Excellent idea for a thread.
I'm a moderately frequent commenter and very occasional poster here, reading since the beginning.
In the 1970s I studied pure mathematics as an undergraduate and theoretical computer science as a postgrad, and then worked in the latter field for some years. However, I now regard all the work I did there as a waste of time, despite the citation counts, and since around 1996 began to move into more practical areas.
I got interested in control theory and the particular subfield that has been the subject of most of my top-level posts here (intro), and have developed in physical simulation a walking robot based on those principles.
I've also developed software for script-driven real time procedural animation of human upper body movement as part of a project for animating deaf sign language. I think it works pretty well, and I'd love to extend it to more general animation for the obvious application area, video games -- with all respect to the deaf, animated sign language is very much a niche application. I haven't had time to seriously work on this, since what actually pays my salary at present is developing finite element methods and software for simulating biological organ growth.
I also wrote the article on artificial languages for the 3rd edition of the Routledge Linguistics Encyclopedia, and was the Klingon consultant for series 7 of "Big Brother". ghImlu'meH QaQ jaj vaghdich!
I'm currently studying stochastic calculus with a view to figuring out just what, if anything, classical control theory and Bayesian reasoning have to do with each other.
If this sounds like a resume touting for work, it's intended to. :-)
We have recently obtained evidence that a number of people, some with quite interesting backgrounds and areas of expertise, find LessWrong an interesting read but find limited opportunities to contribute.
This post is an invitation to engage, in relative safety but just a little beyond saying "Hi, I'm a lurker". Even that little is appreciated, to be sure, and it's OK for anyone who feels the slightest bit intimidated to remain on the sidelines. However, I'm confident that most readers will find it quite easy to answer at least the first of the following questions:
...and possibly these follow-ups:
Comments like the following, from the "Attention Lurkers" thread, suggest untapped resources:
My own area of professional expertise is computer programming - perhaps one of the common sub-populations here. I'm also a parent, and have been a beneficiary of prenatal diagnosis (toxoplasmosis: turned out not to be a big deal, but it might have been). My curiosity is often engaged by what goes on "behind the scenes" of the professions I interact with as an ordinary citizen.
Yes, I would be quite interested in striking up a conversation about applying the tools discussed here to prenatal diagnosis; or in a conversation about which conceptual tools that I don't know about yet turn out to be useful in dealing with the epistemic or ethical issues in prenatal diagnosis.
Metaphorically, the intent of this post is to provide a marketplace. We already have the "Where are we?" thread, which makes it easier for LessWrongers close to each other to meet up if they want to. ("Welcome to LessWrong" is the place to collect biographical information, but it specifically emphasizes the "rationalist" side of people, rather than their professional knowledge.)
In a similar spirit, please post a comment here offering (or requesting) domain-specific insights. My hunch is, we'll find that even those of us in professions that don't seem related to the topics covered here have more to contribute than they think; my hope is that this comment thread will be a valuable resource in the future.
A secondary intent of this post is to provide newcomers and lurkers with one more place where contributing can be expected to be safe from karma penalties - simply answer one of the questions that probably comes up most often when meeting strangers: "What do you do?". :)
(P.S. If you've read this far and are disappointed with the absence of any jokes about "yet another fundamental question", thank you for your attention, and please accept this apophasis as a consolation gift.)