Well, one reason why I feel that I need someone to follow is... severe underconfidence in my ability to make decisions on my own. I'm still working on that. Choosing a person to follow, and then following them, feels a whole lot easier than forging my own path.

I should mention again that I'm not actually "following" Eliezer in the traditional sense. I used his value system to bootstrap my own value system, greatly simplifying the process of recovering from christianity. But now that I've mostly finished with that (or maybe I'm still far from finished?), I am, in fact, starting to think independently. It's taking a long time for me to do this, but I am constantly looking for things that I'm doing or believing just because someone else told me to, and then reconsidering whether these things are a good idea, according to my current values and beliefs. And yes, there are some things I disagree with Eliezer about (the "true ending" to TWC, for example), and things that I disagree with SIAI about ("we're the only place worth donating to", for example). I'll probably start writing more about this, now that I'm starting to get over my irrational fear of posting comments here.

Though part of me is still worried about making SIAI look bad. And I'm still worried that the stuff I've already posted may end up harming SIAI's mission (and my mission) more than it could possibly have helped. Though of course it would be a bad idea to try to hide problems that need to be examined and dealt with. And the idea of deliberately trying to hide information just feels wrong. It feels like Dark Arts. I should also mention that the idea of deliberately not saying things, in order to avoid making the group look bad, isn't actually something I was told by anyone from SIAI, I think it was a bad habit I brought with me from christianity.