NaNoWriMo Takeaways 2018

I won NaNoWriMo this year. I've never done that before.

Truth be told, I've never even come close. In 2013, I started planning a story but didn't commit any words to the page before turning my spare attention back to school work. In 2015, I got about about 13% of the way towards a reduced goal before losing focus. Since then, I've had to much on my plate to even naively think that I could complete.

Having now made the time commitment to write 50,000 words in the course of a month, I can say that I was right to wait. It's possible to accomplish a lot in the course of a month with a few hours every day, but during undergrad I certainly didn't have that many extra hours to spare. As a graduate, though, the equation in a little different.

My novel is nowhere near finished, but it's satisfying to have gotten so far into a fiction-writing project. As it turns out, my past attempts have been suffering, at least in part, from analysis-paralysis. My desire to plan out the story in intricate detail interferes with my ability to just sit down and put words on the page. Niven's 17th Law.

From here on out, my plan is to write about a thousand words per day, without worrying about it if I happen to fall behind one day. If I can keep that up, I'll be at 80,000 words by the end of the year. Whether the book will be done at that point is an entirely separate question. Once it is, I can start revising the draft in the direction of something publishable. I don't know if I'd ever want to publish this, but that's a matter for another day.

November Links

SpaceX is undergoing some reorganization to accelerate the timeline for Musk's satellite internet project.

Arguably related: Aerospace America on the perilous road to Mars.

French artist Thomas Appéré renders Ryugu in comparison to several major cities, which gives a nice sense of scale.

Scott Alexander has been particularly prolific this month and I'm wildly behind. The major items include updates on ketamine, SSRIs, marijuana and preschool, with a new Much More Than You Wanted To Know on the latter.

Long-time rationality blogger Kelsey Piper does a Vox Explainer on Nick Bostrom's vulnerable world hypothesis. It's a worrying read, and it's not clear what we can do about it. World government is often brought up in this situation, but it's not obvious that that would actually reduce long-term existential risk.

A new (?) rationality blog argues that rationality is not systematize winning and discusses why this formulation is so controversial in the first place.

Robin Hanson on funding prestige science.

Speaking of which: scientists finally isolate enough specimens of a long-elusive microorganism to sequence its DNA. It turns out that they represent an entirely new supra-kingdom of life.

Doing statistics on an illustration from Jurassic Park.

Senator Sasse (R-NE) discusses the impact that high-fidelity photo and video manipulation could have on the future of journalism and political trust.

What the end of World War I sounded like.

Our World In Data looks at income inequality in 83 countries and concludes that's there was no global trend between 1990 and 2015. Certain regions and many individual countries saw significant rises, but enough countries saw insignificant change or reduction to defy a clean narrative.

Data does not suggest that corporal punishment is good for child development, and countries than ban it tend to have less violent crime among youths. The researchers are careful to note that this doesn't necessarily prove anything: countries which ban spanking are probably different in other ways, as well.

The surprisingly sensible case for building a Congressional dorm. Representatives-elect who can't afford DC rent until their salaries take effect in January are making a lot of headlines, but there's also pragmatic reasons to consider such a project. It reduces the barrier-to-entry for relatively regular citizens to run for office, and bipartisan room assignments might improve the political climate on Capitol Hill.

In what may be a related story, Rep. Joe Kennedy (D-MA)—yes, that Joe Kennedy—wants House Democrats to focus on a positive-sum economic ideology, rather than the current left-right conflict.

Meanwhile, in Connecticut, the argument for reforming the party primary system gets stronger.

US crops are rotting in warehouses as farmers suddenly can't sell their crops to China. Grain silos are full and farm bankruptcies have doubled since 2014. It's almost like tariffs are bad for the little guy. New Zealand, on the other hand, abolished farm subsidies in the 1980s and now their agricultural industry is stronger than the rest of their economy.

Another pro-market solution: Congress might actually vote on a carbon tax. The proposed bill, which has bipartisan support, would remove a lot of existing emissions limits and substitute a flat fee per ton of CO₂ released. Because this would raise consumer prices, revenue from the tax would go into a citizens dividend for a net benefit to poorer Americans. Personally I'd prefer to spend the money on a broad-spectrum strategy to improve our energy economy, but creating a mini-UBI would certainly go a long way toward passing it.

Exciting news from the Supreme Court: civil asset forfeiture is probably going to be ruled a violation of the Eighth Amendment. This is the latest from the interesting coalition between Justices Sotomayor and Gorsuch on criminal justice reform.

Q4 Progress Report: November Week 4

We are perilously close to being done with the house. Yesterday, we transported the remaining couple pieces of furniture and the majority of the remaining stuff in the garage, plus miscellaneous tools and the like. Dad and I also raked nearly all the leaves on the lawn, which was convenient ahead of the snowstorm we got today.

Since we're getting close, I'm planning to dial back up the job search this week with a new round of applications. Things have been a bit slow in the lead-up to Thanksgiving—having both parents around more does hell for productivity—but we're looking at a few weeks of relative normalcy before the Christmas season really kicks off. There's really not that much more touch-up work to do, so I should have plenty of time to focus on longer-term goals.

Speaking of personal large projects, NaNoWriMo is continuing well. I'm still on track, though 50,000 words is nowhere near the actual length of this draft. I'm not really sure if I'll go back and revise it when I'm done, but I am planning to continue at about 1000 words per day until it's done.

I'm planning to push out a proper blog post this week, in addition to the monthly links post over here.

The Third Thing

Almost a full year later, I think that I finally remembered the third thing from my followup post on accidental life outcome patterns. I'm not completely certain that this was the third thing I had in mind at the time, but definitely adds to a general perception of things going downhill all at once.

Specifically, my longtime barber had an accident sometime in the summer of 2016. This barber, Bud, had been cutting my hair since before I could process speech—since I could grow actual hair, in fact. He was at least in his 80s around the time of his motorcycle accident, and what his family described on the answering machine would be serious at any age. I'm still not sure if he recovered but he definitely couldn't continue cutting hair.

This is notable for me because a) yet another reminder of human frailty and b) I never asked Bud what the normal haircut he gave me was called. I haven't been truly satisfied with another barber since then. I don't really think "short" is a complicated request, yet I keep coming out of the barber shop looking the way I used to go into it. If I had a bit more time to burn, I would just go to different shops on a rotation until I tricked them into getting it short enough, but I don't, so I haven't.

Compared to the other things, this consequence for me personally is kind of trivial, so I'm not massively surprised that I forgot it. Also, it falls into a slightly different category: not something which had finally started going well, but an erstwhile constant that suddenly disappeared. Even so, it adds to a generalized perception that things suddenly fell apart in the late summer and autumn of 2016.

In reality, however, the conditions were all set for failure modes to occur; I just hadn't noticed and/or acknowledged them yet. Picking up on problematic trends before they become serious problems is a useful life skill, so I guess this combined ordeal will be a valuable experience in the end. Nevertheless, I can't shake the feeling that many—if not most—personal and family problems confronting the socio-economically well-off are artificial and could be avoided with a much smaller amount of foresight than we need in practice.

Oh well. Everyone has to start somewhere.

Q4 Progress Report: November Week 3

This week's update is late, but for good reason: we were working on the house tonight until close to the time that I'd usually be going to bed. However, I'm extremely pleased with the result. Aside from a single table and a few cleaning implements, there's nothing left inside the house proper. There are a number of items still in the garage, but those won't be a serious issue for showing the property. Allegedly, some realtors are coming to take a look this week.

Between that and a Thanksgiving party, I didn't have a great deal of time to write today, so I've managed to fall behind again, though I successfully caught up over the course of the last week and built up a small margin. Between that and the few hundred I did manage to get out, the situation is far less serious than before. My goal is to catch up tomorrow, but whether or not that happens is another story.

The only other big things that are coming to mind from the last week were some plumbing issues, but it appears that I successfully resolved those. However, poor drainage from those sinks has been a persistent problem, so I'm not ready declare total victory just yet. I'll be keeping that under observation as the week continues.

Q4 Progress Report: November Week 2

Big thing this week was the midterm elections. I'll probably write a more detailed post on the subject later, but for now let's just say my decision to stop paying attention to politics was probably the right choice given how watching the results come in (and reading the analysis) negatively affected my productivity.

Among other effects, I continued to fall behind on NaNoWriMo for the first part of the week. I've since recovered and started regaining ground, but I'm still several thousand words behind. I've crossed the 10,000 word boundary I mentioned in my 2018 predictions, though, so that's a positive. Right now, it's unclear whether I'll ever feel like sharing this story with the world, but it's already for a symbolic "first novel" even if it never sees the light of day.

I've also recovered on my sleep schedule, though that's still in the tentative mood. Since cold weather tends to aggravate my tendency to oversleep, I found a hack in my behavior: when I get out of bed to turn off the alarm, go to the thermostat and turn it up to the daytime temperature. Even if I turn back in, I'll be less cold later on—and have a task to motivate moving around keeps me awake longer. Generally speaking, that helps people avoid sleeping.

There's no particularly noteworthy goals for this week besides continuing along all fronts.

Q4 Progress Report: October Week 5/November Week 1

So what happened this week? It's been such a whirlwind that I really haven't managed to catalog all of it narratively. I had to sit down and look over my weekly to do list to properly make this post, if that says anything.

Underlying all of this, of course, was continued work on the house, mostly in the cleaning and yard-work department. I've also started the final round of paint touch-up, which I'm not going to estimate the quantity of thanks to my past experiences with planning fallacy. Overall, though, I would say that I'm satisfied with our progress in that regard.

After a lot of struggle and some forensic computing on my own programs, I finished the astrodynamics project that I've been mentioning all month, which you can read about on my WordPress blog. I'm honestly quite happy with the result and it's given me a lot of ideas for other, less complex writing material.

Speaking of writing, once Halloween was over and all zero of the Trick-or-Treaters we got this year had left, I began my NaNoWriMo project. So far I've done better than in all of my previous attempts, though given that it's only November 4th that doesn't say all that much. I'm under-quota for today, though only by a few hundred words, so I'm not going to worry about it too much. There will be a lot more work before this idea will be remotely ready for widespread consumption.

I can probably catch up tomorrow, though I'm also planning to do up a summary sheet on the candidates that'll be on our ballot Tuesday for the election. I still haven't decided which candidate I prefer for most of the downballot races, so this will be primary for my benefit, though of course I'll be sending to my parents so that they can make a quasi-informed selection.

Aside from that, well, more of the same. Hopefully I can make NaNoWriMo fit in my schedule; my plan is to get my words in before lunchtime and dive into other obligations after that point. The end of daylight savings time works in my favor here: I'm not moving my sleeping hours at all, just getting up a hour "earlier" compared to everyone else. I'd been wanting to make this change regardless, so being reminded about the time change was a present surprise. (For the record, I still favor making Daylight Saving's Time permanent).

October Links

The German Aerospace Center's MASCOT "rover" successfully detached from the Japanese Hayabusa2 spacecraft and landed on the asteroid Ryugu. The probe completed its intended scientific observations before battery power ran out.

NASA's Parker Solar Probe flies by Venus, lowering orbit to approach the Sun. The spacecraft has now set a new record for distance from the Sun. Closest approach is expected for November 5th.

Boeing wins the contract for a new Air Force training airplane, set to replace the aging-but-storied fleet of T-38 Talons.

This month in exponential curves: half of all human experience has happened since the 14th century. 15% happened to people currently living. Almost a third has happened during the life of the oldest person currently living. There's been a bit more turn-over in world's oldest person than usual this year, though it's hard to establish the "normal" range for a sample size this small.

This month is ballistic curves: the Soyuz launch failure. The spacecraft set to carry NASA astronaut Nick Hague and cosmonaut Aleksey Ovchinin aborted after a launch vehicle failure, landing safely in Kazakhstan. At this point, it's unclear how the Soyuz ISS launch schedule will be adapted, but Roscosmos is carrying on with uncrewed Soyuz launches as the investigation continues. Results are expected in the next week, with current speculation focusing on a failure of a side boosters to separate cleanly from the central sustainer stage. The next Soyuz launch date has yet to be announced, but will need to come relatively soon. Neither commercial crew capsule is ready for flight (arguably because Congress raided the funds to pay for the Space Launch System), so either another Soyuz will have to go up by January or the ISS will have to go uncrewed temporarily.

It's been a bad month for space telescopes, as well: Chandra and Hubble both went into safe mode this month, but have since resumed science operations. Kepler, however, has exhausted its fuel supply and was officially retired by NASA. Losing Kepler is less of a blow to the astronomy community given than TESS is now operational, but still a sad moment.

In related news, NASA is winding down the efforts to contact the Opportunity rover, which has been silent since June 10. The probe may still be capable of operations if the solar panels are covered by dust, so listening won't cease for several more months, but NASA wants to focus its resources on Mars InSight's arrival next month.

Internal prediction markets may or may not be something of a corporate fad lately, but Robin Hanson argues that anonymous "bad-news boxes" will work just as well. They're a lot easier to implement and so far seem to have a proven track record.

National Review discusses problems with the technocratic left, in a way that really illustrates the contradictory meanings of the word technocratic in contemporary discourse. The story's examples are interesting but ultimately less important than the fact that "evidence-based policy" often entails cherry-picking the evidence. For me, though, that's not a condemnation of basing your policy on evidence so much as a reminder that epistemic honesty is difficult and rarely cleaves cleanly down ideological lines.

Scott Alexander's latest musings on consciousness.

Sarah Constantin reflects on turning 30.

Q4 Progress Report: October Week 4

Fall allergies are having an effect, but nevertheless I made satisfying progress this week. All of the major remaining action-items on the house are complete, so at this point all remains is basic cleaning and touching up the paint. I'm confident that the house will be market-ready within a fortnight, though I'm not in charge of the paperwork so that might end up delaying matters.

Since we're nearly there, I am still intending to attempt NaNoWriMo this year. My planning is a little spotty but gradually coming together. Most of my writing effort has been directed at some sticky blog posts that I'd like to push out by the end of the month.

The goals for this week, then, are the necessary writing and continuing the cleaning/painting process. I've also instituting a small change in my weekly schedule, swapping Application Mondays with my normal off-day on Tuesday. Normally I find that I'm pretty tired after working on the house over the weekend, so it's easier to recuperate on Monday and then prepare a quality application.

Q4 Progress Report: October Week 3

Despite some hurdles, I made good progress this week. Several of the major remaining items for the move were checked off this weekend, and we should be meeting with the realtor to start the process of putting the house on the market. Most of the remaining tasks are pretty simple (aside from perfectionist touch-up work that I'll probably be doing until we hand over the keys).

There were some challenges at the new house this week as well, primarily a clogged drain that took some proper plumbing work to fix. That's been solved, however, and we shouldn't have serious trouble with it again.

I also spend some time working on various projects of my own, including the astrodynamics project I've alluded to previously. That's been almost entirely wrapped up and I should have the blog post finished within a few days (though I'll admit that I said the same thing last week). I also finished Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy (Goodreads review here) and I'm perilously close to finishing Failure Is Not an Option. All told, it's been a good week for my reading progress.

This coming week has no dramatic plans besides meeting with the realtor and attending a Halloween Party next Saturday. My blog post should be up in a few days, and I've begun my serious NaNoWriMo planning. Aside from that, things are going relatively well provided no new preventable emergencies rear their ugly heads.