Welcome to Less Wrong!

Hi, I am Alyssa, a 16-year-old aspiring programmer-and-polymath who found her way to the wiki page for Egan's Law from the Achron forums. From there I started randomly clicking on links that mostly ended up leading to Eliezer's posts. I was a bit taken aback by his attitude toward religion, but I had previously seen mention of his AI Box thing (where (a) he struck me as awesome, and (b) he said some things about "intelligence" and "wisdom" that caused me to label him as an ally against all those fools who hated science), and I just loved his writing, so I spent about a week reading his stuff alternately thinking, "Wow, this guy is awesome" and "Poor atheist. Doesn't he realize that religion and science are compatible?" Eventually, some time after reading Religion's Claim to be Non-disprovable, I came to my senses. (It is a bit more complicated and embarrassing than that, but you get the idea.)

That was several months ago. I have been lurking not-quite-continuously since then, and it slowly dawned on me just how stupid I had been -- and more importantly, how stupid I still am. Reading about stuff like confirmation bias and overconfidence, I gradually became so afraid to trust myself that I became an expert at recognizing flaws in my own reasoning, without being able to recognize truth or flaws in others' reasoning. In effect, I had artificially removed my ability to consciously classify (non-obvious) statements as true: the same gross abuse of humility I had read about. After a bit of unproductive agonizing over how to figure out a better strategy, I have decided I'm probably too lazy for anything but making samples of my reasoning available for critique by people who are likely to be smarter than me -- for example, by participating in discussion on Less Wrong, which in theory is my goal here. So, hi! (I have been tweaking this for almost an hour and will submit it NOW.)

My name's Normal Anomaly, and I'm paranoid about giving away personal information on the Internet. Also, I don't like to have any assumptions made about me (though this is likely the last place to worry about that), so I'd rather go without a gender, race, etc. Apologies for the lack of much personal data. I can say that my major interest is biology, although I am not yet anything resembling an expert. I eventually hope to work in life extension research. I’m an Asperger’s Syndrome Sci Fi-loving nerd, which is apparently the norm here.

I used to have religious/spiritual beliefs, though I was also a fan of science and was not a member of an organized religion. I believed it was important to be rational and that I had evidence for my beliefs, but I was rationalizing and refusing to look at the hard questions. A couple years ago, I was exposed to atheism and rationalism and have since been trying to make myself more reasonable/less insane. I found LW through Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality a few months ago, and have been lurking and reading the sequences. I'm still scared of posting on here because it’s the first discussion forum where I have known myself to be intellectually outclassed.

I chose the name Normal Anomaly because in my everyday meatspace life I feel different from (read: superior to) everyone around me, but on LW I feel like an ordinary mortal trying to keep up with people talking over my head. Hopefully I've lurked long enough to at least speak the language, and I won't be an annoyance when I comment. I want to socialize with people superior to me; unfortunately for me, they tend to want the same.

In the time I've been lurking, I've started seriously considering cryonics and will probably sign up unless something else changes my mind. I think it's pretty likely that an AGI will be developed eventually, and if it ever is it definitely needs to be Friendly, but I have no idea when other than that I hope it’s in my lifetime, which I want to end only of my own choosing and possibly never.

I'm Ellen, age 14, student, planning to major in molecular biology or something like that. I'm not set on it, though.

I think I was browsing wikipedia when I decided to google some related things. I think I found some libertarian or anarchist blog that then had a link to Overcoming Bias or Lesswrong. Or I might've seen the word transhumanism on the wiki page for libertarianism and googled it, with it eventually leading here somehow. My memory is fuzzy as it was pretty irrelevant to me.

I'm an atheist, and have been for a while, as is typical for this community. I wasn't brought up religiously, so it was pretty much untheism that turned into atheism.

My rationalist roots... I've always wanted to be right, of course. Partly because I could make mistakes from being wrong, partly because I really, really hated looking stupid. Then I figured that I couldn't know if I was right unless I listened to the other side, really listened, and was careful. (Not enough people do even this. People are crazy, the world is mad. Angst, angst.) I found lesswrong which has given me tools to much more effectively do this. w00t.

I'm really lazy. Curse you, akrasia!

It should be obvious how I came up with my username. Aren't I original?

Some other hobbies I have are gaming and anime/manga. Amusingly enough, I barely ever watch any anime. The internet is very distracting.

Edit: Some of this stuff is outdated. I don't plan to major in molecular biology, for one, and I don't like how I wrote the rationalist roots part. Meh. I doubt anyone is going to see this, but I'm 16 now and plan to major in Computer Science.

Hi, I'm Zoe. I found this site in a round-about way after reading Dawkin's The God Delusion and searching some things related to it. There was a comment in a forum mentioning Less Wrong and I was interested to see what it was.

I've been mainly lurking for the past few months, reading the sequences and some of the top posts. I've found that while I understand most of it, my high-school level math (I'm 16) is quite inadequate, so I'm working through the Khan Academy to try and improve it.

I'm drawn to rationalism because, quite simply, it seems like the world would be a better place if people were more rational and that has to start somewhere. Whatever the quotes say, truth is worthwhile. It also makes me believe in myself more to know that I'm willing and somewhat able to shift my views to better match the territory. Maybe someday I'll even advance from 'somewhat' into plain ol' 'able'.

My goals here, at this point, aren't particularly defined. I find the articles and the mission inspiring and interesting and think that it will help me. Maybe when I've learnt more I'll have a clearer goal for myself. I already analyze everything (to the point where many a teacher has been quite annoyed), so I suppose that's a start. I'm looking forward to learning more and seeing how I can use it all in my actual life.

Cheers, Zoe

Hello.

I've been reading Less Wrong from its beginning. I stumbled upon Overcoming Bias just as LW was being launched. I'm a young mathematician (an analyst, to be more specific) currently working towards a PhD and I'm very interested in epistemic rationality and the theory of altruist instrumental rationality. I've been very impressed with the general quality of discussion about the theory and general practice of truth-seeking here, even though I can think of places where I disagree with the ideas that I gather are widely accepted here. The most interesting discussions seem to be quite old, though, so reviving those discussions out of the blue hasn't felt like - for lack of a better word - a proper thing to do.

There are many discussions here of which I don't care about. A large proportion of people here are programmers or otherwise from a CS background, and that colors the discussions a lot. Or maybe it's just that the prospect of an AGI in recent future doesn't seem at all likely to me. Anyway, the AI/singularity stuff, the tangentially related topics that I bunch together with them, and approaching rationality topics from a programmer's point of view I just don't care about. Not very much, at least.

The self-help stuff, "winning is everything" and related stuff I'd rather not read. Well, I do my best not to. The apparent lack of concern for altruism in those discussions makes me even wish they wouldn't take place here in the first place.

And then there are the true failings of this community. I had been thinking of registering and posting in some threads about the more abstract sides of rationality, but I must admit I eventually got around to registering and posting because of the gender threads. But there's just so much bullshit going on! Evolutionary psychology is grossly misapplied (1). The obvious existence of oppressive cultural constructs (2) is flatly denied. The validity of anecdotes and speculation as evidence is hardly even questioned. The topics that started the flaming have no reason of even being here in the first place. This post pretty well sums up the failures of rationality here at Less Wrong; and that post has been upvoted to 25! Now, the failings and attitudes that surfaced in the gender debate have, of course, been visible for quite some time. But that the failures of thought seem so common has made me wonder if this community as a whole is actually worth wasting my time for.

So, in case you're still wondering, what has generously been termed "exclusionary speech" really drives people away (3). I'm still hoping that the professed rationality is enough to overcome the failure modes that are currently so common here (4). But unfortunately I think my possible contributions won't be missed if I rid myself of wishful thinking and see it's not going to happen.

It's quite a shame that a community with such good original intentions is failing after a good start. Maybe humans simply won't overcome their biases (5) yet in this day and age.

So. I'd really like to participate in thoughtful discussions with rationalists I can respect. For quite a long time, Less Wrong seemed like the place, but I just couldn't find a proper place to start (I dislike introductions). But now as I'm losing my respect for this community and thus the will to participate here, I started posting. I hope I can regain the confidence in a high level of sanity waterline here.

(Now a proper rationalist would, in my position, naturally reconsider his own attitudes and beliefs. It might not be surprising that I didn't find all too much to correct. So I might just as well assume that I haven't been mind-killed quite yet, and just make the post I wanted to.)

EDIT: In case you felt I was generalizing with too much confidence - and as I wrote here, I agree I was - see my reply to Vladimir Nesov's reply.

(1) I think failing to control for cultural influences in evolutionary psychology should be considered at least as much of a fail as postulating group selection. Probably more so.

(2) Somehow I think phrases like "cultural construct", especially when combined with qualifiers like "oppressive", trigger immediate bullshit alarms for some. To a certain extent, it's forgivable, as they certainly have been used in conjunction with some of the most well-known anti-epistemologies of our age. But remember: reversing stupidity doesn't make you any better off.

(3) This might be a good place to remind the reader that (our kind can't cooperate)[http://lesswrong.com/lw/3h/why_our_kind_cant_cooperate/]. (This is actually referring to many aspects of the recent debate, not just one.)

(4) Yes, I know, I can't cooperate either.

(5) Overcoming Bias is quite an ironic name for that blog. EDIT: This refers exclusively to many of Robin Hanson's posts about gender differences I have read. I think I saw a post linking to some of these recently, but I couldn't find a link to that just now. Anyway, this footnote probably went a bit too far.

WHO I AM: I have 24 years of existence. I give math, chemistry and physics lessons to high school students since 17. I am pretty good at it and I never announced anywhere on planet that I give lessons - all new students appear from recommendations from older students. On the end of 2016 I already had 38 months going to the university, trying to get mechanical engineering credentials. I wasn't interested on the course - I really liked the math and the subjects, but the teachers sucked and the experience was, in general, terrible. I hated my life and was doing it just to look good for my parents - always loved arts and I study classical music since 14. I heard about "artificial intelligence" just once, and I decided all my actions in life should be towards automate the process of learning. I started a MIT Python course and then dropped out university. I am completely passionate about learning.

WHAT I'M DOING: (short-term) I am currently learning and doing beautiful animations with the python library called MANIM (Mathematical ANIMations). I am searching for people to unite forces to transform tens of posts in The Sequences into video content with this library. I hope to gather money from it and spread rationality in general, turning it more popular. My family and my best friends have shit quality life and I would like to get enough money to change that. Most of my reasoning is "explore the solution space and find the best ways to help most people, if you really help and it is something scalable, you will get money on the way". If I get the money (instrumental goal), I will help those who need (relatives and close friends). As soon as I achieve this goal, I will jump to my long-term goals on helping ending disease, extending life (first) then killing unwanted death, refining art, playing games.

HOW I FOUND YOU: I googled "pascal wager artificial intelligence" after seeing a Robert Miles (AI researcher) video. Then I found Roko's basilisk, read a lot about it and had a bad week. Then I found Eliezer Yudkowsky talking about it, and my fear went away. Then I discovered this forum and it turned out to be my main source of truth-seeking. I don't know personally anyone who has access to this kind of source of information (Lesswrong), collective truth-seeking with strong grounds.

I VALUE: I value people who works towards making the life of others better. I value people who really seeks truth. I value people who takes ethical problems seriously. I value people who spends more than 5 minutes by the clock looking for better solutions for our everyday problems.

TO ACHIEVE WHAT I VALUE: To make the life of others better, I am daily trying to discover how can I use the programming knowledge I am acquiring daily about blockchain, artificial intelligence and mobile/web/software development to create real solutions for real problems - solutions for drinking water, food (automate prodution/distribution), education (for all ages), energy, housing, income, health and environment. I didn't develop a scalable solution for any of these problems, because I am still learning and it is very hard, I admit, but I will help, no matter what, and if you wanna lose, just bet against me. I just need a little more time.

Hello! I'm a first-year graduate student in pure mathematics at UC Berkeley. I've been reading LW posts for awhile but have only recently started reading (and wanting to occasionally add to) the comments. I'm interested in learning how to better achieve my goals, learning how to choose better goals, and "raising the sanity waterline" generally. I have recently offered to volunteer for CFAR and may be an instructor at SPARC 2013.

Hello, Less Wrong.

I suppose I should have come here first, before posting anything else, but I didn't come here through the front door. :3 Rather, I was brought here by way of HP:MOR, as I'm sure many newbies were.

My name is Anthony. I'm 21 years old, married, studying Linguistics, and I'm an unapologetic member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.

Should be fun.

Hello, Less Wrong.

My name is Zachary Vance. I'm an undergraduate student at the University of Cincinnati, double majoring in Mathematics and Computer Science--I like math better. I am interested in games, especially board and card games. One of my favorite games is Go.

I've been reading Less Wrong for 2-3 months now, and I posted once or twice under another name which I dropped because I couldn't figure out how to change names without changing accounts. I got linked here via Scott Aaronson's blog Shtetl-Optimized after seeing a debate between him and Eliezer. I got annoyed at Eliezer for being rude, forgot about it for a month, and followed the actual link on Scott's site over here. (In case you read this Eliezer, you both listen to people more than I thought (update, in Bayesian) and write more interesting things than I heard in the debate.) I like paradoxes and puzzles, and am currently trying to understand the counterfactual mugging. I've enjoyed Less Wrong because everybody here seems to read everything and usually carefully think about it before they post, which means not only articles but also comments are simply amazing compared to other sites. It also means I try not to post too much so Less Wrong remains quality.

I am currently applying to work at the Singularity Institute.

Greetings, LessWrong!

I'm Saro, currently 19, female and a mathematics undergraduate at the University of Cambridge. I discovered LW by the usual HP:MoR route, though oddly I discovered MoR via reading EY's website, which I found in a Google search about Bayes' once. I'm feeling rather fanatical about MoR at the moment, and am not-so-patiently awaiting chapter 78.

Generally though, I've found myself stuck here a lot because I enjoy arguing, and I like convincing other people to be less wrong. Specifically, before coming across this site, I spent a lot of time reading about ways of making people aware of their own biases when interpreting data, and effective ways of communicating statistics to people in a non-misleading way (I'm a big fan of the work being done by David Spiegelhalter). I'm also quite fond of listening to economics and politics arguments and trying to tear them down, though through this, I've lost any faith in politics as something that has any sensible solutions.

I suspect that I'm pretty bad at overcoming my own biases a lot of the time. In particular, I have a very strong tendency to believe what I'm told (including what I'm being told by this site), I'm particularly easily inspired by pretty slogans and inspirational tones (like those this site), and I have, and have always had, one of those Escher-painting brains, to the extent that I was raised very atheist but am now not so sure. (At some level, I have the thought that our form of logic should only apply to our plane of existence, whatever that means.) But hey, figuring all that out is what this site's about, right?

Hello fellow Less Wrongians,

My name is Josh and I'm a 16-year-old junior in high school. I live in a Jewish family at the Jersey Shore. I found the site by way of TV Tropes after a friend told me about the Methods of Rationality. Before i started reading Eliezer's posts, i made the mistake of believing I was smart. My goal here is mainly to just be the best that I can be and maybe learn to lead a better life. And by that I mean that I want to be better than everyone else I meet. That includes being a more rational person better able to understand complex issues. I think i have a fair grip on the basic points of rationality as well as philosophy, but i am sorely lacking in terms of math and science (which can't be MY fault obviously, so I'll just go ahead and blame the public school system). I never knew what exactly an logarithm WAS before a few days ago, sadly enough (I knew the term of course, but was never taught what it meant or bothered enough to look it up. I have absolutely no idea what i want to do with my life other than amassing knowledge of whatever i find to be interesting.

I was raised in a conservative household, believing in God but still trying to look at the world rationally. My father never tried to defend the beliefs he taught me with anything but logic. I suppose I'm technically atheist, but i prefer to consider myself agnostic. Believe it or not, I actually became a rationalist after my dad got me to read Atlas Shrugged. While i wasnt taken in very much by the appeal to my sense of superiority, however correct it may be, i did take special notice of a particular statement in which Rand maintains that man is a reasoning animal and that the only evil thought is to not think as to do so is to reject the only tool that mankind has used to survive and instead embrace death. This and her rejection of emotion as a substitute for rationality impressed me more than anything i had read up to that point. i soon became familiar with Aristotle and from then on studied both philosophy and rationality. Of course i hadnt really seen anything before I started reading Eliezer's writing!

Overall, Im just happy to be here and have enjoyed everything i have seen of the site so far. Im still young and relatively ignorant to many of the topics discussed here, but if you will just bare with me, as i know you will, i might, in time, actually learn to add something to the site. Thanks for reading my story, i look forward to devoting many more hours to the site!

HI, I'm GDC3. Those are my initials. I'm a little nervous about giving my full name on the internet, especially because my dad is googlible and I'm named after him. (Actually we're both named after my grandfather, hence the 3) But I go by G.D. in real life anyway so its not exactly not my name. I'm primarily working on learning math in advance of returning to college right now.

Sorry if this is TMI but you asked: I became an aspiring rationalist because I was molested as a kid and I knew that something was wrong, but not what it was or how to stop it, and I figure that if I didn't learn how the world really worked instead of what people told me, stuff like that might keep happening to me. So I guess my something to protect was me.

My something to protect is still mostly me, because most of my life is still dealing with the consequences of that. My limbic system learned all sorts of distorted and crazy things about how the world works that my neocortex has to spend all of its time trying to compensate for. Trying to be a functional human being is sort of hard enough goal for now. I also value and care about eventually using this information to help other people who've had similar stuff happen to them. I value this primarily because I've pre-committed to valuing that so that the narrative would motivate me emotionally when I hate myself too much to motivate myself selfishly.

So I guess I self-modified my utility function. I actually was pretty willing to hurt other people to protect myself as a kid. I've made myself more altruistic not to feel less guilty (which would mean that I wasn't really as selfish as I thought I was), but to feel less alone. Which is plausible I guess, because I wasn't exactly a standard moral specimen as a kid.

I hope that was more interesting than upsetting. I think I can learn a lot from you guys if I can speak freely. I hope that I can contribute or at least constitute good outreach.

Hi, I'm Taryn. I'm female, 35 and working as a web developer. I started studying Math, changed to Comp Sci and actually did my degree in Cognitive Science (Psychology of intelligence, Neurophysiology, AI, etc) My 3rd year Project was on Cyberware.

When I graduated I didn't see any jobs going in the field and drifted into Web Development instead... but I've stayed curious about AI, along with SF, Science, and everything else too. I kinda wish I'd known about Singularity research back then... but perhaps it's better this way. I'm not a "totally devoted to one subject" kinda person. I'm too curious about everything to settle for a single field of study.

That being said - I've worked in web development now for 11 years. Still, when I get home, I don't start programming, preferring pick up a book on evolutionary biology, medieval history, quantum physics, creative writing (etc) instead. There's just too damn many interesting things to learn about to just stick to one!

I found LW via Harry Potter & MOR, which my sister forwarded to me. Since then I've been voraciously reading my way through the sequences, learning just how much I have yet to learn... but totally fascinated. This site is awesome.

[Hi everyone!]

Hi, I'm Sarah. I'm 21 and going to grad school in math next fall. I'm interested in applied math and analysis, and I'm particularly interested in recent research about the sparse representation of large data sets. I think it will become important outside the professional math community. (I have a blog about that at http://numberblog.wordpress.com/.)

As far as hobbies go, I like music and weightlifting. I read and talk far too much about economics, politics, and philosophy. I have the hairstyle and cultural vocabulary of a 1930's fast-talking dame. (I like the free, fresh wind in my hair, life without care; I'm broke, that's Oke!)

Why am I here? I clicked the link from Overcoming Bias.

In more detail, I'm here because I need to get my life in order. I'm a confused Jew, not a thoroughgoing atheist. I've been a liberal and then a libertarian and now need something more flexible and responsive to reason than either.

Some conversations with a friend, who's a philosopher, have led me to understand that there are some experiences (in particular, experiences he's had related to poverty and death) that nothing in my intellectual toolkit can deal with, and so I've had to reconsider a lot of preconceptions.

I'm here, to be honest, for help. I've had difficulty since childhood believing that I am valuable, partly because in mathematics you always have the example before you of people far better. Let me put it this way: I need to find something to do or believe that doesn't crumble periodically into wishing I were dead, because otherwise I won't have a very productive future. That sounds dismal, but really it's a good problem to have -- I'm pretty fortunate otherwise. Still, I want to solve it. I like this community, I think there's a lot to learn here, and my inclination is always to solve problems by learning.

• Persona: Rain
• Age: 30s
• Gender: Unrevealed
• Location: Eastern USA
• Profession: Application Administrator, US Department of Defense
• Education: Business, Computers, Philosophy, Scifi, Internet
• Interests: Gaming, Roleplaying, Computers, Technology, Movies, Books, Thinking
• Personality: Depressed and Pessimistic
• General: Here's a list of my news sources

Rationalist origin: I discovered the scientific method in highschool and liked the results of its application to previously awkward social situations, so I extended it to life in general. I came up with most of OB's earlier material by myself under different names, or not quite as well articulated, and this community has helped refine my thoughts and fill in gaps.

Found LW: The FireFox add-on StumbleUpon took me to EY's FAQ about the Meaning of Life on 23 October 2005, along with Max More, Nick Bostrom, Alcor, Sentient Developments, the Transhumanism Wikipedia page, and other resources. From there, to further essays, to the sl4 mailing list, to SIAI, to OB, to LW, where I started interacting with the community in earnest in late January 2010 and achieved 1000 karma in early June 2010. Previous to the StumbleUpon treasure trove, I had been turned off the transhumanist movement by a weird interview of Kurzweil in Wired, but still hopeful due to scifi potentials.

Value and desire to achieve: I'm still working on that. The metaethics sequence was unsatisfactory. In particular, I have problems with our ability to predict the future and what we should value. I'm hoping smarter than human intelligence will have better answers, so I strongly support the Singularity Institute.

hi everybody,

I'm 22, male, a student and from Germany. I've always tried to "perceive whatever holds the world together in its inmost folds", to know the truth, to grok what is going on. Truth is the goal, and rationality the art of achieving it. So for this reason alone lesswrong is quite appealing.

But in addition to that Yudkowsky and Bostrom convinced me that existential risks, transhumanism , the singularity, etc. are probably the most important issues of our time.

Furthermore this is the first community I've ever encountered in my life that makes me feel rather dumb. ( I can hardly follow the discussions about solomonoff induction, everett-branches and so on, lol, and I thought I was good at math because I was the best one in high school :-) But, nonetheless being stupid is sometimes such a liberating feeling!

To spice this post with more gooey self-disclosure: I was sort of a "mild" socialist for quite some time ( yeah, I know. But, there are some intelligent folks who were socialists, or sort-of-socialists like Einstein and Russell). Now I'm more pro-capitalism, libertarian, but some serious doubts remain. I'm really interested in neuropsychological research of mystic experiences. ( I think I share this personal idiosyncrasy with Sam Harris...) I think many rational atheists ( myself included before I encountered LSD), underestimate the preposterous and life-transfomring power of mystic experiences, that can convert the most educated rationalist into a gibbering crackpot. It makes you think you really "know" that there is some divine and mysterious force at the deepest level of the universe, and the quest for understanding involves reading many, many absurd and completely useless books, and this endeavor may well destroy your whole life.

Good day I'm a fifteen year-old high school student, Junior, and ended up finding this through the Harry Potter & MOR story, which I thought would be a lot less common to people. Generally I think I'm not that rational of a person, I operate mostly on reaction and violence, and instinctively think of things like 'messages' and such when I have some bad luck; but, I've also found some altruistic passion in me, and I've done all of this self observation which seems contradictory, but I think that's all a rationalization to make me a better person. I also have some odd moods, which split between talking like this, when usually I can't like this at all.

I'd say something about my age group but I can't think of anything that doesn't sound like hypocrisy, so I think I'll cut this off here.

• Aaaugh, just looking at this giant block of text makes me feel like an idiot.

Hi everyone, I've been reading LW for a year or so, and met some of you at the May minicamp. (I was the guy doing the swing dancing.) Great to meet you, in person and online.

I'm helping Anna Salamon put together some workshops for the meetup groups, and I'll be posting some articles on presentation skills to help with that. But in order to do that, I'll need 5 points (I think). Can you help me out with that?

Thanks

Mike

Hello everyone,

My name is Allison, and I'm 15 years old. I'll be a junior next year. I come from a Christian background, and consider myself to also be a theist, for reasons that I'm not prepared to discuss at the moment... I wish to learn how to view the world as it is, not through a tinted lens that is limited in my own experiences and background.

While I find most everything on this site to be interesting, I must confess a particular hunger towards philosophy. I am drawn to philosophy as a moth is to a flame. However, I am relatively ignorant about pretty much everything, something I'm attempting to fix. I have a slightly above average intelligence, but nothing special. In fact, compared to everyone on this site, I'm rather stupid. I don't even understand half of what people are talking about half the time.

I'm not a science or math person, although I find them interesting, my strengths lie in English and theatre arts. I absolutely adore theatre, not that this really has much to do with rationality. Anyway, I kind of want to get better at science and math. I googled the double slit experiment, and I find it.. captivating. Quantum physics holds a special kind of appeal to me, but unfortunately, is something that I'm not educated enough to pursue at the moment.

My goals are to become more rational, learn more about philosophy, gain a basic understanding of math and science, and to learn more about how to refine the human art of rationality. :)

Hello everyone!

Name: Tuesday Next Age: 19 Gender: Female

I am an undergraduate student studying political science, with a focus on international relations. I have always been interested in rationalism and finding the reasons for things.

I am an atheist, but this is more a consequence of growing up in a relatively nonreligious household. I did experiment with paganism and witchcraft for several years, a rather frightening (in retrospect) display of cognitive dissonance as I at once believed in science and some pretty unscientific things.

Luckily I was able to to learn from experience, and it soon become obvious that what I believed in simply didn't work. I think I wanted to believe in witchcraft both as a method of teenage rebellion and to exert some control over my life. However I was unable to delude myself.

I tried to interest myself in philosophy many times, but often became frustrated by the long debates that seemed divorced from reality. One example is the idea of free will. Since I was a child (I have a memory of trying, when I was in elementary school, of trying to explain this to my parents without success) I have had a conception of reality and free will that seemed fairly reasonable to me and I never understood what all the fuss was about.

It went something like this: The way things did turn out is the only way things could have turned out, given the exact pre-existing circumstances. In particular, when one person makes a decision they presumably do so for a reason, whether that reason is rational or not; if that decision is not predetermined by the situation and the person, then it is random. If a decision is random, this is not free will because the choice is not a result of a person's decision; rather it is a result of some random phenomenon involving the word "quantum."

But since no two situations are alike, and it is impossible for anyone to know everything, let alone extrapolate from knowledge of the present to figure out what the future will be, there is no practical effect from this determinism. In short, we act as if we have free will and we cannot predict the future. It is the same thing with reality. Whether it is "real" or not is irrelevant.

The practical consequences of this, for me at least, are that arguing about whether we have free will or not misses the point. We may be able to predict the "future" of a simple computer program by knowing all the conditions of the present, but cannot do the same for the real world; it is too complex.

I finally found this articulated, to my great relief that I was not crazy for believing it, in Daniel Dennet's "Freedom Evolves." This is what got me interested in philosophy again.

I am also interested in how to change minds (including my own). I have always had fairly strong (and, in retrospect, irrational) political beliefs. When I took an Economics course, I found many of my political beliefs changing significantly.

I even found myself arguing with a friend (who like me is fairly liberal), and he later praised me for successfully defending a point of view he knew I disagreed with. (The argument in question was about a global minimum wage law; I was opposed.) I found this disconcerting as I was in fact arguing what I honestly believed, though I do have a tendency to play "Devil's Advocate" and argue against what I believe.

This forced me to confront the fact that some of my political views had actually changed. Later, when I challenged some of the basic assumptions that Economics class made, like the idea that markets can be "perfect," I found myself reassessing my political views again. I am trying to get in the habit of doing this to avoid becoming dogmatic.

Anyway, I think that's enough for now; if anyone has any questions I would be happy to address them.

--Tuesday

Hey everyone.

I'm Jandila (not my birth, legal or even everyday name), I'm a 28-year old transgendered woman living in Minnesota. I've been following EY's writings off and on since many years ago on the sl4 mailing list, mostly on the topic of AI; initially I got interested in cognitive architecture and FAI due to a sci-fi novel I've been working on forever. I discovered LW a few years ago but only recently started posting; somehow I missed this thread until just recently.

I've been interested in bias and how people think, and in modifying my own instrumental ability to understand and work around it, for many years. I'm on the autistic spectrum and have many clusters of neurological weirdness; I think this provided an early incentive to understand "how people think" so I could signal-match better.

So far I've stuck around because I like LW's core mission and what it stands for in abstract; I also feel that the community here is a bit too homogenous in terms of demographics for a community with such an ostensibly far-reaching, global goal, and thus want to see the perspective base broadened (and am encouraged by the recent influx of female members).

Hey everyone,

My name is Jennifer Davies. I'm 35 years old and am married with a 3 year old daughter. I live in Kitchener, Ontario, Canada.

Originally a computer programmer, I gave it up after spending a year coding for a bank (around 1997). Motivated by an interest in critical thinking, I earned a BA in Philosophy.

Currently, I'm completing a one year post-grad program to become a Career Development Practitioner. I plan to launch a private practice in 2012 to help people find and live their passions while providing them with the tools to do so.

A friend introduced me to Harry Potter: Methods of Rationality and Less Wrong. I have never enjoyed a piece of reading more than that fanfic -- I even saved a PDF version to introduce to my daughter once she's able to benefit from it.

My main motivations (that I'm aware of) for becoming a member of this community are to: improve my thinking skills (and better understand/evaluate values and motivations), help clients to think more rationally, better encourage independent, critical thought in my daughter.

Although it can be painful at times (for my ego) to be corrected, I appreciate such corrections and the time put into them.

Any tips for teaching young children rationality? I'm at a loss and wonder if I need to wait until she's older.

I've existed for about 24 years, and currently live in Boston.

I regard many of the beliefs popular here - cyronics, libertarianism, human biodiversity, pickup artistry - with extreme skepticism. (As if in compensation, I have my own unpopular frameworks for understanding the world.) I find the zeitgeist here to be interestingly wrong, though, because almost everyone comes from a basically sane starting point - a material universe, conventionally "Western" standards of science, reason, and objectivity - and actively discusses how they can regulate their beliefs to adhere to these. I have an interest in achieving just this kind of regulation (am a "rationalist",) and am aware that it's epistemically healthy to expose myself to alternative points of view expressed in a non-crazy way. So hopefully the second aspect will reinforce the first.

As for why I'm a rationalist, I don't know, and the question doesn't seem particularly interesting to me. I regard it beyond questions of justification, like other desires.

Hi all, I'm Jen, an Australian Jewish atheist, and an student in a Computer Science/Linguistics/Cognitive Science combined degree, in which I am currently writing a linguistics thesis. I got here through recommendations from a couple of friends who visit here and stayed mostly for the akrasia and luminosity articles (hello thesis and anxiety/self-esteem problems!) Oh and the other articles too, but the ones I've mentioned are the ones that I've put the most effort into understanding and applying. The others are just interesting and marked for further processing at some later time.

I think I was born a rationalist rather than becoming one - I have a deep-seated desire for things to have reasons that make sense, by which I mean the "we ran some experiments and got this answer" kind of sense as opposed to the "this validates my beliefs" kind of sense. Although having said that I'm still prey to all kinds of irrationality, hence this site being helpful.

At some point in the future I would be interested in writing something about linguistic pragmatics - it's basically another scientific way of looking at communication. There's a lot of overlap between pragmatics and the ideas I've seen here on status and signalling, but it's all couched in different language and emphasises different parts, so it may be different enough to be helpful to others. But at the moment I have no intention of writing anything beyond this comment (hello thesis again!), the account is mostly just because I got sick of not being able to upvote anything.

Hi, my handle is gscshoyru (gsc for short), and I'm new here. I found this site through the AIBox experiment, oddly enough -- and I think I got there from TVTropes, though I don't remember. After reading the fiction, (and being vaguely confused that I had read the NPC story before, but nothing else of his, since I'm a fantasy/sci-fi junkie and I usually track down authors I like), I started reading up on all of Eliezer's writings on rationality. And found it made a lot of sense. So, I am now a budding rationalist, and have decided to join this site because it is awesome.

That's how I found you -- as for who I am and such, I am a male 22-year-old mathematics major/CS minor currently working as a programmer in New Jersey. So, that's me. Hi everyone!

Hello, Less Wrong!

I'm Bill McGrath. I'm 22 years old, Irish, and I found my way here, as with many others, from TVTropes and Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality.

I'm a composer and musician, currently entering the final year of my undergrad degree. I have a strong interest in many other fields - friends of mine who study maths and physics often get grilled for information on their topics! I was a good maths student in school, I still enjoy using maths to solve problems in my other work or just for pleasure, and I still remember most of what I learned. Probablity is the main exception here - it wasn't my strongest area, and I've forgotten a lot of the vocabulary, but it's the next topic I intend to study when I get a chance. This is proving problematic in my understanding of the Bayesian approach, but I'm getting there.

I've been working my way through the core sequences, along with some scattered reading elsewhere on the site. So far, a lot of what I've encountered has been ideas that are familiar to me, and that I try to use when debating or discussing ideas anyway. I've held for a while now that you have to be ready to admit your mistakes, not be afraid of being wrong sometimes, and take a neutral approach to evidence - allowing any of these to cloud your judgement means you won't get reliable data. That said, I've still learned quite a bit from LW, most importantly how to express these ideas about rationality to other people.

I'm not sure I could pinpoint what moment brought me to this mindset, but it was possibly the moment I understood why the scientific method was about trying to disprove, rather than prove, your hypothesis; or perhaps when I realized that the empiricisist's obligation to admit when they are wrong was makes them strong. Other things that have helped me along the way - the author Neal Stephenson, the comedian Tim Minchin, and Richard Fenyman.

My other interests, most of which I have no formal training in but I have read about in my own time or have learned about through conversation with friends, include:

-politics - I consider myself to be socially liberal but economically ignorant

-languages (I speak a little German and less Irish, have taken brief courses in other languages), linguistic relativism

-writing, and the correct use of language

-quantum physics (in an interested layman way - I am aware of a lot of the concepts, but I'm by no means knowledgeable)

-psychology

as well as many other things which are less LW-relevant!

Thank you to the founders and contributors to the site who have made it such an interesting collection of thoughts and ideas, as well as a welcoming forum for people to come and learn. I think I'll learn a lot from it, and hopefully some day I'll be able to repay the favour!

-Bill

Hi, I'm Lincoln. I am 25; I live and work in Cambridge, MA. I currently build video games but I'm going to start a Ph.D program in Computer Science at the local university in the fall.

I identified rationality as a thing to be achieved ever since I knew there was a term for it. One of the minor goals I had since I was about 15 was devising a system of morality which fit with my own intuitions but which was consistent under reflection (but not in so many words). The two thought experiments I focused on were abortion and voting. I didn't come up with an answer, but I knew that such a morality was a thing I wanted -- consistency was important to me.

I ran across Eliezer's work 907 days ago reading a Hacker News post about the AI-box experiment, and various other Overcoming Bias posts that were submitted over the years. I didn't immediately follow through on that stuff.

But I became aware of SIAI about 10 months ago, when rms on Hacker News linked an interesting post about the Visiting Fellows program at SIAI.

I think I had a "click" moment: I immediately saw that AI was both an existential risk and major opportunity, and I wanted to work on these things to save the world. I followed links and ended up at LW; I didn't immediately understand the connection between AI and rationality, but they both looked interesting and useful, so I bookmarked LW.

I immediately sent in an application to the Visiting Fellows program, thinking "hey, I should figure out how to do this" -- I think it was Jasen who responded and asked me by email to summarize the purpose of SIAI and how I thought I could contribute. I wrote the purpose summary, but got stuck on how to contribute. I had barely read any of the Sequences at that time and had no idea how I could be useful. For those reasons (as well as a healthy dose of akrasia), I gave up on my application at that time.

Somewhere in there I found HP:MoR (perhaps via TVTropes?), saw the author was "Less Wrong" and made the connection.

Since then, I have been inhaling the Sequences; in the last month I've been checking the front page almost daily. I applied to the Rationality Boot Camp.

I'm very far from being a rationalist -- I can see that my rationality skills are really quite poor, but I at least identify as a student of rationality.

Hello, I'm Jeff, I found this site via a link on an XKCD forum post, which also included a link to the Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality fan-fic. I read the book first (well, what has been written so far, I just couldn't stop!) and decided that whoever wrote that must be made of pure awesome, and I was excited to see what you all talked about here.

After some perusal, I decided I had to respond to one of the posts, which of course meant I had to sign up. The post used keyboard layouts (QWERTY, etc.) as an example of how to rephrase a question properly in order to answer it in a meaningful way. Posting my opinion ended up challenging some assumptions I had about the QWERTY layout and the Dvorak layout, and I am now three and a half hours into learning the Dvorak layout in order to determine which is actually the better layout (based on things I read it seemed a worthwhile endeavor, instead of too difficult like I assumed).

I would have posted this in Dvorak layout, but I only have half the keys down and it would be really, really slow, so I switched back to QWERTY just for this. QWERTY comes out practically as I think it - Dvorak, not so much yet. The speed with which I'm picking up the new layout also shatters some other assumptions I had about how long it takes to retrain muscle memory. Turns out, not long at all (at least in this case), though becoming fluent in Dvorak will probably take a while.

I would say I am a budding rationalist, and I hope this site can really speed my education along. If that doesn't tell you enough about who I am, then I don't really know what else to say.

Greetings, fellow thinkers! I'm a 19-year-old undergraduate student at Clemson University, majoring in mathematics (or, as Clemson (unjustifiably) calls it, Mathematical Sciences). I found this blog through Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality about three weeks ago, and I spent those three weeks doing little else in my spare time but reading the Sequences (which I've now finished).

My parents emigrated from the Soviet Union (my father is from Kiev, my mother from Moscow) just months before my birth. They spoke very little English upon their arrival, so they only spoke Russian to me at home, and I picked up English in kindergarten; I consider both to be my native languages, but I'm somewhat more comfortable expressing myself in English. I studied French in high school, and consider myself "conversant", but definitely not fluent, although I intend to study abroad in a Francophone country and become fluent. This last semester I started studying Japanese, and I intend to become fluent in that as well.

My family is Jewish, but none of my relatives practice Judaism. My mother identifies herself as an agnostic, but is strongly opposed to the Abrahamic religions and their conception of God. My father identifies as an atheist. I have never believed in Santa Claus or God, and was very confused as a child about how other people could be so obviously wrong and not notice it. I've never been inclined towards mysticism, and I remember espousing Physicalist Reductionism (although I did not know those words) at an early age, maybe when I was around 9 year old.

I've always been very concerned with being rational, and especially with understanding and improving myself. I think I missed out on a lot of what Americans consider to be classic sci-fi (I didn't see Star Wars until I got to college, for example), but I grew up with a lot of good Russian sci-fi and Orson Scott Card.

I used to be quite a cynical misanthrope, but over the past few years I've grown to be much more open and friendly and optimistic. However, I've been an egoist for as long as I can remember, and I see no reason why this might change in the foreseeable future (this seems to be my primary point of departure from agreement with Eliezer). I sometimes go out of my way to help people (strangers as much as friends) because I enjoy helping people, but I have no illusions about whose benefit my actions are for.

I'm very glad to have found a place where smart people who like to think about things can interact and share their knowledge!

I originally wrote this for the origin story thread until I realized it's more appropriate here. So, sorry if it straddles both a bit.

I am, as nearly as I believe can be seen in the present world, an intrinsic rationalist. For example: as a young child I would mock irrationality in my parents, and on the rare occasions I was struck, I would laugh, genuinely, even through tears if they came, because the irrationality of the Appeal to Force made the joke immensely funnier. Most people start out as well-adapted non-rationalists; I evidently started as a maladaptive rationalist.

As an intrinsic (maladaptive) rationalist, I have had an extremely bumpy ride in understanding my fellow man. If I had been born 10 years later, I might have been diagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome. As it was, I was a little different, and never really got on with anyone, despite being well-mannered. A nerd, in other words. Regarding bias, empathic favoritism, willful ignorance, asking questions in which no response will effect subsequent actions or belief confidences, and other peculiarities for which I seem to be an outlier, any knowledge about how to identify and then deal with these peculiarities has been extremely hard-won from years upon years of messy interactions in uncontrolled environments with few hypotheses from others to go on (after all, they "just get it", so they never needed to sort it out explicitly).

I've recently started reading rationalist blogs like this one, and they have been hugely informative to me because they put things I have observed about people but failed to understand intuitively into a very abstract context (i.e. one that bypasses intuition). Less Wrong, among others, have led to a concrete improvement in my interactions with humanity in general, the same way a blog about dogs would improve one's interactions with dogs in general. This is after just a couple months! Thanks LW.

I suppose it's high time I actually introduced myself.

Hullo LW! I'm Elizabeth Ellis. That's a very common first name and a very common last name, so if you want to google me, I recommend "relsqui" instead. (I'm not a private person, the handle is just more useful for being a consistently recognizable person online.) I'm 24 and in Berkeley, California, USA. No association with the college; I just live here. I'm a cyclist, an omnivore, and a nontheist; none of these are because of moral beliefs.

I'm a high school dropout, which I like telling people after they've met me, because I like fighting the illusion that formal education is the only way to produce intelligent, literate, and articulate people--or rather, that the only reason to drop out is not being one. In mid-August of this year I woke up one morning, thought for a while about things I could do with my life that would be productive and fulfilling, and decided it would be helpful to have a bachelor's degree. I started classes two weeks later. GEs for now, then a transfer into a communication or language program. It's very strange taking classes with people who were in high school four months ago.

My major area of interest is human communication. Step back for a moment and think about it: You've got an electric meatball in your head which is capable of causing other bits of connected meat to spasm, producing vibrations in the air. Another piece of meat somewhere else is touched by those vibrations ... and then the electric meatball in somebody else's head is supposed to produce an approximation of the signals that happened to be running through yours? That's ridiculous. The wonder isn't how often we miscommunicate, it's that we ever communicate well.

So, my goal is to help people do it better. This includes spreading communication techniques which I've found effective for getting one electric meatball to sync up with another, as well as more straightforward things like an interest in languages. (I'm only fluent in English, but I'm conversational in Spanish, know some rudimentary Hebrew, and have a semester-equivalent or less of a handful of other things.)

One of my assets in this department is that, on the spectrum of strongly logic-driven people to strongly emotion-driven people, I am fairly close to the center. This has its good and bad points. I understand each side better than the other one does, and have had success translating between them for people who weren't getting across to each other. On the other hand, I'm repelled by both extremes, which can be inconvenient. I think that no map of a human can be accurate without acknowledging emotions in the territory, which we feel, and which drive us, but which we do not fully understand. This does not preclude attempting to understand them better; it just requires working with those emotions rather than wishing they didn't exist.

I came to LW because someone linked me to the parable of the dagger and it delighted me, so I looked around to see what else was here. I'm interested in ways to make better decisions and be less wrong because I find it useful to have these ideas floating around in my head when I have a decision to make--much like aforementioned communication techniques when I'm talking to someone. I'm not actively trying to transform myself, at least not in any way related to rationality.

That's everything of any relevance I can think of at the moment.

Greetings, all. Found this site not too long ago, been reading through it in delight. It has truly energized my brain. I've been trying to codify and denote a number of values that I held true to my life and to discussion and to reason and logic, but was having the most difficult time. I was convinced I'd found a wonderful place that could help me when it provided me a link to the Twelve Virtues of Rationality, which neatly and tidily listed out a number of things I'd been striving to enumerate.

My origins in rationality basically originated at a very, very young age, when the things adults said and did didn't make sense. Some of it did, as a matter of fact, make more sense once I'd gotten older - but they could have at least tried to explain it to me - and I found that their successes too often seemed more like luck than having anything to do with their reasons for doing things. I suppose I became a rationalist out of frustration, one could say, at the sheer irrationality of the world around me.

I'm a Christian, and have applied my understanding of Rationality to Christianity. I find it holds up strongly, but am not insulted that not everyone feels that way. This site may be slanted atheist, but I find that rationalists have more in common with each other no matter their religious beliefs than a rationalist atheist has with a dogmatic atheist, or a rationalist Christian has with a dogmatic Christian, generally speaking.

I welcome discussion, dialog, and spirited debate, as long as you listen to me and I listen to you. I have a literal way of speaking, and don't tend to indulge in those lingual niceties that are technically untrue, which so many people hold strongly to. My belief is that if you don't want to discuss something, don't bring it up. So if I bring something up, I'd better darn well be able to discuss it. My belief is also that I should not strongly hold an opinion if I cannot strongly argue against my opinion, so I value any and all strong arguments against any opinion I hold.

I look forward to meeting many of you!

My name is Laural, 33-yo female, degree in CS, fetish for EvPsych. Raised Mormon, got over it at 18 or so, became a staunch Darwinist at 25.

I've been reading OvercomingBias on and off for years, but I didn't see this specific site till all the links to the Harry Potter fanfic came about. I had in fact just completed that series in May, so was quite excited to see the two things combined. But I think I wouldn't have registered if I hadn't read the AI Box page, which convinced me that EY was a genius. Personally, I am more interested in life-expansion than FAI. I'm most interested in changing social policy to legalize drugs, I suppose; if people are allowed to put whatever existing substances in their bodies, the substances that don't yet exist have a better chance.

I also found this blog through HP:MoR.

My ultimate social value is freedom, by which I mean the power of each person to control their own life. I believe in something like a utilitarian calculus, where utility is freedom, except that I don't really believe that there is a common scale in which one person's loss of freedom can be balanced by another person's gain. However, I find that freedom is usually very strongly positive-sum on any plausible scale, so this flaw doesn't seem to matter very much.

Of course, freedom in this sense can only be a social value; this leaves it up to each person to decide their own personal values: what they want for their own lives. In my case, I value forming and sustaining friendships in meatspace, often with activities centred around food and shared work, and I also value intellectual endeavours, mostly of an abstract mathematical sort. But this may change with my whims.

I might proselytise freedom here from time to time. There would be no point in proselytising my personal values, however.

Hi all.

I found this site through Methods of Rationality (as I suspect many have, of late). I've been reading through the sequences and archives for a while, and am finally starting to feel up to speed enough to comment here and there.

My name is Sam. I'm a programmer, mostly interested in writing and designing games. Oddly enough, my username derives from my much-neglected blog, which I believe predated this website.

I've always relished discovering that I'm wrong; if there's a better way to consistently improve the accuracy of one's beliefs, I'm not aware of it. So the LW approach makes an awful lot of sense to me, and I'm really enjoying how much concentrated critical thinking is available in the archives.

I'm also polyamorous, and so I'm considering a post or two on how polyamory (and maybe other kinds of alternative sexualities) relates to the practice of rationality. Would there be any interest in that sort of thing? I don't want to drag a pet topic into a place it's unwanted.

Furthermore, I am overfond of parentheses and semicolons. I apologize in advance.

I'm Valerie, 23 and a brand new atheist. I was directed to LW on a (also newly atheist) friend's recommendation and fell in love with it.

Since identifying as an atheist, I've struggled a bit with 'now what?' I feel like a whole new world has opened up to me and there is so much out there that I didn't even know existed. It's a bit overwhelming, but I'm loving the influx of new knowledge. I'm still working to shed old patterns of thinking and work my way into new ones. I have the difficulty of reading something and feeling that I understand it, but not being able to articulate it again (something left over from defending my theistic beliefs, which had no solid basis). I think I just need some practice :)

EDIT: Your link to the series of posts on why LW is generally atheistic is broken. Which makes me sad.

• Handle: thoughtdancer
• Name: Deb
• Location: Middle of nowhere, Michigan
• Age: 44
• Gender: Female
• Education: PhD Rhetoric
• Occupation: Writer-wannabe, adjunct Prof (formerly tenure-track, didn't like it)
• Blog: thoughtdances Just starting, be gentle please

I'm here because of SoullessAutomaton, who is my apartment-mate and long term friend. I am interested in discussing rhetoric and rationality. I have a few questions that I would pose to the group to open up the topic.

1) Are people interested in rhetoric, persuasion, and the systematic study thereof? Does anyone want a primer? (My PhD is in the History and Theory of Rhetoric, so I could develop such a primer.)

2) What would a rationalist rhetoric look like?

3) What would be the goals / theory / overarching observations that would be the drivers behind a rationalist rhetoric?

4) Would a rationalist rhetoric be more ethical than current rhetorics, and if so, why?

5) Can rhetoric ever be fully rational and rationalized, or is the study of how people are persuaded inevitably or inherently a-rational or anti-rational (I would say that rhetoric can be rationalized, but I know too many scholars who would disagree with me here, either explicitly or implicitly)?

6) Question to the group: to what degree might unfamiliar terminology derived from prior discussions here and in the sister-blog be functioning as an unintentional gatekeeper? Corollary question: to what degree is the common knowledge of math and sciences--and the relevant jargon terms thereof--functioning as a gatekeeper? (As an older woman, I was forbidden from pursuing my best skill--math--because women "didn't study math". I am finding that I have to dig pretty deeply into Wikipedia and elsewhere to make sure I'm following the conversation--that or I have to pester SoullessAutomaton with questions that I should not have to ask. sigh)

I'm a 24 year old PhD student of molecular biology. I arrived here trying to get at the many worlds vs copenhagen debate as a nonspecialist, and as part of a sustained campaign of reading that will allow me to tell a friend who likes Hegel where to shove it. I'm also here because I wanted to reach a decision about whether I really want to do biology, if not, whether I should quit, and if I leave, what i actually want to do.

Hello. I've been browsing articles that show up on the front page for about a year now. Just recently started going through the sequences and decided it would be a good time to create an account.

Hi, I've been hanging around for several months now and decided to join. My name is John and I found the site (I believe) via a link on CommonSenseAtheism to How to actually change your mind. I read through many of those posts and took notes and resonated with a lot. I loved EY's Twelve Virtues and the Litany of Gendlin.

I'm a graduate in mechanical engineering and work as one today. I don't know that I would call myself a rationalist, but only because I haven't perhaps become one. In other words, I want to be but do not consider myself to be well-versed in rationalist methods and thought compared to posts/comments I read here.

To close, I was brought to this site in a round-about way because I have recently de-converted from Catholicism (which is what took me to CSA). I'm still amidst my "quest" and blog about it HERE. I would say I'm not sure god doesn't exist or that Christianity is false, but the belief is no longer there. I seek to be as certain and justified I can in whatever beliefs I hold. LessWrong has seemed to be a good tool toward that end. I look forward to continuing to learn and want to take this opportunity to begin participating more.

Note: I also post as "Hendy" on several other blogs. We are the same.

Hello!

I work in a semi-technical offshoot of (ducks!) online marketing. I've always had rationalist tendencies, and reading the material on this website has had a "coming home" feeling for me. I appreciate the high level of discourse and the low levels of status-seeking behaviors.

I am female, and I read with interest the discussion on gender, but unfortunately I do not think I can contribute much to that topic, because I have been told repeatedly that I am "not like other women." I certainly don't think it would be a good idea to generalize from my example what other women think or feel (although to be honest the same could be said about my ability to represent the general populace).

I found my way here through the Harry Potter story, which a friend sent to me knowing that I would appreciate the themes. I am enjoying it tremendously.

My name's Axel Glibert. I'm 21, I just finished studying Biology and now I'm going for a teaching job. I found this wonderful site through hp and the methods of rationality and it has been an eyeopener for me.

I've been raised in a highly religious environment but it didn't take very long before I threw that out of the window. Since then I had to make my own moral rules and attempts at understanding how the universe works. My firsts "scientific experiments" were rather ineffective but it caused me to browse through the science section of the local library... and now, more then a decade later, here I am!

I have long thought I was the only one to so openly choose Science over Religion (thinking even scientists were secretly religious because it was the "right thing to do") but then I found Less Wrong filled with like-minded people! For the past 3 months I've been reading through the core sequences on this site and now I've finally made an account. I'm still too intimidated by the sheer brilliance of some of the threads here to actually post but that's just more motivation for me to study on my own.

I'm Floris Nool a 24 year old recently graduated Dutch ex-student. I came across this site while reading Harry's new rational adventures, which I greatly enjoy by the way. I must say I'm intrigued by several of the subjects being talked about here. Although not everything makes sense at first and I'm still working my through the immense amounts of interesting posts on this site, I find myself endlessly scrolling through posts and comments.

The last few years I increasingly find myself trying to understand things, why they are like they are. Why I act like I do etc. Reading about the greater scientific theories and trying to relate to them in everyday life. While I do not understand as much as I want to, and probably never will seeing the amounts of information and theories out there, I hope to come to greater understanding of basically everything.

It's great to see so many people talking about these subjects, as in daily life hardly anyone seems to think about it like I do. Which can be rather frustrating when trying to talk about what I find interesting subjects.

I hope to be able to some day contribute to the community as I see other posters do, but until I feel comfortable enough about my understanding of everything going on here I will stay lurking for a while. Only having discovered the site two days ago doesn't exactly help.

I recently found Less Wrong through Eliezer's Harry Potter fanfic, which has become my second favorite book. Thank you so much Eliezer for reminding my how rich my Art can be.

I was also delighted to find out (not so surprisingly) that Eliezer was an AI researcher. I have, over the past several months, decided to change my career path to AGI. So many of these articles have been helpful.

I have been a rationalist since I can remember. But I was raised as a Christian, and for some reason it took me a while to think to question the premise of God. Fortunately as soon as I did, I rejected it. Then it was up to me to 1) figure out how to be immortal and 2) figure out morality. I'll be signing up for cryonics as soon as I can afford it. Life is my highest value because it is the terminal value; it is required for any other value to be possible.

I've been reading this blog every day since I've found it, and hope to get constant benefit from it. I'm usually quiet, but I suspect the more I read, the more I'll want to comment and post.

Hello! I'm Sam. I'm 17, a newly minted high school graduate, and I'll be heading off to Reed College in Portland, Oregon next month.

I discovered Less Wrong through a link (whose origin I no longer remember) to "A Fable of Science and Politics" a couple of months ago. The post was rather striking, and the site's banner was alluring, so I clicked on it. The result, over the past couple of months, has been a massive accumulation of bookmarks (18 directly from Less Wrong at the time of this writing) accompanied by an astonishing amount of insight.

This place is probably the most intellectually stimulating site I've ever found on the internet, and I'm very much looking forward to discovering more posts, as well as reading through the ones I've stored up. I have, until now, mostly read bits and pieces that I've seen on the main page or followed links to, partially because I haven't had time and partially because some of the posts can be intimidatingly academic (I don't have the math and science background to understand some of what Eliezer writes about), but I've made this account and plan to delve into the Sequences shortly.

To some degree, I think I've always been a rationalist. I've always been both inquisitive and argumentative (captain of my school's debate team, by the way), and those qualities combined tend to lead one to questioning established thought. Although my parents are mildly religious, I don't think I ever actually believed in God (haven't gone to synagogue since my Bar Mitzvah), and that lack of belief hardened into strong atheism.

I'm very fond of logic, and I've argued myself from atheism to materialism and hence to determinism, with utilitarianism thrown in along the way. They're not popular viewpoints, but they're internally consistent, and the world becomes much clearer and simpler when seen from them. I'm still trying to refine my philosophies to create a truly coherent view of the world. I very much enjoy Less Wrong both because it's a hub of my low-percentage philosophy and because it's uniquely clarifying in its perspectives.

I enjoy psychology and philosophy, the former of which I'm considering as a major, and was heavily influenced by reading The Moral Animal (which I highly recommend if you haven't already read it) during my freshman year of high school. I love reading, practice introspection, and am continually attempting to incorporate as much information as I can into my worldview.

I actually already have about one and a half posts ready (one on consciousness, one on post rem information), but I'll readily wait until I've read through the Sequences and accumulated some karma before I publish them.

I've written too much already, so I'll cut this off here. Once again: Hi everyone! My mind is open.

Hi. I'm Cole from Maryland. I found this blog through a list of "greatest blogs of the year." I've forgot who published that list.

I'm in my 23rd year. I value happiness and work to spread it to others. I've been reading this blog for about a month. I enjoy reading blogs like this, because I'm searching for a sustainable lifestyle to start after college.

Cheers

My name is Taiyo Inoue. I am a 32, male, father of a 1 year old son, married, and a math professor. I enjoy playing the acoustic guitar (American primitive fingerpicking), playing games, and soaking up the non-poisonous bits of the internet.

I went through 12 years of math study without ever really learning that probability theory is the ultimate applied math. I played poker for a bit during the easy money boom for fun and hit on basic probability theory which the 12 year old me could have understood, but I was ignorant of the Bayesian framework for epistemology until I was 30 years old. This really annoys me.

I blame my education for leaving me ignorant about something so fundamental, but mostly I blame myself for not trying harder to learn about fundamentals on my own.

This site is really good for remedying that second bit. I have a goal to help fix the first bit -- I think we call it "raising the sanity waterline".

As a father, I also want to teach my son so he doesn't have the same regret and annoyance at my age.

I go by Clarisse and I'm a feminist, sex-positive educator who has delivered workshops on both sexual communication and BDSM to a variety of audiences, including New York’s Museum of Sex, San Francisco’s Center for Sex and Culture, and several Chicago universities. I created and curated the original Sex+++ sex-positive documentary film series at Chicago’s Jane Addams Hull-House Museum; I have also volunteered as an archivist, curator and fundraiser for that venerable BDSM institution, the Leather Archives & Museum. Currently, I'm working on HIV mitigation in southern Africa. I blog at clarissethorn.wordpress.com and Twitter at @clarissethorn.

Besides sex, other interests include gaming, science fiction and fantasy, and housing cooperatives.

I've read some posts here that I thought had really awful attitudes about sexuality and BDSM in particular, so I'm sure I'll be posting about those. I would like it if people were more rational about sex, inasmuch as we can be.

Ignoring the more obvious jokes people make in introduction posts: Hi. My name is Robin. I grew up in the Eastern Time Zone of the United States, and have lived in the same place essentially all my life. I was homeschooled by secular parents - one didn't discuss religion and the other was agnostic - with my primary hobby being the reading of (mostly) speculative fiction of (mostly) quite high quality. (Again, my parent's fault - when I began searching out on my own, I was rather less selective.) The other major activity of my childhood was participation in the Boy Scouts of America.

I entered community college at the age of fifteen with an excellent grounding in mathematics, a decent grounding in physics, superb fluency with the English language (both written and spoken), and superficial knowledge of most everything else. After earning straight As for three years, I applied to four-year universities, and my home state university offered me a full ride. At present, I am a graduate student in mechanical engineering at the same institution.

In the meantime, I have developed an affection for weblogs, web comics, and online chess, much to the detriment of my sleep schedule and work ethic. I suspect I discovered Overcoming Bias through "My Favorite Liar" like everyone else, but Eliezer Yudkowsky's sequences (and, to a lesser extent, Robin Hanson's essays) were what drew me in. I lost interest around when EY jumped to lesswrong.com, but was drawn back in when I opened up the bookmark again in the past day or so, particularly thanks to a few of Yvain's contributions.

Being all of twenty-four and with less worldly experience than the average haddock, I imagine I shan't contribute much to the conversation, but I'll give it my best shot.

(P.S. I am not registered for cryonics and I'm skeptical about the ultimate potential of AI. I'm an modern-American-style liberal registered as a Republican for reasons which seemed good at the time. Also, I am - as is obvious in person but not online - both male and black.)

Hey everyone,

My name is Owen, and I'm 17. I read HPMOR last year, but really got into the Sequences and additional reading (GEB, Thinking Fast and Slow, Influence) around this summer.

I'm interested in time management, with respect to dealing with distractions, especially with respect to fighting akrasia. So I'm trying to use what I know about how my own brain operates to create a suite of internalized beliefs, primers, and defense strategies for when I get off-track (or stopping before I get to that point).

Personally, I'm connected with a local environmental movement, which stems from a fear I had about global warming as the largest threat to humanity a few years ago. This was before I looked into other ex-risks. I'm now evaluating my priorities, and I'd also like to bring some critical thinking to the environmental movement, where I feel some EA ideals would make things more effective (prioritizing some actions over others, examining cost-benefits of actions, etc.).

Especially after reading GEB, I'm coming to realize that a lot of rather things I hold central to my "identity" are rather arbitrarily decided and then maintained through a need to stay consistent. So I'm reevaluating my beliefs and assumptions (when I notice them) and ask if they are actually things I would like to maintain. A lot of this ties back to the self-improvement with regards to time management.

In day-to-day life, it's hard to find others who have a similar info diet/ reading background as me, so I'm considering getting more friends/family interested in rationality a goal for me, especially my (apparently) very grades-driven classmates. I feel this would lead to more constructive discussions and a better ability to look at the larger picture for most people.

Finally, I also perform close-up coin magic, which isn't too relevant to most aspects of rationality, but certainly looks pretty.

I look forward to sharing ideas and learning from you all here!

Hello Lesswrong

I am a nameless, ageless, genderless internet-being who may sometimes act like a 22 year old male from canada. I have always been quite rational and consciously aiming to become more rational, though I had never read any actual discussion of rationality, unless you count cat-v. I did have some possibly wrong ideas that I protected with anti-epistemology, but that managed to collapse on its own recently.

I got linked to lesswrong from reddit. I didn't record the details so don't ask. I do remember reading a few lesswrong articles and thinking this is awesome. Then I read the sequences. The formal treatment of rationality has really de-crufted my thinking. I'm still working on getting to a superhuman level of rationality tho.

I do a lot of thinking and I have some neat ideas to post. Can't wait.

Also, my human alter-ego is formally trained as a mechanical engineer.

I hope to contribute and make the world more awesome!

Hello LessWrong!

My name is Michelle. I am from the United States and am entering college this August. I am a graphic design student who is also interested in public speaking. I was lead to this site one day while browsing fanfiction. I am an avid reader and spend a good percentage of my life reading novels and other literature. I read HPMOR and found the story intriguing and the theories very interesting. When I finally reached the end, I read the author's page and realized that I could find more information on the ideas presented in the book. Naturally, I was delighted. The ideas were mainly why I kept reading. I had not encountered anything similar and found it refreshing to read something that had so many theories that rang true to my ear.

I am not a specialist in any science field or math field. I consider rationality to be something that I wish everyone would get interested in. I really want this idea to stick in more people's heads, but know better than to preach it. I hope to help people become more involved in it, and learn more about rationality and the like.

I'm learning. I'm no expert and hardly consider myself a rationalist. If this were split into ranks like karate, I'd still be a white belt.

I'm looking forward to learning more about rationality, philosophy, and science with all of you here, and hopefully one day contributing, myself!

Hello Less wrong.

I've been reading Yudkowsky for a while now. I'm a philosophy major from NJ and he's been quite popular around here since I showed some of my friends three worlds collide. I am here because I think I can offer this forum new and well considered views on cognition, computability, epistemology, ontology, valid inference in general and also have my views kicked around a bit. Hopefully our mutual kicking around of each others views will toughen them up for future kicking battles.

I have studied logic at high levels, and have an intricate understanding of Godel's incompleteness theorem and of Tarski's undefinability theorem. I plan to write short posts that might make the two accessible when I have the Karma to do so. So the sooner you give me 20 Karma the sooner you will have a non-logician friendly explanation of Godel's first incompleteness theorem.

Hi

Didn't realise that this thread existed, so this 'hello' is after 20 or so posts. Oh well! I found Less Wrong because my brother recommended TVtropes, that linked to Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, and THAT led me back here. I've now recommended this site to my brother, completing the circle.

I've always been interested in rationality, I guess: I wouldn't identify any particular point of 'becoming a rationalist', though I've had times where I've come across ideas that help me be more accurate. Including some on here, actually. There's a second strand to my interest: I work in government and am interested in practical applications of rational thinking in large and complex organisations.

The Singularity Institute and Future of Humanity stuff is not something I've looked at before: I find it fairly interesting on an amateur level, and have some philosophy background that means the discussions make sense to me. I have zero computer science though, and generally my education is in the humanities rather than anything scientific.

Hi everyone!

I found this blog by clicking a link on Eliezer's site...which I found after seeing his name in a transhumanist mailing list...which I subscribed to after reading Ray Kurzweil's The Singularity is Near when I was fifteen. I found Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality at the same time, and I've now successfully addicted my 16-year-old brother as well.

I'm 19 and I'm studying nursing in Ottawa. I work as a lifeguard and swim instructor at a Jewish Community Centre. (I'm not Jewish.) I sing in a girls' choir at an Anglican church. (I'm not Christian.) This usually throws people off a little. My favourite hobbies are writing and composing music. I can program in Java at a fairly beginner level after taking one class as my elective.

I've been reading this site for about a year and I decided it was time to start being useful. Cheers!

Hi there,

My name is Lachlan, 25 years old, and I too am a computer programmer. I found less wrong via Eliezer's site; having been linked there by a comment on Charles Stross's blog, if I recall correctly.

I've read through a lot of the LW backlog and generally find it all very interesting, but haven't yet taken the time and effort to try to apply the useful seeming guidelines to my life and evaluate the results. I blame this on having left my job recently, and feeling that I have enough change in my life right now. I worry that this excuse will metamorphose into another though, and become a pattern of not examining my thinking as best as possible.

All that said, I do often catch myself thinking thoughts that on examination don't hold up, and re-evaluating them. The best expression of this that I've seen is Pratchett's first, second, third thoughts.

Hi, everyone, you can call me Gigi. I'm a Mechanical Engineering student with a variety of interests ranking among everything from physics to art (unfortunately, I know more about the latter than the former). I've been reading LW frequently and for long sessions for a couple of weeks now.

I was attracted to LW primarily because of the apparent intelligence and friendliness of the community, and the fact that many of the articles illuminated and structured my previous thoughts about the world (I will not bother to name any here, many are in the Sequences).

While the rationalist viewpoint is fairly new to me (aside from various encounters where I could not identify ideas as "rationalist"), I am looking forward to expanding my intellectual horizons by reading, and hopefully eventually contributing something meaningful back to the community.

If anyone has recommendations for reading outside LW that may be interesting or relevant to me, I welcome them. I've got an entire summer ahead of me to rearrange my thinking and improve my understanding.

Hi, I`m Michèle. I'm 22 years old and studying biology in Germany. My parents are atheists and so am I.
I stumbled upon this blog, started reading and couldn't stop reading. Nearly every topic is very interesting for me and I'm really glad I found people to talk about these things! Sometimes I find myself over emotional and unable to get the whole picture of situations. I'm trying to work on that and I hope I could get some insight reading this blog.

Hello.
My name is Dan, and I'm a 30 year old software engineer living in Maryland. I was a mostly lurking member of the Extropian mailing list back in the day and I've been following the progress of the SIAI sporadically since it's founding. I've made a few donations, but nothing terribly significant.

I've been an atheist for half my life now, and as I've grown older I've tended more and more to rational thinking. My wife recently made a comment that she specifically uses rational argument with me much more so than anyone else she has to deal with, even at work, because she knows that is what will work. (Obviously, she wins frequently enough to make it worth her while.)

I hope to have something minor to contribute to the akrasia discussion, although I haven't fully formulated it yet. I used to be an avid video game player and I don't play anymore. The last few times I played any games I didn't even enjoy it. I plan to describe the experiences that led to this state. Unfortunately for general applicability, one of those experiences is "grow older and have a child."

It's not the most altruistic of motives, but what most draws me to this community is that I enjoy being right, and there seem to be lots of things I can learn here to help me to be right more often. What I would dream about getting out of this community is a way to find or prepare for meaningful work that helped reduce existential risk. I have a one year old daughter and I was recently asking myself "What is most likely to kill my children and grandchildren?" The answer I came up with was "The same thing that kills everyone else."

Name: Karl Smith

Location: Raleigh, North Carolina

Born: 1978

Education: Phd Economics

Occupation: Professor - UNC Chapel Hill

I've always been interested in rationality and logic but was sidetracked for many (12+) years after becoming convinced that economics was the best way to improve the lives of ordinary humans.

I made it to Less Wrong completely by accident. I was into libertarianism which lead me to Bryan Caplan which lead me Robin Hanson (just recently). Some of Robin's stuff convinced me that Cryonics was a good idea. I searched for Cryonics and found Less Wrong. I have been hooked ever since. About 2 weeks now, I think.

Also, skimming this I see there is a 14 year-old on this board. I cannot tell you how that makes burn with jealousy. To have found something like this at 14! Soak it in Ellen. Soak it in.

Hi all, my name's Drew. I stumbled upon the site from who-knows-where last week and must've put in 30-40 hours of reading already, so suffice to say I've found the writing/discussions quite enjoyable so far. I'm heavily interested in theories of human behavior on both a psychological and moral level, so most of the subject matter has been enjoyable. I was a big Hofstader fan a few years back as well, so the AI and consciousness discussions are interesting as well.

Anyway, thought I'd pop in and say hi, maybe I'll take part in some conversations soon. Looks like a great thing you've got going here.

Hi, I'm Hrishi, 26, male. I work in air pollution modelling in London. I'm also doing a part-time PhD.

I am an atheist but come from a very religious family background.

When I was 15, I once cried uncontrollably and asked to see God. If there is indeed such a beautiful supreme being then why didn't my family want to meet Him? I was told that their faith was weak and only the greatest sages can see God after a lot of self-afflicted misery. So, I thought nevermind.

I've signed up for cryonics. You should too, or it'll just be 3 of us from LW when we wake up on the other side. I don't mind hogging all the press, but inside me lives a shiny ball of compassion which wants me to share the glory with you.

I wish to live a happy and healthy life.

• Handle: Alicorn
• Location: Amherst, MA
• Age: The number of full years between now and October 21, 1988
• Gender: Female

Atheist by default, rationalist by more recent inclination and training. I found OB via Stumbleupon and followed the yellow brick road to Less Wrong. In the spare time left by schoolwork and OB/LW, I do art, write, cook, and argue with those of my friends who still put up with it.

Hello, Less Wrong.

I am Russian, atheistic, 27, trying to be rational.

Initially I came here to read a through explanation of Bayes theorem, but noticed that LessWrong contains a lot more than that and decided to stay for a while.

I am really pleased by quality of material and pleasantly surprised by quality of comments. It is rare to see useful comments on the Internet.

I am going to read at least some sequences first and comment if I have something to say. Though, I know I WILL be sidetracked by HP:MoR and "Three worlds collide". Well, my love for SF always got me.

Salutations, Less Wrong.

I'm an undergraduate starting my third year at the University of Toronto (in Toronto, Ontario, Canada), taking the Software Engineer specialist program in Computer Science.

I found Less Wrong through a friend, who found it through Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, who found that through me, and I found HP: MoR through a third friend. I'm working my way through the archive of Less Wrong posts (currently in March of 2009).

On my rationalist origins: One of my parents has a not-insignificant mental problem that result in subtle psychoses. I learned to favor empirical evidence and rationality in order to cope with the incongruency of reality and some of said parent's beliefs. It has been an ongoing experience since then, including upbringing in both Protestant Anglicanism and Secular Humanistic Judaism; the dual religious background was a significant contributor towards both my rationalism and my atheism.

I eagerly anticipate interesting discussions here.

I'm 17 and I'm from Australia.

I've always been interested in science, learning, and philosophy. I've had correct thinking as a goal in my life since reading a book by John Stossel when I was 13.

I first studied philosophy at school in grade 10, when I was 14 and 15. I loved the mind/body problem, and utilitarianism was the coolest thing ever. I had great fun thinking about all these things, and was fairly good at it. I gave a speech about the ethics of abortion last year which I feel really did strike to the heart of the matter, and work as a good use of rationality, albeit untrained.

I came across Less Wrong via Three Worlds Collide, via Tv Tropes, last September. I then read HPMOR. By this point, I was convinced Eliezer Yudkowsky was the awesomest guy ever. He had all the thoughts I wanted to have, but wasn't smart enough to. I read everything on his website, then started trying to read the sequences. They were hard to understand for me, but I got some good points from them. I attended the National Youth Science Forum in January this year, and spent the whole time trying to explain the Singularity to people. Since then I've made my way through most of Eliezer's writings. I agree with most of what he says, except for bits which I might just not understand, like the Zombies sequence, and some of his more out there claims.

But yeah. Since reading his stuff, I've become stronger. Self improvement is now more explicitly one of my goals. I have tried harder to consider my beliefs. I have learnt not to get into pointless arguments. One of the most crucial lessons was the "learning to lose" from HPMOR. This has prevented me from more than a few nasty situations.

What can I contribute here? Nothing much as of yet. If I know anything, it's the small segment of rationality I've learned here. I'm good at intuitively understanding philosophy and math, but not special by Less Wrong standards.

One thing I do believe in strongly is the importance of mentoring people younger than you. I know two kids a bit younger than me. One is a really smart sciency kid, one a really talented musicish kid. I think that by linking them good science and good music, I can increase their rate of improvement. I wish that someone had told me about, for instance, Bayes's Theorem, or FAI, or Taylor series, when I was younger. You need a teacher. Sadly, there's no textbooks on this topic. But random walks through Wikipedia are a slow, frustrating way to learn when you're a curious 14 year old.

And so yeah. Pleased to meet you kids.

• Handle: dvasya (from Darth Vasya)
• Name: Vasilii Artyukhov
• Location: Houston, TX (USA)
• Age: 26
• Occupation: physicist doing computational nanotechnology/materials science/chemistry, currently on a postdoctoral position at Rice University. Also remotely connected to the anti-aging field, as well as cryopreservation. Not personally interested in AI because I don't understand it very well (though I do appreciate its importance adequately), but who knows -- maybe that could change with prolonged exposure to LW :)

Hello, people.

I first found Less Wrong when I was reading sci-fi stories on the internet and stumbled across Three Worlds Collide. As someone who places a high value on the ability to make rational decisions, I decided that this site is definitely relevant to my interests. I started reading through the sequences a few months ago, and I recently decided to make an account so that I could occasionally post my thoughts in the comments. I generally only post things when I think I have something particularly insightful to say, so my posts tend to be infrequent. Since I am still reading through the sequences, you probably won't be seeing me commenting on any of the more recent posts for a while.

I'm 21 years old, and I live in Cambridge, Mass. I'm currently working on getting a master's degree in computer science. My classes for the spring term are in machine vision, and computational cognitive science; I have a decent background in AI-related topics. Hopefully I'll be graduating in August, and I'm not quite sure what I'll be doing after that yet.

Okay. Demographics. Boring stuff. Just skip to the next paragraph. I’m a masters student in mathematics (hopefully soon-to-be PhD student in economics). During undergrad, I majored in Biology, Economics and Math, and minored in Creative Writing (and nearly minored in Chemistry, Marine Science, Statistics and PE) … I’ll spare you the details, but most of those you won’t see on my resume for various reasons. Think: Master of None, not Omnidisciplinary Scientist.

My life goal is to write a financially self-sustainable computer game… for reasons I’ll keep secret for now. Seems like I’m not the first one in this thread to have this life goal.

I found LW through Harry Potter & MOR. I’d found HP&MOR through Tvtropes. I’d found Tvtropes through webcomic The Meek. I’d found The Meek through The Phoenix Requiem. Which I’d found through Top Web Comics site. That’s as far as I remember, 2 years ago.

I haven’t read most of the site, so far only about Bayes and the links off of that. And I’d started reading Harry Potter 3 weeks ago. So as far as you can see, I’m an ignorant newbie who speaks first and listens second.

I don’t identify myself as a rationalist. Repeat: I DO NOT identify myself as a rationalist. I didn’t notice that I’m different from everyone else when I was eleven. Or twelve. Or thereafter. I’m not smart enough to be a rationalist. I don't mean that in Socratic sense, "I know nothing, but at least I know more than you, idiot." I mean I'm just not smart.. I have the memory of a house cat. I can't name-drop on cue. I'm irrational. And I have BELIEFS (among them emergence, and when I model them, it'll be a Take That but for now it's just a belief).

Oh, and my name is a reference to BOTH Baldur's Gate 2, and to my intention of trying to challenge everything on this blog (what's my alternative? mindlessly agree?), and to how morons can't add 1+1.

Hi LW,

My name's Dan LaVine. I forget exactly how I got linked here, but I haven't been able to stop following internal links since.

I'm not an expert in anything, but I have a relatively broad/shallow education across mathematics and the sciences and a keen interest in philosophical problems (not quite as much interest in traditional approaches to the problems). My tentative explorations of these problems are broadly commensurate with a lot of the material I've read on this site so far. Maybe that means I'm exposing myself to confirmation bias, but so far I haven't found anywhere else where these ideas or the objections to them are developed to the degree they are here.

My aim in considering philosophical problems is to try to understand the relationship between my phenomenal experience and whatever causes it may have. Of course, it's possible that my phenomenal experience is uncaused, but I'm going to try to exhaust alternative hypotheses before resigning myself to an entirely senseless universe. Which is how I wind up as a rationalist -- I can certainly consider such possibilities as the impossibility of knowledge, that I might be a Boltzmann brain, that I live in the Matrix, etc., but I can't see any way to prove or provide evidence of these things, and if I take the truth of any of them as foundational to my thinking, it's hard to see what I could build on top of them.

Looking forward to reading a whole lot more here. Hopefully, I'll be able to contribute at least a little bit to the discussion as well.

Hello, community. I'm another recruit from Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality. After reading the first few chapters and seeing that it lacked the vagueness, unbending archetypes, and overt because the author says so theme that usually drives me away from fiction, then reading Less Wrong's (Eliezer's?) philosophy of fanfiction, I proceeded to read through the Sequences.

After struggling with the question of when I became a rationalist, I think the least wrong answer is that I just don't remember. I both remember less of my childhood than others seem to and developed more quickly. I could rationalize a few things, but I don't think that's going to be helpful.

Anyway, I'm 21 with an A.A. in Nothing in Particular and going for a B.S. in Mathematics and maybe other useful majors in November.

P.S. Quirrell FTW

deleted

Huh, I guess I should have come here earlier...

I'm Lorenzo, 31, from Madrid, Spain (but I'm Italian). I'm an evolutionary psychologist, or try to be, working on my PhD. I'm also doing a Master's Degree in Statistics, in which I discovered (almost by accident) the Bayesian approach. As someone with a longstanding interest in making psychology become a better science, I've found this blog a very good place for clarifying ideas.

I've been a follower of Less Wrong after reading Eliezer's essays on Bayesian reasoning some 3-4 months ago. I've known the Bayes theorem for quite a long time, but little or nothing about the bayesian approach to propability theory. The frecuentist paradigm dominates much of psychology, which is a shame, because I think bayesian reasoning is much better suited to the study of mind. There is still a lot of misunderstanding about what a bayesian approach entails, at least in this part of the world. Oh, well. We'll deal with it.

Thanks and keep up the good work!

Bueno! I'm Jason from San Antonio, Texas. Nice to say 'hi' to all you nice people! (Nice, also, to inflate the number of comments for this particular post - give the good readers of Less Wrong an incrementally warmer feeling of camaraderie.)

I've been reading Overcoming Bias and Less Wrong for over a year since I found a whole bunch of discussions on quantum mechanics. I've stayed for the low, low cost intellectual gratification.

I (actually, formally) study physics and math, and read these blogs to the extent that I feel smarter...also, because the admittedly limited faculties of reason play out a fascinating and entertaining show of bravery against their own project of rationality. What I learn about these shortcomings helps to buttress my own monoliths, as much as what I learn might should could erode these pillars' unsubstantial foundations. It's a thrilling undertaking.

Thanks, all!

Hi everyone!

I'm graduating law school in May 2010, and then going to work in consumer law at a small firm in San Francisco. I'm fascinated by statistical political science, space travel, aikido, polyamory, board games, and meta-ethics.

I first realized that I needed to make myself more rational when I bombed an online confidence calibration test about 6 years ago; it asked me to provide 95% confidence intervals for 100 different pieces of numerical trivia (e.g. how many nukes does China have, how many counties are in the U.S., how many species of spiders are there), and I only got about 72 correct. I can't find the website anymore, which is frustrating; I like to think I would do better now.

I am a pluralist about what should be achieved -- I believe there are several worthy goals in life, the utility of which cannot be meaningfully compared. However, I am passionately convinced that people should be consciously aware of their goals and should attempt to match their actions to their stated goals. Whatever kind of future we want, we are flabbergastingly unlikely to get it unless we identify and carry out the tasks that can lead us there.

Despite reading and pondering roughly 80 LW articles, together with some of their comments, I continue to believe a few things that will rub many LW readers the wrong way. My confidence in these beliefs has gone down, but is still over 50%. For example, I still believe in a naturalistic deity, and I still believe in ontologically basic consciousness. I am happy to debate these issues with individuals who are interested, but I do not plan on starting any top-level posts about them; I do not have the stamina or inclination to hold the field against an entire community of intelligent debaters all by myself.

I am not sure that I have anything to teach LW in the sense of delivering a prepared lecture, but I hope to contribute to discussions about how to best challenge Goodhart's Law in various applied settings.

Finally, thanks to RobinZ for the warm welcome!

Hello All,

my name is Markus, and just decided, after, well, years? of lurk-jumping from sl4 to OvercomingBias to LessWrong that maybe I should participate in the one or another discussion; not doing so seems to lead to constant increase of things I have a feeling I know but actually fall flat on the first occasion of another person posing a question.

The process of finding to (then non-existing) LW started during senior high, when I somehow got interested into philosophy, soon enough into AI. The interest in AI lead to interest in Weiqi (Chess was publicly shot already a handful years ago), lead to an interest into eastern philosophy, lead to (interest, not really doing) Zen, lead to frustration, back to start. I was playing trumpet during those times, too; as a consequence of all interests, I did, well, not so much productive stuff. Procrastination is an often discussed topic here; I was and I am of type-A: do nothing. Well, I played Quake. Now I click links on Facebook.

I would still not call myself a rationalist by execution, but just by aspiration. However, from my philosophical gut-level feeling, just everything else does not make any sense.

I am somehow missing the real-life link; for people with IQ << 160, who are not working on AI or similarly hard topics, I cannot see the potential of the full-blown Bayesian BFG; just doing what is consensus being the best choice is most often the only thing one can do, lacking any data, even more often competence. I really do have a hard time seeing the practical benefits.

So, this one is getting too long already, I'm a chatty person...

Just for completeness, on "what you're doing": I'm currently working as a part-time software developer, and am a philosophy/math/computer science/electrical engineering college-dropout.

BTW, as English is not my mother-tongue, I often fall-back to the dictionary when writing in it; if some things seem to be taken from an overly strange thesaurus, or of especially unorthodox style, you now know why.

• Handle: Zvi
• Name: Zvi Mowshowitz
• Location: New York City
• Age: 30
• Education: BA, Mathematics

I found OB through Marginal Revolution, which then led to LW. A few here know me from my previous job as a professional Magic: The Gathering player and writer and full member of the Competitive Conspiracy. That job highly rewarded the rationality I already had and encouraged its development, as does my current one which unfortunately I can't say much about here but which gives me more than enough practical reward to keep me coming back even if I wasn't fascinated anyway. I'm still trying to figure out what my top level posts are going to be about when I get that far.

While I have told my Magic origin story I don't have one for rationality or atheism; I can't remember ever being any other way and I don't think anyone needs my libertarian one. If anything it took me time to realize that most people didn't work that way, and how to handle that, which is something I'm still working on and the part of OB/LW I think I've gained the most from.

Hello, my friends. I'm a brazilian man, fully blind and gay...

I knew Fanfiction.net, HP MOR and LessWrong. I hope to learn more :)

TL;DR: I found LW through HPMoR, read the major sequences, read stuff by other LWers including the Luminosity series, and lurked for six months before signing up.

My name, as you can see above if you don't have the anti-kibitzing script, Daniel. My story of how I came to self-identify as a rationalist, and then how I later came to be a rationalist, breaks down into several parts. I don't remember the order of all of them.

Since well before I can remember (and I have a fairly good long-term memory), I've been interested in mathematics, and later science. One of my earliest memories, if not my earliest, is of me, on my back, under the coffee table (well before I could walk). I had done this multiple times, I think usually with the same goal, but one time in particular sticks in my memory. I was kicking the underside of the coffee table, trying to see what was moving. This time, I moved it, got out, and saw that the drawer of the coffee table was open; this caused me to realize that this was what was moving, and I don't think I crawled under there again.

Many years later, I discovered Star Trek TNG, and from that learned a little about Star Trek. I wanted to be more rational from the role models of Data and Spock, and I did not realize at the time how non-rational Spock was. It was very quickly, however, that I realized that emotions are not the opposite of logic, and the first time I saw the TOS episode that Luke references [here][http://facingthesingularity.com/2011/why-spock-is-not-rational/], I realized that Spock was being an idiot (though at the time I thought it was unusually idiotic, not standard behavior; I hadn't and still haven't seen much of the original series). It was around this time that I thought I myself was "rational" or "logical".

Of course, it wasn't until much later that I actually started learning about rationalism. Around Thanksgiving 2011, I was on fanfiction.net looking for a Harry Potter fanfic I'd seen before and liked (I still haven't found it) that I stumbled upon Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality. I read it, and I liked it, and it slowly took over my life. I decided to look for other works by that author, and went to the link to Less Wrong because it was recommended (not realizing that the Sequences were written by the same person as HPMoR yet). Since then, I've read the sequences and most other stuff written by EY (that's still easily accessible and not removed), and it all made sense. I finally understood that yes, in fact, I and the other "confused" students WERE correct in that probability class where the professor said that "the probability that this variable is in this interval" didn't exist, I noticed times when I was conforming instead of thinking, and I noticed some accesses of cached thoughts. At first I was a bit skeptical of the overly-atheistic bit (though I'd always had doubts and was pretty much agnostic-though-I-wouldn't-admit-it), until I read the articles about how unlikely the hypothesis of God was and thought about them.

I did not know much about Quantum Mechanics when I read that sequence, but I had heard of the "waveform collapse" and had not understood it, and I realized fairly quickly how that was an unnecessary hypothesis. When I saw one of the cryonics articles (I'm cryocrastinating, trying to get my parents to sign up) taking the idea seriously, I thought "Oh, duh! I should have seen that the first time I heard of it, but I was specifically told that the person involved was an idiot and it didn't work, so I never reevaluated" (later I remembered my horror at Picard's attitude in the relevant TNG episode, and I've always only believed in the information-theoretic definition of "death").

After I read the major sequences, I read some other stuff I found through the Wiki and through googling "Less Wrong __" for various things I wanted the LW community opinion on. I found my favorite LW authors (Yvain, Luke, Alicorn, and EY) and read other things by them (Facing the Singularity and Luminosity). I subscribed to the RSS feed (I don't know how that'll work when I want to strictly keep to anti-kibitzing), and I now know that I want to help SIAI as much as possible (I was planning to be a computer scientist anyway); I'm currently reading through a lot of their recommended reading. I'm also about to start GEB, followed by Jaynes and Pearl. I plan to become a lot more active comment-wise, but probably not post-wise for a while yet. I may even go to one of the meetups if one is held somewhere I can get to.

Now we've pretty much caught up to the present. Let's see... I read some posts today, I read Luke's Intuitive Explanation to EY's Intuitive Explanation, I found an error in it (95% confidence), I sent him an email, and I decided to sign up here. Now I'm writing this post, and I'm supposed to put some sort of conclusion on it. I estimate that the value of picking a better conclusion is not that high compared to the cost, so I'll just hit th submit button after this next period.

Edit: Wow, I just realized how similar my story is to parts of Comment author: BecomingMyself's. I swear we aren't the same person!

Hey, I've been an LW lurker for about a year now, and I think it's time to post here. I'm a cryonicist, rationalist and singularity enthusiast. I'm currently working as a computer engineer and I'm thinking maybe there is more I can do to promote rationality and FAI. LW is an incredible resource. I have a mild fear that I don't have enough rigorous knowledge about rationality concepts to contribute anything useful to most discussion.

LW has changed my life in a few ways but the largest are becoming a cryonicist and becoming polyamorous (naturally leaned toward this, though). I feel like I am in a one-way friendship with EY, does anyone else feel like that?

I am a video game developer. I find most of this site fairly interesting albeit once in a while I disagree with description of some behaviour as irrational, or the explanation projected upon that behaviour (when I happen to see a pretty good reason for this behaviour, perhaps strategic or as matter of general policy/cached decision).

Uh...uhm...hello?

Salutations, LessWrong!

I am Daniel Peverley, I lurked for a few months and joined not too long ago. I was first introduced to this site via HPatMOR, my first and so far only foray into the world of fan-fiction. I've been raised as a mormon, and I've been a vague unbeliever for a few years, but the information on this site really solidified the doubts and problems I had with my religion. Just knowing how to properly label common logical fallacies has been vastly helpful in my life, and a few of the posts on social dynamics have likewise been of great utility. I'm seventeen, headed into my senior year of highschool, and on-track to attend a high end university. My hobbies include Warhammer 40k, watching anime, running, exercising, studying chinese, video games, webcomics, and reading and writing speculative fiction and poetry. I live in the skeptic-impoverished Salt Lake City area. I look forward to posting, but I'll probably LURK MOAR for a while just to make sure what I have to say is worth reading.

Hi, I've been lurking on Less Wrong for a few months now, making a few comments here and there, but never got around to introducing myself. Since I'm planning out an actual post at the moment, I figured I should tell people where I'm coming from.

I'm a male 30-year-old optical engineer in Sydney, Australia. I grew up in a very scientific family and have pretty much always assumed I had a scientific career ahead of me, and after a couple of false starts, it's happened and I couldn't ask for a better job.

Like many people, I came to Less Wrong from TVTropes via Methods of Rationality. Since I started reading, I've found that it's been quite helpful in organising my own thoughts and casting aside unuseful arguments, and examining aspects of my life and beliefs that don't stand up under scrutiny.

In particular, I've found that reading Less Wrong has allowed, nay forced, me to examine the logical consistency of everything I say, write, hear and read, which allows me to be a lot more efficient in dicussions, both by policing my own speech and being more usefully critical of others' points (rather than making arguments that don't go anywhere).

While I was raised in a substantively atheist household, my current beliefs are theist. The precise nature of these beliefs has shifted somewhat since I started reading Less Wrong, as I've discarded the parts that are inconsistent or even less likely than the others. There are still difficulties with my current model, but they're smaller than the issues I have with my best atheist theory.

I've also had a surprising amount of success in introducing the logical and rationalist concepts from Less Wrong to one of my girlfriends, which is all the more impressive considering her dyscalculia. I'm really pleased that that this site has given me the tools to do that. It's really easy now to short-circuit what might otherwise become an argument by showing that it's merely a dispute about definitions. It's this sort of success that has kept me reading the site these past months, and I hope I can contribute to that success for other people.

Hello everybody, I'm Stefano from Italy. I'm 30, and my story about becoming a rationalist is quite tortuous... as a kid I was raised as a christian, but not strictly so: my only obligation was to attend mass every sunday morning. At the same time since young age I was fond of esoteric and scientific literature... With hindsight, I was a strange kid: by the age of 13 I already knew quite a lot about such things as the Order of the Golden Dawn or General Relativity... My fascination with computer and artificial intelligence begun approximately at the same age, when I met a teacher that first taught me how to program: I then realized that this would be one of my greatest passion. To cut short a long story, during the years I discarded all the esoteric nonsense (by means of... well, experiments) and proceeded to explore deeper and deeper within physics, math and AI.

I found this site some month ago, and after a reasonable recognition and after having read a fair amount of the sequences, I feel ready to contribute... so here I am.

I started posting a while ago (and was lurking for a while beforehand), and only today found this post.

My parents were both science teachers, and I got an education in traditional rationality basically since birth (I didn't even know it had such a name as "traditional rationality", I assumed it was just how you were supposed to think). I've always used that experimental mindset in order to understand people and the rest of the universe. I'm an undergrad in the Plan II honors program at the University of Texas at Austin, majoring in Chemistry Pre-Med. A friend of mine found HP:MoR on StumbleUpon and shared it with me. I caught up with the story very quickly, and one day as I was bored waiting for Elizeer to post the next chapter, I came to Less Wrong. Lurked for a long time, read the sequences, and adopted technical rationality. One day I had something to say, so I created an account.

Goal in life: Astronaut.

Jeff Kaufman. Working as a programmer doing computational linguistics in the boston area. Found "less wrong" twice: first through the intuitive explanation of bayes' theorem and then again recently through "hp and the methods of rationality". I value people's happiness, valuing that of those close to me more than that of strangers, but I value strangers' welfare enough that I think I have an obligation to earn as much as I can and live on as little as I can so I can give more to charity.

G'day LW Im an Aussie currently studying at the Australian National University in Canberra. My name is Sam and i should point out that the 'G'day' is just for fun, most Australians never use that phase and it kinda makes me cringe.

At at this very moment i'm trying to finish my thesis on the foundations of inductive reasoning, which i guess is pretty relevant to this community. A big part of my thesis is to translate a lot of very technical mathematics regarding Bayesianism and Sollomonoff induction into philosophical and intuitive explanations, so this whole site is really useful to me in just seeing how people think about rationalism and the mechanics of beliefs.

Although I my entire degree has been focused on the rational side of the human spectrum I remain alot more open minded and I think our entire education system regards math and physics too highly and does not leave enough room for creativity. Although create subjects exist in the arts, the generally culture is to regard them as intellectually inferior in some sense which has led to a hugely skewed idea of intelligence.

The saying goes "the map is not the territory" and although we can continually refine our maps through science and math I think truly understanding the territory can only be achieved through direct experience.

Im also very worried about the state of the world and It is exactly through rational open forums such as this that much needed progress can be discussed and advanced.

I guess i have a lot to say and instead of posting it here I should save it for an actual post, whenever i get time. But Its refreshing to see such an interesting online community amongst the seemingly endless rubbish on the net.

Hey Lesswrong! I'm just going to ramble for a second..

I like art, social sciences, philosophy, gaming, rationality and everything that falls in between. Examples include Go, Evolutionary Psychology, Mafia (aka Werewolves), Improvisation, Drugs and Debate.

See you if I see you!

Heikki, 30, Finnish student of computer engineering. Found Less Wrong by via the IRC-channel of the Finnish Transhumanist Association, which was found by random surfing ("Oh, there's a name for what I am?")

As for becoming a rationalist, I'd say the recipe was no friends and a good encyclopedia... Interest in ideas, unhindered by the baggage of standard social activities. One of the most influential single things was probably finding evolution quite early on. I remember (might be a false memory) having thought it would sure make sense if a horse's hoof was just one big toe, and then finding the same classic observation explained in the mentioned encyclopedia... That or dinosaurs. Anyway, fast forward via teenage bible-bashing and a fair amount of (hard) scifi etc. to now being here.

As the first sentence might suggest, I'm not doing nor have done anything of much interest to anyone. Well. Back to lurking, thanks to SilasBarta for the friendly welcome :) .

Hi everyone.

My name is Alan Godfrey.

I am fascinated by rational debate and logical arguments, and I appear to have struck gold in finding this site! I am the first to admit my own failings in these areas but am always willing to learn and grow.

I'm a graduate of mathematics from Trinity Hall, Cambridge University and probability and statistics have always been my areas of expertise - although I find numbers so much more pleasant to play with than theorems and proofs so bear with me!

I'm also a passive member of Mensa. While most of it does not interest me the numerical, pattern spotting and spatial awareness puzzles that it is associated with have always been a big passion of mine.

I have a personal fascination in human psychology, especially my own in a narcissistic way! Although I have no skill in this area.

I currently work for a specialist insurance company and head the catastrophe modelling function, which uses a baffling mixture of all of the above! It was through this that I attended a brief seminar at the 21st Century School in Oxford which mentioned this site as an affiliation although I had already found it a few months previously.

I come to this site with open eyes and an open mind. I hope to contribute insightful observation, engage in healthy discussion and ultimately come away better than I came in.

• Handle: arthurlewis
• Location: New York, NY
• Age: 28
• Education: BA in Music.
• Occupation: Musician / Teacher / Mac Support Guy
• Blog/Music: http://arthurthefourth.com

My career as a rationalist began when I started doing tech support, and realized the divide between successful troubleshooting and what most customers tried to do. I think the key to "winning" is to challenge your assumptions about how to win, and what winning is. I think that makes me an instrumental rationalist, but I'm not quite sure I understand the term. I'm here because OB and LW are among the closest things I've ever seen to an honest attempt to discover truth, whatever that may turn out to mean. And because I really like the phrase "Shut up and calculate!"

Note to new commenters: The "Help" link below the comment box will give you formatting tips.

This community is too young to have veterans. Since this is the first such post, I think we should all be encouraged to introduce ourselves.

Thanks for doing this!

I'm a 20 year old mathematics/music double major at NYU. Mainly here because I want to learn how to wear Vibrams without getting self conscious about it.

Hello. I found this place as a result of reading Yudkowski's intuitive explanation of Bayes Theorem. I think we are like a very large group of blind people each trying to describe the elephant on the basis of the small part we touch. However, if I can aggregate the tactile observations of a large number of us blind people, I might end up with a pretty good idea of what that elephant looks like. That's my goal - to build a coherent and consistent mental picture of that elephant.

Hello my name is Zachary Aletheia (when my wife and i got married we decided to choose a last name based on something that had meaning to use aletheia means truth in greek and we both have a passion for finding out the truth). Looking back on my journey to being a rationalist i think it was a 2 step process (though given how i've repeatedly thought about it i probably have changed the details in my memory quite a bit). I think the first step was during a anthropology class i watched this film about "magic" (i was a neo-pagan at the time who believed i could manipulate energy with my mind) and how absurd the video seemed really made me want to find a way to be able to have beliefs that aren't easy to see as absurd or laughable by others. From there i read quite a lot about logic (i still have a love affair with pure logic, i think i own 3 books on the subject and recently bought one from lukeprog). This all occured while i was a computer engineer undergraduate.

When i couldn't pass physics (which at the time i thought , due to self-serving bias, was because i was more interested in what i got my degree in) i decided to switch majors to psychology. During this time i still took lots of vitamins and supplements and was even a 9/11 truther for a while. Then i took a class called "Cognition" where we learned about quite a few of the biases and heuristics that are talked about on LW. Since then I started listening to a ton of skeptic podcasts and in general have tried to be a better rationalist.

One area that i do seem to have a hard time being a rationalist about is myself. I hold my self in very low self esteem (for instance i truly debated if i should post on here because everyone seems so brilliant how could i possibly add anything). I am hoping on trying to apply reason to that area of my life.

When it comes to life goals i am still trying to figure that out. I am leaning towards becoming a psychology prof but really not sure.

Oh i found lesswrong due to lukeprog and CSA. I have since become basically addicted to reading posts on it.

Oh i live in seaside,ca if anyone lives near there i would love to go to a LW meet-up.

I came across a post on efficiency of charity, and joined in order to be able to add my comments. I'm not sure I would identify myself as a rationalist at all, though I share some of what I understand to be rationalist values.

I am a musician and a teacher. I'm also a theist, though I hope to be relatively untroublesome about this and I have no wish to proselytize. Rather, I'm interested in exploring rational ways of discussing or thinking about moral and ethical issues that have more traditionally been addressed within a religious framework.

Hello all. I want to sign up for cryonics, but am not sure how. Is there a guide? What are the differences in the process for minors? [I pressed enter in the comment box but there aren't any breaks in the comment itself; how do you make breaks between lines in comments?] I'm a sixteen-year-old male from Louisiana in the US. I was raised Christian and converted to atheism a few months ago. I found Less Wrong from Eliezer's site--I don't remember how I found that--and have been lurking and reading sequences since.

Hi Less Wrong,

I'm a computer scientist currently living in Seattle. I used to work for Google, but I've since left to work on a game-creation-software startup. I came to Less Wrong to see Eliezer's posts about Friendly AI and stayed because a lot of interesting philosophical discussion happens here. It's refreshing to see people engaging earnestly with important issues, and the community is supportive rather than combative; nice work!

I'm interested in thinking clearly about my values and helping other people think about theirs. I was surprised to see that there hasn't been much discussion here about moral, animal-suffering-based vegetarianism or veganism. It seems to me that this is a simple, but high-impact, step towards reflective equilibrium. Has there been a conclusive argument against it here, or is everyone on LW already vegetarian (I wish)?

I'd be very happy to talk with anyone about moral vegetarianism in a PM or in a public setting. Even if you don't want to discuss it, I encourage you to think about it; my relationship with animals was a big inconsistency in my value system, and in retrospect it was pretty painless to patch, since the arguments are unusually straightforward and the causal chain is short.

Hi, my name is Dave Whitlock, I have been a rationalist my whole life. I have Asperger's, so rationalism comes very easily to me, too easily ;) I have a blog

http://daedalus2u.blogspot.com/

Which is mostly about nitric oxide physiology, but that includes a lot of stuff. Lately I have been working a lot on neurodevelopment and especially on autism spectrum disorders.

I comment a fair amount in the blogosphere, Science Based Medicine, neurologica, skepchick, Left brain-right brain and sometimes Science blogs; pretty much only under the daedalus2u pseudonym. Sb seems to be in a bit of turmoil right now, so it is unclear how that will fall out.

I am extremely liberal and I think I come by that completely rationally coming from the premise that all people have the same human rights and the same human obligations to other humans (including yourself). This is pretty well codified in the universal declaration of human rights (which I think is insufficiently well followed in many places).

Hello from the lurking shadows!

Some stats:

• Name: Samuel Clamons
• Birth Year: 1990
• Location: College of William and Mary or northern VA, depending on the time of year
• Academic interests: Biology, mathematics, computer science *Personal interests: Science fiction, philosophy, understanding quantum mechanics, writing.

I've pretty much always been at least an aspiring rationalist, and I convinced myself of atheism at a pretty early age. My journey to LW started with my discovery of Aubrey de Gray in middle school and my discovery of the transhumanism movement in high school. Some internet prodding brought me to SL4, but I was intimidated with the overwhelming number of prior posts and didn't really read much of it. The little I did read, however, led me to Eliezer's Creating Friendly AI, which struck me on perusal as the most intelligently-written thing I'd read since The Selfish Gene. Earlier this year, the combination of reading through a few of Gardner Dozois' short "best of" short story collections and the discovery of Google Reader brought me to some of Eliezer's posts on AI and metaethics, and I've been reading through LW ever since. I'm currently plowing slowly through Eliezer's quantum physics sequence while trying not to fall behind too much on new threads.

My primary short-term goal is to learn as much as I can while I'm still young and plastic. My primary mid-range goals are to try to use technology to enhance my biology and to help medical immortality become practical and available while I'm still alive. My long-term goals include understanding physics, preserving what's left of the environment, and maximizing my happiness (while remaining within reasonable bounds of ethics).

I also have a passing but occasionally productive interest in writing science fiction, as well as a strong interest in reading it.

I'm a philosophy PhD student. I studied math and philosophy as an undergrad. I work on ethics and a smattering of Bayesian topics. I care about maximizing the sum of desirable experiences that happen in the future. In less noble moments, I care more immediately about advancing my career as a philosopher and my personal life.

I ran into OB a couple years ago when Robin Hanson came and gave a talk on disagreement at a seminar I was attending. I started reading OB, and then I drifted to LW territory a few months ago.

At first, much of the discussion here sounded crazy to me. It often still does. But I thought I'd give it a detailed look, since everyone here seems to have the same philosophical prejudices as me (Bayesian utilitarian atheist physicalists).

I like discussion of Bayesian topics and applied ethics best.

Hello.

Call me Thomas. I am 22. The strongest force directing my life can be called an extreme phobia of disorder. I came across overcoming bias and Eliezer Yudkowsky's writings, around the same time, in high school, shortly after reading GEB and The Singularity Is Near.

The experience was not a revelation but a relief. I am completely sane! Being here is solace. The information here is mostly systematized, which has greatly helped to organize my thoughts on rationality and has saved me a great amount of time.

I am good at tricking people into thinking I am smart, which you guys can easily catch. And I care about how you guys will perceive me, which means that I have to work hard if I want to be a valuable contributor. Something I am not used to (working hard), since I do good enough work with minimal effort.

My greatest vices are romantic literature, smooth language, and flowery writing. From Roman de la Rose, to The Knight's Tale, to Paradise Lost, to One Hundred Years of Solitude. That crap is like candy to me.

Bad music repulses me. I get anxious and irritable and will probably throw a fit if I don't get away from the music. Anything meticulous, or tedious, will make me antsy and shaky. Bad writing also has the same effect on me. Though, I am punctilious. There's a difference.

My favorite band it Circulatory System, which speaks directly to my joys and fears and hopes. If you haven't listened to them, I highly recommend you do so. The band name means "Human." It is about what is means to be us, about the circular nature of our sentience, and about the circles drawn in history with every new generation. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a_jidcdzXuU

I have opted out of college. I do not learn well in lectures. They are too slow, tedious, and meticulous. Books hold my attention better.

My biggest mistake? In school, never practicing retaining information. I do not have my months memorized and my vocabulary is terrible. It was much funner to use my intelligence to "get the grade" than it was to memorize information. Now, this is biting me on the butt. I need to start practicing memorizing stuff.

I am currently in a good situation. My mom got a job far from her house, and she has farm animals. I made a deal with her, where I watch her house and the animals for free if she lets me stay there. I will be in this position for at least another year.

I have enough web design skills to be useful to web design firms, which brings me my income. I am also a hobbyist programmer, though not good enough yet to turn that skill into money.

I want to teach people to be more rational; that's what I want to do with my life. I am far from being the writer I want to be, and I have not yet made my ideas congruent and clear.

Anybody with good recommendations on how to best spend this year?

Thomas.