I spent a few weeks there. They kept me locked in a room, and there was a slot through which papers with chinese writing were shoved in. I found a book of instructions, which mostly involved changing the writing around and pushing it back out the slot.

Are you self-aware yet? If not, you should come back and stay longer. Though someone else may be sleeping in the Chinese room (really, it's more of a Chinese closet) now.

Apologies for such an open ended question, but could you generally describe the experience?

Sure. I may not have been the typical visitor, but I'm not sure that there is a Typical Visiting Fellow.

I went there with low expectations of actually accomplishing anything. I'm not yet at the point where I can write the sort of hardcore sciencey analytic philosophy papers that are the main output of the Singularity Institute, but I think with 6 months of learning I will be able to meaningfully contribute to that goal.

I tried to share my lessons of entrepreneurship with the housemates that wanted to learn. I sat for an afternoon with a Brazilian entrepreneur living at the SIAI house and we went through all of the logistical details of opening a Delaware corporation as a foreign national. I did a short workshop on SEO. I went to see Thom Yorke twice in Oakland, saw Orbital in San Francisco, and Blue Scholars in Berkeley.

I graduated from school with an engineering in December and because of the success of my kratom business, I didn't need to get a real job, so I had a lot of time to surf the internet. I started reading Less Wrong while trying to actively comment as much as possible. In 4 months of posting on Less Wrong, I learned more than I did in two years of college. In 3 weeks of living at the SIAI house, I learned much more rapidly than I did while just posting on Less Wrong.

So, to answer your question, what I mostly did was sit around and talk with all of the wonderful people that live at the SIAI house or occasionally pass through or hang out. My favorite types of conversations are those where you push the barriers of the kinds of thoughts that humans are capable of having, the kinds of conversations that often stop making sense because there are too many different infinities or recursive loops. At the SIAI house, I could spend hours a day talking about those kind of things. It sometimes felt like I was living at the center of the universe.

Also, the food is good. Lots of delicious healthy things from Trader Joe's and Costco.

Travel diaries linked from the original post might help: http://xuenay.livejournal.com/332512.html

Manage to sell anyone Kratom while you were there?

Not exactly, but I got business cards from a couple head shop owners that were interested in wholesale orders. As an aggregate, the head shops pay too much for their wholesale kratom.

For anyone that didn't get the reference, my primary business at this point is selling legal drugs (sometimes known as "herbal medicine" depending on the conversational context). My website is http://getkratom.com and in the early days of Hacker News (Startup News?) I started an enormous flame war while trying to start a discussion about my business. I have since tried to stop mentioning it here, though I certainly don't mind talking about it to anyone that may be interested.

I never understood why they couldn't buy in bulk from Ebay.

They don't like doing their own packaging -- head shops aren't exactly apothecaries.