Update for 11/26/2017

Okay, last week was pretty crammed again. I think I need to start shortening these updates so they’re easier to write.

Books

🤔

I finished Nick Bostrom’s Superintelligence. Here’s the gist. These are issues I intend to take seriously.

After that I listened to Freedom of Simplicity by Richard Foster. I thought it’d be a good one to accompany my new single tasking theme. I appreciated the context it gave the practice. It was mostly about material simplicity though. Sometimes there’s a trade-off between money and time, and I prefer to save time.

Now I’m on Eliezer Yudkowski’s Rationality: From AI to Zombies. I already thought good reasoning was hard work, but now I see it’s even harder.

Thanksgiving

🙂

My geek meetup group happened to be doing Thanksgiving, so since I had no other plans, I signed up at the last minute. I thought it might feel weird to spend a holiday with people I barely knew, but it ended up feeling like one of their regular events, and I met some new people and had a nice time.

Friday I spent some time a forest preserve I haven’t visited in many years. The trees were mostly bare, but I might come back for their Christmas light display.

Movies

🤔

Tuesday I watched Justice League with my geek group. I agree with others that the CGI wasn’t great, and it was distracting. But I liked it aside from that. I was especially intrigued by Cyborg. I identified with the way half his attention was on in his own strange inner world.

Friday after the forest I went to see Blade Runner 2049. I really liked the aesthetic and the soundtrack. The mystery and plot twists were interesting. It made me a little more worried about the possibility of creating a slave race of AIs, though at the same time it’s too easy to anthropomorphize non-human minds.

Video games

🙂

Saturday I was free all day, so I agreed to play Minecraft with my pals Dav and froststare. We started a complete-the-monument map called Instability. It was fun, but I didn’t really do much to help.