Welcome to Less Wrong! (July 2012)

Hello!

• Age: Years since 1995
• Gender: Female
• Occupation: Student

I actually started an account two years ago, but after a few comments I decided I wasn't emotionally or intellectually ready for active membership. I was confused and hurt for various reasons that weren't Less Wrong's fault, and I backed away to avoid saying something I might regret. I didn't want to put undue pressure on myself to respond to topics I didn't fully understand. Now, after many thousands of hours reading and thinking about neurology, evolutionary psychology, and math, I'm more confident that I won't just be swept up in the half-understood arguments of people much smarter than I am. :)

Like almost everyone here, I started with atheism. I was raised Hindu, and my home has the sort of vague religiosity that is arguably the most common form in the modern world. For the most part, I figured out atheism on my own, when I was around 11 or 12. It was emotionally painful and socially costly, but I'm stronger for the experience. I started reading various mediocre atheist blogs, but I got bored after a couple of years and wanted to do something more than shoot blind fish in tiny barrels. I wanted to build something up, not just tear something down (no matter how much it really should be torn down.)

The actual direct link to Less Wrong came from TV Tropes. I suspect it's one of the best gateway drugs because TV Tropes, while not explicitly atheist or rationalist, does more to communicate the positive ideals and emotional memes of LW-style rationality than most of the atheosphere does. For the first time, I got the sense that "our" way of thinking could be so much more powerful than simply bashing religion and astrology.

One important truth beyond atheism that I have slowly come to accept is inborn IQ differentials, between individuals and groups of individuals. I had to face the fact that P(male| IQ 2 standard deviations above mean) was significantly higher than 50%. I had to deal with the fact that historical oppression probably wasn't the end-all be-all explanation for why women on average hadn't done as much inventing and discovering and brilliant thinking as men. I had to face the fact that mere biology may have systematically biased my half of the population against greatness. And it hurt. I had to fight the urge to redefine intelligence and/or greatness to assuage the pain.

I further learned that my brain was modular, and the bits of me that I choose to call "I" don't constitute everything. My own brain could sabotage the values and ideals and that "I" hold so dearly. For a long time I struggled with the idea that everything I believed in and loved was fake, because I couldn't force my body to actually act accordingly. Did I value human life? Why wasn't I doing everything I possibly could to save lives, all the time? Did I value freedom and autonomy and gender equality? Why could I not help sometimes being attracted to domineering jerks?

It took me a while to accept that the newly-evolved, conscious, abstractly-reasoning, self-reflecting "I" simply did not have the firepower to bully ancient and powerful urges into submission. It took me a while to accept that my values were not lies simply because my monkey brain sometimes contradicted them. The "I" in my brain does not have as much power as she would like; that does not mean she doesn't exist.

Other, non-rationality related information: I love writing, and for a long time I convinced myself that therefore I would love being a novelist. Now, I recognize that I would much rather compose a non-fiction or reflective essay, although ideas for fiction stories still flood in and I rarely do much about it due to laziness and/or fear. I fell in love with Avatar: The Last Airbender for its great storytelling and its combination of intelligence and idealism. I adore Pixar and many Disney movies for the sweetness and heart. I like somewhat traditional-sounding music with easily discernible lyrics that tells a story; I can't get into anything that involves screaming or deliberate disharmony. Show-tunes are great. :)

I don't want to lose the hope/idealism/inner happiness that makes me able to in-ironically enjoy Disney and Pixar and Avatar; I consciously cultivate it and am lucky to have it. If this disposition will be "destroyed by the truth"...well, I have a choice to make then.

I'm Aaron Swartz. I used to work in software (including as a cofounder of Reddit, whose software that powers this site) and now I work in politics. I'm interested in maximizing positive impact, so I follow GiveWell carefully. I've always enjoyed the rationality improvement stuff here, but I tend to find the lukeprog-style self-improvement stuff much more valuable. I've been following Eliezer's writing since before even the OvercomingBias days, I believe, but have recently started following LW much more carefully after a couple friends mentioned it to me in close succession.

I found myself wanting to post but don't have any karma, so I thought I'd start by introducing myself.

I've been thinking on-and-off about starting a LessWrong spinoff around the self-improvement stuff (current name proposal: LessWeak). Is anyone else interested in that sort of thing? It'd be a bit like the Akrasia Tactics Review, but applied to more topics.

'Twas about time that I decided to officially join. I discovered LessWrong in the autumn of 2010, and so far I felt reluctant to actually contribute -- most people here have far more illustrious backgrounds. But I figured that there are sufficiently few ways in which I could show myself as a total ignoramus in an intro post, right?

I don't consider my gender, age and nationality to be a relevant part of my identity, so instead I'd start by saying I'm INTP. Extreme I (to the point of schizoid personality disorder), extreme T. Usually I have this big internal conflict going on between the part of me that wishes to appear as a wholly rational genius and the other part, who has read enough psychology and LW (you guys definitely deserve credit for this) to know I'm bullshitting myself big time.

My educational background so far is modest, a fact for which procrastination is the main culprit. I'm currently working on catching up with high school level math... so far I've only reviewed trigonometry, so I'm afraid I won't be able to participate in more technical discussions around here. Aside from a few Khan Academy videos, I'm still ignorant about probability; I did try to solve that cancer probability problem though, and when put like that into a word problem, I used Bayes' theorem intuitively. (Funny thing is, I still don't understand the magic behind it, even if I can apply it.) I know no programming beyond really elementary C++ algorithms; I have a pretty good grasp of high school physics, minus relativity and QM. I am seeking to do everything in my power to correct these shortcomings, and when/if I achieve results, I'll be happy to post my findings about motivation & procrastination on LW, if anyone is interested.

That which I have in common with the rest of this community is a love for rational, intelligent and productive discussions. I'm hugely disappointed with the overwhelming majority of internet and RL debates. Many times I've found myself trying to be the voice of reason and pointing out flaws in people's reasoning, even when I agreed with the core idea, only to have them tell me that I'm being too analytical and that I should... what... close off my mind and stop noticing mistakes, right? So I come here seeking discussions with people who would listen to reason and facilitate intellectually fruitful debates.

I'm very eager to help spread the knowledge about cognitive biases and educate people in the art of good reasoning.

I'm also interested (although not necessarily well-versed, as mentioned above) in most topics people here are interested in -- everything concerning mathematics and science, as well as philosophy and the mind (which are, by comparison, my two strongest points).

There are quite a few ways in which I don't fit the typical LW mold, though, and I'm mentioning this so that I find out whether any of these are going to be problematic in our interaction.

• For one, I'm not particularly interested in AI and transhumanism. Not opposed to, just indifferent. The only related topic which interests me is life extension research. In the eventuality that some people might try to change my mind about this from the get-go, as I've seen some do with other newbies, I know you probably have some very good arguments for your position, but hopefully nobody's going to mind one less potential AI enthusiast. My interests are spread thin enough as they are.
• I seem to be significantly more left-leaning than the majority of folks here. I'm decidedly not dogmatic about it, though, and on occasion I speak out against heavily ideological discourse even when it has a central message that I agree with.
• Kind of clueless and mathematically illiterate at this moment.

This has to be getting rather long, so I'll stop here, hoping that I've said everything that I believed to be relevant to an intro post.

I've commented infrequently, but never did one of these "Welcome!" posts.

Way back in the Overcoming Bias days, my roomate raved constantly about the blog and Eliezer Yudkowsky in particular. I pattern matched his behaviour to being in a cult, and moved on with my life. About two years later (?), a common friend of ours recommended Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, which I then read, which brought me to Lesswrong, reading the Sequences, etc. About a year later, I signed up for cryonics with Alcor, and I now give more than my former roomate to the Singularity Institute. (He is very amused by this.)

I spend quite a bit of time working on my semi-rationalist fanfic, My Little Pony: Friendship is Optimal, which I'll hopefully release on a timeframe of a few months. (I previously targeted releasing this damn thing for April, but...planning fallacy. I've whittled my issue list down to three action items, though, and it's been through it's first bout of prereading.)

Hi! I got here from reading Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, which I think I found on TV Tropes. Once I ran out of story to catch up on, I figured I'd start investigating the source material.

I've read a couple of sequences, but I'll hold off on commenting much until I've gotten through more material. (Especially since the quality of discussions in the comment sections is so high.) Thanks for an awesome site!

Hi All,

I'm Will Crouch. Other than one other, this is my first comment on LW. However, I know and respect many people within the LW community.

I'm a DPhil student in moral philosophy at Oxford, though I'm currently visiting Princeton. I work on moral uncertainty: on whether one can apply expected utility theory in cases where one is uncertain about what is of value, or what one one ought to do. It's difficult to do so, but I argue that you can.

I got to know people in the LW community because I co-founded two organisations, Giving What We Can and 80,000 Hours, dedicated to the idea of effective altruism: that is, using one's marginal resources in whatever way the evidence supports as doing the most good. A lot of LW members support the aims of these organisations.

I woudn't call myself a 'rationalist' without knowing a lot more about what that means. I do think that Bayesian epistemology is the best we've got, and that rational preferences should conform to the von Neumann-Morgenstern axioms (though I'm uncertain - there are quite a lot of difficulties for that view). I think that total hedonistic utilitarianism is the most plausible moral theory, but I'm extremely uncertain in that conclusion, partly on the basis that most moral philosophers and other people in the world disagree with me. I think that the more important question is what credence distribution one ought to have across moral theories, and how one ought to act given that credence distribution, rather than what moral theory one 'adheres' to (whatever that means).

Hello, everyone!

I'd been religious (Christian) my whole life, but was always plagued with the question, "How would I know this is the correct religion, if I'd grown up with a different cultural norm?" I concluded, after many years of passive reflection, that, no, I probably wouldn't have become Christian at all, given that there are so many good people who do not. From there, I discovered that I was severely biased toward Christianity, and in an attempt to overcome that bias, I became atheist before I realized it.

I know that last part is a common idiom that's usually hyperpole, but I really did become atheist well before I consciously knew I was. I remember reading HPMOR, looking up lesswrong.com, reading the post on "Belief in Belief", and realizing that I was doing exactly that: explaining an unsupported theory by patching the holes, instead of reevaluating and updating, given the evidence.

It's been more than religion, too, but that's the area where I really felt it first. Next projects are to apply the principles to my social and professional life.

Hello everyone,

Thought it was about time to do one of these since I've made a couple of comments!

My name's Carl. I've been interested in science and why people believe the strange things they believe for many years. I was raised Catholic but came to the conclusion around the age of ten that it was all a bit silly really, and as yet I have found no evidence that would cause me to update away from that.

I studied physics as an undergrad and switched to experimental psychology for my PhD, being more interested at that point in how people work than how the universe does. I started to study motor control and after my PhD and a couple of postdocs I know way more about how humans move their arms than any sane person probably should. I've worked in behavioural, clinical and computational realms, giving me a wide array of tools to use when analysing problems.

My current postdoc is coming to an end and a couple of months ago I was undergoing somewhat of a crisis. What was I doing, almost 31 and with no plan for my life? I realised that motor control had started to bore me but I had no real idea what to do about it. Stay in science, or abandon it and get a real job? That hurts after almost a decade of high-level research. And then I discovered, on Facebook, a link to HPMOR. And then I read it all, in about a week. And then I found LW, and a job application for curriculum design for a new rationality institute, and I wrote an email, and then flew to San Francisco to participate in the June minicamp...

And now I'm in the midst of writing some fellowship applications to come to Berkeley and study rationality - specifically how the brain is Bayesian in some ways but not in others, and how that can inform the teaching of rationality. (Or something. It's still in the planning stages!) I'm also volunteering for CFAR at the moment by helping to find useful papers on rationality and cognitive science, though that's on somewhat of a back burner since these fellowships are due very soon. Next month, in fact.

I've started a new blog: it's called 'Joy in the Merely Real', and at the moment I'm exploring a few ideas about the Twelve Virtues of Rationality and what I think about them. You can find it at:

themerelyreal.blogspot.com

Looking forward to doing more with this community in the coming months and years. :)

Greetings LWers,

I'm an aspiring Friendliness theorist, currently based at the Australian National University -- home to Marcus Hutter, Rachael Briggs and David Chalmers, amongst others -- where I study formal epistemology through the Ph.B. (Hons) program.

I wasn't always in such a stimulating environment -- indeed I grew up in what can only be deemed intellectual deprivation, from which I narrowly escaped -- and, as a result of my disregard for authority and despise for traditional classroom learning, I am largely self-taught. Unlike most autodidacts, though, I never was a voracious reader, on the contrary I barely opened books at all, instead preferring to think things over in my head; this has left me an ignorant person -- something I'm constantly striving to improve on -- but has also protected me from many diseased ideas and even allowed me to better appreciate certain notions by having to rediscover them myself. (case in fact, throughout my adolescence I took great satisfaction in analysing my mental mechanisms and correcting for what I now know to be biases, yet I never came across the relevant literature, essentially missing out on a wealth of knowledge)

For a long time I've aspired to join a cultural movement modelled on the principles of the Enlightenment and, to my eyes, LW, MIRI, CFAR, FHI and CSER are exactly the kind of community that can impact society through the use of reason. Alas, I was long unaware of their existence and when I first heard about the 'Singularity' I immediately dismissed it as the science fiction it sounds like, but thankfully this is no longer the case and I can now start making my modest contributions to reducing existential risk.

Lastly, I've never had my IQ measured properly -- passing the Mensa admission test places me at least two SDs above the norm, but that's hardly impressive by LW standards -- and, as much as I value such an indicator, I'm too emotionally invested in my intelligence to dare undergo psychometric testing. (for what it's worth, as a child my development was precocious -- e.g. the development of my motor skills was superior to that of the subjects taking part in this well-known longitudinal study)

I've opened up a lot to you, LWers; I hope my only regret will be not having discovered you earlier...

Hello everyone! I've been a lurker on here for awhile, but this is my first post. I've held out on posting anything because I've never felt like I knew enough to actually contribute to the conversation. Some things about me:

I'm currently 22, female, and a recent graduate of college with a degree in computer science. I'm currently employed as a software engineer at a health insurance company, though I am looking into getting into research some day. I mainly enjoy science, playing video games, and drawing.

I found this site through a link on the Skeptics Stack Exchange page. The post was about cryonics, which is how I got over here. I've been reading the site for about six months now and I have found it extremely helpful. It has also been depressing, though, because I've since realized many of the "problems" in the world were caused by the ineptitude of the species and aren't easily fixed. I've had some problems with existential nihilism since then and if anyone has any advice on the matter, I'd love to hear it.

My journey to rationality probably started with atheism and a real understanding of the scientific method and human psychology. I grew up Mormon, which has since given me some interesting perspectives into groupthink and the general problem of humanity. Leaving Mormonism is what prompted me into understanding why and how so many people could be so systematically insane.

In some ways, I've also found this very isolating because I now have a hard time relating to a lot of people. Just sitting back and watching the ways people destroy themselves and others is very frustrating. It's made worse by my knowledge that I must also be doing this to myself, albeit on a smaller level.

Anyway, I enjoy meeting you all and I will try to comment more on the site! I really enjoy this site and everyone on it seems to have very good comments.

Hi! Long-time lurker, first-time... joiner?

I was inspired to finally register by this post being at the top of Main. Not sure yet how much I'll actually post, but the removal of the passive barrier of, you know, not actually being registered is gone, so we'll see.

Anyway. I'm a dude, live in the Bay Area, work in finance though I secretly think I'm actually a writer. I studied cog sci in college, and that angle is what I tend to find most interesting on Less Wrong.

I originally came across LW via HPMoR back in 2010. Since then, I've read the Sequences, been to a few meetups, and attended the June minicamp (which, P.S., was awesome).

I'm still struggling a bit with actually applying rationality tools in my life, but it's great to have that toolbox ready and waiting. Sometimes... I hear it calling out to me. "Sean! This is an obvious place to apply Bayes! Seaaaaaaan!"

Hi all,

Not quire recently joined, but when I first joined, I read some, then got busy and didn't participate after that.

Age: Not yet 30. Former Occupation: Catastrophe Risk Modeling New Occupation: Graduate Student, Public Policy, RAND Corporation.

Theist Status: Orthodox Jew, happy with the fact that there are those who correctly claim that I cannot prove that god exists, and very aware of the confirmation bias and lack of skepticism in most religious circles. It's one reason I'm here, actually. And I'll be glad to discuss it in the future, elsewhere.

I was initially guided here, about a year ago, by a link to The Best Textbooks on Every Subject . I was a bit busy working at the time, building biased mathematical models of reality. (Don't worry, they weren't MY biases, they were those of the senior people and those of the insurance industry. And they were normalized to historical experience, so as long as history is a good predictor of the future...) So I decided that I wanted to do something different, possibly something with more positive externalities, less short term thinking about how the world could be more profitable for my employer, and more long-term thinking about how it could be better for everyone.

Skip forward; I'm going to be going to graduate school for Policy Analysis at RAND, and they asked us to read Thinking Fast and Slow, by Kahneman - and I'm a big fan of his. While reading and thinking about it, I wanted to reference something I read on here, but couldn't remember the name of the site. I ended up Googling my way to a link to HP:MOR, which I read in about a day, (yesterday, actually) and a link back here. So now LR is in my RSS reader, and I'm here to improve myself and my mind, and become a bit less wrong.

Hello and goodbye.

I'm a 30 year old software engineer with a "traditional rationalist" science background, a lot of prior exposure to Singularitarian ideas like Kurzweil's, with a big network of other scientist friends since I'm a Caltech alum. It would be fair to describe me as a cryocrastinator. I was already an atheist and utilitarian. I found the Sequences through Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality.

I thought it would be polite, and perhaps helpful to Less Wrong, to explain why I, despite being pretty squarely in the target demographic, have decided to avoid joining the community and would recommend the same to any other of my friends or when I hear it discussed elsewhere on the net.

I read through the entire Sequences and was informed and entertained; I think there are definitely things I took from it that will be valuable ("taboo" this word; the concept of trying to update your probability estimates instead of waiting for absolute proof; etc.)

However, there were serious sexist attitudes that hit me like a bucket of cold water to the face - assertions that understanding anyone of the other gender is like trying to understand an alien, for example.

Coming here to Less Wrong, I posted a little bit about that, but I was immediately struck in the "sequence rerun" by people talking about what a great utopia the gender-segregated "Failed Utopia 4-2" would be.

Looking around the site even further, I find that it is over 90% male as of the last survey, and just a lot of gender essentialist, women-are-objects-not-people-like-us crap getting plenty of upvotes.

I'm not really willing to put up with that and still less am I enthused about identifying myself as part of a community where that's so widespread.

So, despite what I think could be a lot of interesting stuff going on, I think this will be my last comment and I would recommend against joining Less Wrong to my friends. I think it has fallen very squarely into the "nothing more than sexism, the especially virulent type espoused by male techies who sincerely believe that they are too smart to be sexists" cognitive failure mode.

If you're interested in one problem that is causing at least one rationalist to bounce off your site (and, I think the odds are not unreasonable, where one person writes a long heartfelt post, there might be multiple others who just click away) here you go. If not, go ahead and downvote this into oblivion.

Perhaps I'll see you folks in some years if this problem here gets solved, or some more years after that when we're all unfrozen and immortal and so forth.

Sincerely,

Sam

Hello! I'm David.

I'm 26 (at the time of writing), male, and an IT professional. I have three (soon to be four) children, three (but not four) of which have a different dad.

My immediate links here were through the Singularity Institute and Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, which drove me here when I realized the connection (I came to those things entirely separately!). When I came across this site, I had read through the Wikipedia list of biases several times over the course of years, come to many conscious conclusions about the fragility of my own cognition, and had innumerable arguments with friends and family that changed minds, but I never really considered that there would be a large community of people that got together on those grounds.

I'm going to do the short version of my origin story here, since writing it all out seems both daunting and pretentious. I was raised rich and lucky by an entrepreneur/university professor/doctor father and a mother who always had to be learning something or go crazy (she did some of both). I dropped out of a physics major in college and got my degree in gunsmithing instead, but only after I worked a few years. Along the way, I've politically and morally moved around, but I'm worried that the settling of my moral and political beliefs is a symptom of my brain settling rather than because of all of my rationalizations.

There are a few reasons that I haven't commented on here yet (mostly because I despise any sort of hard work), and this is an attempt to break some of those inhibitions and maybe even get to know some people well enough (i.e. at all) to actively desire discourse.

Ok, David Fun Facts time:

• I know enough Norwegian, Chinese, Latin, Lojban, and Spanish to do...something useful maybe?

• I almost never think of what I'm saying before I say it (as in black-box), and I let it continue because it works.

• Corollary: I curse a lot when I'm comfortable with people.

• Corollary: My voice is low and loud, so it carries quite far.

• I play a lot of video games, board games, and thought experiment games.

Hi LWers,

I am Robert and I am going to change the world. Maybe just a little bit, but that’s ok, since it’s fun to do and there’s nothing else I need to do right now. (Yay for mini-retirements!)

I find some of the articles here on LW very useful, especially those on heuristics and biases, as well as material on self-improvement although I find it quite scattered among loads of way to theoretic stuff. Does it seem odd that I have learned much more useful tricks and gained more insight from reading HPMOR than from reading 30 to 50 high-rated and “foundational” articles on this site? I am sincerely sad that even the leading rationalists on LW seem to struggle getting actual benefits out of their special skills and special knowledge (Yvain: Rationality is not that great; Eliezer: Why aren't "rationalists" surrounded by a visible aura of formidability?) and I would like to help them change that.

My interest is mainly in contributing more structured, useful content and also to band together with fellow LWers to practice and apply our rationalist skills. As a stretch goal I think that we could pick someone really evil as our enemy and take them down, just to show our superiority. Let me stress that I am not kidding here. If rationality really counts for something (other than being good entertainment for sciency types and sci-fi lovers), then we should be able to find the right leverages and play out a great plot which just leaves everyone gasping “shit!” And then we’ll have changed the world, because people will start taking rationality serious.

Let me send out a warm “thank you” to you all for welcoming me in your rationalist circles!

Greetings. I am Error.

I think I originally found the place through a comment link on ESR's blog. I'm a geek, a gamer, a sysadmin, and a hobbyist programmer. I hesitate to identify with the label "rationalist"; much like the traditional meaning of "hacker", it feels like something someone else should say of me, rather than something I should prematurely claim for myself.

I've been working through the Sequences for about a year, off and on. I'm now most of the way through Metaethics. It's been a slow but rewarding journey, and I think the best thing I've taken out of it is the ability to identify bogus thoughts as they happen. (Identifying is not always the same as correcting them, unfortunately) Another benefit, not specifically from the sequences but from link-chasing, is the realization that successful mental self-engineering is possible; I think the tipping point for me there was Alicorn's post about polyhacking. The realization inspired me to try and beat the tar out of my akrasia, and I've done fairly well so far.

My current interests center around "updating efficiently." I just turned 30; I burnt my 20s establishing a living instead of learning all the stuff I wanted to learn. I figure I only have so many years left before neural rigor mortis begins to set in, and there's more stuff I want to learn and more skills I want to aquire than time to do it in. So, how does one learn as much truth as possible while wasting as little time as possible on things that are wrong? The difficulty I see is that a layperson to a subject (the C programming language for purposes of this example) can't tell the difference between K&R and Herbert Schildt, and may waste a lot of time on the latter when they should be inhaling the former or something similar. The "Best Textbooks" thread looks like it will be invaluable here.

A related concern is that some subjects in science don't lend themselves to easy verification. How does one construct an accurate model of a thing when, for reasons of cost or time, you can't directly compare your map (or your textbook's map) to the territory? I can read a great deal about, say, quantum mechanics, but without an atom smasher in my backyard it's difficult to check if what I'm reading is correct. That's fine when dealing with something you know is settled science. It's harder when trying to draw accurate conclusions about things that are politically charged (e.g. global warming), or for which evidence in any direction is slim. (e.g. cryonics)

Something else I'm interested in is the Less Wrong local meetups. There's one listed for my area (Atlanta) but it doesn't appear to be active. Finding interesting people is hard when you're excessively introverted. I've tried Mensa meetings, but most of the people there were nearly twice my age and I found it difficult to relate. Dragoncon worked out better (well, almost), but only happens once a year.

A fair number of intro posts seem to include religious leanings or (more frequently) lack thereof, so I'll add mine: I was raised mildly Christian but it began to fade out of my worldview around the time I read the bit about how disobedient children should be stoned to death. In retrospect my parents probably shouldn't have made me read the Bible on days that we skipped church. Churches leave that stuff out. Now I swing back and forth between atheism, misotheism, and discordianism, depending on how I'm feeling on any given day, and I don't take any of those seriously.

Is it still acceptable/advisable to comment in the Sequences, even as old as they are? It looks from the comment histories in them that some people still watch and answer in them. I doubt I'll muck around too much elsewhere until I've finished them.

Hey everyone,

As I continue to work through the sequences, I've decided to go ahead and join the forums here. A lot of the rationality material isn't conceptually new to me, although much of the language is very much so, and thus far I've found it to be exceptionally helpful to my thinking.

I'm a 24 year old video game developer, having worked on graphics on a particular big-name franchise for a couple years now. It's quite the interesting job, and is definitely one of the realms I find the heady, abstract rationality tools to be extremely helpful. Rationality is what it is, and that seems to be acknowledged here, a fact I'm quite grateful for.

When I'm not discussing the down-to-earth topics here, people may find I have a sometimes anxiety-ridden attachment to certain religious ideas. Religious discussion has been extremely normal for me throughout my life, so while the discussion doesn't make me uncomfortable, my inability to come to answers that I'm happy with does, and has caused me a bit of turmoil outside of discussion. Obviously there is much to say about this, and much people may like to say to me, but I'd like to first get through all the sequences, get all of my questions about it all answered, pay attention a bit to the discussions here, and I'll go from there. I have no grand hopes to finally put these beliefs to rest, but I will go to lengths to see whether it is something I should do. To pick either seems to me to suppose I have a Way to rationality, if I understand the point correctly. I would invite any and all discussion on the topic, and I appreciate the little "welcome to Theists" in the main post here. :)

See you all around.

I've been commenting for a few months now, but never introduced myself in the prior Welcome threads. Here goes: Student, electrical engineering / physics (might switch to math this fall), female, DC area.

I encountered LW when I was first linked to Methods a couple years ago, but found the Sequences annoying and unilluminating (after having taken basic psych and stats courses). After meeting a couple of LWers in real life, including my now-boyfriend Roger (LessWrong is almost certainly a significant part of the reason we are dating, incidentally), I was motivated to go back and take a look, and found some things I'd missed: mostly, reductionism and the implications of having an Occam prior. This was surprising to me; after being brought up as an anti-religious nut, then becoming a meta-contrarian in order to rebel against my parents, I thought I had it all figured out, and was surprised to discover that I still had attachments to mysticism and agnosticism that didn't really make any sense.

My biggest instrumental rationality challenge these days seems to be figuring out what I really want out of life. Also, dealing with an out-of-control status obsession.

To cover some typical LW clusters: I am not signed up for cryonics, and am not entirely convinced it is worth it. And I am interested in studying AI, but mostly because I think it is interesting and not out of Singularity-related concern. (I get the feeling that people who don't share the prominent belief patterns about AI/cryonics hereabouts think they are much more of a minority than they actually are.)

Hi, I'm Edward and have been reading the occasional article on here for a while. I've finally decided to officially join as this year I'm starting to do more work on my knowledge and education (especially maths & science) and I like the thoughtful community I see here. I'm a programmer, but also have a passion for history. Just as I was finishing university, my thinking led me to abandon the family religion (many of my friends are still theists). I was going to keep thinking and exploring ideas but I ended up just living - now I want to begin thinking again.

Regards, Edward

I'm Abd ul-Rahman Lomax, introducing myself. I have six grandchildren, from five biological children, and I have two adopted girls, age 11 from China, and age 9 from Ethiopia.

Born in 1944, Abd ul-Rahman is not my birth name, I accepted Islam in 1970. Not being willing to accept pale substitutes, I learned to read the Qur'an in Arabic by reading the Qur'an in Arabic.

Back to my teenage years, I was at Cal Tech for a couple of years, being in Richard P. Feynman's two years of undergraduate physics classes, the ones made into the textbook. I had Linus Pauling for freshman chemistry, as well. Both of them helped create how I think.

I left Cal Tech to pursue a realm other than "science," but was always interested in direct experience rather than becoming stuffed with tradition, though I later came to respect tradition (and memorization) far more than at the outset. I became a leader of a "spiritual community," and a successor to a well-known teacher, Samuel L. Lewis, but was led to pursue many other interests.

I delivered babies (starting with my own) and founded a school of midwifery that trained midwives for licensing in Arizona.

Self-taught, I started an electronics design consulting business, still going with a designer in Brazil.

I became known as one of the many independent inventors of delegable proxy as a method of creating hierarchical communication structure from the bottom up. Social structure, and particularly how to facilitate collective intelligence, has been a long-term interest.

I was a Muslim chaplain at San Quentin State Prison, serving an almost entirely Black community. In case you haven't guessed, I'm not black. I loved it. People are people.

So much I'm not saying yet.... I became interested in wikis early on, but didn't get to Wikipedia until 2005, becoming seriously active in 2007. Eventually, I came across an abusive blacklisting of a web site, a well-known archive of scientific papers on cold fusion. I'd been very aware of the 1989 announcement and some of the ensuing flap, but had assumed, like most people with enough knowledge to know what it was about, that the work had not been replicated.

When I looked, I became interested enough to buy a number of major works in the area (including almost all of the skeptical literature).

Among those who have become familiar, cold fusion (a bit of a misnomer; at the least it was prematurely named), is an ultimately clear example of how pseudoskepticism came to dominate a whole field, for over fifteen years. The situation flipped in the peer-reviewed journals beginning about eight years ago, but that's not widely recognized, it is merely obvious if one looks at what has been published in that period of time..

Showing this is way beyond the scope of this introduction, but I assume it will come up. I'm just asserting what I reasonably conclude, having become familiar with the evidence, (and I'm working with the scientists in the field now, in many ways).

As to rational skepticism, I was known to Martin Gardner, who quoted a study of mine on the so-called Miracle of the Nineteen in the Qur'an, the work of Rashad Khalifa, whom I knew personally.

I naively thought, for a couple of days, that a rational-skeptic approach to cold fusion might be welcome on RationalWiki. Definitely not. Again, that's another story. However, I'm not banned there and have sysop privileges (like most users).

On RationalWiki, however, I came across the work of Yudkowsky, and this blog. Wow! In some of the circles in which I've moved, I've been a voice crying in the wilderness, with only a few echoes here and there. Here, I'm reluctant to say anything, so commonly cogent is comment in this community. I know I'm likely to stick my foot in my mouth.

However, that's never stopped me, and learning to recognize the taste of my foot, with the help of my friends, is one way in which I've kept my growth alive. The fastest way to learn is generally to make mistakes.

I'm also likely to comment, eventually, on the practical ontology and present reality of Landmark Education, with which I've become quite familiar, as well as on the myths and facts which widely circulate about Landmark. To start, they do let you go to the bathroom.

Meanwhile, I've caught up with HPMOR, and am starting to read the sequences. Great stuff, folks.

Hello. I was brought here by HPMOR, which I finished reading today. Back in 1999 or something I found the site called sysopmind.com which had interesting reads on AI, Bayes theorem (that I didn't understand) and 12 virtues of rationality. I loved it for the beauty that reminded me of Asimov. I kept it in my bookmarks forever. (I knew him before he was famous? ;-))

I like SF (I have read many SF books but most were from before 1990 for some reason) and I'm a computer nerd, among other things. I want to learn everything, but I have a hard time putting in the work. I study to become a psychologist, scheduled to finish in 2013. My favorite area of psychology is social psychology, especially how humans make decisions, how humans are influenced by biases or norms or high status people. I'm married and have a daughter born in 2011.

I like to watch tv-shows, but I have high standards. It is SF if it is based in science and rationality, otherwise it's just space drama/space action and I have no patience for it. I also like psychological drama, but it has to be realistic and believable. Please give recommendations if you like. (edited:) Also, someone could explain in what way Star Trek, Babylon 5 or Battlestar Galactica is really SF or Buffy is feminist, so I know if they are worth my while.

I highly doubt that I'll be posting articles or even joining discussions anytime soon, since right now, I'm just getting started on reading the sequences and exploring other parts of the site, and don't feel prepared yet to get involved in discussions. However, I'll probably comment on things now and then, so because of that (and, honestly, just because I'm a very social person), I figured I might as well post an introduction here.

I appreciate the way that discussions are described as ending on here, because I've noticed in other debates that "tapping out" is seen as running away, and the main trait that gives me problems in my quest for rationality is that I'm inherently a competitive person, and get more caught up in the idea of "winning" than of improving my thinking. I'm working on this, but if I do get involved in discussions, the fact that they aren't seen as much as competitions here compared to other places should be helpful to me.

Anyway, I guess I'll introduce myself. I'm Alexandra, and I'm a seventeen year old high-school student in the United States (I applied to the camp in August, but I never received any news about it, so I assume that I wasn't accepted). Like many people here, I found out about this website through Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, but I've been interested in improving my rational thinking since I was young. I grew up in a secular and intellectual home, so seeing the world and myself realistically have always been major goals for myself, and I've always naturally tried to apply logical thinking and the scientific method to my problems, but I've never really formally studied rationality (though I did take statistics last year).

I'm pretty smart, but as a high school student (especially one who, due to various bad experiences with the school system, only really found motivation and purpose in school-work less than a year ago), I don't have too much technical knowledge, which I hope to change. I'm more experienced in aggressive self-awareness than I am in more technical ideas (such as the contrast between Bella from Luminosity and Harry in HPMOR). I'm not really interested in a future in rationality work (and, while I'm interested in transhumanism, I don't really see myself being pulled in that direction for a career), I just want to improve my own thinking in order to better use my mind as a tool to achieve my goals.

While I might come across it on here, I actually don't act very intellectual in my usual social interactions (especially compared to my younger brother, who's very openly and almost aggressively rational). I usually keep my rationality to myself except for certain situations, and use it internally to figure out the best way to approach situations, but I usually come across as much more flippant and frivolous than I actually am (especially since I'm very much an extrovert). I'm too misanthropic to expect rationality from others, so I prefer to use my inner logical side to figure out how to interact with people on their respective levels in a way that works best for me. I can understand the desire to appear as rational and intelligent as you truly are, I just am a very utilitarian person and have found that placing less emphasis on that side of myself works best for me.

I'm used to most people that I debate with being irrational and easily upset. It never used to bother me, because I consider my intelligence to be a mental tool of mine rather than a personality trait, and because my naturally competitive personality meant that I still enjoyed debates that fell into petty conflict, but recently (maybe because I'm maturing, maybe because I'm busier these days), I've found myself getting bored with that sort of thing. So I'm definitely interested in intellectual discussions on here, though I might not involve myself in them until I'm better prepared.

One thing that I've noticed about myself is that, in discussions, I tend to insist on responding to every single point made by others rather than just selecting some to focus on (before I realized that's what people were doing, it used to bother me that others wouldn't respond to every individual point I made). I'm not sure whether that's something shared by other members of this website or just a personal quirk.

This is getting rambly because I'm a long-winded person, but I'll add a bit more (mostly non-rationality-related) information. I'm not a theist or a spiritual person, but atheism seems obvious enough to me that I don't see much point in discussing it anymore (unless the more "New Age"-y members of my family get a little too pushy with me). I'm interested in physics, math, foreign languages, literature, singing, exploring urban areas, climbing things, transhumanism (especially life-extension, because I want to live forever) and throwing parties. I have a strong appreciation for the arts, but I don't personally do anything artistic (other than singing, which is just a hobby), and I'm easily entertained by the small pleasures in life (good food, pretty views, attractive people of either gender, and fluffy blankets). I really like cats and books and the nighttime, and I'm more interested in clothes and makeup than might be expected from an eccentric, science-loving rationalist with quite a few geeky interests, but people are complex. I tend to be a bit surreal when I'm not purposefully trying to be serious.

Hellow Lesswrong! (I posted this in the other July2012 welcome thread aswell. :P Though apparently it has too many comments at this point or something to that effect.)

My name is Ryan and I am a 22 year old technical artist in the Video Game industry. I recently graduated with honors from the Visual Effects program at Savannah College of Art and Design. For those who don't know much about the industry I am in, my skill set is somewhere between a software programmer, a 3D artist, and a video editor. I write code to create tools to speed up workflows for the 3D things I or others need to do to make a game, or cinematic.

Now I found lesswrong.com through the Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality podcast. Up unto that point I had never heard of Rationalism as a current state of being... so far I greatly resonate with the goals and lessons that have come up in the podcast, and what I have seen about rationalism. I am excited to learn more.

I wouldn't go so far to claim the label for myself as of yet, as I don't know enough and I don't particularly like labels for the most part. I also know that I have several biases, I feel like I know the reasons and causes for most, but I have not removed them from my determinative process.

Furthermore I am not an atheist, nor am I a theist. I have chosen to let others figure out and solve the questions of sentient creators through science, and I am no more qualified to disprove a religious belief than I would be to perform surgery... on anything. I just try to leave religion out of most of my determinations.

Anyway! I'm looking forward to reading and discussing more with all of you!

Current soapbox: Educational System of de-emphasizing critical thinking skills.

If you are interested you can check out my artwork and tools at www.ryandowlingsoka.com

Hello,

My name is Trent Fowler. I started leaning toward scientific and rational thinking while still a child, thanks in part to a variety of aphorisms my father was fond of saying. Things like "think for yourself" and "question your own beliefs" are too general to be very useful in particular circumstances, but were instrumental in fostering in me a skepticism and respect for good argument that has persisted all my life (I'm 23 as of this writing). These tools are what allowed me to abandon the religion I was brought up in as a child, and to eventually begin salvaging the bits of it that are worth salvaging. Like many atheists, when I first dropped religion I dropped every last thing associated with it. I've since grown to appreciate practices like meditation, ritual, and even outright mysticism as techniques which are valuable and pursuable in a secular context.

What I've just described is basically the rationality equivalent of lifting weights twice a week and going for a brisk walk in the mornings. It's great for a beginner, but anyone who sticks with it long enough will start to get a glimpse of what's achievable by systematizing training and ramping up the intensity. World-class martial artists, olympic powerlifters, and ultramarathoners may seem like demi-gods to the weekend warriors, but a huge amount of what they've accomplished is attributable to hard work and dedication (with a dash of luck and genetics, of course).

The Bruce Lees of the mind, however, are more than just role models. They're the people who will look extinction risk square in the face and start figuring out how to actually the problems. They're the people who will build transhuman AIs, extinguish death, probe the bedrock of reality, and fling human civilization into deep-space. As the dojo is to the apprentice, so is Less Wrong to the aspiring rationalist.

Sadly, when I was gripped rather suddenly by a fascination with math and physics as a child, there was not enough in the way of books, support, and instruction to get the prodigy-fires burning. To this day deep math and physics remain and interesting but largely inscrutable realm of human knowledge. But I'm still young enough that with hard work and dedication I could be a Bostrom or a Yudkowsky, especially if I manage to scramble onto their shoulders.

So here I am, ready to sharpen the blade of my thinking, that it may more effectively be turned to both pondering metaphysical quandaries and solving problems that threaten our collective future. I am excited by the prospects, and hope I am up to the challenge.

I am Yan Zhang, a mathematics grad student specializing in combinatorics at MIT (and soon to work at UC Berkeley after graduation) and co-founder of Vivana.com. I was involved with building the first year of SPARC. There, I met many cool people at CFAR, for which I'm now a curicculum consultant.

I don't know much about LW but have liked some of the things I have read here; AnnaSalamon described me as a "street rationalist" because my own rationality principles are home-grown from a mix of other communities and hobbies. In that sense, I'm happy to step foot into this "mainstream dojo" and learn your language.

Recently Anna suggested I may want to cross-post something I wrote to LW and I've always wanted to get to know the community better, so this is the first step, I suppose. I look forward to learning from all of you.

Hi,

My name is Hannah. I'm an American living in Oslo, Norway (my husband is Norwegian). I am 24 (soon to be 25) years old. I am currently unemployed, but I have a bachelor's degree in Psychology from Truman State University. My intention is to find a job working at a day care, at least until I have children of my own. When that happens, I intend to be a stay-at-home mother and homeschool my children. Anything beyond that is too far into the future to be worth trying to figure out at this point in my life.

I was referred to LessWrong by some German guy on OkCupid. I don't know his name or who he is or anything about him, really, and I don't know why he messaged me randomly. I suppose something in my profile seemed to indicate that I might like it here or might already be familiar with it, and that sparked his interest. I really can't say. I just got a message asking if I was familiar with LessWrong or Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality (which I was not), and if so, what I thought of them. So I decided to check them out. I thought the HP fanfiction was excellent, and I've been reading through some of the major series here for the past week or so. At one point I had a comment I wanted to make, so I decided to join in order to be able to post the comment. I figure I may as well be part of the group, since I am interested in continuing reading and discussing here. :-)

As for more about my background in rationality and such, I like to think I've always been oriented towards rationality. Well, when I was younger I was probably less adept at reasoning and certainly less aware of cognitive biases and such, but I've always believed in following the evidence to find the truth. That's something I think my mother helped to instill in me. My acute interest in rationality, however, probably occurred when I was around 18-19 years old. It was at this point that I became an atheist and also when I began Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy.

I had been raised as a Christian, more or less. My mother is very religious, but also very intelligent, and she believes fervently in following the evidence wherever it leads (despite the fact that, in practice, she does not actually do this). The shift in my religious perspective initially occurred around when I first began dating my husband. He was not religious, and I had the idea in my head that it was important that he be religious, in order for us to be properly compatible. But I observed that he was very open-minded and sensible, so I believed that the only requirement for him to become a Christian was for me to formulate a sufficiently compelling argument for why it was the true religion. And if this had been possible, it's likely he would have converted, but alas, this was a task I could not succeed at. It was by examining my own religion and trying to answer his honest questions that I came to realize that I didn't actually know what any good reasons for being a Christian were, and that I had merely assumed there must be good reasons, since my mother and many other intelligent relgious people that I knew were convinced of the religion. So I tried to find out what these reasons were, and they came up lacking.

When I found that I couldn't find any obvious reasons that Christianity had to be the right religion, I realized that I didn't have enough information to come to that conclusion. When I reflected on all my religious beliefs, it occured to me that I didn't even know where most of them came from. So I decided to throw everything out the window and start from scratch. This was somewhat difficult for me emotionally, since I was honestly afraid that I was giving up something important that I might not get back. I mean, what if Christianity were the true religion and I gave it up and never came back? So I prayed to God (whichever god(s) he was, if any) to lead me on a path towards the truth. I figured if I followed evidence and reason, then I would end up at the truth, whatever it was. If that meant losing my religion, then my religion wasn't worth having. I trusted that anything worth believing would come back to me. And that even if I was led astray and ended up believing the wrong thing, God would judge me based on my intent and on my deeds. A god who is good will not punish me for seeking the truth, even if I am unsuccessful in my quest. And a god who is not good is not worth worshipping. I know this idea has been voiced by many others before me, but for me this was an original conclusion at the time, not something I'd heard as a quote from someone else.

Another pertinent influence of rationality on my life occured during my second year of college. I had decided to see a counselor for problems with anxiety and depression. The therapy that counselor used was Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy, and we often engaged in a lot of meaningful discussions. I found the therapy and that particular approach extremely helpful in managing my emotions and excellent practice in thinking rationally. I think it really helped me become a better thinker in addition to being more emotionally stable.

So it's been sort of a cumulative effect, losing my religion, going to college, going through counseling, etc. As I get older, I expose myself to more and more ideas (mostly through reading, but also through some discussion) and I feel that I get better and better at reasoning, understanding biases, and being more rational. A lot of the things I've read here are things that I had either encountered before or seemed obvious to me already. Although, there is plenty of new stuff too. So I feel that this community will be a good fit for me, and I hope that I will be a positive addition to it.

I have a lot of unorthodox ideas and such that I'd be happy to discuss. My interests are parenting (roughly in line with Unconditional Parenting by Alfie Kohn), schooling/education (I support a Sudbury type model), diet (I'm paleo), relationships (I don't follow anyone here; I've got my own ideas in this area), emotions and emotional regulation (REBT, humanistic approach, and my own experience/ideas) and pretty much anything about or related to psychology (I'm reasonably educated in this area, but I can always learn more!). I'm open to having my ideas challenged and I don't shy away from changing my mind when the evidence points in the opposite direction. I used to have more of a problem with this, in so far as I was concerned about saving face (I didn't want to look bad by publicly admitting I was wrong, even if I privately realized it), but I've since reasoned that changing my mind is actually a better way of saving face. You look a lot stupider clinging to a demonstrably wrong position than simply admitting that you were mistaken and changing your ideas accordingly.

Anyway, I hope that wasn't too long an introduction. I have a tendency to write a lot and invest a lot of time and effort in to my writings. I care a lot about effective communication, and I like to think I'm good at expressing myself and explaining things. That seems to be something valued here too, so that's good.

Hello LW,

Last Thursday, I was asked by User:rocurley if, in his absence, I wanted to organize a hiking event (originally my idea) for this week's DC metro area meetup, during which I discovered I could not make posts, etc. here because I had zero karma. I chose to cancel the meetup on account of weather. I had registered my account previously, but realizing that I might have need to post here in the future, and that I had next to nothing to lose, I have decided to introduce myself finally.

I discovered LW through HPMOR, through Tvtropes, I believe. I've read some LW articles, but not others. Areas of interest include sciences (I have a BS in physics), psychology, personality disorders, some areas of philosophy, reading, and generally learning new things. One of my favorite books (if not /the/ favorite) is Godel, Escher, Bach, which I read for the first (and certainly not last) time while I was in college, 5+ years ago.

I'm extremely introverted, and I am aware that I have certain anxiety issues; while rationality has not helped with the actual feeling of anxiety, it has allowed me to push through it, in some cases.

I got into a community of intelligent, creative free-thinkers by reading fan fiction of all things.

You know the one.

Anyway, my knowledge of what is collectively referred to as Rationality is slim. I read the first 6 pages of The Sequences, felt like I was cheating on a test, and stopped. I'll try to make up for it with some of the most unnecessarily theatrical and hammy writing I can get away with.

I love word play, and over the course of a year I offered (as a way of apology) to owe my friend a quarter for every time I improvised a pun or awful joke mid-conversation, by the end of which I could have bought a dinner for him at Pizza Delight- I didn't. It's on my to-do list to compile all the wises that Carlos Ramon ever cracked on The Magic School Bus and put it on you tube, because no one else has and it needs to be done, damn it. As you can tell, I sometimes write for it's own sake, sort of a literary hedonist if you will. But all good things must come to an end...

My greatest principle is that a person's course in life is governed by their reaction to their circumstance, and that nothing at all is of certainty. The nature of the human mind is a process which our current metaphors and models can only approximate, a physical system adjusting itself, which words like "I", "our" and "qualia" can only activate whatever concept we have to answer the question of "What". Because of this, I have a great sympathy towards Eastern spirituality and some Christian mysticism, because they have the spirit of what we're all trying to accomplish here; to answer a question.

Sometimes I end up in the psychological equivalence of a fractal zoom where philosophy has this impossible to divide property, of all things linking to others without there being any elementary axioms or parts, probably because of that whole "brain made of neurons" racket. I concluded that emotions are just another form of sense; love, curiosity and understanding being reactions and sensory input much like taste and touch. Happily any cognitive dissonance or emptiness can be discarded the same way, and the logical contradiction a property of the purely physical (rather than comforting "conceptual") nature of our very thought, meaning that I'll simultaneously accept the objective truth of this, but reject any emotional significance, as emotional significance is itself deconstructed as a concept.

Of course the empathy gap and the nature of attention span (or at least my attention span) means that I'm normally not like this unless triggered. To me, regular life is the reaction of our psyche, broken up occasionally by the temporary delusion that a fractal zoom of philosophy can answer my questions. I call this a "delusion" because the concept of a question to be answered is an extraneous layer added to by an entity which just wants to avoid suffering.

The human mind; a non-linear physical system which tries to evaluate itself with a linear processing system that's not suited to that sort of thing at all. Sometimes I wonder if who we are is just the sum of five or six different personalities, each with about a fifth of sixth of our functioning, plus a heavy specialization in one type of behaviour, the sum of which is an idea of what is right and wrong with a sense of identity. Given the existence of neural pathways in our spinal column, I wouldn't be surprised. Sometimes I feel like I can feel the shape of our brains based on this, but that's probably just me connecting concepts to high school biology.

I went off the rails a bit there, but looking back, I figure this should be a more honest introduction from me than any structured post. Even so, I doubt I can really convey that kind of leg twisting logical insanity without the meaning being hallowed by interpretation and pattern recognition.

Ugh, I feel like there wasn't a speck of relate-ability there at all. Well, I'm eighteen years old and male. I followed the My Little Pony following out of a combination of boredom, fascination and a love of the bizarre. The show never struck a chord with me at all, really, but the fandom was something else. There was a period of about a month where I read crossover fan fictions, but I couldn't be bothered after that point, because the fandom's growth wound down and the novelty was gone. Even so, Nine Knackered Souls is the funniest fan fiction I've ever read, a Red vs Blue crossover. Fallout Equestria is the longest and most "so-okay-it's average" fan fiction, despite the fact that I was drawn in enough to overlook the Mary sue aspects and read the whole thing in like four days in one sitting...

I'm going into Computer Science at Dalhousie University, and CSci being what it is, I'm going to make up my path as I go along. I really don't know enough about robotics, AI or informatics to make the choice between them right now anyway.

Hello. I am from Istanbul, Turkey (A Turkish Citizen born and raised). I came across LessWrong on a popular Turkish website called EkşiSözlük. Since then, this is the place I checked to see what's new when there's nothing worth reading on Google Reader and I have time. (So long posts you have!)

I am 31 years old and I have a BSc in Computer Science and MSc in Computational Sciences (Research on Bioinformatics). But then, like most of the people in my country does, I've landed upon a job where I can't utilize any of these information. Information Security :)

Why did I complain about my job? Here is why:

I've been long since looking for "the best way to have lived a life". What I mean by this is, I have to say, at the moment of death "I lived my life the best way I could, and I can die blissfully". This may come off a bit cliché but bear in mind that I'm relatively new to this rationality thing.

While I was learning Computer Science for the first time, I saw there was great opportunity in relating computational sciences to social sciences so as to understand inner workings of human beings. This I realised when the Law&Ethics instructor asked us to write an essay on what would be "the best way to live your life" and I was then learning "Greedy Algorithms" Granted there would be many gaps in my arguments but my case was like this: "You can't predict how long you will live. So the best way to search for the (sub)optimal life was to utilize a greedy algorithm. That is, at every decision point, you have to select the best alternative that maximizes your utility at that time." You soon come to learn that this is easier said than done. (No long term goals, no relationships.. etc) And greedy algorithms may generate a sub-optimal solution, rather than the optimal solution (because you have at one point chosen the wrong path since you didn't consider leaving this far)

I currently suspect that Bayesian (Or Laplacian maybe? ) methods may have the best luck to increase the possibility that I live a good life. I wrote all over the place, but one last thing I want to add.

I do not believe an afterlife or a soul for that matter. This has happened very recently relative to most of you. So, I was constantly looking for a "rational" justification for continuing living a good life . I am on the verge of giving up looking, since there seems to be nothing to find, and just living. Which is a little sad actually, since I still have the feeling that I could probably do something great with my life. But then constant questioning seems to also lead to a sub-optimal life. (May be with an even lower utility than greedy algorithm) I guess, what I am trying to say is I am on the verge of becoming a hedonist..

I'd love to learn your ideas or reading recommendations on how best to live a life. I'd also love to organize meetups of rationalists in Turkey.

P.S. If you haven't seen yet, there's a book called "The theory that would not die", which is an excellent source on many (and I mean it when I say many) things Bayesian.

Hello. I've read sequence articles and discussion off this website for a while now. Been hesitant to join before because I like to keep my identity small but recently realized that being able to talk to others about topics on this site will make me more effective at reaching my goals.

Armchairs are very comfortable and I'm having some mental difficulty putting the effort into the practice of achieving set goals. It's very hard to actually do stuff and easy to just read about interesting topics without engaging.

I'm interested more in meta-ethics than in physics, more in decision theory than practical AI. My first comments will likely be in the sequences or in discussion comments of a few specific natures.

This should be fun, I look forward to talking with you. Ask me any questions that arouse your curiosity.

The browsing experience with Kibitzing off is strange but not unpleasant. How long did it take for you to get accustomed to it?

Hi, I'm Liz.

I'm a senior at a college in the US, soon to graduate with a double major in physics and economics, and then (hopefully) pursue a PhD in economics. I like computer science and math too. I'm hoping to do research in economic development, but more relevantly to LW, I'm pretty interested in behavioral economics and in econometrics (statistics). Out of the uncommon beliefs I hold, the one that most affects my life is that since I can greatly help others at a small cost to myself, I should; I donate whatever extra money I have to charity, although it's not much. (see givingwhatwecan.org)

I think I started behaving as a rationalist (without that word) when I became an atheist near the end of high school. But to rewind...

I was raised Christian, but Christianity was always more of a miserable duty than a comfort to me. I disliked the music and the long services and the awkward social interactions. I became an atheist for no good reason in the beginning of high school, but being an atheist was terrible. There was no one to forgive me when I screwed up, or pray to when the world was unbearably awful. My lack of faith made my father sad. Then, lying in bed and angsting about free will one night, I had some philosophical revelation, and it seemed that God must exist. I couldn't re-explain the revelation to myself, but I clung to the result and became seriously religious for the next year or so. But objections to the major strands of theism began to creep up on me. I wanted to believe in God, and I wanted to know the truth, and I found out that (surprise) having an ideal set of beliefs isn't compatible with seeking truth. I did lots of reading (mostly old-school philosophy), slowly changed my mind, then came out as an atheist (to close friends only) once the Bible Quiz season was over. (awk.)

At that point I decided to never lie to myself again. Not just to avoid comforting half-truths, but to actively question all beliefs I held, and to act on whatever conclusions I come to. After hard practice, unrelenting honesty towards myself is a habit I can't break, but I'm not sure it's actually a good policy. For example, a few white lies would've helped me move past a situation of extreme guilt last year.

Anyway, more recently, I read HPMOR and I'm now reading Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow. I'm slowly working through the Sequences too. I always appreciate new reading recommendations.

I have some thoughts on Newcomb's Paradox. (Of course I am new to this, probably way off base, etc.) I think two boxes is the right way to go, and it seems that intuition towards one-boxing often comes from the idea that your decision somehow changes the contents of the boxes. (No reverse causality is supposed to be assumed, right?) Say that instead of an infallible superintelligence, the story changes to

"You go to visit your friend Ann, and her mom pulls you into the kitchen, where two boxes are sitting on a table. She tells you that box A has either $1 billion or $0, and box B has $1,000. She says you can take both boxes or just A, and that if she predicted you take box B she didn't put anything in A. She has done this to 100 of Anne's friends and has only been wrong for one of them. She is a great predictor because she has been spying on your philosophy class and reading your essays."

Terribly small sample size, but a friend told me this changes his answer from one box to two. As far as I can tell these changes are aesthetic and make the story clearer without changing the philosophy.

And, a question. Why is Bayes so central to this site? I use Bayesian reasoning regularly, but I learned Bayes' Theorem around the time I started thinking seriously about anything, so I'm not clear on what the alternative is. Why do y'all celebrate Bayes, rather than algebra or well-designed experiments?

Edit: Read farther in Thinking, Fast and Slow; question answered.

I'm Mike Johnson. I'd estimate I come across a reference to LW from trustworthy sources every couple of weeks, and after working my way through the sequences it feels like the good outweighs the bad and it's worth investing time into.

My background is in philosophy, evolution, and neural nets for market prediction; I presently write, consult, and am in an early-stage tech startup. Perhaps my highwater mark in community exposure has been a critique of the word Transhumanist at Accelerating Future. In the following years, my experience has been more mixed, but I appreciate the topics and tools being developed even if the community seems a tad insular. If I had to wear some established thinkers on my sleeve I'd choose Paul Graham, Lawrence Lessig, Steve Sailer, Gregory Cochran, Roy Baumeister, and Peter Thiel. (I originally had a comment here about having an irrational attraction toward humility, but on second thought, that might rule out Gregory "If I have seen farther than others, it's because I'm knee-deep in dwarves" Cochran… Hmm.)

Cards-on-the-table, it's my impression that

(1) Lesswrong and SIAI are doing cool things that aren't being done anywhere else (this is not faint praise);

(2) The basic problem of FAI as stated by SIAI is genuine;

(3) SIAI is a lightning rod for trolls and cranks, which is really detrimental to the organization (the metaphor of autoimmune disease comes to mind) and seems partly its own fault;

(4) Much of the work being done by SIAI and LW will turn out to be a dead-end. Granted, this is true everywhere, but in particular I'm worried that axiomatic approaches to verifiable friendliness will prove brittle and inapplicable (I do not currently have an alternative);

(5) SIAI has an insufficient appreciation for realpolitik;

(6) SIAI and LW seem to have a certain distaste for research on biologically-inspired AGI, due in parts to safety concerns, an organizational lack of expertise in the area, and (in my view) ontological/metaphysical preference. I believe this distaste is overly limiting and also leads to incorrect conclusions.

Many of these impressions may be wrong. I aim to explore the site, learn, change my mind if I'm wrong, and hopefully contribute. I appreciate the opportunity, and I hope my unvarnished thoughts here haven't soured my welcome. Hello!

Hello everyone, Like many people, I come to this site via an interest in transhumanism, although it seems unlikely to me that FAI implementing CEV can actually be designed before the singularity (I can explain why, and possibly even what could be done instead, but it suddenly occurred to me that it seems presumptuous of me to criticize a theory put forward by very smart people when I only have 1 karma...).

Oddly enough, I am not interested in improving epistemic rationality right now, partially because I am already quite good at it. But more than that, I am trying to switch it off when talking to other people, for the simple reason (and I'm sure this has already been pointed out before) that if you compare three people, one who estimates the probability of an event at 110%, one who estimates it at 90%, and one who compensates for overconfidence bias and estimates it at 65%, the first two will win friends and influence people, while the third will seem indecisive (unless they are talking to other rationalists). I think I am borderline asperger's (again, like many people here) and optimizing social skills probably takes precedence over most other things.

I am currently doing a PhD in "absurdly simplistic computational modeling of the blatantly obvious" which better damn well have some signaling value. In my spare time, to stop my brain turning to mush, among other things I am writing a story which is sort of rationalist, in that some of the characters keep using science effectively even when the world is going crazy and the laws of physics seem to change dependent upon whether you believe in them. On the other hand, some of the characters are (a) heroes/heroines (b) awesomely successful (c) hippies on acid who do not believe in objective reality (not that I am implying that all hippies/people who use lsd are irrational). Maybe the point of the story is that you need more than just rationality? Or that some people are powerful because of rationality, while others have imagination, and that friendship combines their powers in a my little pony like fashion? Or maybe its all just an excuse for pretentious philosophy and psychic battles?

Hi! Given how much time I've spent reading this site and its relatives, this post is overdue.

I'm 35, male, British and London-based, with a professional background in IT. I was raised Catholic, but when I was about 12, I had a de-conversion experience while in church. I remember leaving the pew during mass to go to the toilet, then walking back down the aisle during the eucharist, watching the priest moving stuff around the altar. It suddenly struck me as weird that so many people had gathered to watch a man in a funny dress pour stuff from one cup to another. So I identified as atheist or humanist for a long time. I can't remember any incident that made me start to identify as a rationalist, but I've been increasingly interested in evidence, biases and knowledge for over ten years now.

I've been lucky, I think, to have some breadth in my education: I studied Physics & Philosophy as an undergrad, Computer Science as a postgrad, and more recently rounded that off with an MBA. This gives me a handy toolset for approaching new problems, I think. I definitely want to learn more statistics though - it feels like there's a big gap in the arsenal.

There are a few stand-out things I have picked out from LW and OB so far. "Noticing that I am confused", and running toward that feeling rather than away from it, has helped at work. "Dissolving the question" has helped me to clarify some problems, and I'd like to be better at it. The material on how words can mislead has helped me to pay more attention to what people mean in discussion.

Non-rationality stuff: my lust to learn new things runs ahead of my ability to follow through, so I have far too many books! Like many people here, I have akrasia issues. I am interested in what can be done to improve quantity and quality of life, as well as productivity, including fitness and mindfulness meditation. Lastly, I'm taking a long trip to LA, flying on August 1, and I'd like to meet up with the LW community there.

Background:

21-year old transgender-neither. I spent 13 years enveloped by Mormon culture and ideology, growing up in a sheltered environment. Then, everything changed when the Fire nation attacked.

Woops. Off-track.

I want my actions to matter, not from others remembering them but from me being alive to remember them . In simpler terms, I want to live for a long time - maybe forever. Death should be a choice, not an unchanging eventuality.

But I don't know where to start; I feel overwhelmed by all the things I need to learn.

So I've come here. I'm reading the sequences and trying to get a better grasp on thinking rationally, etc., but was hoping to get pointers from the more experienced.

What is needed right now? I want to do what I can to help not only myself, but those whose paths I cross.

~Jenna

My name is Itai Bar-Natan. I have been lurking here for a long time, more recently I start posting some things, but only now do I formally introduce myself.

I am in grade 11, and I began reading less wrong at grade 8 (introduced by Scott Aaronson's blog). I am a former math prodigy, and am currently taking one graduate-level course in it. This is the first time I am learning math under the school system (although I not the first time I attended math classes under the school system). Before that, I would learn from my parents, who are both mathematicians, or (later on) from books and internet articles.

Heedless of Feynman, I believe I understand quantum mechanics.

One weakness I am working to improve on is the inability to write in large quantities.

I have a blog here: http://itaibn.wordpress.com/

I consider less wrong as a fun time-waster and a community which is relatively sane.

I'm Robby Oliphant. I started a few months ago reading HP:MoR, which led me to the Sequences, which led me here about two weeks ago. So far I have read comments and discussions solely as a spectator. But finally, after developing my understanding and beginning on the path set forth by the sequences, I remain silent no more.

I am fresh out of high school, excited about life and plan to become a teacher, eventually. My short-term plans involve going out and doing missionary work for my church for the next two years. When I came head on against the problem of being a rationalist and a missionary for a theology, I took a step back and had a crisis of belief, not the first time, but this time I followed the prescribed method and came to a modified conclusion, though I still find it rational and advantageous to serve my 2 year mission.

I find some of this difficult, some of this intuitive and some of this neither difficult or intuitive, which is extremely frustrating, how something can appears simple but defy my efforts to intuitively work it. I will continue to work at it because rationality seems to be praiseworthy and useful. I hope to find the best evidence about theology here. I don't mean evidence for or against, just the evidence about the subject.