Welcome to Less Wrong! (8th thread, July 2015)

Howdy All!

I’m a post middle-aged, impressively moustachioed dude from Texas, now living in Wisconsin. I moved up here recently, following the work, and now have a fine job in a surprising career path. See, I recently took a couple degrees in Mathematics (which I capitalize out of love, grammar be damned!) hoping to be a teacher for the rest of my time. It turns out, that was not such a good move for me and I was fortunate to receive an offer to get back into private-sector IT. I am now happily managing UNIX systems for a biggish software company here in the tundra.

I’ve been consuming the sequences and lurking in the forum (and newly the Slack cahtrooms) for several weeks. I have no recollection of how I found the site; StumbleUpon would be my first guess, though the xkcd forum is nearly as likely. As I read through the LW site I am struck by the quality of discourse, which is high even among those who disagree.

I am motivated to fill in some gaps in my own thinking on various issues of interest and importance. With the exception of my atheism, I don’t have many strongly held opinions (though at times I do seem to lean quite a ways over on some of them).

So, how did I become a rationalist? Well. Hmmm. I got pulled into a youth cult in high school. At a rally (or whatever) I was implored by a zealot on stage to “seek the truth”. I realized in hindsight he probably meant something other than that, like: “listen to me and read the bible and there’s your source of truth”. But I took him at his word. I looked at other religions and started taking philosophy courses. I talked to people who held beliefs different from my own. I dug in and studied issues of morality, politics, aesthetics, and more. Gradually I started to realize that I didn’t believe any of the ideas pushed at me by organized religion. I remember questioning what it means to “believe” and concluding that I simply don’t believe in any of the gods other people claim exist.

At one point, back in my late teens, I was a bible thumping (literally and figuratively), charismatic, evangelical prophet of christ. A few years later I was openly secular, having still not fully grokked the scope of the words “atheist” and “agnostic”.

These days I am still openly secular, and when I get to know you, I’ll let on that I’m a gnostic atheist, and perfectly happy to Taboo both words (as I understand that phrase), preferably over good dark beer on tap and a basket of deep-fried cheese curds.

I am hesitant to admit that one of my principle interests lately is politics. While I support (and adore) the idea that politics is the mind killer, I can’t shake a notion that we, the folks who strive to be less wrong, should be involved in the larger discussion. If there’s a subset of human endeavor that really needs an IV drip of less wrongness, it’s politics.

Now I’ve found this part of the webs, I am fair sure I’ll continue to spend more time here than I ought.

Hello from Spain! I first found about LW after reading a post about Newcomb's problem and the basilisk last summer. A week after that I found HPMOR and I've been reading and lurking for this whole year. It's been amazing to see how there are other people with ideas like transhumanism and who are trying to become systematically better.

I decided to post here for the first time because I recently atended a CFAR workshop and realized that I could actually help in building a better community. I'm currently translating RAZ to Spanish and hope to create a rationality community in Madrid.

Some other things about me:

• I'm currently studying Physics at Cambridge but I'm thinking of going into applied Maths and probably into computer science. (I'm very interested in AI risk)
• I'm trying to find the best way to build healthy relationships and communities of people that help each other be better. (After my experience at CFAR I felt like I'm missing something amazing by not being in an environment like the Bay Area and want to recreate that.)

And that's it! You're all amazing for being part of something like this, hope we can make it even better all together! :)

Regards from Argentina,

Great post. I had started reading through this site randomly while I got more and more into HPMOR, which a friend recommended, and having a little list of posts to start will most probably prove helpful.

I would like to mention that the thing about this community I found the most astonishing was a comment that read something like "Edit: After reading some responses I've changed my mind and this comment no longer respresents my beliefs." I did not even know that it was possible for a human being to be so greatful and humble upon being proven wrong. And humility is something I most definitely need to learn, and I suspect I will be able to do so here. In fact, I already did, for I acknowledged the fact that someone outside my field (pure math, until recently) has something to teach me. Yes, I am (was?) THAT arrogant in a deep level, but here and now I just feel like a child, craving to learn the art of rationality.

Thank you all for what this site constitutes!

Hi, my name is Jordan Sparks, and I'm the Executive Director of Oregon Cryonics. I work very hard every day to improve cryonics technology and to attract potential cryonics clinicians.

Hi LW! My name is Yaacov, I've been lurking here for maybe 6 months but I've only recently created an account. I'm interested in minimizing human existential risk, effective altruism, and rationalism. I'm just starting a computer science degree at UCLA, so I don't know much about the topic now but I'll learn more quickly.

Specific questions:

What can I do to reduce existential risk, especially that posed by AI? I don't have an income as of yet. What are the best investments I can make now in my future ability to reduce existential risk?

Hello LW!

Been lurking for about three years now- it’s time to at least introduce myself. Plus, I want to share a little about my current situation (work problems), and get some feedback on that. I’ll try and give a balanced take, but remember I’m talking about myself here…

First, for background, I’m 23, graduated about a year and a half ago with degrees in finance, accounting, and economics (I can sit still and take tests), and I also played basketball in college (one thing I can definitively say I’m good at is dribbling a basketball).

Brief Intellectual Journey
I didn’t care much about anything besides sports until I got to college. Freshmen year, I took a micro class and found it interesting, so I went online and discovered Marginal Revolution. I’ve been addicted to the internet ever since.

It started with the George Mason econ guys (Kling, Caplan, Roberts—that’s my bias), then I got interested in the psychology behind our beliefs and our actions (greatest hits being The Righteous Mind (Haidt), Thinking Fast and Slow (Kahneman), Mark Manson’s blog, Paul Graham’s blog). Somewhere during that time I stumbled across Lesswrong, SSC, HPMOR, and the rest of the rationality blogosphere, and it’s all just amazing. I love it but the downside is that I probably spend too much time reading instead of doing something more challenging.

The Big Three (EA, job/career, religion)
Right now, these three are overwhelming everything else, and I want to talk about them. First the easy one, religion. I am not religious, and that fact has caused me significant strife. I’ve lost an important relationship, become less close with my family (I’m in the closet- can’t bring myself to tell my mom), and generally feel kind of isolated because everyone I know seems to be religious and I struggle to look past that Important difference of opinion.

EA
I admire the EA movement and everyone involved. My base belief is that I do not need a lot of money to live on, and there are many people/causes that could make better use of the extra than me. I do have a high degree of uncertainty on what the best cause is, but I’ve simply been deferring those questions to GiveWell and I’m ok with that arrangement. So that’s the vision, but what about the execution?

Not great. While I did donate a pretty significant amount (for me) at the beginning of this year, I’ve stopped sending any money. The current problem is the uncertainty around where my income is going to come from in the future, as well as the overall unenjoyable experiences that all of my office type jobs have been to date. Those experiences make me want to save as much as possible, so I can be free to spend time how I want.

Let’s talk about my current job, and how utterly crazy it is. I don’t have anything lined up to do after this, but I don’t know how much longer I can hang on- it’s that bad. I try to stay upbeat about it but I know it’s only a matter of time (in my mind as of now, if I’m still working there in one month, I have failed).

I work at a small, boutique wealth management firm, and I have many objections with how this business works. It’s pretty simple- in my opinion, the incentive structure (how we are paid) is in direct conflict with actually giving good advice. And no one knows what they are paying us. And we don’t give good advice because that is harder to sell. And it doesn’t matter because there is money everywhere. And the industry is changing and we are not. And the work environment is mildly toxic. Ok, let me explain all of this more clearly.

Fees/Revenue- This is our emphasis- all team meetings come back to discussions of revenue. This part of our business is very easy to understand. We are paid based on our Assets Under Management (average fee is just over 1%- that means a $1,000 account would pay us $10/year, a $1,000,000 account would pay us $10,000/year). We are also paid commissions for selling insurance and annuity contracts.

My objections:

• Logic of AUM model means we literally value people based on the size of their investable assets.
• The +1% fee is too high. The dollar amount for our larger clients can get truly absurd, even though we do the same stuff for them as everyone else. There is starting to be more attention to fees as competition and technology change the game, but we are still getting by the old way because we can (for now).
• % fee obscures the true amount that they are paying us. Also, fee is deducted automatically from their account, similar to payroll taxes, so they don’t even notice when it goes. Sorry, I can’t help but focus on the fee because it matters, especially over long time periods we are talking about hundreds of thousands of dollars. And this is to do something that basically amounts to a commodity service- investment management- and we won’t even do that as good as we could (I am an advocate for indexing- but we have to make things complicated and put portfolios together with 20+ holdings and an active/passive mix of funds).
• We push insurance (permanent life insurance specifically) and annuity contracts more than we should because of the commissions.

I would like to simply give financial advice, and charge a clear, transparent fee for those services, but because it wouldn’t be as profitable (you have any other theories?) we get this mess of a system.

This is getting long, so I’ll wrap up with some quick-hit ‘culture’ objections:

• I am in the office from 7:30 am – 6:00 pm at a minimum every day. That is soul-crushing when I have zero confidence that we are doing a Good Thing. I don’t have time to do much else.
• I have to wear a tie every day (not ideal)
• Charisma and delivery matter more than actually giving good advice.
• I make retirement plans for people. Most of these people project their income ‘needs’ in retirement to be something ridiculous like $20k/month throughout their thirty year retirement. I know, I know- I try to detach and I realize that this is their money and I have nothing to do with it and not to get overly moral with it, BUT I struggle. I struggle to care enough to actually dig in as much as I could, because 1. You’re very rich, it doesn’t matter and 2. The discussion on fees above taints everything.
• My bosses will say one thing in this meeting and the opposite in the next- it’s whatever the client wants to hear- whatever will get the deal done. They are completely malleable to what the situation requires. Kind of amazing to watch, but mostly sad/upsetting.

Qualifiers
Overall, we are not robbing them. We do provide value in that we are giving people some structure and guidance (most people need this- the behavioral aspect can make a huge impact). They came to us and agreed to the terms, so what the heck. But it just gets stupid when you could say instead of engaging with us, make these two clicks and save $20,000/year. That is wasteful, and I do not like waste.

Agree/Disagree? Am I crazy? Feedback is welcome.

Hey less wrong.

I am Vicente and I am new here, i have been lurking here for one or two months and I have just created an account two or three weeks ago.

And right now I am reading Rationality: From AI to Zombies from Eliezer Yudkowsky.

some facts about me:

• I live in Quebec city, Canada
• I am under 18 but you will never know my age
• I love computer science and I know php a little bit of c and html css (but those are not real programming languages)
• I love and use free software (like in freedom)
• the distro that I use is Debian gnu/linux

and that it!

and also:

i wanted to know howto have a bio in your user page like eliezer page.

Hi everyone.

I'm about to start my second year of college in Utah. My intent is to major in math and/or computer science, although more generally I'm interested in many of the subjects that LessWrongers seem to gravitate towards (philosophy, physics, psychology, economics, etc.)

I first noticed something that Eliezer Yudkowsky posted on Facebook several months ago, and have since been quietly exploring the rationality-sphere and surrounding digital territories (although I'm no longer on FB). Joining LessWrong seemed like the obvious next step given the time I had spent on adjacent sites. I'm here solely out of curiosity and philosophical interest.

Thanks to Sarunas and predecessors for the welcome page, and the LW community more generally. I look forward to being a part of it.

Hello! I'm Alex, from Maryland, but I go to college in Ithaca, NY, where I am working on my math major/computer science minor. Way back when, a few of my friends kept talking about how great HPMOR was, so I started reading and I loved it. It is one of my all-time favorite stories. As I was reading it, I was very interested by all the ways Harry knew how to think right, and then one of my friends recommended the sequences and I read them all! Except for metaethics and quantum stuff.

I really enjoyed the sequences. They changed how I think. I managed to climb out of the agnostic trap of "you can neither prove nor disprove the existence of a deity". I plan on becoming even more rational. I've heard CFAR is a good resource.

I had been reading the posts on the main page for a while when I saw the most recent census and felt guilty about taking it without an account, so I made one but haven't used it until now. I didn't feel right commenting in other places when I hadn't introduced myself, but I am finally done putting it off!

Hi LWers.

My brothers got me into HPMOR, I started reading a couple sequences, switched over to reading the full Rationality: AI to Zombies, and recently finished that. The last few days, I've been browsing around LW semi-randomly, reading posts about starting to apply the concepts and about fighting akrasia.

I'm guessing I'm atypical for an LW reader: I'm a stay-at-home mom. Any others of those on here?

Hi, I am a graduate student who is working on getting a PhD in math. My journey here started when I took a moral philosophy course as an undergrad that made me think about what I should do. I decided that I should do my best to improve the world, and I eventually decided that existential risk mitigation was the highest priority improvement. Researching that lead me here, I lurked for a few years, and now I have finally made an account.

I am hoping to get some insight here as to whether it would be most effective for me to work on the AI friendliness problem, donate money, or something else. I am also interested in learning how to manage routine aspects of my life better.

Hi, I'm Alexandra. I'm turning 18 tomorrow, and I'm slowly coming to the conclusion that I have GOT to be more rigorous in my self-improvement if I'm going to manage to reach my ambitions.

I'm not quite a new member- I've lurked a lot, and even made a post a while back that got a decent number of comments and karma.

I discovered Less Wrong through HPMOR. It was the first time I'd read a story with genuinely intelligent characters, and the things in it resonated a lot with me. This was a couple of years ago. I've spent a lot of time here and on the various other sites the rationalist community likes.

I'm mostly posting this now because I'd like to get more involved. I recently read an article that said the best way to increase competency at a subject is to join a community revolving around the subject. I live in OKC, where I've never even HEARD of another student of rationality. The closest I've gotten is introducing my boyfriend to HPMOR.

I'm a biology student at a community college near my living space. I'm very good at biology, english, philosophy, etc. I'm really, REALLY bad at chemistry/physics and math. I've done some basic research into what makes a person suck at mathematical things, but it's been frustratingly low on insights. Most of the time, it's resulted in "you need to practice! you need to learn mathematical thinking!" which is objectively true, but practically, a little more detail in what to do about it would be nice. Practice hasn't really seemed to help too much beyond working problems. Give me an equation and variables and I can do the math. But I can't EXPLAIN anything, or apply it to non-obvious problems involving it. This is seriously getting in the way of both my biology studies and my study of rationality. I took general chemistry 1 twice to get a low B. I'm in the first two weeks of general chemistry 2 and it takes ages to get what seems like basic concepts. When I discovered I magically had a B in College Algebra, I suspected the professor curved the grade without telling us. I withdrew from precalc after three weeks because I realized I couldn't cope.

I'm hoping to get into contact with some of the more mathematically inclined people here who are willing to help. I considered emailing a few of the higher-profile contributors to the community, but frankly, they're intimidating and the idea is very scary to my inner caveman worrying about being kicked out of the tribe.

I have some pretty lofty goals for my future research- I want to go into genetically modified organisms, and try to improve nutrition and caloric intake in parts of the world where that sort of thing is difficult to get. Reducing scarcity in our society seems like a good start to a general boost in the "goodness" of the world. But there is absolutely no way I can succeed at this if I can't get a good handle on math and chemistry. My skill at the lower levels of biology is only going to carry me so far.

I've probably rambled enough, so thanks if you took the time to read. If, for some strange reason, you feel a pull towards helping a struggling student get a grasp on abstract thinking, I urge you to give into the temptation because oh god I need the help.

Hello. My name is Andrey, I'm a C++ programmer from Russia. I've been lurking here for about three years. As many others I've found this site by link from HPMOR. The biggest reason for joining in the first place was that I believe the community is right about a lot of important things, and the comments of quality that's difficult to find in the bigger Net. I've already finished reading the Sequences and right now I'm interested in ethics and I believe I've got a few ideas to discuss.

For the origin story as a rationalist, as it often happens it's all started with a crisis of faith. Actually, the second one. The first was a turn from Christianity to a complicated New Age paradigm I'll maybe explain later. The second was prompted by a question of why I believe some of the things I believe in. While I used to think there was a lot of evidence for the supernatural, I've started trying to verify them and also read religion apologetics to evaluate the best arguments they have. Yup, they were bad. The world doesn't look like there exists a powerful interventionist deity. (And even if the miracles they were talking about that happen right now are true miracles, all of them are better explained with not at all omnipotent or omniscient slightly magical fairies). This, coupled with my interests for physics and biology made me think there are problems that are both huge and don't get the attention they deserve. Like, y'know, death or catastrophic changes. And all we've got are some resources, some understanding of how things actually are and a limited ability to cooperate with each other.

I'm looking forward to discuss stuff with people here.

Well since I'm procrastinating on important things I might as well use this time to introduce myself. Structured procrastination for the win!

Hello everyone, I have been poking around on less wrong , slater star codex and related places for around three to four years now but mostly lurking. I have gradually become more and more taken with the risks of artificial intelligence orders of magnitudes smarter than us Homo Sapiens. In that aspect, I'm glad that the topic of a super-intelligent AI has taken off into the mainstream media and academia. EY isn't the lonely crank with no real academic affiliation, a nerdy Cassandra of his time, spewing nonsense on the internet anymore. From what I gather, status games are so cliche here that it's not cool. But with endorsements by people like Hawking and Gates, people can't easily dismiss these ideas anymore. I feel like this is a massively good thing because with these ideas up in the air so to speak, even intelligent AI researchers who disagree on these topics will probably not accidentally build an AI that will turn us all into paper clips to maximize happiness. That is not to say that there doesn't exist numerous other failure pathways. Maybe someday notions such I. J. Good's idea of a improving intelligence feedback loop will make it's way into standard AI textbooks. You don't have to join the lw sub-community to understand the risks, neither do you have to read through the sequences and all that. IMO, the greatest good less wrong has done so far for the world is to propagate and legitimate these concerns. I'm aware of the other key ideas in the memespace of lesswrong(rationality and all that) but it's hard enough to get the general public and other academics and researchers to take concern about super intelligent AI as an existential risk seriously without all sort of other ideas outside of their inference bubble.

Intellectually, my background is in physics.(currently studying, along with requisite math you pick up from physics) I have been reading philosophy for a ridiculous long time(around seven years now) although as a part time hobby. Probably like most people here, I have an incurable addiction to the internet. I also read a lot, in varied intellectual fields. I read a lot of fiction, anything from Milton to YA books. Science fiction and fantasy probably is responsible for why I find trans-humanist notions so easy to swallow. You read enough F. A Hamilton and Greg Egan and things like living forever and super intelligent machines are downright tame in comparison. I like every academic subject, gender studies doesn't count. Neuroscience, economics, computer science.. you name it. Even "fluffy" stuff like sociology and psychology and literature. I am doomed to be caught between the two cultures( C.P. Snow)

As to the stuff regarding rationality and cognitive biases, while the scientific evidence wasn't in until fairly recently. Hume anticipated all it centuries ago. Now I know lesswrong isn't very impressed with a prior armchair philosophizing without a scrap of evidence, I have to disagree on account of correct theories being much easier to build off empirical data and that deducing the correct theory to explain natural phenomenon without any empirical data in terms of experiments is much much harder. Hume had a huge possibility space while modern psychologists and cognitive scientists have a much small one. Let's not forget Hume's most famous quote. "“If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance; let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.” I honestly can't say I was surprised by the framework presented in the series like most people were, it's sure nice to find a community that was thinking on the same lines that I do! A lot of the tactics to apply these ideas so I can overcame these heuristics were very nice and welcome. My favorite aspect of lw has to be that people has an agreed framework to discuss things and in theory we can come to agreements. Debating is one of my favorite things to do and frankly most people are not worth arguing with and is a waste of time.

I'm interested in contributing in the study of friendly AI and have some ideas regarding it. So I might post here in the future stuff I'm thinking about. Please please feel free to criticize such posts to your heart's content. I appreciate feedback much more than I care about slights or insults so feel free to be rude. My ideas are probably old or wrong anyway, I have't had time to look through all the literature presented here or elsewhere.

Lastly, I should mention I have been active in the lesswrong irc room. If you want to find me, I'm there. also if lukeprog sees this, I really liked the the literature summaries you post sometimes. it's been a huge help and saved me a ton of time in my own exploration of the scientific literature.

Hello all,

I found this site from a link in the comments section of an SCP Foundation post, which consequently linked to one of Eliezer's stranger allegorical pieces about the dangers of runaway AI intelligence getting the best of us. I've been hooked since.

Thanks to this site, I'm relearning university physics through Feynman, have plans to pick up a couple textbooks from the recommended list, and plan on taking the opportunity to meet some hopefully intellectually stimulating people in person if any of the meetups you guys seem to regularly have manage to ever make it closer to the general Massachusetts area.

I recently graduated with a B.S in Chemistry with the now odd realization that I haven't really learned anything during my experiences at university. I hope participating here will alleviate this void of knowledge I could have potentially learned.

Furthermore, if I'm lucky, I might get to contribute to the plethora of useful discussions that seem to populate this site. If I'm even luckier, those contributions will be positive. Let's just hope I learn fast enough to make sure luck isn't the deciding factor for such an outcome.

I am also curious as to the level of regular activity this site receives, perhaps a link to some statistics? Any reply would be greatly appreciated.

Also, I don't know if this is really relevant here, but I'd like to mention that I have a weird dream of someday inventing direct mental communication between people that doesn't involve the use of language, or at the very least help such a project along if any exist. I don't know if anybody will care for such news, or even if this is a realistic goal to strive for considering the multitude of other priorities I have in life, but hey, it is what it is. Supposedly, meeting such a goal would at least require some optimization of my own ability to think clearly and correctly. Yet another reason to come here, no doubt.

Well, here goes nothing! Hi guys!

Hello!

I became interested in psychology at a young age, and irritated everyone around me by reading (and refusing to shut up about) the entire psych section of my local library. I had a difficult time at that age separating the "woo" from actual science, and am disappointed that I focused more on "trivia learned" and "books read" than actual retention. At any rate, I have a pretty good contextual knowledge of psychology, even if my specific knowledge is shaky. I put this knowledge to good use for seven years while I worked with developmentally delayed children.

I discovered Less Wrong in 2011/2009/2007/I actually have three distinct memories of discovering it at different times, but was turned off by the trend of atheism. I know how ridiculous that is for an aspiring rationalist, to reject evidence because it's uncomfortable. The "quiet strain" was too much, and I found the community exclusive and hard to break into. This site was not responsible for the disintegration of my faith, but it was another nudge in that direction. I don't know how to quantify my beliefs anymore; I think the God/No-God dichotomy is irrelevant. I'm perfectly willing to accept evidence of a superintelligent, superpowerful being. But assigning characteristics like "supernatural" is wrong. If such a creature exists, it's merely something we don't understand yet.

I am a lifelong fan of Harry Potter, so I've been keeping up with HPMOR off and on. I've decided to involve myself in this community now, because developing connections with rational people is a priority now. There are so many people having interesting, rational conversations, and I'd like to meet them. I'd like to participate in the public eye, as egotistical as that may sound. The concepts of rationality are getting mainstream attention, and those public-forum debates will be more and more crucial. I intend to be involved.

EDIT: I used the phrase "at any rate" too often

Hello all!

Im a medical student and a researcher. My interests are consciousness, computational theory of mind, evolutionary psychology, and medical decision making. I bought Eliezers book and found here because of it.

Want to thank Eliezer for writing the book, best writing i have read this year. Thank You.

Hello from Houston, Texas! I've been following LessWrong for several years now, slowly working my way through the Sequences. I'm an aspiring fantasy/sci-fi writer, martial artist, and outdoorsman and I am overjoyed to be a part of the LW community. It's hard for me to say exactly when I first 'clicked' on rationality, but the Tsuyoku Naritai post certainly struck a chord for me.

A few months ago, I attended a LessWrong meetup in Austin. I enjoyed the meetup immensely, not least because it also happened to be a Petrov Day celebration. I'd like to attend LW meetups more frequently, but I live in Spring (north Houston) and the Austin meetup is a 3+ hour drive for me.

So, I've decided to start a Houston meetup group. According to some (admittedly old) statistics, the number of visitors to LessWrong from the Houston area is over 9000, and I think this is more than enough to create an enjoyable meetup group.

Our first meetup will be Saturday, February 20 at the Black Walnut Cafe in the Woodlands, TX. It will start at 1:00PM and go until 4:00PM (or later, if enough people show up and are interested in staying).

If you're interested, please reply below so I know who to expect!

Hello everyone! Came to less wrong as a lurker something like a two years ago (Perhaps more, my grasp on time is... fragile at best), and binged through all of HPMOR that was up then, and waited with bated breath for the rest. After a long time spent lurking, reading the blogs and then the e-book, I decided I wanted to do more than aimlessly wander through readings and sequences.

So here I am! I posted to the lounge on reddit, and now I'm posting here. The essence of why I'm posting now is simple: I want to start down a road towards aiding in the work towards FAI. I graduated a year and a half ago, and I want to start learning in a directed and purposeful way. So I'm here to ask for advice on where and how to get started, outside of standard higher education.

I joined lesswrong because my friends suggested it to me. I really like all the articles and the fact that the comments on the articles are useful and don't have lots of bad language. This really surprised me.

I think I've caused enough kerfluffles around here that many people know me but I'm Cameron. I've been on the site almost a year I think. BA and MA in Political Science. I have a regular interest in philosophy and I found out about the site from a disparaging article on Slate.com. I'm one of the weird spiritual people on her practicing western esoterica. In the past I've worked in media and PR. Currently, I'm a novelist in Tacoma, WA, USA and host of The Cameron Cowan Show, every monday and friday on youtube (fresh shows in August!) For more information, clips and All The News You Need To Know In 10 Minutes or Less (and why you should care about it), see me at CameronCowan.net! Thanks for reading!

Hello LW,

My name is Alex, and while I first discovered LW 2-3 years ago, I have only visited the site sporadically since then. I have always found the discussion here intriguing and insightful, but never found myself motivated enough to dedicate time to joining the community (until now!).

I'm a 26 year old Canadian with an undergraduate degree majoring in chemistry and minoring in philosophy (with a healthy dose of physics on the side). I have always been very analytical and process driven, and I have used that to fuel my creativity, and develop a more thorough understanding of the world we find ourselves a part of. I have been self-employed since graduating, with the eventual goal of returning to school for a graduate degree.

In my undergrad, my strengths and interests were in synthetic/materials chemistry, as well as organic chemistry. I spent time working for a research group that specialized (largely) in group 14 nano-material chemistry, which I enjoyed immensely. The areas of philosophy I concentrated on were philosophy of science, computing & AI, theory of mind, and existentialism. In short, I avoided the 'historical overview' philosophy courses in favour of those which were more relevant to the rapidly changing technological world (not to say philosophers of times past are uninteresting or have no current relevance, but I think the LW audience will empathize).

I expect that my contributions here will, in some sense, help me parse out what I would like to dedicate my future institutional studies to. I value knowledge and truth, as well as academic integrity and humility. I am off put by individuals who are unquestioning or unable to logically reason effectively, so I hope I will find a good home here. The toolbox of logical reasoning has allowed mankind to build itself up out of the primordial muck, and it seems that mastery of these tools is essential for continued advancement (and perhaps even survival). So, in addition to the above, I hope that my time here will allow me to continue honing my own tools of logic.

Hi everyone,

I'm a PhD candidate at Cornell, where I work on logic and philosophy of science. I learned about Less Wrong from Slate Star Codex and someone I used to date told me she really liked it. I recently started a blog where I plan to post my thoughts about random topics: http://necpluribusimpar.net. For instance, I wrote a post (http://necpluribusimpar.net/slavery-and-capitalism/) against the widely held but false belief that much of the US wealth derives from slavery and that without slavery the industrial revolution wouldn't have happened, as well as another (http://necpluribusimpar.net/election-models-not-predict-trumps-victory/) in which I explain how election models work and why they didn't predict Trump's victory. I think members of Less Wrong will find my blog interesting or, at least, that's what I hope. I welcome any criticisms, suggestions, etc.

Philippe

Hello all,

South Carolinian uni student. Been lurking here for some time. Once my desire to give an input came to a boil, I decided to go ahead and make an account. Mathematics, CompSci, and various forms of Biology are my intensive studies.

Less intense hobbies include music theory, politics, game theory, and cultural studies. I'm more of a 'genetics is the seed, culture is the flower' kind of guy.

The art of manipulation is fascinating to me; sometimes, when one knows their audience, one must make non-rational appeals to their audience to persuade them. This is why I rarely consider any political movement to be ignorant when they make certain non-rational claims; it is the sweet art of manipulation blossoming. Whether or not a certain political movement is using these tactics for a beneficial end-game is up for debate, but I nevertheless stray from calling the heads of political philosophies 'stupid'. (Note: the followers may be useful idiots)

Very nice forum. I appreciate the culture here, and these dialogues rank with Plato.

Hello from Boston. I've been reading LW since some point this summer. I like it a lot.

I'm an engineering student and willing to learn whatever it takes for me to tackle world problems like poverty, hunger and transmissible diseases. But for now I'm focusing my efforts on my degree.

Hello LessWrong!

I'm Marko, a mathematician from Germany. I like nerding around with epistemology, decision theory, statistics and the like. I've spent a few wonderful years with the Viennese rationality community and got to meet lots of other interesting and fun LessWrongians at the European Community Weekend this year. Now I'm in Zürich and want to build a similar group there.

Thanks for giving me so much food for thought!

Hi everyone.

I've already posted a couple of pieces - probably should have visited this page first, especially before posting my last piece. Well, such is life.

I headed over to LessWrong because I was/am a bit burned out by the high-octane conversations that go on online. I've disagreed with some things I've read here, but never wanted to beat my head - or someone else's - against a wall. So, I'm here to learn. I like the sequences have picked up some good points already - especially about replacing the symbol with the substance.

Question - what's the ettiquette about linking stuff from one's own blog? I'm not trying to do self-promotion here, but there's one or two ideas I've developed elsewhere & would find it useful to refer to them.

Hi LW Users,

I apologise in advance for not having more to say initially, but I created an account on this website for one reason. I have one proposition/idea to put forth on the discussion section.

I would prefer to wait until I have twenty karma so that I may post the proposition/idea there, so I hope that your curiosity has been sparked enough, otherwise let me know.

Thanks so much for reading :)

Hi LW,

I got interested in rationality from the books Irrationality, some others I can't remember in between and later, fast and slow. Somehow I found HPMOR, which I loved, and through that, found this. Other influences have included growing up with quite strongly religious parents (first win for the power of the question - but why do you believe that, first loss for thinking that because something was obvious to me I could snap my fingers and make it obvious to others.)

What I'm doing: I'm in my twenties, working in the energy sector because I started following global warming and resource shortages when I was 16, thought it was an important area and decided to go work in that. The things I have learnt from an engineering degree, a bit more life, and LW, mean that I don't necessarily still believe it is THE area of importance, but as an area, I'm happy enough in it for now. My job basically involves lots of programming, modelling and data handling anyway so that is fun! I get to encounter my biases in the work environment occassionally/ regularly as I have to try and work out how much confidence to have in the data available and in my various theories. For my job at least, I do find attempting to debiase useful at a day to day level, if not as useful as being a significantly better programmer would be.

So far on less wrong I have read about half the sequences, of which the most resonant for me was the one on cached thoughts. Whilst simple, this drew together a bunch of other points learnt, and which felt really clearly, like how I think. I'm reading the sequences from a link on here that I've put on my kindle. This is pretty good, but I don't know how much shorter the A-Z version is. I do skip occasional bits. I feel that a little graph of the sequences, similar to the very simple one on http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/hframe.html would help newbies negotiate through.

Anyway, I'm continuing enjoying to read posts on here, but hope to start contributing by: a) Continuing to try and help others to learn (at least the basics) of this stuff b) Maybe setting up a meetup in Bristol, UK. c) Posting some thoughts up to the hive mind if and when I have some worth sharing

Hello from Canada! I study computer science and philosophy at the University of Waterloo. Above anything, I love mathematics. The certainty that comes from a mathematical proof is amazing, and it fuels my current position about epistemology (see below). My favourite courses for mathematics so far have been the introductory course about proofs, and a course about formal logic (the axioms of first order logic, deduction rules, etc). Philosophy has always been very interesting to me: I've taken courses about epistemology, ethics, the philosophy language; I am also currently taking a course about political philosophy, and am reading Nietzsche on the side. I also love to debate. Although I don't practice Christianity anymore, I loved debating about religion with my friends.

I have come to Less Wrong to talk about my epistemological views. It is a form of skepticism. I view (i.e. define) truth exclusively as the outcome of some rational system. I reject all claims unless they are given in terms of a rational system by which it can be deduced. Even when such a system is given, I would call the claim true only given the context of the rational system at hand and not (necessarily) under any other systems.

For example, "2 + 2 = 4" is true when we are using the conventional meanings for 2, 4, +, and =, along with a deductive system that takes expressions such as "2 + 2 = 4" and spits out true or false. On the contrary, "2 + 2 = 4" is false when we use the usual definitions of 2 and 4 and = but + being defined for x and y and the (regular) sum of x and y minus one. This is an illustration of the truth of a claim only making sense once it has precise meaning, axioms that are assumed to be true, and some system of deduction.

When a toddler sees the blue sky and asks his mother why the sky is blue and she responds with something about the scattering of light, he has a choice: either he accepts the system of scattering implies blueness, or he can ask again: "Why?" She might reply with something about molecules, etc... Eventually, the toddler seems to have two choices: either he must accept that the axioms of the scientific method are true just because or reject the whole thing for not being justified all the way through.

My view on epistemology is distinct from the above options. It wouldn't reject the whole system (useless; no knowledge) or truly believe in the axioms of the scientific method (naive; they could be wrong). It would appreciate the intrinsic nature of the ideas; that the scattering of light can imply that the sky is blue. It would view rational systems as tools that can be used and then put away, rather than thing that have to be carried around your whole life.

What do you think about this? Can you suggest any related readings?

Hello LW,

My name is Colton. I'm a 22 year old electrical engineering student from Missouri who found Less Wrong about a year ago through Slate Star Codex and binged most of the sequences.

I have been interested in the study of bias and how to avoid it since I read the book Predictably Irrational a few years back. I also consider myself quite academic for an engineer, with a good deal of physics, math, and computer science theory under my belt.

I have been lurking around LW for a little over a year. I found it indirectly through the Simulation Argument > Bostrom > AI > MIRI > LW. I am a graduate of Yale Law School, and have an undergraduate degree in Economics and International Studies focusing on NGO work. I also read a lot, but in something of a wandering path that I realize can and should be improved upon with the help, resources, and advice of LW.

I have spent the last few years living and working in developing countries around the world in various public interest roles, trying to find opportunities to do high-impact work. This was based around a vague and undertheorized consequentialism that has been pretty substantially rethought after finding FHI/MIRI/EA/LW etc. Without knowing about the larger effective altruism movement (aside from vague familiarity with Singer, QALY cost effectiveness comparisons between NGOs, etc.) I had been trying to do something like effective altruism on my own. I had some success with this, but a lot of it was just the luck of being in the right place at the right time. I think that this stuff is important enough that I should be approaching it more systematically and strategically than I had been. In particular, I am spending a lot of time moving my altruism away from just the concrete present and into thinking about “astronomical waste” and the potential importance of securing the future for humanity. This is sort of difficult, as I have a lot of experiential “availability” from working on the ground in poor countries which pulls on my biases, especially when faced with a lot of abstraction as the only counterweight. However, as stated, I feel this is too important to do incorrectly, even if it means taming intuitions and the easily available answer.

I have also been spending a lot of time recently thinking about the second disjunct of the simulation argument. Unless I am making a fundamental mistake, it seems as though the second disjunct, by bringing in human decision making (or our coherent extrapolated volition, etc.) into the process, sort of indirectly entangles the probable metaphysical reality of our world with our own decision making. This is true as a sort of unfolding of evidence if you are a two-boxer, but it is potentially sort-of-causally true if you are a one-boxer. Meaning if we clear the existential hurdle, this is seemingly the next thing between us and the likely truth of being in a simulation. I actually have a very short write-up on this which I will post in the discussion area when I have sufficient karma (2 points, so probably soon…) I also have much longer notes on a lot of related stuff which I might turn into posts in the future if, after my first short post, this is interesting to anyone.

I am a bit shy online, so I might not post much, but I am trying to get bolder as part of a self-improvement scheme, so we will see how it goes. Either way, I will be reading.

Thank you LW for existing, and providing such rigorous and engaging content, for free, as a community.

Hello all!

I'm a graduated International Relations student from London. I took a year off after graduation to learn how to manage my finances and invest in the stock market. Because of that, I came across my life hero, Charlie Munger, the vice-chairman of Berkshire Hathaway. He is a machine of rationality and is by far one of the wisest men (if not the wisest) alive. He wrote an essay called, "The psychology of human misjudgement" (http://law.indiana.edu/instruction/profession/doc/16_1.pdf) which I implore all rationality-seekers to devour. This essay changed my life, and I have never looked back.

Charlie said that we all have a moral obligation to be rational. So, here I am :)

Hello LW,

I'm an aspiring rationalist from a community called PsychonautWiki. Our intent it to study and catalog all manner of altered states of continuousness in a legitimate and scientific manner. I am very interested in AGI and hope to understand the architecture and design choices for current major AGI projects.

I'll probably start a discussion for you guys tomorrow.

Aleks

Hey y'all, I come here both as a friend and with an agenda. I'm scary.

See I have a crazy pet theory... (and yes it's a TOE, fancy that!)

...and I'd love to give it a small home on the Internet. Here?

This like to share it with you because this community seems to be be the proper blend of open minded and skeptical. Which is what the damn thing needs.

Anyways I've lurked for quite awhile, and you guys have been great at opening my mind to a lot of things. I figure this might be good enough and crazy enough to give something back.

As a personal note, I'm currently an engineer who is wondering if he should go back to school to become an academic. When I was a college student at a big faceless university, I was too awkward, clueless, and erratic to navigate the system in a way that got me attention so grabbed my degree and ran.

BTW I'm not one of those foaming at the mouth mofos who will debate endlessly and fruitlessly in an attacking manner toward anyone who dare criticize his crackpot theory. I'm more like "man, why does this idea have to be so damn compelling, better get it out on the web". I've also posted it extremely little thus far, I do not design to spray it all over the internet.

Hello all,

I am just an other lurker here. Most of the times, I am found in LW slack group. I think, I better had introduced myself earlier. I have zero karma so I am unable to post anything at all. It would be better for me to explore how LW website works.

-Best

Hi. I'm Bernardo, a business student from Brazil. I came across Less Wrong from a answer to a thread on Quora (https://www.quora.com/How-would-you-estimate-the-number-of-restaurants-in-London). It got me interested in Fermi Estimates and I'm surfing Less Wrong to read about it.

I'd love to translate those articles on Fermi Estimates to Portuguese to add to the translated pages list. How do I do that?

Hi friends,

I'm Chris :D I've been lurking on and off for a few months now (after hearing about LW from some of my friends at uni, reading some SlateStarCodex, and devouring HPMOR in less than a week) and have decided it's about to take the plunge into the scary world of commenting. (It's a bit scary being a somewhat smart person among people who are much, much smarter)

My academic background: growing up in my family meant I picked up a lot of random stuff, but at uni I have been studying pure mathematics and a bit (pun intended) of computer science.

What motivates me: I'm very passionate about Raising the Sanity Waterline. If I learn - for the first time - something which I think is important, I get this sudden panic of "Why have I only learned this now?! Everyone should know this!". And I get very excited when I'm helping other people learn stuff I've learned.

Longer version of background: My parents have worked as Protestant Christian theological educators (i.e. training pastors and church leaders) in the Middle East since before I was born. They have always been very keen on learning as a lifelong project (a lot of my dad's work is applying evidence-based teaching research to theological education). So - somewhat like Harry Potter in HPMOR - our house has always been full of books. To add to that, I was privileged to get to meet a lot of people from very different worlds: from my Muslim close friends at school to some of my parents' suppporters in the US who have never gone far from their home state. This meant I encountered drastically different worldviews and cultural approaches to thinking, and often found it frustrating how poorly people understood each other. Thanks to my parents' influence, I also unconsciously gravitated towards people who were interested in how the world works.

Since leaving for Australia at 18 for study, I have spent much of my university life learning about things other than my specialisation, both from smart friends and from the internet. So this has meant I have changed my mind about quite a few things already.

I look forward to changing my mind about many more things, and learning completely new things!

I'm a creative writer and a virtual assistant, I have been a freelancer for 2years now. From the creative educational environment I'll like to express an interest in becoming more rational, and I found Less Wrong through Intentional Insights.

Hello.

I found LessWrong after reading HPMoR. I think I woke up as a rationalist when I realised that in my everyday reasoning I always judjed from the bottom line not considering any third alternatives, and started to think what to do about that. I am currently trying to stop my mind from always aimlessly and uselessly wandering from one topic to another. I registered on LessWrong after I started to question myself on why do I believe rationality to work, and ran into a problem, and thought I could get some help here. The problem is expressed in the following text (I am ready to move it from welcome board to any other suitable one if needed):

John was reading a book called “Rationality: From AI to Zombies” and thought: “Well, I am advised to doubt my beliefs, as some of them may turn out to be wrong”. So, it occurred to John to try do doubt the following statement: “Extraordinary claim requires extraordinary evidence”. But that was impossible to doubt, as this statement was a straightforward implication of the theorem X of probability theory, which John, as a mathematician, knew to be correct. After a while a wild thought ran through his mind: “What if every time a person looks at the proof of the theorem X, the Dark Lords of the Matrix alter the perception of this person to make the proof look correct, but actually there is a mistake in it, and the theorem is actually incorrect?” But John didn’t even consider that idea seriously, because such an extraordinary claim would definitely require extraordinary evidence.

Fifteen minutes later, John spontaneously considered the following hypothetical situation: He visualized a religious person, Jane, who is reading a book called “Rationality: From AI to Zombies”. After reading for some time, Jane thinks that she should try to doubt her belief in Zeus. But it is definitely an impossible action, as existence of Zeus is confirmed in the Sacred Book of Lightning, which, as Jane knows, contains only Ultimate and Absolute Truth. After a while a wild thought runs through her mind: “What if the Sacred Book of Lightning actually consists of lies?” But Jane doesn’t even consider the idea seriously, because the Book is surely written by Zeus himself, who doesn’t ever lie.

From this hypothetical situation John concluded that if he couldn’t doubt B because he believed A, and couldn’t doubt A because he believed B, he’d better try to doubt A and B simultaneously, as he would be cheating otherwise. So, he attempted to simultaneously doubt the facts that “Extraordinary claim requires extraordinary evidence” and that “Theorem X is proved correctly”.

As he attempted to do it, and succeeded, he spent some more time considering Jane’s position before settling his doubt. Jane justifies her set of beliefs by Faith. Faith is certainly an implication of her beliefs (the ones about reliability of the Sacred Book), and Faith certainly belongs to the meta-level of her thinking, affecting her ideas about existence of Zeus located at the object level.

So, John generalized that if he had some meta-level process controlling his thoughts and this process was implied by the very thought he was currently doubting, it would be wise to suspend the process for the time of doubting. Because not following this rule could make him not to lose some beliefs which, from the outside perspective, looked as ridiculous as Jane’s religion. John searched through the meta-level controlling his thoughts. He was horrified to realize that Bayesian reasoning itself fitted the criteria: it was definitely organizing his thought process, and its correctness was implied by the theorem X he was currently doubting. So he was sitting, with his belief unsettled and with no ideas of how to settle it correctly. After all, even if he made up any idea, how could he know that it wasn’t the worst idea ever intentionally given to him by the Dark Lords of the Matrix? He didn’t allow himself to disregard this nonsense with “Extraordinary claim requires extraordinary evidence” – otherwise he would fail doubting this very statement and there would be no point in this whole crisis of faith which he deliberately inflicted on himself…

Jane, in whose imagination the whole story took place, yawned and closed a book called “Rationality: From AI to Zombies”, lying in front of her. If learning rationality was going to make her doubt herself out of rationality, why would she even bother to try that? She was comfortable with her belief in Zeus, and the only theory which could point out her mistakes apparently ended up in self-annihilation. Or, shortly, who would believe anyone saying “We have evidence that considering evidence leads you to truth, therefore it is true that considering evidence leads you to truth”?

Salutations! I've been reading Less Wrong for three or four years now without registering - ever since stumbling across a supremely accessible explanation of Bayes Theorem - and suddenly felt I might have something to add. I feel significantly more cynical than most of the posters here, but endeavor to keep my pessimism grounded.

My parents raised me rationalist (not merely atheist), encouraging an environment where questions were always more important than answers and everyone was willing to admit that "I don't know." I spent the requisite few years in my adolescence imagining I knew everything, but that delusion passed. Then I dropped out of three colleges - on scholarships, making those hard lessons less expensive than they might have been - and today I run the inter-branch delivery department of a medium-sized county library system.

I've got a stubborn fascination with philosophical materialism and behavioral neuroscience, with a recent focus on the linguistic nature of consciousness. I think that language in general - and narrative in particular - is a compression algorithm for transmitting complex ideas like "We ought to go the store." My linguistic memory map of what you already know means I don't assume I have to tell you which store, or why, or how.

Such maps are made of stories, and that means they required a protagonist. I've come to believe that consciousness is systematized experience of being that protagonist, molded by evolution to make communication faster and easier. Which makes consciousness the character the brain plays when it needs to work with other brains, and the set of mental tools with which narrative memories are compressed for later storytelling.

At any rate, I'm here to continue to have all of my perspectives challenged, and with this account I suppose I can also start challenging perspectives.

Hi,

I'm a middle-aged computer scientist/philosopher, who specialized in artificial intelligence and machine learning back in the stone age when I was getting my degrees. Since then I've done a bit of work in probabilistic simulations and biologically inspired methods of problem solving, mostly for industry. I've recently finished writing a book about politics, although God knows if I'll ever sell a copy. Now I'm into a bit of everything. Politics. Economics.

I came here looking for input into a conlang project that I'm working on. Basically it involves the old Sapir-Whorf/Eprime/Loglan dream of creating a language that's better suited for rational cognition than English, and I'm looking for linguistic mechanisms that might aid in this and that need to be built in from the bottom up (since surface mechanisms can be added later). I already know of the three conlangs mentioned above, although I don't speak them, so I'm looking for ideas that aren't contained therein, or that if they are might have been missed by a person without a deep knowledge of the languages. I did a search of the archives here and saw some discussion around this general topic, but nothing of immediate use, although I could easily have missed something.

All ideas welcome.

Hello LW! Long time lurker here. Got here from HPMOR a few years ago now. This is one of my favourite places on the internet due to its high sanity waterline and I thought I'd sign up so I could participate here and there (plus I finally came up with a username I like!). I've got a B.Sc. in math with a concentration in psychology (apparently that is a thing you can get, I didn't know either) and my other passions are music, film, humor, and being right all the time ;)

Thanks to LW and the rest of the rationality blogosphere, I've added effective altruism to my life goals. I've been wondering lately how we might shift the cultural norm from "boy I sure hope I have a big house and drive a fancy sports car by the time I'm 30" to "boy I sure hope I'm donating lots of money to worthy charities by the time I'm 30".

Hi! I'm interested in curing death or at least contributing to the cure. I'm an ok computer programmer and I'm preparing to go to school this spring to work on a bachelor's degree in Biomedical Engineering with a minor in Cognitive Science. I'd like to make friends with someone who is also at the early planning stages of pursuing a similar degree, and yeah, I do realize just how specific those requirements are, but it doesn't hurt to keep an eye out just in case. I'm in a fairly good place in my life to pursue my education, but I don't yet know how it's going to go. If you're in a good place to go to school, but are scared or need if you need some help deciding that it's what you want to do, instead of stressing or worrying about it, how about we work on it together? I'm currently reviewing a number of educational topics, primarily through Khan Academy.

I discovered the joys of cognitive science while reading Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality. I've always fancied myself a fairly rational person, but I've not yet studied it formally.

Hello!

I first heard about LW through a SomethingAwful thread. Not the most auspicious of introductions, but when I read some of your material on my own instead of receiving it through the sneerfilter, I found myself interested. Futurology and cognitive biases are two topics that are near and dear to my heart, and I hope to pick up some new ideas and perhaps even new ways of thinking here. I've also had some thoughts about Friendly AI which I haven't seen discussed yet, and I'm excited to see what holes you guys can poke in my theories!

Hi! I signed up to LessWrong, because I have the following question.

I care about the current and future state of humanity, so I think it's good to work on existential or global catastrophic risk. Since I've studied computer science at a university until last year, I decided to work on AI safety. Currently I'm a research student at Kagoshima University doing exactly that. Before April this year I had only little experience with AI or ML. Therefore, I'm slowly digging through books and articles in order to be able to do research.

I'm living off my savings. My research student time will end in March 2017 and my savings will run out some time after that. Nevertheless, I want to continue AI safety research, or at least work on X or GC risk.

I see three ways of doing this:

• Continue full-time research and get paid/funded by someone.
• Continue research part-time and work the other part of the time in order to get money. This work would most likely be programming (since I like it and am good at it). I would prefer work that helps humanity effectively.
• Work full-time on something that helps humanity effectively.

Oh, and I need to be location-independent or based in Kagoshima.

I know http://futureoflife.org/job-postings/, but all of the job postings fail me in two ways: not location-independent and requiring more/different experience than I have.

Can anyone here help me? If yes, I would be happy to provide more information about myself.

(Note that I think I'm not in a precarious situation, because I would be able to get a remote software development job fairly easily. Just not in AI safety or X or GC risk.)

Hello from NZ. So I'm basically, I'm here to promote my... Jokes, I came across this website from a Wait But Why article I was doing research on (Cryonics). The comments here are next level awesome, people share ideas and I feel like the moderators aren't ruled by one discourse or another. So yeah I decided to jump on in and check it out.

I enjoy Science, Learning, Entrepreneur stuff, and better ways of looking at the world.

Hi. I live in Umeå, Sweden. I have been aware of Less Wrong for some time now. First through HPMoR, and more lately I have been reading posts that my friend has recommended to me. I just recently decided I want to also join the discussion, so i crated this user to be able to comment.

I find it very useful do distinguish between what I call "debate" and "discussion"
"debate" = everyone involved is trying to win, where "win" usually means convincing the audience.
"discussion" = everyone involved is trying to learn the truth.
Less wrong is obviously a place for discussion, but even in a discussion I find the above vocabulary useful. However I don't know if this distinction are common use of these words. What words are commonly used for these concepts on LW?

I am currently thinking about The Worst Argument in the World. But I want to read some more before I decide if I have something relevant to contribute.

And I disagree with Yudkowsky's version of timeless physics. I might say something abut that If I can just find a way to formulate what I want to say. (It is not a language problem. It is more about that I fist have to explain stuff about gauge and symmetries and how sometimes you should not get rid of redundant variables just because you can.)

I am currently writing a thesis in Loop Quantum Cosmology. It is about an alternative ideas about the beginning of the universe. I is really cool but not as cool as it sounds. Due to several reasons I will probably not stay in this field. After my defence I don't know what to do. If some one have a job offer, or a career suggestion, let me know.

Hey LW. I found this site about an hour ago while browsing Quora (I know, I know) and the concept is really appealing to me. Currently I'm studying for my undergrad degree in Neuroscience, not sure exactly what direction I want to take it in afterwards. Artificial neural networks and AI in general are intriguing to me. Being able to actually explain/understand concepts like consciousness and perception of reality in a material sense is sort of my (possibly idealistic) goal. Empiricism is very dear to me, but I think in order to fully explore any idea you can't pit it against rationalism--if that's even a thing that people still do. It's likely that I'll do more lurking than anything else on here, but I'm looking forward to it anyways!

Hi. Just leaving a few comments about me and what I have been doing in terms of research people here will find interesting. I joined just a couple of days ago so I am not so sure about styles, this seems to be the proper place for a first post and I am guessing the format and contents are free.

While I was once a normal theoretical physicist, I was always interested in the questions of why we believe in some theories, I think that for a while I felt that we were not doing everything right. As I went through my professional life, I had to start interacting with people from different areas and that meant a need to learn Statistics. Oddly, I taught myself Bayesian methods before I even knew there was something called hypothesis tests.

Today, my research involves parts of Opinion Dynamics (I am still a theoretical physicist there, somehow), and I have been starting to make more and more use of results of human cognition experiments to understand a few things as well as a Bayesian framework to generate my models. I have also been doing some small amount of research in evolutionary models. But my real main interest in the moment can easily be seen in a paper that I just put online at the ArXiv preprint site. Indeed, while I already knew the site and found it interesting, time limits meant I never really planed to write anything here. So, the reason I actually joined the site now is because I think you will find the whole discussion in the paper quite interesting. I do think that my main conclusion there about human reasoning and its consequences is so obvious that it always amazes me how deep our instincts must be for it to have remained hidden.

There is a series of biases and effects that happen when we decide to support an idea. And those biases make us basically unable to change our minds or, in other words, to learn. In the paper I inspect the concept of choosing an idea to support from what we know about rationality. I conduct a small simulation experiment with different models that suggest that our desire to have one only idea is behind extremist points of view, and I finally discuss the consequences of it all for scientific practice. There is a book planned, with many more details and aimed at the layperson, the first draft version is complete, but it will still take a while before the book is out. The article is in drier prose, of course.

Anyway, while I am still submitting it for publication, the preprint is available at

http://arxiv.org/abs/1508.05169

The name of the article is "Thou shalt not take sides: Cognition, Logic and the need for changing how we believe", I do think you people here will have a lot of fun with it.

Best, André

META. LessWrong Welcome threads have changed very little since late 2011. Should something be updated?

Hello,

Browsing the web I found this site. I think it will be fun to indulge a bit and read more.

I'm retired, living on a sailboat and enjoying life. At this time I can't think of any topic of interest in the context of discussions, but I like the reading and I'm sure I'll jump in somewhere to contribute more down the road.

Peter

Hey kids. I'm a young Canadian philosophy student trying to diversify my understanding of the world-as-it-is. Pressing my way through Rationality A-Z slowly, but while doing university, progress can be slow. I've been visiting the site frequently for a few months, but typically feel too uninformed to comment. I appreciate the (surprise) lack of bias and openness to critical thinking here, that I've found mysteriously vacant from my social, business and academic circles. I've gone through the process of being contrarian, then being a 'communist' (then reading Camus) then being lost in a world where it's difficult to find thinknig happening, at all. I come here to remind myself how to be (hah) less wrong, and see what cool things other intelligent folks are working on. If anyone has any links to blogs or sources that are interesting to someone trying to learn about...everything, I'm always looking for more networks to look to for information. Also what does a philosophy student who doesn't want to fall prey to the philosophy tropes do? (I already work at a pizza place.)

Rachelle is an academic consultant at a community college in specializes in helping students with their academic problems, college stress and such. She also works part-time for an online dissertation help at dissertation corp. She’s also a hobbyist blogger and loves to do guest blogging on education or college life related topics.

Hello from Paris, France.

As many of you, I first discovered all of this by HPMOR (actually, its French translation). I then read entirely Rationality, from AI to Zombie (because, honestly, reading things in order is SO MUCH easier than having 20 tabs open with 20 links I followed on the previous pages). I thought I would finish to read this blog, or at least the sequences, before posting, and then realized it may implies I would never post.

I'm a doctor in Fundamental Computer Science, an amateur writer (in French only), and an LGBT activist who goes into school in order to speak of LGBTphobia and sexism with 119 classes (and counting).

I can't tell right now exactly why I so much like the idea of rationality. I guess that it is unrelated to the fact that I wrote the article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rational_set recently . Its probably more related to the fact that I love the idea of being a robot, at least, being like I thought a robot was when I didn't know that robot are programmed by humans. I can rationalize it ... by hoping that, rationals methods would help me be more efficient in order to fight LGBTphobia (and probably more efficient to do research and publish, or to write more...) Even if, to tell the truth, I'm not yet convinced that studying rationality is a rational action in order to attains those goals. On the other hand, even if rationality may not be the BEST tool ever in order to attains those goal, I'm more confident in the advise I find here than in the advice of a random self-help book I could find in a shelve of my super market, because I assume some people indeed did research before giving those advise.

Hi! I've been lurking around here for a while; I'm quite the beginner and will be further lurking rather than contributing. A few months ago, I found and played a nifty little game that asked you to make guesses about statistics and set an interval of confidence, is mostly about updating probabilities based on new information and that ultimately requires you to collect information to decide whether a certain savant is more likely in his cave or at the pub. I've been wanting to have another look at it, but I have been entirely unable to find it again.

Could anyone point me to it? I'm fairly certain it was from this website. Thanks for the help, and keep up the interesting posts!

EDIT: http://cassandraxia.com/projs/advbiases/ in case anyone else is looking for it.

Hello I am from Department of Psychology of Higher School of Economics. I study problem solving, systems thought, and help and counteraction in social interactions. Both rationality and irrationality are important here.

Web: http://www.hse.ru/en/staff/apoddiakov#sci, http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/cf_dev/AbsByAuth.cfm?per_id=426114

Hi. I have only ever browsed one thread on this website, before. i used to like arguing a lot, but I lost my fervor when I felt like the validity of my argument and ability to defend myself in argument didn't and doesn't matter to most. It makes me sad. I only want to make everyone happy and able to cope with their pain, but everyone rejects me.

I don't have much of a personality beyond my liking logic a lot. All I know is logic, even if most people disagree with me. I am saddened by the fact that I feel my life only truly began in my late teens when I randomly came across the knowledge I needed to gain the opinions I have today. I never want anyone else to experience the sadness I have again. I want to change the world, via argument. Hello.

I once had a chance to make friends like me, but I threw that chance away, because the day that opportunity fell into my lap was the day I formally lost my faith in humanity, and lost my fervor to change the world....

Hello from Beijing.

I found out about Less Wrong from Slate Star Codex. I also read HPMOR last year, but hadn't realised there was a connection between that and Less Wrong.

I am posting here because I have been thinking about morality. I get into a lot of debates that all boil down to the fact that people hold a very firm belief in a particular moral principle, to the extent that they would be happy to force others to live in accordance to that principle, without evaluating whether this principle is subjective or rational.

In response to this, I have come up with a framework for evaluating moral theories, and I would like to hear the rationalist community's feedback. Briefly, what I propose is that a moral theory needs to meet three criteria: a) the ethical principles that comprise it must not be internally contradictory; b) its ethical principles must be non-arbitrary as far as possible (so, "be good to other people just because" is not good enough); and c) if the theory's principles are taken to their logical conclusion, they must not lead to a society that the theory's proponents themselves would consider dystopian.

I would like to hear people's thoughts on this - if you think it's intriguing, I am happy to submit an article to expand on my rationale for proposing this framework.

Best, Aris

Hi all,

I'm a 3rd year CS student at MIT interested in working with computer graphics in the future. I have way too many things I'm interested in doing (I pretty much can't find any field/hobby that I think would be completely boring after I put enough effort into finding out more about it), but things I'm actually involved in and maybe a little good at are art (digital/traditional, and some 3D) and music (singing mostly nowadays). In terms of how I spend my free time I love games and reading, and generally spending too much time on the internet.

I've always been a rationalist I think (though not a very good one), but only became more of an altruistic rationalist more recently after going through a pretty rough year. Not sure exactly why the combination of things that happened last year changed me so much, but I went from caring mostly about being right to caring about being a Good Person.

Anyway how I ended up here is procrastination from working/studying for finals. Staying up late tends to get me overly excited about the infinite amount of interesting content on the web. I'm not a very extroverted person so finding a community like this is really great.

What I'm mainly hoping to get out of LW is to improve how I live and think, to help me do better on my path from Rationalist to Altruistic Rationalist and hopefully later to Altruistic Rationalist Who Actually Does Things That Help People. I've realized I like talking a lot about my ideals but don't do enough to really apply them to my life. I'm also somewhat interested in the question of how art (or well humanities/entertainment...anything less concrete than being a doctor) helps the world. On the one hand I feel like maybe I should aspire to do something more "concrete" than what I'd probably do with my work in computer graphics (try to reform the government? cure some disease? make advancements in our understanding of physics?), but on the other hand I know that the humanities can be extremely powerful, and though I haven't completely thought this out, maybe life with only cures and efficient/good governments and a good understanding of physics without any stories or love of beauty isn't the best life for humans. I'm also debating whether being altruistic means you should sacrifice some of your own quest for self-actualization to help other people, or if you should focus even more on it since that is what you'd want others to do (not sure if I'm really wording this well here...).

Given the time though, I better stop here. I look forward to learning from you all!

Hello Less Wrong community! I study Statistics at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro in Brazil. I am oriented by the bayesian probability philosophy because our Department of Statistical Methods is focused in studies of Bayesian Statistics. I found this website during my studies of bayesian philosophy and error. In Rio de Janeiro, we still do not have any rationality community, but in São Paulo there is meetings organized every month in Meetup. I am very exited to spend my time in this community developing and debating philosophy of error!

Hiya! I am currently a postdoc in the neurosciences, with a computational focus. Dealing with the uncertainties and vicissitudes attendant upon one still plodding on along the path to "nowhere close to tenure-track". My core research interests include decision making, self-control/self-regulation, goal-directed behaviour, RL in the brain etc. I am quite interested in AI research, especially FAI and while I am aware of the broad picture on AI risk, I would describe myself as an optimist. On the social side of things, I am interested in understanding why people believe the things they do (in so far that I am not trying to figure this out as I dangle from the tree...) and my approach has always been one of asking open-ended questions to refine my model of "where someone is coming from" and this helps me have civil discussions with people whose views would be incompatible with mine. I am truly glad that civil discourse and collective truth-seeking are community norms here...one of my biggest pet peeves is that this is what "science'' should be about, as an enterprise, but in modern academia, one seldom feels as though one is part of such a community. Those who disagree, or have had much better times in academia are welcome to disagree. When I am not thinking about computational models, AI, ethics, or whatnot, I pretend to hoard crumpets, drink lots of tea and coffee and make trips to and from the DC Universe (the one that existed prior to Flashpoint). I discovered Scott Aaronson's fantastic blog a year ago, and this was followed by trips to SSC - and this is how I found LW. Love all 3 and now glad to join LW.

Oh, for some reason I am unable to see the button for voting on posts/comments...is there a Karma threshold to be crossed before one can vote?

Hey everybody! My name's Trent, and I'm a computer science student and hobbyist game developer who's been following LessWrong for a while. Finished reading the sequences about a year ago (after blazing through HPMOR and loving it) and have lurked here (and on Weird Sun Twitter...!) since then. Figured I'd make an account and get more involved in the community; reading stuff here makes me more motivated in my studies, and it's pretty entertaining either way!

I'd love to be one of the first people on Mars. Not sure how realistic that goal is or what steps I should even take to make it happen beyond saving $500,000 for a supposed SpaceX ticket and mastering a useful skill (coding!), but it's something to shoot for!

Looking forward to reading the linked posts, I haven't seen a lot of them! Also, is this the newest Welcome thread? It's over a year old...!

We'd love to know who you are, what you're doing: I was a high school teacher. Now I'm back to school for Honours and hopefully PhD in science (computational modelling) in Australia. I'm Chinese-Indonesian (my grammar and spelling are a mess) and I'm a theist (leaning toward Reformed Christianity).

what you value: Whatever is valuable.

how you came to identify as an aspiring rationalist or how you found us: My friend who is now a sister under the Fransiscan order of the Roman Catholic Church recommended me Harry Potter and the method of Rationality.

I think the theist community needs a better, more rational arguments for their belief. I think the easiest way is to test it against rational people. I hope this is the right place.

I am interested in making rationality be more accessible to the general public.

I am also interested in developing an ideal, universal curriculum. And I think rationality should be an integral part of it.

Am Sargin Rukevwe Oghneneruona, Am from Nigeria a student studying Business Administration and Management in Delta state polytechnic otefe. I am a rational person and this has helped me a lot i really love engaging in certain activities which could make me become a more rational thinker and also improve my knowledge about being rational. I found out about less wrong by reading articles on http://intentionalinsights.org/ and also written by Intentional insight personnel which has helped me alot to build my strength and knowledge of achieving goals and becoming more successful in life. I believe becoming a member of lesswrong.com would also help me in becoming a more rational thinker.

Hi! i am new and don't know where to ask this question exactly, so I'm asking here..

how do you vote on articles and comments? i can't figure out how!!

(i hope I'm not noticing some obvious button and be embarrassed)

Hello from a lot of places! :) I'm Chinese (Shanghai), studying in Brighton England, and lives in Vienna Austria (Moving to Prague Czech soon). How I discovered LW is not a very long story.

I have a great interest in artificial intelligence. I was reading James Barrat's 'Our Final Invention' and he mentioned AI-Box experiment which got me excited (because just that morning I was reading an article about the Turing Test and how it's very unreliable in measuring intelligence in machines; AI box experiment might be a better experiment in the future?). Before he elaborated the story in chapter 3 (which i found out later), I googled this experiment and led me to Yudkowsky's website. After reading through the thread on the experiment (some really interesting conversations between Yudkowsky and the challengers; I still disagree with James Higgins who denied most of the questions raised by Yudkowsky and giving ambiguous answers). Then I was curious about the link given to me by google which led me to a publicised log of a AI box experiment. It led me here and i had a look around. A whole website about rationality. It's like i found a gold mine.

I am currently studying ALevels - maths, further maths, computer science and physics. I wish to study computer science with artificial intelligence in the future in uni. My goal is computer science and philosophy at Oxford.

Anyways, in the future I wish to contribute more on this website. I believe that sharing thoughts is the best way to expand our knowledge, better than reading books. I am writing an EPQ on the safety of ASI so hopefully i can get some inspiration from the LW community. My interest in life is easy, just question everything, so please bear with them. :) A rational world should be everyone's goal. With the development of AGI/ASI, i hope our world will be a better place and rationality is the key. I am so happy I found this place and I hope I can help make a difference.

1

I’ve found the Welcome thread!

Hi, I’m Alia and I live with my husband in San Jose, California. I found this site via SlateStarCodex and having read Rationality:From AI to Zombies I think this is a fascinating and useful set of concepts and that using this type of reasoning more often is something to aspire to. I want to do more Bayesian calculations so I get more of a feel for them.

I’m also a fundamentalist* Christian. I’m perfectly ready to discuss and defend these beliefs, but I wouldn’t always bring up these beliefs in threads. I’m not trying to deceive or trick anyone, I just don’t want to derail a thread that is actually about something else. I do think it’s possible to be both a rationalist and a Christian as to stay reasonably intellectually consistent.

*(a note on why I choose the identification fundamentalist. Not long after American Christians split into mainline and fundamentalist groups, the fundamentalists got a bunch of bad press focused on certain sub-groups that were anti-intellectual. The other fundamentalists dealt with this by splitting off and re-branding themselves as evangelical. I’m not anti-intellectual and generally in the group that would self identify as evangelical, but I’m choosing to stick with the fundamentalist label for three reasons. 1) I don’t think changing the label or re-branding is a good way to deal with negative affect attached to a word. At best it just avoids the issue rather than solving the problem. 2) I don’t believe in disavowing people because they are unpopular with third parties. While I dis-agree with the anti-intellectuals on some things, the agreement on common core beliefs that lead to the fundamentalist label in the beginning is still there. 3) I think the fundamentalist label provides more clarity. The evangelicals worked hard and successfully to avoid getting over identified with and sub-group or coincidental characteristic. But as a result the label evangelical stayed vague, Individuals and groups that are more in the mainline tradition sometimes call themselves or get called evangelical. On the other hand opponents who wanted to hang on to the negative affect kept calling anything from the original fundamentalist tradition ‘fundamentalist.’ So on the I think fundamentalist will convey the most accurate idea of where I’m coming from theologically.)

Hi from San Diego, California. I'm an attorney with academic training in molecular biology (BS, MS, PhD). I have an intense interest in politics, specifically the cognitive biology/social science of politics. I'm currently reading The Rationalizing Voter by Lodge and Taber. I have read both of Tetlock's books, Haidt's Righteous Mind, Khaneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow, Thaler's Nudge, Achen and Bartels Democracy for Realists and a few others. I also took a college-level MOOC on cognitive biology and attendant analytic techniques (fMRI, etc) and one on the biology of decision making in economics.

Based on what I have taught myself over the last 6-7 years, I came up with a new "objective" political ideology or set of morals that I thought could be used to at least modestly displace or supplement standard "subjective" ideologies including liberalism, conservatism, capitalism, socialism, Christianity, anarchy, racism, nationalism and so on. The point of this was an attempt to build an intellectual framework that could help to at least partially rationalize politics, which I see as mostly incoherent/irrational from my "objective" public-interest oriented point of view.

I have tried to explain myself to both lay audiences (I'm currently a moderator at Harlen's Place, a politics site on Disqus https://disqus.com/home/channel/harlansplace/ ), but have failed. I confess that I'm becoming discouraged at the possibility of applying cognitive and social science to even slightly rationalize politics. What both Haidt and Lodge/Tabor have to say, makes me think that what I am trying is futile. I have tried contact about 50-60 academics, including Tetlock, Haidt, Bartels and Taber, but none have responded with any substance (one got very annoyed and chewed me out for wasting his time; http://www.overcomingbias.com/ ) - most don't respond at all. I get that -- everyone is busy and crackpots with new ideas are a dime a thousand.

Anyway, I stumbled across this site this morning while looking for some online content about the affect heuristic. I thought I would introduce myself and try to fit in, if I'm up to the standards here. My interest is in trying to open a dialog with one or more people who know this science better than myself so that I can get some feedback one whether what I am trying to do is a waste of time. As a novice, I suspect that I misunderstand the science and overestimate the limits of human rationality in politics in a society that lives under the US constitution (free speech).

My blog is here: http://dispol.blogspot.com/

Hi Less Wrong,

I am John Chavez from the Philippines. I'm a part-time teacher in a community college, teaching computer hardware servicing and maintenance to out-of-school youths.

As I take much value on helping others in my community and reach out to people who needs help, I came to know about Intentional Insights on Facebook, which leads me here in Less Wrong. I have been here for a while reading several published articles. There are a lot of articles here that I really love to read, although I must admit that there are a few that I found confusing and I disagree of.

Hence, I am introducing myself to you to formally start my quest in learning more about being rationalist.

I hope this will be enough for you to welcome me in your community. It will be humbling to know your thoughts :)

Thanks!

Hi Less Wrong,

I am John Chavez from the Philippines. I'm a part-time teacher in a community college, teaching computer hardware servicing and maintenance to out-of-school youths.

As I take much value on helping others in my community and reach out to people who needs help, I came to know about Intentional Insights on Facebook, which leads me here in Less Wrong. I have been here for a while reading several published articles. There are a lot of articles here that I really love to read, although I must admit that there are a few that I found confusing and I disagree of.

Hence, I am introducing myself to you to formally start my quest in learning more about being rationalist.

I hope this will be enough for you to welcome me in your community. It will be humbling to know your thoughts :)

Thanks!

Retracted

Hello Less Wrong!

My name is Bryan Faucher. I'm a 27 year old from Edmonton (Canada) in the middle of the slow process of immigrating to Limerick (Ireland) where my wife has taken a contract with the University. I've been working in education for the past five years but I'm looking to pursue a masters in mathematical modeling next year, rather than attempting to fight for the right to work in a crowded industry as a non-citizen.

I've been aware of LW for something like six years, having been introduced by an old roommate's SO by way of HPMOR. In that time I've read through the sequences and a great deal of what I suppose could be called the "supplementary content" available on the site, but never found a reason to dive in to the discussion. I don't remember exactly when I created this account, but it was nice to have it waiting for me when I needed it!

I'm joining in now because I was very much grabbed by Sarah Constantin's "A Return to Discussion". I've been a member of a mid-sized discussion forum for over a decade, where I now volunteer my time as an administrator. We've done OK - better than most - in terms of maintaining activity in the face of the web's movement away from forums and bulletin boards, but the tone of our conversations has certainly changed: in may ways sliding through the grooves which Sarah seems to be describing. My purview as admin includes the "serious" discussion section of the form, and I feel I'm fighting a losing battle year over year to maintain "nerd space" in the face of cynical irony and the widespread fear of engagement.

I'm hoping to be inspired by the changes the LW community has set to out to make. To learn from what goes right here, and, in some small way, to contribute to the effort which I think is an important one. Intellectually, I don't have a hope in hell of keeping up with the local heavy hitters, but I can bring a lot of, ya know... grit.

Anyway, thanks for reading. I hope this was a fair place to post this. A new newbie thread seems to be wanting, unless I missed something, and I suppose if nothing else I can wrack up enough karma in the next few days to create one. See you around!

Hello!

I am new to this site but judging from HPMOR and some articles I read here, I think I have come to the right place for some help.

I am working on the early stages of a project called WikiLogic which has many aims. Here are some that may interest LW readers specifically:

-Make skills such as logical thinking, argument construction and fallacy recognition accessible to the general public

-Provide a community created database of every argument ever made along with their issues and any existing solutions

-Highlight the dependencies between different fields in academic circles

The project requires knowledge of Bayes networks, linguistics and many more fields that I have little experience of although i am always learning. This is why I am looking for you guys to review the idea and let me know your thoughts. At this stage, unfiltered advise on any aspect of the project is welcome.

The general idea along with a short video can be found on the front page of the main site:

http://www.wikilogicfoundation.org/

Feel free to explore the site and wiki to get a better feel of what I am trying to do. Please forgive poorly written or unfinished parts of the site. It is early days and it seems unproductive to finish before I get feedback that may change its course...

Hi LW! My name is Alex, a Salesperson by profession. I found Less Wrong through Intentional Insights and been here for a couple of months now. I'd like to express my interest in becoming more rational.

Hello everyone,

/u/mind_bomber here from https://www.reddit.com/r/Futurology.

I've been a moderator there for over two years now and watched the community grow from several thousand futurist to over 3.5 million subscribers. As a moderator I've had the pleasure of working with Peter Diamandis, David Brin, Kevin Kelly, and others on several AMA's. I also curate the glossary and post videos, documentaries, talks, and keynotes to the site.

I hope to participate in this community, although the Less Wrong Community is exactly the type of people I would like to see over at https://www.reddit.com/r/Futurology. So if you have a chance please stop by and tell me what you think.

Cheers,

/u/mind_bomber

I discovered LessWrong maybe one or two years ago after reading about it on RationalWiki after searching online for a community of autodidacts (a Quora user recommended this place), and after googling Alfred Korzybski's phrase 'the map is not the territory'. I've been reading LessWrong intensively since I read my first page and first article. I thought I had developed a unique mindset, but was impressed to see that this community had discovered a lot of the same ideas and so many more. I left high school specifically so I could make sense of everything and figure what I should do if there's anything I should do. I now intend to take an online adult high school advanced functions course so I may study computer science in university. Besides computer science, I want to study neuroscience. I want to be a malware analyst and a neuroscientist. (Maybe one day I will work as a sort of sci-fi brain malware exorcist :P) But my actual skills lie in a formal understanding of persuasion, disagreement resolution, rhetoric, dialectics, communication, justification theory, and philosophy of argument. There should be an umbrella term for all this stuff; they are all closely related conceptually.

Other notable characteristics:

• I also have a deep appreciation for worldbuilding, symbolism, personality psychology (which I have some serious opinions about), and cellular automata.

• I made my own Game of Life ruleset using Golly.

• I'd tell of my Big 5 and MBTI results but I hate those models. So instead, I'll tell just tell you that I'm argumentative but diplomatic and gently critical. I am bursting with self-esteem. I am enthusiastic because there is no excuse to permanently giving up and not because it will be easy to safely achieve perfection. I am always stressing the importance of consequentialism and always defending deontological-seeming choices on consequentialist grounds, just as any consequence-concerned consequentialist-identifier would. I have no idea what Hogwarts house I belong to.

• I use all the major cultural hubs of the web, the most popular sites on which one may socialize, and those sites which are especially facilitative of internet friendships

• I have internet friends of multitudinous backgrounds and persuasions and I would welcome more

• I love going on long walks, in the day and in the night. My longest was ten hours! The empty suburban streets of the night can induce reflection and feelings of liberation like few other things can. I've had this habit since I was just 14.

• I am compiling insights on task and resource management, aka insights on beating akrasia.

• Ray Kurzweil saved me from suicide. I'm no longer as optimistic about the future as when I started reading his stuff, but I see there is a life-worthy chance for humanity to get better.

• I would rather have many friends who are supposed to be my enemies than many enemies who are supposed to be my friends.

• The bullet point immediately above this one is also my motto.

Hello, I find this since wei dai use it, but I find this a copy of reddit, hackernews etc, honestly I just want to make a proposal here since I stop believing in human intelligence from a long time, I only believe in a sort of "social physics" that constantly build new facts and organisations, anyway.

I will not give you any single label on myself, sorry: but I'm sure good money will arouse from a good social network system and since actual ones lack any intelligence (.org XD) maybe you could do the case with some changes, I value this at more than 30% probability and so I'm doing this little text now. Hope from this group of minds first non idiotic money could arise.

Hello everyone,

I'm a PhD student in social psychology focusing my time mainly on applied statistics and quantitative methods for the study of brain and behavior. My research focuses on the way that people's goals influence the way they reason and form judgments, but I've also dabbled a bit in self-regulation/self-control.

Perhaps my attraction to this community is based on the fact that I feel that my field is an unfriendly environment for the free exploration of novel or uncommon ideas. Specifically, I suspect that many of the models of human decision-making being put forth by our field over-estimate the tendency for biases/heuristics to lead to errors or poor judgments. For example, few (if any) of my colleagues are aware that our stereotypes of other groups tend to be highly accurate and this effect is one of the largest effects in all of social psychology. It appears that, in many cases, our biases tend to improve accuracy and decision-making quality. However, to utter phrases like "stereotype accuracy" around most social psychologists is to invite suspicion about one's underlying motives. I'm here not because I want to talk about stereotype accuracy in particular, but because I'd like to be able to consider such an idea without the threat of damaging my reputation and career.

I also like thinking about AI and how an (accurate) understanding of human reasoning in information-starved contexts could help us design AI responsibly, but that's just whipped cream.

(Somehow I posted this in the wrong place the first time, so I'm posting it here now.) Hi, I first discovered this site a few years ago, but never really participated on it. Looking back, it appears I only commented once or twice, saying something condescending about morality. Recently, I rediscovered the site, because I started noticing updates on a Facebook group (no longer) affiliated with it. What's funny is I only realized I had an account when I tried to register under the exact same User Name. I've started reading the sequences and am interested in participating in the discussions. I've thought intensely about certain topics since I was young, but I didn't really apply a scientific (or rationalist) approach to it until my Junior year of college, when I joined an Atheist community at my school. Many times, I see different sides to an issue. This isn't to say I stay on the fence for everything, but I understand most situations are complicated with at least some conflicting ideals.

Hello I am from Department of Psychology of Higher School of Economics (Moscow, Russia). I study problem solving, systems thought, and help and counteraction in social interactions. Both rationality and irrationality are important here.

Web: http://www.hse.ru/en/staff/apoddiakov#sci, [SSRN] (http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/cf_dev/AbsByAuth.cfm?per_id=426114)

Hello everybody. Stefano Libey is writing. Libey is my lovely nom de plume. I always wish to comprehend how reality works, what reality is or exists as, and my peculiar stand in it. I quite normally use rationality in order to do so. I believe I as a piece of the Intellect cannot do otherwise. To achieve my understanding I am accostumed to handling some instruments, one of which is etymology. I believe that etymon can unveil important, and strikingly illuminating, traits about a word, which I consider to be a vector of behaviour and accomplishment. By saying so, I mean that a word, far from being just a sound production and a mere semantic item, is a concrete conduct, an entity both ambiguous and precise. A fact resonating throughout reality.

Amongst the topics I love to enter into are the following. – The democracy notion, which I etymologically break up so as to find out the truth it conceals. Democracy is an exceedingly interesting notion because it is generally, and uncritically, embraced as an irrefutably beautiful and irrenounceable idea. – The religion notion, which I divest of the standardized meaning, so that it may be possible for me to see whether religion hides dangerously somewhere else than the quarters it is usually associated with. – Aesthetics, with the philosophical meaning of focus on appearance (Germ. ‘der Schein’, ‘die Erscheinung’), the latter being reckoned as a distinction from reality. I do not subscribe to this dichotomy. And in order to illustrate my position I am developing a particular philosophical theoretical framework which attempts to reconcile concepts that are normally viewed as opposites.

Many other themes and meditation grounds mesmerize me. Any concept whotsoever, once it has triggered some curiosity, can take, by means of being deemed as partaking in a causalistic concatenation, its own relevant place in rationality.

I would love to use the LessWrong platform to set forth my perspective on ratio and seminal thoughts of my theory on the Intellect. Reflecting upon democracy is my way to start scratching the surface of LessWrong to the core.