I have always been reasonably intelligent (my current IQ (not from internet tests) hovers somewhere around mensa levels) and I have always been incredibly curious. These two traits has led me to always figgure out on my own, all the things I was supposed to learn in shcool in advance; I have always been at least a year ahead in mathematics and natural sciences, and I still am.
This does of course pose a slight problem when I have not been the same way in many, many other areas, and the kicker is that my parents never ever have heard of motivational psychology.
This has, as of my current analysis, led me to in my childhood and early teens believe that I was a lazy no good slob who was somehow broken in the "free will" department. Not that these beliefs ever were overt, it seems that it makes a lot of sense in hindsight as I have always been prone to dips in my self esteem.
It is only in the recent few months of discovering LW that I have found out: "Hey, I'm not broken, just ignorant." And fortunately ignorance has a cure.
If my parents had raised me to have a work ethic instead of not having one, I would probably have been in substantially better standing by now. I am a so far a nigh genius who can only barely coerce himself to work with anything not immediately interesting.
A waste? probably. Are there still hope for me? definitely.
Much of it is mitigated by the fact that I am 19 years old and my parents truly are loving and caring, but none the less they raised me suboptimally.
Also, if your parents thought that your being intelligent was extremely important, you may have concluded that you'd only get praise for what you could do easily.
This article is a deliberate meta-troll. To be successful I need your trolling cooperation. Now hear me out.
In The Strangest Thing An AI Could Tell You Eliezer talks about asognostics, who have one of their arm paralyzed, and what's most interesting are in absolute denial of this - in spite of overwhelming evidence that their arm is paralyzed they will just come with new and new rationalizations proving it's not.
Doesn't it sound like someone else we know? Yes, religious people! In spite of heaps of empirical evidence against existence of their particular flavour of the supernatural, internal inconsistency of their beliefs, and perfectly plausible alternative explanations being well known, something between 90% and 98% of humans believe in the supernatural world, and is in a state of absolute denial not too dissimilar to one of asognostics. Perhaps as many as billions of people in history have even been willing to die for their absurd beliefs.
We are mostly atheists here - we happen not to share this particular delusion. But please consider an outside view for a moment - how likely is it that unlike almost everyone else we don't have any other such delusions, for which we're in absolute denial of truth in spite of mounting heaps of evidence?
If the delusion is of the kind that all of us share it, we won't be able to find it without building an AI. We might have some of those - it's not too unlikely as we're a small and self-selected group.
What I want you to do is try to trigger absolute denial macro in your fellow rationalists! Is there anything that you consider proven beyond any possibility of doubt by both empirical evidence and pure logic, and yet saying it triggers automatic stream of rationalizations in other people? Yes, I pretty much ask you to troll, but it's a good kind of trolling, and I cannot think of any other way to find our delusions.