, and there’s a chance that earlier factors sent me into states where I was bothered by things I otherwise wouldn’t have been, and those things aren’t part of the main problem at all. Possible causes include: a general drifting from my original/developed motivations, being back at school where I have many associations of living “normally”, and meeting and becoming involved with other singularitarians. As I think back to the beginnings of this, that theory about a dominating early factor seems well supported. While those other things probably contributed, I do recall an initial, really big issue being lack of relaxation.
I have slightly unusual (inhuman) heroes, and one frequent trait is extreme single-mindedness. I love characters that figure out what has to be done, in the long or short-term, and then set about doing it with unwavering determination. I’d strived for that for awhile, and I was pleased as I got closer and closer. Recently, and certainly affected by the pressure of studying for and then applying to consulting firms (something I was genuinely interested in), I’d basically succeeded in doing this, and I think this was my undoing. I was able to spend all my waking hours on work with no breaks  just for fun for its own sake, which I’d previously been taking occasionally through “failure of will”/akrasia, or not being fully honest about what was most helpful.
Without having the expectation or experience of just kicking back and relaxing, ever, I felt like a huge ship, straining and groaning at the seams. I knew my seams were strong enough to hold, this was too important for me to ever really give up on, but I was starting to quake with the strain. It’s like in Star Trek, when Kirk takes the ship to warp factor 6 and Scotty exclaims “The ship canna take that much cap’n!” Why do they even put that kind of drive in there anyway? I’m admittedly not very familiar with the lore.
I wrote a post sometime around this period, which I kept as a draft. Here’s a paragraph from it:
“I just can’t seem to find a good way to justify relaxing or doing nothing like I used to, each moment of time is one in which I could be helping to save 6.7 billion lives. I can realize of course that I start to go a little crazy when I don’t do anything fun, and can slot my time to include some fun things, but the pressure is still there, making me choose how much time to spend where, where the greater marginal value is. A little voice tells me to just fuck it, drop off the grid, forsake these world saving efforts and basically all my ideals, turn my back on every great hope I ever had for myself, of doing the right thing when it was required of me. I don’t think that’s a sustainable choice, but there’s a voice suggesting it. It doesn’t help that I’m not smart enough to be exceptional, compared to a lot of people I’m not really that much to speak of.”
I’d always believed that you can’t try to save the world through willpower, not when it may takes years of dedicated work. It has to be done with habit and lifestyle changes. Maybe my gradual progression brought me too far in one direction, and I couldn’t bring myself to pull back without first really failing to sustain that extreme of a lifestyle, and that brought me to sustain myself there – momentarily – with willpower. I could allow myself to do less as long as I knew I couldn’t do more, but I really had to know I couldn’t do more. I still can’t be sure, but at least now I’ve got much better reason to think that I can’t.
Huh, a new but related theory that just came to me is that while things were working out, my work just naturally brought me into fun relationships with people. Since school started again I’ve mostly just interacted with my parents, and though they are nice (and incredibly cheap) people to live with, it’s not as rewarding as conversing with peers. Alas, too many theories, and not enough time or reason to test them rigorously. They do however tend to make roughly coherent recommendations.
There are a fantastic number of  reasons to work towards saving the world, and one of them is that it can be a lot of fun doing it. Thinking way back, that’s what got me started on all this. There are many reasons I should work on this, but there are also reasons I just simply want to. I believe that element of fun and immediate desire is important: even if it’s not necessary for all people it sure is helpful as hell. I’ll explain about some reasons I find this fun in a future post.

October 7th, 2009
For Humanity’s sake, this may be the time!

From Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure:
Rufus: Well you can start by signing this for my kids.
(Holds out a CD of Wyld Stallyns music.)
Ted: Why?
Rufus: They’re big fans of yours.
Ted: What?
Rufus: Everyone is. Wyld Stallyns music is the foundation for our whole society.
Bill & Ted: No way.
Rufus: Yes way. In fact, I believe you were there. The futuristic place with the domes?
Bill: And the totally excellent music.
Ted: They totally worshipped us there, Rufus.
Rufus: I know. That’s why I was sent to make sure you passed your History report. If you guys were separated it would have been disastrous for life as we know it. You see, eventually your music will help put an end to war and poverty. It will align the planets and bring them into universal harmony. Allowing meaningful contact with all forms of life. From extra terrestrials to common household pets. And, it’s excellent for dancing.
(If you’d like to hear the full song and are into that sort of thing [I am], you can find it here. Great if you need some cheering-up from contemplating existential risk all day.)

September 17th, 2009
Riding the bus this morning we were stopped at one corner for a bit, and there was a woman there waiting for another line. She was dressed very simply in a work uniform, with her hair back, and a 2 or 3 year old son in her arms. He was looking about, squinting and seeming a little irritated with the sunlight. She seemed in that quiet early-morning mood, and though she gave off a strong impression of intelligence and maturity I got the feeling the child was unplanned, perhaps had when she was still a teenager. I’d also guess she was single, and I started to think about life and outcomes we may never have wished for but that we come to live with. Then, as he was looking with confusion at the bus or something else, she came out of her reverie and with great warmth and easy affection, kissed him on the cheek.