Manifest for this Author’s Note:

• Writing notes.
• Update on the Center for Applied Rationality.
• Massive combined fan-art update.

Writing notes:

85:  The new revised version of Ch. 85 is something I could not get right in time for the end of the last update string – I started by posting 78 before 85 was finished – so I gave up and wrote the previous alternate ending.  Also, I didn’t want to have the fic spend a long time with a current stopping-point quite that gloomy.

86:  I regret that I could not come up with any reasonable way to have Harry shout “Temporal fugue!” or “Kage bunshin no jutsu!” before attacking.

If you’re wondering why the heck Ch. 86 took so long, it can be summed up as:

• 70%: Not enough hours to work on HPMOR.  86 & 87 arrived courtesy of my employer authorizing me to work full-time on Methods for a week.
• 30%: Ch. 86 is (1) a bunch of fiddly things that needed to happen before the next arc so everything keeps moving in the right direction, (2) mostly in the form of dialogue affecting people’s states of knowledge, in (3) a ‘reaction’ chapter where momentum is naturally low.  I ended up deleting a good deal of what I wrote for 86 because it just wasn’t possible to pack in all the fiddly stuff, and I figured I was probably overestimating how much fiddly stuff was needed.

Ch. 87 (Hermione-centric) went much faster and will go up on Friday.

Ch. 88 must begin a longer sequence and the longer sequence has some fiddly bits.  So there’ll probably be another interval before Ch. 88 and its attached sequence gets posted.

Center for Applied Rationality update:

The Center for Applied Rationality is holding 4-day workshops on Jan 25-28 and Mar 1-4.  These are high-intensity workshops aimed at entrepreneurs, hackers, and other ambitious, analytic folk; no prior LessWrong.com reading required, general backgrounds OK.  These workshops should provide a well-rounded spectrum of practice in the most critical cognitive skills that CFAR has developed and refined.  We should have at least one or two big names at these.

These workshops are aimed at people to whom it can provide a lot of value, and priced accordingly, during a time when CFAR hasn’t yet scaled up fundraising and is using these workshops to fund core operations.  Nonetheless, partial financial aid is available for the workshops on a needs basis.

This brings me to CFAR’s Inaugural Fundraising Drive, a $60,000 Matching Challenge in which your donations will be matched dollar-for-dollar, up to $60,000, until Jan 31st, 2013.

CFAR could make very good use of a lot more money than this while starting up.  I don’t work for the Center for Applied Rationality and they don’t pay me, but their work is sufficiently important that the Singularity Institute (which does pay me) has allowed me to offer to work on Methods full-time until the story is finished if HPMOR readers donate a total of $1M to CFAR.

CFAR is hiring.  Who, and how many people, will depend on how the fundraising goes.  Please apply regardless – it can’t hurt.

Mega combined fan-art update:

• Dylan Vaughan: Quirrell being a BAMF 
• Dzhu:  1 2 3 4 5 6
• Vadim Kulikov: Confess Your Ignorance
• David Capito (cameo in Ch. 86): Path to Azkaban
• Rose Pinnisi: Somewhere in the Dungeons
• Purely Sadistic:
  • Chaos Legion music
  • Hermione’s theme music:  Innocence
  • The Three Generals (perhaps the most beautiful three-generals art I’ve seen so far; also, note Draco’s background)
  • Impending Sense of Doom
  • General Granger (as she descends into water)
• Shallandavar: Tricia Glasswell
• Mystic Marbles:  Charred Memories
• Pencil-Monkey:  Luna Lovegood

New inspired works (fanfiction with explicitly similar rationalist themes):

• Harry Potter and the Natural 20 by Sir Poley (a D&D Munchkin is transported into the canon universe by a summoning gone wrong; smart!canon!Quirrell; author has confirmed explicit Methods inspiration).
• Friendship is Optimal by Iceman (an Equestria MMORPG with a real AI built to play Celestia – more AI than cogpsych)
• Myou’ve Gotta Be Kidding Me by DataPacRat (a rationalist arrives in Equestria… as a cow)

Cameos:  Ch. 86:  Samantha Crowley (Harry-Potter-Addict).  David Capito.  Beth Martin.  Colleen Johnson (donated by Tavoriel).  Pencil-Monkey, as Unseen University character Adrian Turnipseed.  Nancy Hua.  Nathan Rehfuss.  Sherice Ngaserin (Ilae).  Shehla (Shallandavar).  Chloe.

Ch. 87 will be posted on Friday, December 21st, at 7PM Pacific Time.

This Report won’t be long, since I spent all day working on HPMOR instead of composing the Progress Report.  22,000 words into Ch. 86 which is proving incredibly difficult.  The True version of Ch. 85, which I could not manage to write to my satisfaction in time for the previous series of updates, has been completed.  I intend to post the revised Ch. 85 and the new Ch. 86 as soon as Ch. 86 is done – it won’t be the perfect reading experience that it would be if I had the other chapters ready, but HPMOR has gone too long without an update.  If I can manage to finish 86 in December, the update will be on 7PM Pacific Time of Sunday of whatever week.  (Probably not the 2nd or the 9th, though – I’m not that close to finishing 86.)

If there is no new chapter posted before then, the next Progress Report will be on 10PM Pacific Time of Jan 2nd, 2013.  (Not the 1st, this time, because I might be doing something else on New Year’s Day.)

Meanwhile, in hopes my own tastes can prevent you from starving, fics I’ve finished and enjoyed lately include “Naruto: Game of the Year Edition” (Naruto discovers he’s living inside a video game and begins to adapt accordingly) and “Big Human on Campus” (Ranma enters the Rosario x Vampire campus and nobody believes he’s actually a human), both of which are much better, and much funnier, than their premises perhaps sound.

It’s getting shockingly hard to find enjoyable reading material anywhere, including in mainstream science fiction and fantasy.  I think that reading fanfiction has trained me to expect a certain amount of funny and awesome in my stories, and mainstream SF&F, whatever its other virtues, is not delivering the quantity of hedons per second I have come to expect.  I mean, yes, have your characters suffer and character-develop, but also have them strap a solid-fuel rocket to a broomstick, ya know?  I try to read the mainstream stuff now and nobody in the novels is having any fun even when I’m a third of the way through the book.  It’s like they don’t even realize their readers might want sympathetic hedons along with the suffering and character development.

Signing off until next time, hoping it’s soon,
Eliezer Yudkowsky.

18,000 words into Ch. 86, still one scene left to go.  I’m behind on my LessWrong.com posting schedule so basically got no chance at at all to work on HPMOR this month, and I don’t know if next month is going to be any better.  I usually try to take at least one solid day per month to work on HPMOR – the day before the update – but something came up and I couldn’t work on HPMOR for that day.  Will try to make it up next month.

Under the circumstances, I think I’d better answer a question that I’ve been a bit coy about up until now:

• I knew from literally the first chapter how the story would end.  We have not gotten lost.
• The fic’s plot will resolve at least as much as got resolved in the original Rowling books.  All currently open plot parentheses will be closed – I never drop a stitch without meaning to pick it up.
• We have two major story arcs (and a couple of intervening chapters) left to go before the end of the story.

I wish I could just post Ch. 86 when that monster’s done – I’m strongly tempted to – but it doesn’t come at a very good break point to leave the story.  It’s not so much a dramatic cliffhanger, as that it wouldn’t be a finished place to leave things while writing the rest of the arc.  I’ll finish Ch. 86, see if the rest goes faster, and then if it doesn’t go faster, post Ch. 86.

The fic is not abandoned; I’ve been working on it.  I just haven’t had the time to work on it for more than 30 minutes at a time.

All this non-HPMOR you’ve been getting has produced, among others, the following Less Wrong posts you might like:

• The Useful Idea of Truth
• The Map is Not the Territory
• The Fabric of Real Things
• Causal Diagrams and Causal Models
• Stuff that Makes Stuff Happen
• Proofs, Implications, and Models
• Logical Pinpointing

After the Highly Advanced Epistemology 101 sequence (the rest of which has already been written) comes the next and really important sequence Open Problems in Friendly AI – I also have this whole day job where I try to save the world, remember.  Writing math explanations is hard if you want to do it right with the neat illustrations and everything.  But all things end, and that Sequence too shall be finite.

Good fanfiction I’ve read lately:  Harry Potter and the Natural 20 is to the great art of Munchkinism what HPMOR is to rationality-in-general (the author has confirmed that HPMOR was explicit inspiration for the story, so I’m counting it as Rationalist Fanfic).  Remember, there’s a whole genre out there waiting to be invented – you don’t have to wait for me to write it!

Elaine, she of the beautiful and haunting fan music “Sphere of Stars” for Ch. 20, has a released a new album “Personal Growth” on Bandcamp.  Listen for free, purchase for $5.

Shannon Friedman (Chaotic Shannon in Ch. 78, also my girlfriend) is still accepting coaching/counseling clients, specializing in productivity unblocking and depression.  If you’ve got a problem with either productivity blocking or depression, give this (or something like it) an immediate try to see what happens (it often beats not talking to anyone and quietly suffering).

The Center for Applied Rationality is running a 3-day intensive workshop on Rationality for Entrepreneurs, Nov 16-18 in the greater San Francisco Bay Area.  This new improved workshop is aimed at attendees not previously familiar with LessWrong material – especially startup cofounders and other business leaders, but all attendees are welcome.  It’s priced higher, and will deliver value accordingly (or your attendance fee will be refunded).  If you want an intensive course on the most valuable cognitive techniques for daily life and daily entrepreneurialism, sign up now.

More generally, to anyone who wants to live in a saner world: the Center for Applied Rationality is now in that vital startup stage where every dollar matters – where donations greatly shorten the timeline to better research, and determine who can be hired as the first employees.  There’s a chance here to reach up toward that impossible dream of a better world where people aren’t crazy all the damn time, because believe it or not, nobody’s really tried anything like this before.  If you’ve got the power to fund this sort of thing – drop by our Berkeley office and talk to us, or attend a workshop and see for yourself what’s going on.  Or just act immediately.  Science, reason, and rationality – it’s what Muggles use instead of magic, and it’s all we’ve got.

The next Progress Report will be posted on Dec 1st, at 10PM Pacific Time.

15,000 words and two more scenes into Ch. 86, one scene left to go after the current one, and then it’ll be on to Ch. 87.  Further chapters will be shorter and less dialogue-y, I dearly hope (action takes much less time to write than dialogue).

Slightly later tonight on LessWrong.com (i.e. before midnight), I hope to publish the first post of a new Sequence, Highly Advanced Epistemology 101 for Beginners, which will update at least 3 times a week after that.

Aaron Tucker of Harvard would like to set up an HPMOR readers’ meetup, or just meet any other HPMOR readers going to Harvard.  He can be emailed at aarontucker@college.harvard.edu, and will be physically present on Thursday October 11th at 9 PM in the Cambridge Queen’s Head Pub.

The r/HPMOR subreddit continues to be highly active.  Now up to 1,640 Bayesian Conspirators!

Word to the HPMOR Podcast, now with its own dedicated site – they’re up to Ch. 67 and with some pretty high production values, having redone some of the earlier chapters too!  Also word to the Russian, Czech, and French translations, respectively up to 57, 53, and 83.  HPMOR.ru is a large collaboration of high quality, with participation by Jack Dilindjer, Moira, Lavash, Loonyphoenix, Alaric, Xeye, StrangeCat, Sergcold, Klekle, Alexqwesa, Chaika.che, Polina, Baskakov, You_know_who, Anzy, and Yuliy.

Things I’ve finished reading lately:  The over-a-million-words Negima / Mega Crossover fanfiction Unequally Rational and Emotional which starts off slow but had me laughing for solid hours by the later chapters; Eric Falkenstein’s new book The Missing Risk Premium (urgent reading for any investor who thinks there’s a risk premium); and the Mahou Sensei Negima manga (for the love of God stay away from the anime and movies).

Next Progress Report on Nov 1st, 10PM Pacific Time.

6,660 words into Ch. 86.  Again, I hope things regularize now that I’m going back to my main SIAI job rather than doing CFAR work (I still didn’t have much chance to work on HPMOR in August per se).  Next Progress Report on October 1st, 2012, at 10PM Pacific Time.  (I’m now calling them “Progress Reports” because the phrase “Progress Update” is apparently still, despite many and mighty disclaimers, confusing people into expecting new HPMOR chapters.)  Scrivener does seem definitely helpful, by the way.

/r/HPMOR on Reddit now has 1,367 subscribers.  (!)

I’ll be visiting New York on September 24th, and on the rest of the East Coast probably also Boston and possibly New Haven, both for business purposes and to officiate the wedding of a couple of good friends.  If you’re interested in becoming a major supporter of the Center for Applied Rationality, email me (yudkowsky@gmail.com) and we may be able to meet while I’m there.

We’re still finalizing the details, but the Center For Applied Rationality may soon be running two more events:

• A weekend rationality workshop in London, UK
• A set of 4-day rationality workshops in the San Francisco Bay area, in California.

If you’d like to be kept in the loop about these events, and sent an application when applications open, please fill out this one-minute form.