Fall 2018 Quarterly Review

Back in October, I laid out some focus areas and strategies for the final months of 2018. I intend to do this again for the first quarter of 2019, but before that, it's worth taking the time to reflect on how well I did at meeting my Q4 objectives.

I had major objectives in nine (9) different areas. Of these, I achieved three, did not succeed at two, and made progress on four. Let's look at each of them in turn while considering how the different focus areas interacted with one another.

The most obvious success was selling our old house. That took a long time, a lot longer than anyone really expected—my facetious prediction of 2019 from last January very nearly turned out to be correct. It was correct, if you're limited to two sigfigs. Because this took almost the entirety of the quarter, some of the projects I might have had time to undertake if we had finished earlier went undone.

The other successes are somewhat less dramatic: competing in (and winning) NaNoWriMo and finishing Introduction to Flight. Neither of those went particularly impressively, but I managed to complete them while working on the house and dealing with other aspects of family life.

One aspect of family life that none of us managed very well was organization. I was specifically hoping to organize some of my possessions in advance of the possibility of moving out. (I had wanted to do this at the old house before Mom and Dad decided to move, but they sprung the announcement on me before any significant progress could be made.) I will probably be able to fold my own organization into the process of getting things set up in the new house, however.

Similarly, I did not make any real progress on the possibility of applying for graduate school, because we couldn't really afford it. We'll see about that this quarter, depending on how my continued job search goes.

Speaking of which: I made some continued progress in the hiring process in the fourth quarter, but did not secure employment. (I'm still waiting to hear back on the results of some of my phone interviews.) I don't feel that I submitted the sorts of quality applications I had been hoping to when I set aside Mondays—later switched to Tuesdays—for that specific purpose.

The same goes for my other nonfiction reading goals, and programming. I did well on the latter during October, culminating in an extensive blog post. Since then, however, I've barely touched MATLAB at all, let alone working in other environments. For the former, meanwhile, I managed to work through a few papers and presentations, but still have a lot of material waiting on my desktop.

In both cases, I see this as a failure to allocate time to goals. The problem, of course, was not that the goals were unimportant, but simply that there wasn't time for everything and they fell by the wayside. The lesson here is paring down one's objectives to what's reasonable with the time or resources at hand. This applies equally to the final focus area, nonfiction writing, where I managed to continue pushing out monthly blog posts, but didn't get very far with anything more expansive or frequent.

The high level lesson here remains more-or-less the same as always: set reasonable goals based on your true values while accounting for planning fallacy. I did moderately well last quarter, but could have done a lot better. I will be taking this into account in the coming months and trying to set my Q1 objectives with that in mind.

Predictions for 2019

As in 2017 and 2018, I am making a set of predictions for what will happen in 2019. At the end of the year, I will come back and score them to see how accurate I was. The rules are the same as they have been for the past two years.

PERSONAL/PROFESSIONAL

I will read 15 books this year: 95%
....20 books: 80%
....30 books: 60%
I will read three technical/science/engineering books this year: 80%
....five books: 60%
I will write an average of one blog post per month: 90%
...two blog posts per month: 70%
I will still be using Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr: 80%
I will remain single this year: 60%
I will have my wisdom teeth removed: 60%
I will not be hospitalized this year: 95%
I will compete in NaNoWriMo: 80%
...and succeed: 70%
My French will improve this year: 60%
I will not begin learning Russian this year: 70%
I will begin learning a new programming language this year: 70%
I will either find an engineering job or enroll in grad school: 90%
I will still be participating in the Less Wrong/SSC community: 90%
I will attend some sort of Solstice event: 70%

SCIENCE/SPACE

No successful human clones announced: 80%
KIC 8462852 will not be satisfactorily explained: 80%
No strong evidence of extra-terrestrial life found: 95%
The Mars InSight lander will still be operational: 90%
Both Voyager spacecraft will still be operational: 80%
Hubble Space Telescope will still be operational: 90%
JWST scheduled to launch on or before December 31, 2021: 70%
SpaceX conducts Demonstration Mission 1 successfully: 90%
SpaceX conducts Demonstration Mission 2 successfully: 70%
Boeing conducts the Orbital Test Flight successfully: 90%
Boeing conducts the Crew Test Flight successfully: 70%
Falcon Heavy will fly at least once this year: 80%
SLS scheduled to launch on or before December 31, 2020: 70%
Virgin Galactic tourist flights will not begin this year: 60%
Blue Origin begins crewed test flights this year: 70%
No Chinese crewed space flights this year: 80%
No deaths in space this year: 90%
No country leaves the ISS Treaty: 90%
Sci-Hub will remain easily accessible from the United States: 80%

POLITICS/WORLD

Donald Trump will still be President of the United States: 95%
Mike Pence will still be Vice President of the United States: 95%
Donald Trump will still be planning to run for re-election: 90%
At least one new US government shutdown will occur this year: 80%
More than 5 major Democrats (current or former Governor, Senator, or Representative) announce Presidential bids: 90%
....more than 10: 70%
At least one major Republican announces a Presidential primary challenge: 70%
United States will not go to war with a nuclear power: 90%
United States will not enter a major new war (>100 US casualties): 70%
Theresa May will still be Prime Minister of the United Kingdom: 80%
UK will leave the European Union: 90%
No additional countries opt to leave the European Union: 90%
North Korean government will not be overthrown or displaced: 95%
North Korean government will not begin major liberal reforms: 95%
US Nominal GDP will finish ahead of the EU and China: 80%
Bitcoin will end the year valued $500 or above: 80%
....$1000 or above: 60%
Fewer than 25 cases of wild polio contracted this year: 70%
Fewer than 100 cases of vaccine-derived polio this year: 80%

META

I will remember to score these predictions: 95%
I will still be overconfident in these predictions: 80%
I will be less overconfident than in 2018: 60%

I am making sixty (60) predictions this year, which is the same number as in 2017 (ten more than 2018). This change is attempting to balance sample size against my tendency towards overconfidence. Additionally, each category besides Meta has an equal number of predictions, which will let me do more direct comparisons at the year-end analysis.

I am still not willing to bet money on these predictions, though thinking about $1 bets did help me reduce my confidence. (Maybe I'll write something about my 2012 election bet later in the week.) Hopefully next year I will feel sufficiently confident to follow Bryan Caplan's advice. That will, of course, depend on the results of this year's predictions.

Come back in twelve months to see how I did. In the meantime, happy New Year!

2018 Prediction Results

As in 2017, I made a number of predictions about how 2018 would go—fifty predictions, to be exact. Today, we're going to see how well I did.

Predictions left unmarked were correct, those struck through were incorrect. Two predictions are marked in italics because I can't decide how to score them. First, I not scoring my prediction that astronauts would launch from US soil. Virgin Galactic conducted a test flight that reached space by some definitions, but I should have stated clearly what would qualify. Second, I don't know whether the current state of Brexit negotiations indicate that the UK is "on track to leave the European Union"—and I'm not sure anyone else does, either.

PERSONAL/ACADEMIC

I will read 15 books this year: 95%
....20 books: 80%
....30 books: 60%
I will write an average of two blog posts per month: 80%
....three blog posts per month: 70%
....four blog posts per month: 60%
I will not experience a major political/religious/philosophical conversion: 95%
I will write more than 10,000 words of fiction this year: 70%
I will still be using Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr: 90%
I will remain single this year: 60%
I will vote in the 2018 midterm elections: 95%
I will not be hospitalized: 95%
I will not have my wisdom teeth removed: 90%
My French will improve this year: 60%
Jayhawk Rocket Design will begin constructing the hybrid rocket engine: 70%
I will graduate with my degree in aerospace engineering: 95%
....in May: 90%
....with a GPA 3.2 or above: 80%
KU Aerospace will place in at least one AIAA Design Competition: 90%
....two AIAA Design Competitions: 80%
I will no longer be living in Kansas: 60%
I will either find an engineering job or enroll in grad school by December: 95%

SCIENCE/SPACE

No successful human clones announced: 80%
No major progress on figuring out the "EM Drive": 70%
Falcon Heavy successfully launches this year: 80%
SpaceX Dragon 2 test-flown this year: 90%
....successfully: 80%
Boeing Starliner test-flown this year: 90%
....successfully: 80%
Astronauts will launch from American soil: 70%
Virgin Galactic tourist flights won't begin this year: 60%
Blue Origin begins crewed tests this year: 60%
No crewed flights beyond Low Earth Orbit: 90%
NASA Orion will remain on-schedule: 70%
No deaths in space this year: 90%
No country leaves the ISS Treaty: 90%

POLITICS/WORLD

Donald Trump will still be President at the end of 2018: 95%
Mike Pence will still be Vice President: 95%
Republicans will lose the House and/or Senate at midterms: 90%
Theresa May will still be Prime Minister of the United Kingdom: 90%
UK will remain on track to leave the European Union: 80%
No additional countries will leave the European Union: 70%
US Nominal GDP will finish ahead of the EU and China: 80%
Bitcoin will end the year valued $500 or above: 80%
....$1000 or above: 70%
....$10,000 or above: 60%
Fewer than 10 cases of wild polio will be contracted: 70%

META

I will remember to score these predictions: 95%
I will have been overconfident in these predictions: 80%
I will have been less overconfident than in 2017: 60%

Similar to last year, the last two predictions require me to do some of the analysis before I can actually score them. In theory, these could become subjective tie-breakers, but that isn't what happened this year.

60% predictions: 2 right and 7 wrong, for a score of 22%
70% predictions: 4 right and 4 wrong, for a score of 50%
80% predictions: 8 right and 3 wrong, for a score of 73%
90% predictions: 9 right and 2 wrong, for a score of 82%
95% predictions: 8 right and 1 wrong, for a score of 89%

Graphed, my results look like this:

Yikes.

This is clearly at lot more overconfident than in 2017, when I at least had a few categories that scored above the orange line. Laying further under the line indicates greater overconfidence, while laying further above the line indicates greater underconfidence. Perfect calibration is ideal, but it's usually better to be underconfident than overconfident.

By category, I did pretty well in Politics/World this year, and okay in Personal/Academic My worst category was surprisingly Science/Space. This seemed to be clustered on launch schedule optimism, which is more of a single-point failure than in any of the other categories.

My overall take-away from these results is that my 2018 predictions were actually a lot riskier than my 2017 predictions, even though I came away from those feeling rather silly. That was my first time trying to project exactly a year into the future, though, so to some degree that's expected.

I wanted to decrease my confidence this year, but it doesn't seem like I really did that. Instead, it seems like I made several less probable predictions and assigned these higher probabilities than they really deserved.

Low sample sizes obviously apply, but 2018 challenges the idea that I should increase the number of predictions for 2019. I'm hesitant to just add more predictions, because it would be easy to simply come up with possibilities I haven't thought about very much, and assign probabilities more-or-less randomly. It might be better to largely recycle the predictions which can be recycled, and try to get the odds better for the next twelve months.

Check back in to see which way I go.

Q4 Progress Report: December Week 5

We finished the house this week. Completely. We took the last of the stuff out, handed over the keys, and I watched as Mom and Dad signed the final paperwork. We're done. We even got paid in a timely manner.

It's a little weird to think about, if we're being honest. That's the place where I spent my entire childhood, and now I'm probably never going back there. I might not even go to that street again, despite still living in the same area. Even though this has been literal years in the making, I didn't really feel like I had full closure on the matter. But that's typical.

At least I'm feeling better. I woke up a lot less sick on Christmas Eve. I don't know if we would have finished had I not improved by the end of Christmas. As is was, we managed to have a relatively enjoyable holiday and finish everything up by the scheduled signing time.

Since that point, I've mostly been working on hitting my end-of-the-year blogging goals. I pushed out the rocket science post I'd been working on and my December links. Tomorrow, my scored predictions for 2018 will go up (unless something drastic happens between now and then). Ideally, I'll also have 2019 predictions up on New Year's Day.

I'd also like to do full reviews of my quarterly goals, and—conditional on the results—lay out some objectives for the first quarter of 2019. Those have less strict desired deadlines, though probably still within the next week.

I also need to re-up my Youth Protection certification tomorrow, and at some point it would be nice to start putting away the Christmas decorations. That will probably entail an extensive negotiation process with Dad, but I won't bother transcribing any details.

December Links

Crew launches to the International Space Station resume successfully after the failure of MS-10 in October. The crew of that mission will end up flying to the space station with NASA astronaut Christina Koch in February. Meanwhile, Russian cosmonauts performed an EVA to investigate damage to the MS-09 spacecraft, which was discovered to be leaking in August.

NASA's OSIRIS-REx spacecraft arrived at the asteroid Bennu, beginning a three-year observation of the body which will conclude with an Earth sample-return in 2023.

Cassini data confirms that Saturn's rings are a transient phenomenon and will disappear within a few hundred million years.

Virgin Galactic completed a powered test flight that, by some definitions, crossed the boundary into space. SpaceShipTwo achieved an altitude of 83 kilometers (52 miles) which is above the line the US Air Force uses, but not above the Kármán Line. I'm torn on whether to count this towards my 2018 prediction that astronauts would launch from the United States. The pilots will be receiving commercial astronaut wings from the FAA, but I should have explicitly stated what counts.

More good news: the Federal Railroad Administration approved new rules last month that would bring the regulations on US passenger rail cars in line with European standards. This will allow American railways (i.e. Amtrak) to import passenger cars directly from Europe and Asia. Currently, imported cars require extensive modification even though the foreign standards result in lighter and safer rail cars.

Ever wanted to read Rationality: From AI to Zombies in physical book form? Now you can, at least part of it. MIRI is releasing reworked versions of two volumes as ebooks and physical printings. I'm looking forward to having the entire collection on my shelf someday.

That said, there's still a lot of good material in the Less Wrong archives. For example, Yudkowsky discussing the tradeoff between popularity and correctness.

More discussion on using prediction markets to determine the direction of scientific research.

Scott Alexander looks at the polling data and concludes that "Trumpist" positions have gotten less popular since Donald Trump launched his Presidential campaign. In a related story, support for  the president among the active duty troops has been declining continuously, while support for General Mattis remained high. Note that both of these articles were published before Mattis's resignation as Secretary of Defense and the government shutdown.

Gwern discusses Littlewood's Law as applied to global media and how paying attention to fantastically rare events can break our brains. Further reading: Most of What You Read on the Internet is Written by Insane People. The title is a bit hyperbolic, but gets at the idea that many active internet denizens are way, way removed from the societal baseline.

Ranked-choice voting wins in Maine as incumbent Rep. Bruce Poliquin drops his lawsuits against Jared Golden, who won the ME-02 Congressional race on later-round preferences.

Ozy Brennan discusses ways that the effective altruist movement can make itself more attractive to centrists and conservatives.

Why do success and failure compound? To put it simply, momentum. This seems relevant to some of the problems my family recently overcame, and hopefully can avoid repeating.

Q4 Progress Report: December Week 4

I caught Mom's cold.

She ended up getting antibiotics for it; I don't have nearly as bad a case of it (assuming that it is, in fact, the same cold), so I'm not planning to go to the doctor at this time. Mom is getting better, thankfully.

Hopefully I'll wake up feeling better tomorrow. This has really put a damper on Christmas preparations, and our expected closing on the house. That should take place later in the coming week, however, so hopefully next week's review will be a little more exciting.

Q4 Progress Report: December Week 3

It was a busy week. I'm tired.

I think we're done with the interior painting, which really just leaves a once-over on the floors left to do before we're in the clear to hand the property over. I'm not removing the painting supplies though until I get confirmation from my parents, though. Of course, I'll still need to keep the yard up, but that's a different sort of struggle.

That said, the last few days haven't felt much like a reprieve, because other factors naturally come into play. Most notably, I've been to three (3) social functions of various sizes in as many days. Mom is also fighting off a cold, so I've been looking to manage an even higher percentage of household tasks than usual.

Oh, and we put up the Christmas tree tonight. No decorations yet, but I'll get into that in the next few days.

I had intended to get a haircut on Friday, but just...didn't. On the bright side, it's a bit warmer, which is when I prefer to get them anyways. It is beginning to get annoying, though, so the incentive is definitely there.

My other major goal for the week is to push out a blog post on some elementary rocket engineering principles, with derivations. I'm having a lot of fun with my notes, so the incentives are there, too.

Ideas, Ideas Everywhere—And Not A Word To Write

Since NaNoWriMo ended, I've been having a lot more trouble writing than I'd expected. Maintaining that level of output was obviously extremely difficult, but I had figured that cutting back my daily allowance would make things easier.

No dice. I dropped to 1000 and then 500 words a day, and I'm still not really feeling any desire to keep pushing on that story. Part of the problem is that I'm running into a complex part of the plot which I'm not really sure how to execute, so writer's block is hitting pretty hard. That's...to be expected, I guess. Part of the reason for doing NaNoWriMo was gaining a bit more experience writing something besides the early introduction to a book.

The thing is, it's not like I'm out of ideas for stories. I just sort of...burnt out on that particular story.

If I had other active projects, that probably wouldn't be as much of a problem. But I haven't worked on anything recently—any fiction project, to be clear—that made it past the early planning stages. I've got scenes, characters, subplots running around in my mind, but nothing that really resembles a coherent story arc.

Of course, as I've remarked before elsewhere, I find it difficult to develop conventional plots because I just don't alieve in evil. Whenever I'm trying to set up a conflict, I find it extraordinarily difficult to come up with a reason that the characters couldn't solve the problem before the first act.

Maybe I should just double down on that. Surprise, the rest of this sci-fi thriller is actually a rom-com!

It's not like I have any reason to believe I'd be better at writing romance, but at least then I don't have to make excuses for having happy characters. Probably. I don't actually know what's standard in those sorts of books.

We'll see what happens. I've thrown some words on the page with no clue where they'd go, but got some feel for writing that atmosphere and mood in the process. I'm unlikely to salvage it; other ideas are more appealing. Maybe I'll play around with plots over the weekend and run with one of them next week.

Is it almost Christmas already?

Q4 Progress Report: December Week 2

Writing has slowed down a lot, though that's arguably due to other factors. For instance, we've tentatively accepted an offer on the house already, which led to some mid-week crunch that I hadn't previously been expected. If this goes through, the property turn-over won't happen for some time, but it's nice to have a date on the calendar for that.

My parents' participation in a Christmas market for church, on the other hand, was entirely expected but nevertheless took up a good deal of time. I also had the pleasure of doing a phone interview this week, but—though not entirely expected—wasn't an interruption to my overall routine.

This week is mostly going to be focused on continuing the turn-over prep, though I think my parents are in the Christmas spirit and want to decorate before some company is over on ... Wednesday? I can't keep their schedule straight. I'm a little skeptical that that will happen but we will just have to wait and see. A higher priority for me is a haircut—it's getting to be time again and I'd rather not have just had one during all the holiday going-outside-and-back-in-again. Complete opposite of a rest if you ask me (but of course you didn't).

There's also some administrative stuff on the horizon—changing over accounts that are still using my school email, making sure files are organized, and maybe working on some writing for the next month. I may take a break from my current NaNoWriMo draft and focus on some other fiction project, or perhaps doing a few end-of-year blog posts is in order. I'll probably decide tomorrow.

Oh, and happy Smallpox Eradication Day!

Q4 Progress Report: November Week 5/December Week 1

December is here, which means we're two-thirds of the way through the fourth quarter of 2018. Or, to put it another way, there's less than a month left in the year.

As previously mentioned, I completed NaNoWriMo last month. The book itself is a long way from finished, but I've got some momentum now. Over the coming weeks I'll be putting a lot fewer words on the page each day, but that's in part because I find the difficultly of the marginal word rises non-arithmetically past a few hundred. Two thousand words (per day) is considerably more than twice as hard as one thousand words. At least right now; that may change as I get a bit more practice.

I also managed to push out a proper blog post as well as my November links before midnight Friday. That was a little closer than I like it, but manageable.

Over at the other house, I've been retrieving the last stragglers from the garage and finishing up the paint touch-up. That's been going faster than expected, which is good because the house is officially on the market.

Since between these changes my free time is slightly increasing, I've been going to a few more social events and, as predicted, ramping up the job search. I'm also hoping to work on some writing projects—there's some posts I'd like to do on some engineering topics to better explain them to my non-aerospace friends and family. Provided I manage to avoid getting roped into too many holiday activities, keep an eye out for those.