So, what have I been doing since last time?

Effective altruism in Czech Republic

I decided I want more effective altruism in general, and also in Czech Republic in particular. Me, Jirka Nádvorník, Radim Lacina and Dan Hnyk started working on organizing a conference on effective altruism in Prague, probably some time in fall. The work is fulfilling and interesting: I’ve never done anything similar and I think I’ll learn a lot from this. Our current idea is a weekend with 1 day of events aimed at educating the broader public about EA and related crucial issues, then 1 day of an “unconference” mostly aimed at community building.

Unfortunately, progress has been pretty slow so far.

Our main priority is securing a venue, then fixing a date. We quickly agreed on a sweet venue in Prague we’d really like to have (Paralelní polis), but unfortunately communication with them has been sluggish. I think we didn’t dedicate enough attention to this - we should have contacted potential venues sooner and more broadly. We’ll fix that.

We’d like to talk with the organizers of EA Global to see if we could make our conference an official EAGx event, but communication has been slow. We’re (so far unsuccessfully) trying to reach anyone from LEAN (Local Effective Altruism Network), which is the org behind Effective Altruism Hub. It seems they tried to start a small Czech online EA community, but it didn’t take off and it seems inactive now, so we’d like to see what could we do about that.

We’d like to use the conference to bootstrap the Czech EA community: have EAs know each other and talk to each other, regular meetups, materials in Czech, talking to Czech influencers and media. We are working on establishing a small non-profit. We currently just have a bare-bones site at efektivni-altruismus.cz.

Psych

I talked with my psychologist a few days after publishing Recent icky personal stuff. The session was basically just my huge mind-dump, maybe just a bit more verbose than that public post. There was relatively little back-and-forth - I mostly gave a long, prepared spiel and got just a few questions. I was a bit surprised by what in particular interested my psychologist: my ideas about polyamory and my experiences with recreational drugs. Discussing both made me a bit anxious. It’s probably nothing to analyze, just something to expect when dumping personal stuff on strangers.

The next step is a personality test, which I’m taking a few days from now. It should take about 4 hours. I was wondering what’s taking so long to test, and there’s an interesting reason the test is so long: it’s supposed to be tedious, because when you’re tired, your answers are less biased (e.g., you put up less effort to look like a nice person).

I was mostly well the last month. I felt sad a few days and cried a few times, because of my own anxieties, because I worry about everything, because sometimes I feel I have no idea what I’m doing. Mostly around personal relationships. Working on it.

Actual work

I apologized to my thesis advisor for not doing any work yet, explained I have been depressed, and promised to send him a draft text for my thesis assignment the next day. I still didn’t do that, and it was some weeks ago. That was all I did about finishing my degree. I sometimes feel a bit bad about not making any progress. Last year, I had hoped I would be finished by now.

I didn’t get the H-1B visa, so I’m not moving to Mountain View this year. I’ll probably have the option of working in some office in Europe. I’m currently optimistic about the prospect. If I want to finish my master’s, employment would probably have to wait until February 2017.

Many questions I need to answer, many things I want to do, many tradeoffs I’d rather not have to decide.

Rome

I was in Rome for a week. I’m not usually one to highly value museums and historical buildings, but I really enjoyed Rome’s antiquities. People in Rome have been building the city since ~900 BC to the modern day. Everywhere you dig, you’ll eventually find something Etruscan or Roman or at least medieval. After you make it through all the Renaissance built on top of that. The remains are aesthetically nice, but what I enjoyed more was a feeling of frisson I got from the inscriptions.

Take a look at this one. (Quoted from the Colloseum website.)

Decius Marius Venantius Basilius v(ir) c(larissimus) et inl(ustris) praef(ectus) urb(i) patricius consul ordinarius arenam et podium quae abominandi terrae motus ruina prostravit sum(p)tu proprio restituit.

Decius Marius Venantius Basilius, very famous and well known prefect of the city, patrician, regular consul, repaired the arena and the podium which a dreaded movement of the earth had cast into ruin, at his own expense.

What gives me frisson is this thought:

Once upon a time, there lived a man called Decius Marius Venantius Basilius. He was an actual human being, like you and me. There were probably people he hated, and people he loved. He had friends, he had hobbies, sometimes he felt good and sometimes he felt bad. And, 1500 years later, we know he was there. There was a horrible earthquake. And Decius Marius Venantius Basilius went and had it repaired at his own expense.

History is not finished. We’re writing it every day with our actions.

Various

I’m slacking off a bit with running and jiu-jitsu. Win: I’ll be running my first 10k in September. Fail: I mostly stopped going to jiu-jitsu the last 2-or-so weeks. I’ll try to pick up the slack.

I’m visiting Vienna next weekend to see their local rationality meetups, talk to a few people who might be interested in our EA conference, and to generally hang out.

In September, I’m going with a group of friends (mostly from high school) for a trip around Ukraine, mostly to see the Chernobyl exclusion zone. They’re putting a new sarcophagus on the NPP this year, so this is my last opportunity to see it the way I remember it from STALKER :)