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Mitchell_Porter20

If a world splits, the energy of each split-off world would have to be less than the original world.

No, you are misunderstanding the argument. I am a MWI opponent but I know you are getting this wrong. If we switch to orthodox QM for a moment, and ask what the energy of a generic superposition is, the closest thing to an answer is to talk about the expectation value of the energy observable for that wavefunction. This is a weighted average of the energy eigenvalues appearing in the superposition. For example, for the superposition 1/sqrt(2) |E=E1> + 1/sqrt(2) |E=E2>, the expectation value is E1/2 + E2/2. What Q22 in the Everett FAQ is saying is that the expectation value won't apriori increase, even if new worlds are being created within the wavefunction, because the expectation value is the weighted average of the energies of the individual worlds; and in fact the expectation value will not change at all (something you can prove in a variety of ways).

To use an extreme example, that's supposed to be why you can't see anyone in a world where the Nazis won WWII: That part of the wavefunction is so decoherent from yours that any interference is just random noise and there is therefore no meaningful interference.

Well, this is another issue where, if I was talking to a skilled MWI advocate, I might be able to ask some probing questions, because there is a potential inconsistency in the application of these concepts. Usually when we talk about interference between branches of the wavefunction, it means that there are two regions in (say) configuration space, each of which has some amplitude, and there is some flow of probability amplitude from one region into the other. But this flow does not exist at the level of configurations, it only occurs at the level of configuration amplitudes. So if "my world", "this world", where the Nazis lost, is one configuration, and the world where the Nazis won is another configuration, there is no way for our configuration to suddenly resemble the other configuration on account of such a flow - that is a confusion of levels.

For me to observe interference phenomena, I have to be outside the superposition. But I wasn't even born when WWII was decided, so I am intrinsically stuck in one branch. Maybe this is a quibble; we could talk about something that happened after my birth, like the 2000 US election. I live in a world where Bush won; but in principle could I see interference from a world where Gore won? I still don't think it makes sense; the fact that I remember Bush winning means that I'm in that branch; I would have to lose the memory for the probability flow here to come into contact with the probability flow in a branch where Gore won. More importantly, the whole world configuration would have to morph until it came to resemble a world where Gore won, for some portion of the probability flow "here" to combine with the probability flow there.

I'll try to explain what I'm talking about. The wavefunction consists of a complex-valued function defined throughout configuration space. Configuration space consists of static total configurations of the universe. Change exists only at the level of the complex numbers; where they are large, you have a "peak" in the wavefunction, and these peaks move around in configuration space, split and join, and so on. So really, it ought to be a mistake to think of configurations per se as the worlds; instead, you should perhaps be thinking about the "peaks", the local wavepackets in configuration space, as worlds. Except, a peak can have a spread in configuration space. A single peak can be more like a "ridge" stretching between configurations which are classically inconsistent. This already poses problems of interpretation, as does the lack of clear boundaries to a peak... Are we going to say that a world consists of any portion of the wavefunction centered on a peak - a local maximum - and bounded by regions where the gradient is flat??

But here I can only throw up my hands and express my chronic exasperation with the fuzzy thinking behind many worlds. It is impossible to intelligently critique an idea when the exponent of the idea hasn't finished specifying it and doesn't even realize that they need to do more work. And then you have laypeople who take up the unfinished idea and advocate it, who are even more oblivious to the problems, and certainly incapable of answering them.

Paul, if I could convey to you one perspective on MWI, it would be as follows: Most people who talk about MWI do not have an exact definition of what a world is. Instead, it's really an ideology, or a way of speaking: QM has superpositions in it, and the slogan is that everything in the superposition is real. But if this is to be an actual theory of the world, and not just an idea for a theory, you have to be more concrete. You have to say exactly what parts of a wavefunction are the worlds. And when you do this, you face new problems, e.g. to do with relativity and probability. The exact nature of the problems depends on how the MWI idea is concretized. But if you give me any concrete, detailed version of MWI, I can tell you what's wrong with it.

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wnoise00

First, let me say beautifully clear explanation of what MWI is and especially what questions it needs to answer.

Except, a peak can have a spread in configuration space. A single peak can be more like a "ridge" stretching between configurations which are classically inconsistent. This already poses problems of interpretation, as does the lack of clear boundaries to a peak... Are we going to say that a world consists of any portion of the wavefunction centered on a peak - a local maximum - and bounded by regions where the gradient is flat??

I do... (read more)

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0PaulAlmond
I do admit to over-generalizing in saying that when a world splits, the split-off worlds each HAVE to have lower energy than the "original world". If we measure the energy associated with the wavefunction for individual worlds, on average, of course, this would have to be the case, due to the proliferation of worlds: However, I do understand, and should have stated, that all that matters is that the total energy for the system remains constant over time, and that probabilities matter. Regarding the second issue, defining what a world is, I actually do understand your point: I feel that you think I understand less on this than is actually the case. Nevertheless, I would say that getting rid of a need for collapse does mean a lot and removes a lot of issues: more than are added with the "What constitutes a world" issue. However, we probably do need a "more-skilled MWI advocate" to deal with that.
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[-]Luke_A_Somers390

Hello!

I'm a 32 year old physics PhD, working (so far) on the oh-so-fashionable subfield of graphene and carbon nanotubes. I took Quantum field theory, which is a little unusual for an experimentalist (though not positively rare). I have a background in programming, and a moderate degree of interest in AI.

I came here by way of the Methods of Rationality. After reading that, and upon seeing that there was a sequence on quantum mechanics, I had a suspicion that it wouldn't be terrible. This suspicion was vastly exceeded. I never encountered the slightest technical flaw, which is better than many physicists can produce on the subject, let alone philosophers and amateur physicists.

I began wandering and seeing what else there was, and it is good. The atmosphere also seems quite good around here, so I thought I'd join the community rather than treating it as a collection of essays and comments.

So here I am.

~~ Edited to add: ~

I am not sure how this got so many upvotes. Was it the praise? The brevity? That I'm a physicist? The score just stands out on the page a bit, and I'm not at all sure why.

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7realitygrill
upvoted, because I've been wondering how the QM sequence is looked upon by physicists :)
9Luke_A_Somers
I'd be interested to know that myself. I've only spoken with a few because it's a potentially awkward subject. I recall one other strongly and one other regular-strength in favor of MW+decoherence (both in my rough age-group); one classmate said "decoherence, as I understand it, is a little more reasonable sounding than most", for ontology, but uses the Copenhagen interpretation when thinking about epistemology; one professor was against MW just on uneasiness grounds, but didn't have a firm opinion; one professor with the philosophy "If it's just quantum mechanics, I'm not interested. If it's not quantum mechanics, I'm not interested", which is formally equivalent to MW + decoherence but without the explicit acknowledgement that it is; one who was against everything, especially the part with everything in it; and too many "Let's stop talking about this/I'm not qualified to have an opinion/Aargh" to count. ~~ In this tiny sample of mostly experimentalists: People with a preference for the Bohm guide wave interpretation: 0 People with a preference for more sophisticated just-QM interpretations such as transactional or consistent histories: 0 People who accept wavefunction collapse as real: 1 on the fence. A survey on the subject could be interesting.
4Normal_Anomaly
It's because you're a physicist who commented about the QM sequence. I, and apparently a lot of other people who've read it, really wanted to know if we've absorbed any mistakes. Thanks for giving a more informed opinion than most of us can bring. :)
3christina
I can't answer for anyone else, but I think graphene work sounds pretty cool, so here's an upvote from me!
[-]tmgerbich370

Hello Less Wrong!

I was on facebook and I saw a wall post about the fanfiction Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality. I haven't read fanfiction much since I was a kid, but the title was intriguing, so I clicked on it and started reading. The ideas were interesting enough that I went to the author's page and it brought me here.

Anyways, I'm a 22 year old female person. I'm graduating from college in 2 weeks with a chemistry major and I have no real plans, so it makes posting about my life situation a little awkward right now. I'll probably be heading back to the Chicagoland area and trying to find a job, I guess.

I can already tell that this site is going to wreak havoc on my ability to finish up all my projects, study for finals, and hang out with my friends. I just spent a couple hours reading randomly around and I can tell I've barely scratched the surface on the content. But after I almost died laughing at the post about the sheep and the pebbles I was hooked. Really, I just want to be a freshman again so I can spend my time staying up all night thinking and talking and puzzling things out with EZmode classes and no real responsibilities.

Anyways. I'm pretty excited about gett... (read more)

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9Alicorn
Welcome! I love your story about the Monty Hall problem. Consider putting it as a toplevel anecdote in the Discussion Section.
5Swimmer963 (Miranda Dixon-Luinenburg)
I'm very interesting in reading your future posts! It sounds like you have a lot of potential and a lot of learning to do, which is always the most exciting combination. I wish I could be your roommate and get to hear all of this!
4NancyLebovitz
Definitely an interesting intro, and it's good to see someone care so much about whether they understand the world. Approximate quote from Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error: "How does being wrong feel? Exactly like being right."
2JStewart
That was an awesome introduction post. I like the way you think.
[-]Stabilizer340

Hey everbody,

I'm a PhD Student in Physics. I came across Lesswrong when I read Eliezer's interview with John Baez. I was very intrigued by his answers: especially with his idea that the world needs to understand rationality. I identify with rationalism and especially with Lesswrong, because it just clicked. There were so many things in the world which people accepted and which I knew were just plain wrong. And before I found Lesswrong, I was a frustrated mess. And when I found Lesswrong it was a breath of fresh air.

For example: I was a pretty good debater in college. So in order to be a better debater, I started reading more about logical fallacies, which are common in argument and debate, such as ad hominem, slippery slope, appeal to authority etc . And the more I learnt about these, the more I saw that these were exactly the techniques common in debate. I was forced to conclude that debating was not about reaching the truth, but about proving the other person wrong. The people in debating circles were very intelligent; but very intelligent in a useless (and maybe harmful) way. They were scarcely interested in the truth. They could take any argument, twist it, contort it, appeal ... (read more)

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7Swimmer963 (Miranda Dixon-Luinenburg)
Welcome, Stabilizer! Interesting that you say this...I haven't had the same experience at all. I was raised basically agnostic/atheist, by parents who weren't so much disapproving of religion as indifferent. I started going to church basically because I made friends with a girl who I had incredibly fun times hanging out with and who was also a passionate born-again Christian. I knew that most of the concepts expressed in her evangelical Christian sect were fallacious, but I met a lot of people whose belief had allowed them to overcome difficult situations and live much happier lives. Even if true belief wasn't an option for me, I could see the positive effect that my friend's church had, in general, in the community it served. And I was a happier, more positive, and more generous person while I attended the group. There was a price to pay: either I would profess my belief to the others and feel like I was lying to a part of myself, or I wouldn't, and feel like ever-so-slightly an outsider. But maybe because of my particular brain architecture, the pain of cognitive dissonance was far outweighed by the pleasure of having a ready-made community of kind, generous (if not scientific-minded) people eager to show me how welcoming and generous they could be. I have yet to find something that is as good for my mental health and emotional stability as attending church. That being said, a year of not attending church and reading LessWrong regularly has honed my thinking to the point that I don't think I could sit back and enjoy those church services anymore. So that avenue is closed to me now, too.
4TheOtherDave
For what it's worth, it depends a lot on the church service: I know quite a few very sharp thinkers whose church membership is an important and valuable part of their lives in the way you describe. But they are uniformly members of churches that don't demand that members profess beliefs. One gentleman in particular gave a lay sermon to his church on Darwin's birthday one year about how much more worthy of admiration a God who arranges the fundamental rules of the universe in such a way that intelligent life can emerge naturally out of their interaction, than is a God who instead must clumsily go in and manually construct intelligent life, and consequently how much more truly worshipful a view of life is the evolutionary biologist's than the creationist's, which was received reasonably positively. So you might find that you can get what you want by just adding constraints to the kind of church service you're looking for.
6Swimmer963 (Miranda Dixon-Luinenburg)
Sounds like the Unitarian church that my parents took us to for a few years...I'm not sure why they took us, but I think it might have had more to do with "not depriving the children of a still-pretty-typical childhood experience like going to Sunday school" than with a wish to have church an important part of their lives. I would probably enjoy the Unitarian community if I joined for long enough to really get to know them... I'm sure the adults were all very kind, welcoming people. Still, the two churches that I've attended the most are High Anglican and Pentecostal. The Anglican cathedral is where I sang in the choir for more than five years, and the music is what really drew me; although the Anglican church is very involved in community projects and volunteering, almost the whole congregation is above the age of fifty, and the young people who do attend are often cautious, conservative, and not especially curious about the world, which reduces the amount of fun I can have with them. Surprisingly enough, in the Pentecostal church where the actual beliefs professed are much more extreme, most of the congregation are young and passionate about life and even intellectually curious. They are fun to hang out with...in fact, I frequently had more fun spending a Friday night at a Pentecostal event than at a party. They took their beliefs seriously and really lived according to how they saw the Bible, even though I have no doubt their actions would have been considered weird in a lot of contexts and by many of their friends. I think a lot of the apparent mental health benefit of this church came from the community's decision to stop caring about social stigmas and just live. This is, I think, what I most respected about them...but for a lot of the same reasons, I now find their ideas and beliefs a lot more jarring than those of the Anglican church. I have no doubt that there are churches on all sides of the continuum: "traditional" communities, like the Anglican church
0Stabilizer
I used to have that kind of brain architecture for quite some time, and I kind of miss it. But as I started studying more and more physics, it just became harder and harder. So, I guess the trade-off got really skewed at some point of time. I have to mention that my religiosity kind of went through cycles. There was a time when I was an internally-militant (not very outspoken) atheist, followed by a period of considerable appreciation for religion, and again followed by a (currently) pretty comfortable atheism. If I think back to my first episode of atheism (religion was my default state as I was born in a pretty religious family), I guess I was pretty uncomfortable with it, in the sense that I felt that a lot more needed to be explained. In the intervening episode of religiosity, I appreciated the exact things that you mention about religion, but I just didn't like all the baggage, i.e. the time and money spent in rituals. My religion was Hinduism, which is highly ritualistic, but enjoys some nice philosophies. I still like some of the philosophy but I dislike most of the ritual.
0Swimmer963 (Miranda Dixon-Luinenburg)
Funny. That's probably a brain architecture thing, too, but I really enjoy a lot of the High Anglican rituals at the church where I used to sing in choir. The traditional carols that all of us know by heart, every single word... The ministers and the bishop in their beautiful robes leading the choir in a procession around the cathedral while we sing in insane harmony... Stuff like the ritual of turning out all the lights and everyone leaving in the dark on Maundy Thursday (day before Easter Friday) to symbolize Jesus' death. It's all very theatrical, and very moving, and usually makes me cry. I have a feeling that you might be talking about a different kind of ritual, though, if you're frustrated by the amount of time and money spent on them.
2[anonymous]
Building and running a church, paying for a bishops education and the time he works there, training children to sing, and all of the time people spend there is not a small investment. Multiply that by all the churches in the world, and add the cost of various missions and church plants to spread religion, or the charities which do their work sub-optimally because they take religion more seriously then saving lives and I imagine that the figure would become inappropriately ludicrous. Not that just eliminating religion would make us all much more efficient, humans are very gifted at wasting time and money.
3Swimmer963 (Miranda Dixon-Luinenburg)
I've heard that argument before, and it does have a lot of weight. In this case, though, are we talking about religion or about costly ritual? Both are cultural phenomena, and they're frequently found together, but there are religions that aren't into ritual at all, like Quakers, who are best known for their simple, silent style of prayer and worship, and don't go around building fancy cathedrals). And there are costly "rituals" which are not related to religion at all: football, for example, or theatre. Agreed that churches which run charities may run their sub-optimally from an atheist's point of view, since a lot of the time one of the unstated aims of their charity is to convert people. (This used to make me furious when I attended the Pentecostal church mentioned in one of the parent comments.) But we were talking about ritual, and I was specifically talking about deeply moving, meaningful rituals. It just so happens that the ones that have meaning to me are religious in nature. I know a lot of people find arts and theatre meaningful, and likely there are people who find watching sports meaningful, in a similar way. There's some kind of human instinct to gravitate towards activities that are communal, repetitive, and have a sense of tradition that imbues them with meaning. There's also a human instinct to think superstitiously, which I don't share much, and which makes it hard for me to really enjoy those meaningful moments in church. Nitpick: yes, paying for a bishop's work and teaching children to sing is something that happens "under religion's umbrella." That doesn't make it bad! I learned to sing better through the church choir (for which I was paid a monthly stipend for the community service of singing during Sunday worship!) than I would have in the $400-per-month children's choir, which I probably wouldn't have been allowed into...most people thought I was tone deaf until I proved them wrong. Bishops who organize community events and charities are doi
0Swimmer963 (Miranda Dixon-Luinenburg)
I've heard that argument before, and it does have a lot of weight. In this case, though, are we talking about religion or about costly ritual? Both are cultural phenomena, and they're frequently found together, but there are religions that aren't into ritual at all (like (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quakers), who are best known for their simple, silent style of prayer and worship, and don't go around building fancy cathedrals). And there are costly "rituals" which are not related to religion at all: football, for example, or theatre. Agreed that churches which run charities may run their sub-optimally from an atheist's point of view, since a lot of the time one of the unstated aims of their charity is to convert people. (This used to make me furious when I attended the Pentecostal church mentioned in one of the parent comments.) But we were talking about ritual, and I was specifically talking about deeply moving, meaningful rituals. It just so happens that the ones that have meaning to me are religious in nature. I know a lot of people find arts and theatre meaningful, and likely there are people who find watching sports meaningful, in a similar way. There's some kind of human instinct to gravitate towards activities that are communal, repetitive, and have a sense of tradition that imbues them with meaning. There's also a human instinct to think superstitiously, which I don't share much, and which makes it hard for me to really enjoy those meaningful moments in church. Nitpick: yes, paying for a bishop's work and teaching children to sing is something that happens "under religion's umbrella." That doesn't make it bad! I learned to sing better through the church choir (for which I was paid a monthly stipend for the community service of singing during Sunday worship!) than I would have in the $400-per-month children's choir, which I probably wouldn't have been allowed into...most people thought I was tone deaf until I proved them wrong. Bishops who organize communi
5thomblake
Please do not sign your posts. That information is conveyed by the username listed at the top of the post.
2Peacewise
Welcome to lesswrong, I'm quite new here too. I read your intro and think you would probably thoroughly devour Edward De Bono's "I am right, you are wrong". I agree with you regarding debating (and criticism) and so does De Bono, he writes about it quite elegantly. Cheers, peacewise.
0[anonymous]
I have a Physics question for you: is time continuous? I mean, is any given extent of time always further divisible into extents of time?
3kilobug
As far as I understand it : any time smaller than Planck's time (around 10^-43 second) is not meaningful, because no experiment will ever be able to measure it. So the question is kinda pointless, for all practical purpose, time could be counted as integer units of Planck's time.
0[anonymous]
I've read that too, but I get confused when I try to use this fact to answer the question. On the one hand, it seems you are right that nothing can happen in a time shorter than the Planck time, but on the other hand, we seem to rely on the infinite divisibility of time just in making this claim. After all, it's perfectly intelligible to talk about a span of time that is one half or one quarter of Planck time. There's no contradiction in this. The trouble is that nothing can happen in this time, or as you put it, that it cannot be meaningful. But does this last point mean that there is no shorter time, given that a shorter time is perfectly intelligible? Suppose for example that exactly 10 planck times from now, a radium atom begins decay. Exactly 10 and a half planck times from now, another radium atom decays. Is there anything problematic in saying this? I've not said that anything happened in less than a Planck time. 10 Planck times and 10.5 Planck times are both just some fraction of a second and both long enough spans of time to involve some physical change. If there's nothing wrong with saying this, then we can say that the first atom began its decay one half planck length before the second. This makes a half Planck length a meaningful span of time in describing the relation between two physical processes.
5Cthulhoo
Well, the correct answer up to this point is that we don't know. We would need a theory of quantum gravity to understand what's happening at this scale, and who knows how many ither step further we need to move to have a grasp of the "real" answer. Up to now, we only know that "something" is going to happen, and can make (motivated) conjectures. It may indeed be that time is discretized in the end, and talking about fractions of planck time is meaningless: maybe the universe computes the next state based on the present one in discrete steps. In your case, it would be meaningless to say that an atom will decay in 10.5 Planck times, the only thing you could see is that at step 10 the atom hasn't decayed and at step 11 it has (barring the correct remark of nsheperd that in practice the time span is too short for decoherence to be relevant). But, honestly, this is all just speculation.
0[anonymous]
Thanks for the response, that was helpful. I wonder if the question of the continuity of time bears on the idea of the universe computing its next state: if time is discreet, this will work, but if time is continuous, there is no 'next state' (since no two moments are adjacent in a continuous extension). Would this be important to the question of determinism? Finally, notice that my example doesn't suggest that anything happens in 10.5 planck times, only that one thing begins 10 planck times from now, and another thing begins 10.5 planck times from now. Both processes might only occupy whole numbers of planck times, but the fraction of a planck time is still important to describing the relation between their starting moments.
1Cthulhoo
Warning: wild speculations incoming ;) I don't think continuous time is a problem for determinism: we use continuous functions every day to compute predictions. And, if the B theory of time turns out to be the correct interpretation, everything was already computed from the beginning. ;) What I was suggesting was this: imagine you have a Planck clock and observe the two systems. At each Planck second the two atoms can either decay or not. At second number 10 none has decayed, ad second 11 both have. Since you can't observe anything in between, there's no way to tell if one has decayed after 10 or 10.5 seconds. In a discreet spacetime the universe should compute the wavefunctions at time t, throw the dice, and spit put the wavefunctions at time t+1. A mean life of 10.5 planck seconds from time t translates to a probability to decay at every planck second: then it either happens, or it doesn't. It seems plausible to me that there's no possible Lorentz transformation equivalent in our hypothetical uber-theory that allows you to see a time span between events smaller than a planck second (i.e. our Lorentz transformations are discreet, too). But, honestly, I will be surprised if it turns out to be so simple ;)
0[anonymous]
Do you think you could explain this metaphor in some more detail? What does 'computation' here represent?
1thomblake
Just a side-note... I don't think this was supposed to be a 'metaphor'.
0[anonymous]
Fair enough. How does the view of the universe as a computer relate to the question of the continuity of time?
0A1987dM
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_physics (It's been years since I read that article; I'm going to read it again...)
2[anonymous]
I read that too as soon as I saw thomblake's reply. I'm a newcomer here, and I hadn't heard of this view of physics before so it was very informative (though the quality of the wiki article isn't that high, citation wise). I've also been talking to a physicist/philosopher about this (he's been saying a lot of the same things you have) and he gave me the impression that if there's a consensus view in physics, it's that time is continuous...but that this is an open question. Is this computationalist view of physics popular here, or rather, is it more popular here than in the academic physics community? It seems as though a computationalist view would on the face of it come into some conflict with the idea of continuous time, since between any state and any subsequent computed therefrom there would be an intermediate state containing different information than the first state. But I'm way out of my depth here.
2[anonymous]
In your example you're using the term "now". That term already implies a point in time and therfore an infinitely divisible time. The problem is that while you certainly could conceive of a half planck time you could never locate that half in time. I.e. an event does not happen at a point in time. It happens anywhere in a given range of time with at least the planck length in extend. Now suppose that event A happens anywhere in a given timeslice and event B happens in another timeslice that starts half a planck time after the slice of event A. You can not say that event B happens half a planck time after event A since the timeslices overlap and thus you cannot even say that event B happens at all after event A. It might be the other way round. So while in your mind this half planck length seems to have some meaning in reality it does not. Your mind insists on visualizing time as continuous and therefore you can't easily get rid of the feeling that it were.
0[anonymous]
Why do you say that the time slices overlap? It seems on your set up, and mine, that they do not. The point seems to be just that nothing can happen in less than a Planck time, not that something cannot happen in 10.5 Planck times. The latter doesn't follow from the former so far as I can see. But I'm not on firm ground here, and I may well be mistaken. (ETA: But at any rate my example above doesn't involve anything happening in 10.5 Planck times. Everything I describe in that example can be said to occur in a whole number of planck times.) And 'now' doesn't imply infinite divisiblity: we could have moments of time whether or not time is infinitely divisible, and we would need to refer to them to talk about the limit between two planck times anyway. And we cannot arrive at moments by infinite divisibility anyway, since moments are extensionless, and infinite division will always yield extensions.
2[anonymous]
Ah, english is not my native language. With "event B happens in another timeslice that starts half a planck time after the slice of event A" I meant timeslice B starts half a planck length after timeslice A started, so the second half of A overlaps with the fist of B. B does not happen at 10.5 planck times after now. It happens somewhere between 10 and 11 planck times after "now" and you cannot tell when. Do not visualize time as a sequence of slices. Edit: My point is, it's simply impossible to visualize time. If your brain insists on visualizing it, you will never understand. Because whenever you visualize a timeslice you visualize it with a clear cut start and a clear cut end. But that's not how this works. Edit2: Maybe I'm just reading your response wrong. My point is that the precision in your example is the problem. There is no event that happens at a time with a precision smaller than one planck length. So 10.5 is just as wrong as 0.5.
0[anonymous]
Ahh, I see, I think I misunderstood you. I'm not sure I understand why A and B overlap. The claim about Planck times is that nothing can happen in less time. Does it follow from that that all time must be measured in whole numbers of Planck times? A photon takes one Planck time to pass through one Planck length, but I can't see anything problematic with a cosmic ray passing through one Planck length in 10.5 Planck times. In other words does the fact that the Planck time is a minimum mean that it's an indivisible unit? I don't think anything in my example relies on visualizing time, or on visualizing it as a series of slices. But I may be confused there. Do you have reason to think that one cannot visualize time? I suppose I agree that time is not a visible object, and so any visualization is analogical, but isn't this true of many things we do visualize to our profit? Like economic growth, say. What makes time different?
4[anonymous]
No. The claim is that nothing is located in time with a precision smaller than the planck time.
0[anonymous]
I don't really doubt that you're right. Most everything I read on the subject agrees with or is consistant with what you're saying. But the idea is still very confusing to me, so I appreciate your explanations. Let me try to make my troubles more clear. So far as I understand it, a Planck time is a minimum because that's the time it takes the fastest possible thing to pass through the minimum possible length. If something were going 99% the speed of light, or 75% or any percentage other than 100%, 50%, 25%, 12.5% etc. then it would travel through the Planck length in a non-whole number of Planck times. So something traveling at 75% the speed of light would travel through the Planck length at 1.5 Planck times. Maybe we can't measure this. That's fine. But say something were to travel at a constant velocity through two Planck lengths in three Planck times. Wouldn't it just follow that it went through each Planck length in 1.5 Planck times? It may be that we can't measure anything with precision greater than whole numbers of Planck times, but in this scenario it wouldn't follow from that that time is discontinuous.
2kilobug
Mathematically speaking, you can say "in average it travelled for 1 Planck length in 1.5 Planck time". But physically speaking, it doesn't mean anything. Quantum mechanics works with wavefunction. Objects don't have an absolutely precise position. To know where the object is, you need to interact with it. To interact with it, you need something to happen. Due to Heinsenberg's Uncertainity Principle (even if you consider it as a "certainity principle" as Eliezer does), you just can't locate something more precisely in space than a Planck length, nor more precisely in time than a Planck time. Done at quantum level, objects don't have a precise position and speed. So saying "it moves at 0.75c so it crosses 1 Planck length in 1.5 Planck time" doesn't hold. It can only hold as an average once the object evolved for many Planck times (and moved many Planck length).
0[anonymous]
I see. But this raises again my original worry: does QM's claim about Planck times actually say anything about the continuity of time? Or just something about the theoretical structure of QM? Or just something about the greatest possible experimental precision? Does a limit on the precision of time at this level imply that these are actual indivisible and discontinuous units?
1thomblake
Maybe I'm just too steeped in pragmatism to notice, but it seems your question has already been answered. For example: No, a limit on precision tells you that it's not meaningful to ask whether or not there are actual indivisible and discontinuous units. There's no experiment that could tell the difference.
0[anonymous]
I think pragmatism is a fine approach here, but could you clarify for me what your think the answer to my question is exactly? If it's not meaningful to ask whether or not there are indivisible and discontinuous units, then is the answer to my question "Does QM's claims about Planck time imply that time is discontinuous?" simply "No" because QM says nothing meaningful about the question one way or the other?
5A1987dM
In ‘pure’ QM (without gravity), the Planck length has no special significance, and spacetime is assumed to be continuous. But we know that QM as we know it must be an approximation because it disagrees with GR (and/or vice versa), and the ‘correct’ theory of quantum gravity might predict weird things at the Planck scale. So far, most proposed theories of quantum gravity have little more predictive power than “The woman down the street is a witch; she did it”, though some do predict stuff such as the dispersion of gamma rays I've mentioned elsewhere.
0[anonymous]
We're trying to dissolve the question by pointing out that there exists a third option besides "continuous" or "discontinuous". So the answer to "Does QM's claims about Planck time imply that time is discontinuous?" would be "No, but neither is it continuous, but a third thing that tends to confuse people." Edit: retracted because I don't think this is helpful.
1nshepperd
For a start the classical hallucination of particles and decay doesn't really apply at times on the planck scale (since there's no time for the wave to decohere). There's just the gradual evolution of the quantum wavefunction. It may be that nothing interesting changes in the wavefunction in less than a planck time, either because it's actually "blocky" like a cellular automata or physics simulation, or for some other reason. In the former case you could imagine that at each time step there's a certain probability (determined by the amplitude) of decay, such that the expected (average) time is 0.5 planck times after the expected time of some other event. Such a setup might well produce the classical illusion of something happening half a planck time after something else, although in a smeared-out manner that precludes "exactly".
0[anonymous]
That's a good point about decay, but my example only referred to the beginning of the process of decay. I wasn't trying to claim that the decay could take place in less than one, one, or less than one trillion planck times. The important point for my example is just that the starting points for the two decay processes (however long they take) differ by .5 planck times. Nothing in the example involves anything happening in less than a Planck time, or anything happening in non-whole numbers of Planck times.
0kilobug
But the thing is : how can you measure that the decay differs by .5 Planck times ? That would require an experimental device which would be in a different state .5 Planck times earlier, and that's not possible, according to my understanding.
0[anonymous]
Good point. I agree, it doesn't seem possible. But this is what confuses me: no measuring device could possibly measure some time less than one Planck time. Does it follow from this alone that a measuring device must measure in whole numbers of Planck times? In other words, does it follow logically that if the planck time is a minimum, it is also an indivisible unit? This is my worry. A photon travels across a planck length in one planck time. Something moving half light-speed travels across the same distance in two planck times. If Planck times are not only a minimum but an indivisible unit, then wouldn't it be impossible for some cosmic ray (A) to move at any fraction of the speed of light between 1 and 1/2? A cosmic ray (B) moving at 3/4 c couldn't cover the Planck length in less time than A without moving at 1 c, since it has to cover the planck length in whole numbers of planck times. This seems like a problem.
2kilobug
It could be like that something moving at 3/4 c will have, on each Planck time, a 3/4 chance of moving of one Planck length, and a 1/4 chance of not moving at all. But that's how I understand it from a computer scientist point of view, it may not be how physicists really see it. But I think the core reason is that since no signal can spread faster than c, no signal can cross more than one Planck length over a Planck time, so a difference of less than a Planck time can never be detected. Since it cannot be detected, since there is no experimental setting that would differ if something happened a fraction of Planck time earlier, the question has no meaning. If time really is discreet or continuous doesn't have any meaning, if no possible experiments can tell the two apart.
6A1987dM
Of course, given any experiment, spacetime being discrete on a sufficiently small scale couldn't be detected, but given any scale, a sufficiently precise experiment could tell if spacetime is discrete at that scale. And there's evidence that spacetime is likely not discrete at Planck scale (otherwise sufficiently-high-energy gamma rays would have a nontrivial dependency of speed on energy, which is not what we see in gamma-ray bursts). See http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v462/n7271/edsumm/e091119-06.html
0[anonymous]
Thanks for the post and for the very helpful link.
0[anonymous]
The difference between discreet or continuous time is a concern of mine because it bears on what it means for something to be changing or moving. But I'm very much in the dark here, and I don't know what physicists would say if asked for a definition of change. Do you have any thoughts?
1kilobug
Well, the nature of time is still a mystery of physics. Relativity killed forever the idea of a global time, nad QM damaged the one of a continuous time. Hypothesis like Julian Barbour's timeless physics (which has significant support here), or Stephen Hawking's imaginary (complex number) time could change it even more. Maybe once we have a quantum gravity theory and an agrement over the QM interpretation we could tell more... but for now, we've to admit we don't know much about the "true nature" of change or movement. We can only tell how it appears, and since any time smaller than Planck time could never be detected, we can't tell apart from that if it's continuous or discreet.
0[anonymous]
Well, I'm not so much asking about the true nature of change or movement but rather just what we mean to say when we say that something is changing or has changed. I take it that if I told any layperson that a block of wood changed from dark to pale when left out in the sun, they would understand what I mean by 'changed'. If interrogated as to the meaning of change they might say something like "well, it's when something is in one condition at one time, and the same thing is in another condition at another time. That's a change." But obviously that's quite informal and ill suited to theoretical physics. On the other hand, physicists must have some basic idea of what a change or motion is. Yet I cannot think of anything more precise or firm than what I've said above.
5kilobug
If you go deep enough in physics, you don't have "wood". You just have a wavefunction. The wavefunction evolves with time in "classical" QM physics, and just exists statically in timeless physics. And "the same thing" doesn't mean much, since there is nothing like "this electron" but only "one electron". Saying that a piece of wood changed is an upper-level concept, which you can't directly define in fundamental physics, but only approximates (like "pressure", or "wood", or "liquid"). The way you define your high level approximation doesn't really need to know if the lower level is continuous or not. The same way you won't define "liquid" differently just because we discovered that protons are not indivisible, but made of quarks. Of course, lower level can be relevant : for example the fact there is no such thing as "this electron" contributes to saying that personal identity depends of configuration more than of "the same matter". But it's only a minor argument towards it, for me.
0[anonymous]
Fair enough, but surely the idea is to explain wood and the changes therein by reference to more fundamental physics. So even if the idea of change doesn't show up at the very most fundamental levels, there must be some level at which change becomes a subject of physics. Otherwise, I don't see how physics could profess to explain anything, since it would have nothing to do with empirical (and changable) phenomena. I'd love to talk more about that. Do you see configurations as platonic? And if our configuration is in constant flux (as is hard to doubt) on some level, do we therefore need to distinguish essential aspects of the configuration from accidental ones? And wouldn't this view admit of two distinct persons having the same personal identity? That seems odd.
0kilobug
Well, I will say that a movie is "the same movie", whatever it is stored on analog film, optical support, magnetic support or ssd storage. The content and the physical support are different issue. I'll say that a movie "changed" if you cut or add some scene, or add subtitles, ... but not if you copy the file from your magnetic hard disk to an USB key, even if there are much more differences at physical level between the HD and the USB key. The same is true for personal identity, in my point of view. The personal identity is in the configuration of neurons, and even in the way changes propagate on the neural network, not in the specific matter distribution. Then, personal identity is not binary (am I the same I was one week ago ? and 20 years ago ?). But to a point yes, you can theoretically have two distinct "persons" with the "same" personal identity, if you can duplicate, or scan, a person.
0Stabilizer
I'm sorry, I really don't know. In fact, I don't think I even know what the majority opinion is among physicists (if there is one). At the face of it, it seems like if spacetime is discrete, then up until now, the unit of discreteness is small enough to allow us to do calculus (which assumes continuity) with impunity, even at the smallest of scales our experiments go to. So, as far as experimental evidence goes, there's no reason to believe in discreteness. But I guess your question is whether there are any theoretical arguments which suggest discreteness... to which I really don't have an answer. If I understand some interesting argument in the future, I'll get back to you.
0[anonymous]
Thanks, I'll look forward to it.
[-]KPier340

Hello Less Wrong!

I'm 16, female, and a senior in high school. Before I started reading here, I was not particularly interested in math, science, or rationality (which I had never really heard of). I stumbled on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality in October, and fell in love immediately. I read through the whole story in one night, and finally made the leap to Less Wrong during Eliezer's hiatus.

I started on Less Wrong by reading Mysterious Answers to Mysterious Questions and within three posts I realized that, for the first time in my life, I was surrounded by people significantly smarter than me. Some people would probably have been excited about that; I was terrified. I promised myself that I wouldn't post - wouldn't even create an account, to avoid the temptation of posting - until I had read all the sequences and understood everything everyone said.

In retrospect, that may have been setting the bar a little too high for myself, especially since seven more sequences were added while I was reading. I eventually revised my standard to "I will not comment until I'm sure I actually have something to add to a discussion, and until I understand the things I have read we... (read more)

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2Hul-Gil
Welcome. Just remember: don't take the posts on LessWrong as gospel, so to speak, just because of their source. Eliezer has posted about this several times, though, so you most probably need no reminding.
4KPier
Thanks! I worried for a while about changing my mind too much on the basis of one blog, and I still don't agree with the Less Wrong consensus on everything, but overall I've found them very helpful. Anything specifically you would view with a skeptical eye?
1Hul-Gil
Nothing specific that I can think of! There are some posts I might disagree with, but I don't think there are any systematic errors being made.¹ I agree with the conclusions laid out in most of the posts here, and with Mr. Yudkowsky's posts in particular. It's just easy to become so enthusiastic about becoming rational "the LessWrong way" that you end up losing that rationality! But this is not so easy as it might be with other topics, perhaps. ¹(An example of a post of Eliezer's that contains some things I disagree with would be "Circular Altruism"; I posted my views and some counter-examples there, so I won't go into it here. However, I recognize many people do agree with him, so I'm not claiming to be entirely certain his conclusions are wrong - my point is just that it's a rare individual who never arrives at an incorrect conclusion!)
[-]SRStarin290

My name is Scott Starin. I toyed with the idea of using a pseudonym, but I decided that this site is related enough to my real world persona that I should be safe in claiming my LW persona.

I am a spacecraft dynamics and control expert working for NASA. I am a 35-year old man married to another man, and we have a year-old daughter. I am an atheist, and in the past held animist and Christian beliefs. I would describe my ethics as rationally guided with one instinctive impulse to the basic Christian idea of valuing and respecting one's neighbor, and another instinctive impulse to mistrust everyone and growl at anyone who looks like they might take my food. Understanding my own humanity and human biases seems a good path toward suppressing the instinctive impulses when they are inappropriate.

I came to this site from an unrelated blog that briefly said something like "Eliezer Yudkowsky is frighteningly intelligent" and linked to this site. So, I came to see for myself. I've read through a lot of the sequences. I really enjoyed the Three Worlds Collide story and forced my husband to read it. EY does seems to be intelligent, but I'm signing up because he and the rest of the comm... (read more)

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4jsalvatier
Welcome then! Your first idea does sound interesting, and I look forward to heard about it. Don't worry too much about Karma.
2TheOtherDave
Welcome! Understanding and overcoming human cognitive biases is, of course, a recurring theme here. So is management of catastrophic (including existential) risks. Discussions of charity come up from time to time, usually framed as optimization problems. This post gets cited often. We actually had a recent essay contest on efficient charity that might interest you. The value of religion (as distinct from the value of charity, of community, and so forth) comes up from time to time but rarely goes anywhere useful. Don't sweat the karma. If you don't mind a personal question: where did you and your husband get married?
3SRStarin
We got married in a small town near St. Catharine's, Ontario, a few weeks after it became legal there. Thanks for the charity links. I find practical and aesthetic value in the challenging aspect of "shut up and multiply,"(http://lesswrong.com/lw/n3/circular_altruism/), particularly in the example you linked about purchasing charity efficiently. However, it seems to me that oversimplification can occur when we talk about human suffering. (Please forgive me if the following is rehashing something written earlier.) For example, multiplying a billion people's suffering for 1 second to make it equal to a billion seconds of consecutive suffering to make it seem way more bad than a million consecutive seconds--almost 12 straight days--of suffering done by one person is just plainly, rationally wrong. One proof of that is that distributing those million seconds as one-second bursts at regular intervals over a person's life is better than the million consecutive seconds because the person is not otherwise unduly hampered by the occasional one-second annoyances, but would probably become unable to function well in the consecutive case, and might be permanently injured (a la PTSD). My point is there's something missing from the equation, and that potential lies at the heart of the human impulse to be irrational when presented with the same choice as comparative gain vs. comparative loss.
2TheOtherDave
As you say, a million isolated seconds of suffering isn't as bad as a million consecutive seconds of suffering, because (among other things) of the knock-on effects of consecutivity (e.g. PTSD). Maybe it's only 10% as bad, or 1%, or .1%, or .0001%, or whatever. Sure, agreed, of course. But the moral intuition being challenged by "shut up and multiply" isn't about that. If everyone agreed that sure, N dust-specks was worse than 50 years of torture for some N, and we were merely haggling over the price, the thought experiment would not be interesting. That's why the thought experiment involves ridiculous numbers like 3^^^3 in the first place, so we can skip over all that. When we're trying to make practical decisions about what suffering to alleviate, we care about N, and precision matters. At that point we have to do some serious real-world thinking and measuring and, y'know, work. But what's challenging about "shut up and multiply" isn't the value of N, it's the existence of N. if we're starting out with a moral intuition that dust-specks and torture simply aren't commensurable, and therefore there is no value of N... well, then the work of calculating it is doomed before we start.
1SRStarin
OK, I now understand the way the site works: If someone responds to your comment, it shows up in your mailbox like an e-mail. Sorry for getting that wrong with Vaniver ( i responded by private mail), and if I can fix it in a little while, I will (edit: and now I have). Now, to content: Thanks for responding to me! I didn't feel like I should hijack the welcome thread for something I didn't know hadn't been thoroughly discussed elsewhere. So I tried to be succinct, and failed and ended up garbled. First, 3^^^3 is WAY more than a googolplex ;-) Second, I fully recognize the existence of N, and I tried to make that clear in the last statement of content-value in my answer to you, by recalling the central lesson of "shut up and multiply", which is that people, when faced with identical situations presented at one time as gain comparisons, and at another time as loss comparisons, will fail to recognize the identity and choose differently. That is a REALLY useful thing to know about human bias, and I don't discount it. I suppose my comment above amounts to a quibble if it's already understood that EY's ideas only apply to identical situations presented with different gain/loss values, but I don't have the impression that's all he was getting at. Hence, my caveat. If everyone's already beyond that, feel free to ignore. I agree that dust-specks and torture are commensurable. If you will allow, a personal story: I have distichiasis. Look it up, it ain't fun. My oily tear glands, on the insides of my eyelids, produce eyelashes that grow toward my eyes. Every once in a while, one of those (almost invisible, clear--mine rarely have pigment at all) eyelashes grows long enough to brush my eyes. At that instant, I rarely notice, having been inured to the sensation. I only respond when the lash is long enough to wake me up in the middle of the night, and I struggle to pull out the invisible eyelash. Sometimes, rarely, it gets just the right (wrong) length when I'm driving, and
0Vaniver
This topic interests me quite a bit, and I think it would be well-received here if you focus on the practice and ignore the belief. EY has a number of posts that are unabashedly influenced by religious practices.
1SRStarin
Vaniver, I thought the message from you in my mailbox was private, so I responded in a private manner. But, it was a copy of this public posting; I've got the hang of it now. I cannot, however, figure out how to recover the private response I sent you and post it here as a public reply. Feel free to do so if you like!
1jsalvatier
There's a button in the grey tab when you're in your messages labeled "sent". In the upper left.
1SRStarin
Thanks js, here was my response to Vaniver, responding to the "initiation_ceremony" link, as mundane as it may be: The initiation sequence was funny. And very Agatha Christie, revealing the critical piece of information just as Poirot solves the mystery! 11/16. Would they have let him in?
[-]purplerabbits270

Hi, I'm Alison - I used to be a professional tarot reader and astrologer in spite of having a (fairly average) science degree. I recovered from that over 15 years ago and feel it would be valuable for more people to understand how I came to do it and how I changed my mind. I am also a 45 year old woman, which makes me feel in a tiny minority on LW.

I've been reading large chunks of the sequences for the last year, as well as books like Risk: The Science and Politics of Fear and a bunch of rationalist blogs (and been thoroughly sucked into HPMOR).

Topics I'm particularly interested in include day to day rationality, tackling global warming, rationality from the perspective of people with mental health issues and tackling irrationality while maintaining polite and less arrogant discourse.

Reply
8daenerys
Hi Alison! Welcome to LessWrong! I'm always happy to see people who are interested in maintaining politeness on here. I have a friend who is a professional psychic/ magician/ tarot reader, and he is extremely rational (uses cold reading and builds technology stuff for tricks.). I don't think you necessarily have to give the profession up if it's something you enjoy. So long as you don't fall prey to the trap of believing your own schtick. I would love to hear your story of how you came to change your mind! Glad to have you here!
4juliawise
I'm with you! There's quite a culture divide between "win the argument" and "get along", and since I spend more time in the latter camp, Less Wrong was unpalatable for me at first.
3Vladimir_Nesov
There's also "point out errors", which is different from "win the argument".
4rlp10
May I ask, at that time did you thoroughly believe that you were actually able to predict the future? Also, with the benefit of hindsight, do you consider yourself to have used the dark arts?
0Richard_Kennaway
Hi there (belatedly)! I believe we've met, way back when.
[-]JonathanLivengood230

Hullo Less Wrongers,

I am a philosopher working mostly on methodology and causal inference, though I also dabble in (new wave) experimental philosophy -- not to be confused with the straight-up physics that went by that name from the days of Newton and Boyle until some time in the mid-nineteenth century. ;)

I just finished my PhD (in history and philosophy of science) and started as an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign on August 16th.

From time to time over the last two or three years, I've glanced at Less Wrong and found it engaging. I am a bit depressed at the pessimism often displayed with respect to contemporary philosophy, but part of that depression is the recognition that the critiques are pretty reasonable. Anyway, I thought I should officially sign on so that I can throw in my two cents and expose my thinking to severe -- but, hopefully, courteous -- testing.

Reply
[-]Oscar_Cunningham130

Welcome!

I am a bit depressed at the pessimism often displayed with respect to contemporary philosophy, but part of that depression is the recognition that the critiques are pretty reasonable.

Don't worry, 99% of philosophy is crud, but only because 99% of everything is crud. (That doesn't sound as reassuring as it did in my head. :-) )

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2JonathanLivengood
Only 99%? That sounds low. ;)
0[anonymous]
Which 99% are you talking about?
[-]TedW230

I thank the Ravenclaw Harry Potter for bringing me here. I've been lurking for a couple of weeks. My first clue that I'd feel at home here was learning that Eliezer taught himself physics by reading the Feynman lectures.

I'm an evolutionary ecologist by training, and a self-taught Python programmer and GIS analyst. I currently work at a community college, where I do a lot of one-on-one biology-teaching. I spend a lot of time thinking about where students go wrong when they're thinking about science, and how to help them think more about their own thinking. (In my department we call it metacognition.) I'm also the father of a four-year-old, and so I also spend a good part of my home-life confronting and responding to some pretty fascinating cognitive and philosophical puzzles. (Her latest interest: the origins and arbitrariness of names.)

I've been developing as a rationalist (without the label) since who-knows-when during childhood, but I trace my more careful, articulated thinking about my own thinking to my early grad-school days, when I spent a lot of time fretting over how scientists should think about nature and problem-solving.

I'm looking forward to learning some new cognitive habits (my current thing is to think of -- and teach -- many cognitive skills as habits) and reinforcing some that I already have.

Reply
[-]earthwormchuck163210

I'm bad at this.

Oh well here goes.

Hi there! I'm Erik. I'm 20 years old.

I am a pure math major at the University of Waterloo. I am half way through my third year here.

That being said, I am largely an autodidact, which I gather is pretty common around these parts. Up until age 13 or so I was primarily interested in physics. In the course of trying to learn physics, I inevitably had to learn some math. So I did, and I never looked back. I can actually pinpoint the exact moment, all those years ago, when I became sure that I would spend the rest of my life doing math. But I won't bore you with such an excessively personal story.

My mathematical interests are fairly broad. My single greatest fear is that I will probably have to specialize at some point, to learn truly focus on one subject area; To think that I could ever actively decide not to want to learn all the things. I plan to delay this for as long as possible.

I tend to lean towards what I consider to be a pragmatic form of ultrafinitism. Other mathematicians tend to punch me when I talk about that though. A favourite pet problem of mine is to try to work how to recover things like eg real analysis without having to talk about inf... (read more)

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[-]cousin_it150

An easy example: How do you know how far away the sun is?

Terry Tao has a really cool presentation on that topic: The Cosmic Distance Ladder.

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4Nornagest
Parallax effects are a surprisingly good reason to reject heliocentrism. Wrong, of course, but it does seem to fail the sniff test -- and about all the Greeks had to work with were sniff tests of varying sophistication. Although now I kind of wonder how Aristarchus' critics explained his observations.
2gwern
That was long, but very good. People underestimate the ancient Greeks - it's awesome to see the whole set of calculations laid out. (This reminds me guiltily of a post I keep meaning to write doing something similar for Atomism.)
1wedrifid
First thing you can do to become better at this: Don't start by telling people you are bad at it. If it was really important that we know that you are bad at it we could probably figure it out for ourselves!
[-]JesseGalef210

Hi everyone, my name is Jesse. I was introduced to LessWrong by my sister, Julia, a couple years ago and I've found the posts here fantastic.

Since college, I've been a professional atheist. I've done communications/PR work for three secular nonprofit organizations, helping to put a friendly face on nontheistic people and promoting a secular worldview/philosophy. It doesn't exactly pay well, but I like knowing that I'm part of making the world a more rational place.

I'm fascinated by a lot of the same things you are - psychology, rationality, language. But as a communications director, I have a particular passion for effective communication and persuasion. The "A Human's Guide to Words" sequence was invaluable in shaping my understanding and practice.

The question currently on my mind (among others) is: "Does it make sense to call a particular persuasion technique unethical? Or does it entirely depend on how it's used?"

Let me know what you think, and I look forward to being a part of this community!

  • Jesse
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[-]Eliezer Yudkowsky310

Some questions to ask:

  • Am I making people stronger, or weaker?
  • What would they think if they knew exactly what I was doing?
  • If lots of people used this technique, would the world be better off or worse off? Is that already happening and am I just keeping pace? Am I being substantially less evil than average?
  • Is this the sort of Dark Art that corrupts anything it touches (like telling people to have faith) or is it more neutral toward the content conveyed (like using colorful illustrations or having a handsome presenter speak a talk)?

(I've recently joked that SIAI should change its motto from "Don't be jerks" to "Be less evil than Google".)

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7kilobug
"Am I making people stronger, or weaker?" That's a very important question, and sometimes hard to get right. Consider a theist for whom the belief in god is a fundamental aspect of his life, whose faith makes him strong because it gives him something to protect. Breaking (or weakening) his belief in god before he built himself a line of retreat can do much more harm than good. What should be done is first building the line of retreat, showing him that even without a god, his life does not become pointless, his ethics won't crumble to dust, and the thing he wants to protect is still worth protecting. And then, but only then, showing to him that his belief in god is not only unnecessary, but also making him weaker.
5JesseGalef
Great questions! Regarding the second one, "What would [people] think if they knew exactly what I was doing?" - I absolutely agree that it's important as a pragmatic issue. If someone will get upset by a technique - justified or not - we need to factor that into the decision to use it. But do you think their discomfort is a sign that the technique is unethical in any meaningful sense, or merely socially frowned upon? Society tends to form its conventions for a reason, but those reasons aren't necessarily tied to a consistent conception of morality. That said, I agree that if people get upset by a practice, it's a good warning sign that the practice could be unethical and merits careful thought. ...Which could be exactly what you meant by asking the question. By the way, I'm looking forward to meeting you at Skepticon next month - I'll be moderating a panel you'll be on!
3lessdazed
If people get upset by a technique, that is a harm, but if their suffering that harm has good consequences, upsetting them was, all else equal, a good thing to do. So upsetting people is always related to ethics as more than just a sign. Unethical things are frowned upon to the extent people feel (at some level) frowning impacts that sort of action; regarding blame: Society often has good reasons behind its moral classifications. Use your gut.
3arundelo
I just checked out the Skepticon list of speakers. Laughter was induced by the picture of David Silverman.
6Paul Crowley
Didn't know the story behind that one, so thank you Know Your Meme. That's the face he made when Bill O'Reilly said "You can’t explain why the tide goes in."
4Shmi
First I thought "Oh great, another believer in n gods for n=0", but after looking through your site I realized that it is much more about rationality and a secular approach to life, not just telling people that faith is a bad thing. As for the morality of a particular persuasion technique, "do unto others..." is still a golden rule, despite its inherent biases and religious connotations.
2pedanterrific
Bienvenidos, Jesse! You may or may not be aware, but this has been discussed at some length around these parts; Dark Arts is an okay summary. (Edit: A particularly good post on the subject is NTLing.) If you've already read it and think the topic could stand more elaboration, though, I'm with you. Oh, and "professional atheist"? Totally awesome.
0JesseGalef
Thanks for the tip! I've come across some of this material, but haven't read it in a systematic way. I very occasionally refer to persuasion as 'the dark arts' - I think that phrase/connection came from LW originally. Earlier this year I gave a talk on the psychology of persuasion, synthesizing some of the fascinating studies that have been done. Rather than present the most blatant techniques as manipulation, I framed them as known weaknesses in our minds that could be exploited if we weren't wary and aware. Thus: defense against dark arts. Combining rationality and Harry Potter! Hey, that would be a great fanfiction! (Yes, I'm aware of Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality and have done my best to spread it far and wide.) Thanks for the support regarding my job: I've loved doing it and hope to do more for the secular movement!
2lessdazed
I think the best approach is to read the sequence on a Human's Guide to Words before subject specific material. In particular at least the first nine (until Neural Categories) and also Categorizing Has Consequences Where to Draw the Boundary and Words as Mental Paintbrush Handles.
0pedanterrific
/clears throat suggestively
1pedanterrific
Are you volunteering for the post of LessWrong's DADA professor? The space is open if you want it, though Yvain has previously submitted an application. It should also be noted that a certain someone doesn't seem interested in the job (probably a good thing, on balance).
6JesseGalef
That depends - would I die horribly and mysteriously after a year?
2pedanterrific
No, of course not! Whatever gave you that idea? (You might be found in a closet with three fifth-year Hansonians, though...)
1kilobug
I would say that any persuasion technique that requires plain lies is unethical. Lies are contagious and break trust, while trust is required for any constructive communication. Now, it may be a lesser evil in some situations. But a lesser evil is still evil, and should be avoided every time it can be. So yes, to me, you can call a technique itself unethical. Some exceptional situations may force you to do something unethical, because the alternatives are much worse, but that can be said to anything (you can always construct an hypothetical situation in which a given ethical rule will have to be broken), so if we want to keep that "ethical" word, we can apply it to something like openly lying.
0lessdazed
Particular persuasion techniques are called different things depending on if they are used ethically.
0JesseGalef
That's one useful way to make a distinction! And, honestly, probably the one I lean toward. That's probably the way I'd use the words, but even so I'm trying to figure out whether there's a sensible and coherent way to call a persuasion technique unethical as a reflection on the technique, rather than solely the consequences. I've thought about it another way - if a particular technique is far easier (and more likely) to be used in a way that reduces utility than it is to use in a positive way, society should be wary of it, and perhaps call it an unethical practice. I'm thinking of some alleged pick-up artist techniques that are based on lowering a woman's self-esteem and sense of self-worth. (Disclaimer: this is second or third-hand information about PUA, so I could be misrepresenting it. Regardless of whether it's practiced by PUA, the hypothetical holds.)
1lessdazed
The first step might be to back up and see whether there's a perfectly coherent way to distinguish among persuasion techniques, in case that becomes important. Sure, there are sensible ways to distinguish among them. But if you had a good idea of what your subject's matter was like, and a good idea of how you would want it to be, and you had sufficient power, you could talk softly to them, or torture them, or disassemble their atoms and reshape them into a nearly identical version that had a few changed opinions, or barbecue them and feed them to a child and teach the child the opinions you wanted them to have. All four ways begin with an interlocutor and end with a person made out of mostly the same atoms thinking largely what you set out to have the person you are talking to think. (Note: I do not claim that for every mind, persuasion would work.) While these methods are distinct, there is a continuum of possibilities along the influence-manipulation-reconstruction-recycling axis. I don't think there is a solid, sharp boundary marking a difference in kind between "influence" and Dark Art style "manipulation". On slavery, which everyone agrees is always wrong...right?
[-]Alaeriia200

Salutations,

I am a 22-year-old middle-class male from the Boston area. I was diagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome at a young age, and have lived most of my life on medication, primarily Concerta. I found this site after reading all of Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality in one sleepless night and wanting to read more about rationality. I consider myself to be a rationalist-in-training; while I am capable of actually changing my mind (I believe), I am a procrastinator and let my emotions get the better of me at times. I am pleased to find a community of rationalists, as I can learn from them and better my own skills as a rationalist. I will likely not post very much, but the posts I do write will hopefully be of high quality. (I find that negative incentives, e.g. karma downvotes, have a powerful effect on me; also, I am a perfectionist and want anything I do to be done right the first time according to objective criteria, such as using proper grammar and such.) I can type approximately 50 words per minute (hunt-and-peck) and am obsessed with roller coasters. I hope that I will be accepted into the Less Wrong community.

Sincerely,

Alaeriia

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[-]moe200

Hello all,

I've been following discussions on LW for about 6 months now and have been urged by another member of the community to join in commenting. I've been hesitant to join, but now that I've moved to a state in which I don't know a soul, I'm finding myself reading discussions here more than usual.

I think participation in LW can help me do things better at my job (and in life generally). Discussion here seems a good resource for testing out and working through ideas in a non-combative, but rigorous setting.

My field is evolutionary biology and I recently have spent a lot of time thinking about:

1) Whether people "trained" in the sciences believe they are inherently more objective and clear thinking than those in other fields, and as a consequence do not work hard to make sure their thinking and communication IS clear and objective. I'm not sure that all people receiving a science education are actually well trained to think empirically (I include my own education here), but a degree in science gives them the impression that they are.

2) What are the obstacles to understanding evolutionary biology? I find that students, after having taken an evolutionary biology course,... (read more)

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0Curiouskid
"I find that students, after having taken an evolutionary biology course, STILL fundamentally don't understand." Could you elaborate on this? I haven't taken an evolutionary biology course, but I'd love to know what to look out for if I do decide to take one.
[-]Flay190

Hi all, call me Flay.

I'm a 20-year old graphic design student and traditional artist (figure drawing, mainly) with an array of other odd interests on the side, from costume makeup to programming. Although I do enjoy what I do, and it can certainly be very challenging, I sometimes feel there are parts of my analytical mind being neglected. Reading a few of the sequences here and being thrown all of a sudden back in to the deep end of reason made me realise how much I miss the sensation, and so I decided to register. One of my driving motivations is to try to optimize myself as much as possible, and achieve all I can. As you could guess I’m more than a little perfectionistic, although I'm slowly learning to be less uptight about the whole deal.

I came across Less Wrong while I was researching the singularity movement. I don't consider myself a rationalist yet (or a follower of the singularity movement for that matter), only because I have a great deal more reading to do first. In particular, I haven't finished reading through the core sequences yet, but I intend to do so soon.

Looking forward to meeting everyone!

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4Paul Crowley
There is an optimal amount of uptightness :-) Welcome!
0Flay
True, perhaps one day I'll find it. =P Thanks!
1Oscar_Cunningham
Welcome!
0Flay
Thank you!
[-]DBreneman180

Hi there everyone, I'm a programmer by trade and a video game maker by inclination. I first ran across Less Wrong while random-walking through tvtropes. I read a little of it, found it daunting but fascinating, and it... sat in my bookmarks for about a year after that.

Later, I random-walked upon Harry Potter atMoR, and it rekindled my interest. I'd read a chapter, get on lesswrong, and try and find all the tricks that harry (or other characters) used for that chapter. It was still slow going, because I wanted not just to read the material, but to absorb it and become stronger (Tsuyoku Naritai!)

I... pretty desperately needed it. I grew up in a rural community with an absolutely abhorrent school system, even by the standards of the american school system. I had a middle-school understanding of math and logic going into college, and am still recovering from the effects of a bad start (Bayesian theory and the QM sequence are on the very edge of what's possible for me, but stronger, stronger, I will learn)

I 'came out' as an atheist two years ago to my parents, and began rearranging my life insurance to go to an Alcor membership two weeks ago. All in all, I'm not terribly new to 'critical' thinking in terms of not taking a claim at face value, but still learning how to truly deeply analyze claims as a rationalist.

So um.. hi

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1Emile
Welcome! 'nother Programmer here, and game maker too (I think there are a few of us here). D'you have any nice games to show?
2DBreneman
Just a (very primitive) version of Space Hulk I made in school and a metroid-vania style platformer that never reached completion before the team split. I'm still building up a website for myself and a couple of my fellow designers (www.selfemployedheroes.com) that I'll post them to as soon as I can. Not much I know, but I literally just graduated at the end of February. Still hunting for that first job where I can really make a name for myself.
[-]KrisC180

Hello all. I've been meaning to introduce myself in the old welcome thread for a while now.

I found this site shortly after Overcoming Bias while doing research for an open source project I'm planning to make public within the next few months. The project is peer-based and derived from what I learned about decision making in anthropology classes. (Don't worry, the methods have been Bayesian since before I knew the term.)

In addition to teaching myself Java and a variety of other languages to put that project together, I also do some 3D design and printing. Trying to build a strong skillset for a post scarcity world brought about by personalized manufacturing. Any time now....

I had a lot of early childhood exposure to both the occult and organized religion. I feel that by early 20s I pretty well exhausted everything mysticism and esoteric knowledge has to offer. I have a tendency to get defensive when entire traditions are dismissed by those who have only cursory familiarity. When a group of people pursue a discipline they believe to be useful for centuries, some of their methods and conclusions may be useful.

Studied Materials Engineering and Anthropology (no degree - long story). Vol... (read more)

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3Douglas_Knight
Could you write about what you got out of mysticism? (I suppose that the third sentence could be interpreted as a reason why not.)
0KrisC
Here's one idea: [http://lesswrong.com/lw/37k/rationality_quotes_december_2010/3250?c=1]
[-]Celestia170

Hello Less Wrongians! I'm a 17 year old American student who found Less Wrong through Common Sense Atheism, and has lurked here for several months. Only today did I decide that this was a community I wanted to take the next step with; actually join.

I've always had a rationalist "pull." Though for most of my life it manifested itself in a Traditional Rationalist way, I have a profound drive to find out what is the case. I was raised as a Roman Catholic, though not a particularly strict one, but abandoned this very quickly (fifth grade), helped along by a love of science and a penchant for philosophical questioning which had begun in childhood. My education has been tumultuous. I've always been a bright kid, but for much of my school career felt that I was being held back, so I did most of my learning from books and the internet on my own time; after I'd finished a test early, or at lunch, or after school. This wasn't helped by a massive bout of anxiety I encountered in middle school surrounding rather vicious bullying I suffered for my perceived sexuality (though those harassing me were technically correct - I'm gay). Still, I managed to maintain my As so that I cou... (read more)

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5Wei Dai
Why do you intend to study physics or economics in college?
0Celestia
Because I'm strongly interested in both subjects, could very well pursue a career in one of them (or related fields), and there are excellent resources for both in the university system, especially for physics (research opportunities, labs, etc.).
7Wei Dai
I think the consensus around here is that too many high IQ people go into physics compared to what is socially optimal. Unfortunately my Google-fu is failing me and I can't find the posts/discussions I have in mind. (Anyone want to help me out?) The closest I could find is Paul Christiano's The Value of Theoretical Research.
2komponisto
There's also the comment of Peter Thiel at the 2009 Singularity Summit, referenced here. But in any case note that studying physics in college does not necessarily commit one to "going into" physics. Indeed, Robin Hanson now studies economics professionally but started out studying physics!
4Wei Dai
Thanks, I think between you and gwern you've probably covered what I had in mind. From your linked comment: It might be hard to argue that everyone currently working on string theory should shift their attention, but much easier to argue that at the margins, we need more highly capable people working on creating a positive Singularity, or reducing existential risk, or aging, and fewer doing theoretical research. It's unlikely we can make all string theorists shift their attention anyway, but I feel like we'd be doing some good if we could change a few people's minds (like Celestia's for example). Do you disagree? Sure, but if one doesn't intend to pursue a career in physics, why not study something more generally useful, like computer science?
0Vaniver
You can do both. Some of the value of adding physics is that it's a credible signal and your classmates are a cut above most other departments (and you do pick up some problem-solving techniques).
2gwern
Well, you might be thinking of http://lesswrong.com/lw/1hh/rationality_quotes_november_2009/1ac4 - either de Grey or the mathematician story would do.
2Vaniver
Welcome! I got a physics / econ double degree, and I recommend against studying econ in college, unless there are some really good professors at the college you go to. What you suspect about philosophy is true, and even more true for econ. I learned ~2 things in the econ classes I took that I hadn't learned in my personal reading on the subject (whereas I learned quite a bit of physics in classes), and so feel like those classes were wasted opportunities. I strongly recommend a field like computer science instead, if you have the least bit of aptitude for programming. If not, psychology seems like it could be super useful, but the cognitive science is few and far between, or electrical engineering fits with physics pretty well. (I do recommend reading Adam Smith's On The Wealth of Nations at some point if you haven't already. It's easy enough to get through, and it's a remarkably good foundation for the field.) ((Also, *brohoof* :3))
0kilobug
Welcome here !
[-]juliawise170

Hello. I found LW from two directions: first, I'm serious about philanthropy, and saw references to LW on GiveWell. Second, my husband and I are reading aloud from Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality each night.

I'm a grad student in social work. I find that social work has a lot in common with some of LW's goals (mainly self-improvement). Given that LW is aimed at very high-functioning people, which most social work is not, it uses some different methods. But I suspect LW could benefit from some ideas from social work.

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2KPier
Welcome! If you haven't already, you may want to check out some of LessWrong's posts on efficient philanthropy and Luke's sequence on the scientific knowledge behind self-improvement.. People's brains work (mostly) the same way, whether aspiring rationalists or the beneficiaries of social work, so I'd be very interested in reading your perspective on self-improvement in your field.
0jsalvatier
Welcome! And nice to meet you :) I'd be interested in hearing about social work.
[-][anonymous]160

I am a (shy) NEET who has been stalking the blog for some months now but only recently made an account.

Unfortunately, I cannot really remember how I came across Less Wrong but it quickly started affecting me in the same way TV Tropes does (I have about 10 LW tabs open at the moment).

I find the site really interesting and helpful, yet don't expect to comment that often. I feel as if my English and general knowledge are still not on the average level here so I'll read and read until that improves.

I enjoy anime, computer games, looking at images of cute things, Lolita Fashion and reading, among other things.

I dislike sports, don't -usually- find television or movies interesting and mostly dislike social interaction in person (its fine if I do it through the internet).

I tried studying psychology at a local university but all of the classes were full of nonsense (picture a statistics teacher who said his class was not about math but about arithmetic...) and the hall just outside was full of smokers at all times. I have sensitive lungs and can't tolerate smoke.

I hope to learn a lot here~

-Marcy

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[-]Karmakaiser160

Hello Less Wrong,

I am a 22 year old, caucasian lower class community college student interested in becoming more rational in order to achieve the goal of being useful to the human species. I am a student whose education is taking far too long for financial reasons but I am pursuing a BS in Computer Science and a minor in Cognitive Science because I want to understand human rationality at a deeper level. From there I will decide from my performance in classes if I am smart enough to tackle grad school. I often feel outclassed when reading the discussions here but I plan to learn enough to be useful in conversation just as quick as I can. I intend to become as rational as I am able with my meat brain. I became an atheist in High School, likely about at age 16, but have always deeply suspected there was no god since some brain worm burrowed into my head when I was 6 and said "If something is moral, then it is moral for its own reasons, not because God said so." Though the exact thought that I mulled over in my Sunday School class was "God has to play by the rules." That lead me to always be the devil's advocate in theological discussions (I was raised in a private... (read more)

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2kilobug
Welcome to Less Wrong !
[-]Mirai160

Hello, I'm a government and economics double major in an all-women's liberal arts college in Massachusetts. I discovered Less Wrong through an economics professor who gave a lecture on why it is important to be a rationalist. As an ex-lit. major, the sequence on "A Human's Guide to Words" caught my eye, and I'm currently working my way through it. I look forward to learning more.

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0Normal_Anomaly
Welcome to LW, Mirai! A Human's Guide to Words is one of my favorite sequences too.
0Oscar_Cunningham
Welcome!
[-]Ambition160

Hi! I want to use the Rationality Methods to improve my understanding of myself and how to improve. I guess you could say I had a strange way of "waking up" to Rationality. Many say they looked to rationality after realizing their religion was .... yeah. Well... That was a bit strange for me. when my parents married, "I was born about a year later", they were both from christian families and just went with it. When they realized that Christianity didn't match with the way things actually worked, the explained it all out to me. I was 5. Naturally that got my 5 year old mind thinking, "Wait.... Daddy was WRONG???". It took him about 2 hours to explain this strange new concept to me. That was step 1, on my path to rationality. I... am a 13 year old, confident, curious young male who decided that he wanted to skip the 30 years of bad habits and jump to the rational part. For my security, call me "Ambition".

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4MatthewBaker
Welcome :) We need more awesome young people around here, beware of too much rationality overload though the sequences have been known to cause very large amounts of meta-cognition and symptoms similar to brain freeze.
1DSimon
Hiya! Welcome to Less Wrong. That sounds like a good experience to have as young as possible, finding out that your world view is susceptible to being wrong and needing to be changed. The longer you wait for the first one of those, the harder it is to avoid just closing your eyes to it. Now, though, you're more mentally prepared if it ever happens again.
3Ambition
It sure was. As you can guess I'm not your average teen. Hopefully this time advantage will give me a head start on Rationality, and allow me to go far with it.
[-]Gedusa160

Hi Less Wrong!

Decided to register after seeing this comment and wanting to post give a free $10 to a cause I value highly.

I got pulled into less wrong by being interested in transhumanist stuff for a few years, finally decided to read here after realizing that this was the best place to discuss this sort of stuff and actually end up being right as opposed to just making wild predictions with absolutely no merit. I'm an 18 year old male living in the UK. I don't have a background in maths or computer sci as a lot of people here do (though I'm thinking of learning them). I'm just finishing up at school and then going on to do a philosophy degree (hopefully - though I'm scared of it making me believe crap things)

I've found the most useful LW stuff to be along the lines of instrumental rationality (the more recent stuff). Lukeprog's sequence on winning at life is great! My favorite LW-related posts have been:

... (read more)
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[-]lukeprog160

I suppose I should introduce myself.

I've been reading Overcoming Bias and Less Wrong intermittently for more than a year. I only recently became active, posting a few comments and attending a meetup in Irvine, CA.

I'm a 25-year-old computer systems administrator for businesses in L.A. county, but my real passion is philosophy, and I hope to return to school and become a philosophy professor one day.

Though I was raised an evangelical Christian and pastor's kid, I now write the popular atheism blog Common Sense Atheism and also host three podcasts: one on philosophy, one on meta-ethics, and one on Christianity. On that site I've also posted many Less Wrong-related posts.

P.S. Thanks to orthonormal for this post and for a fun list of 'instant gratification' posts on Less Wrong.

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4orthonormal
I've been impressed with CSA, and the "digest of LW sequences" posts are really well done. Keep up the good work! The first hit is always free...
1lukeprog
Thanks. But, note that I'm not blogging the sequences at CSA. I'm blogging through all of Eliezer's writing, chronologically. One day I may return and attempt one-post summaries of some of the shorter sequences, but I'm hoping somebody on Less Wrong will beat me to it.
[-]madair160

I think that's the most inviting community post I have ever read. I've been a lurker for awhile with almost no participation. Lately I've started catching up on old articles. My background is raised in a Jesus people hippie cult and thus took a long road to atheism and attempted rationality.

In other forums I tend to participate more (I'm a software developer, so that's plenty of online community). However I'm at LessWrong to learn, and so I don't have much to contribute at present. Which reminds me, I love this place for not being ivory tower. I find too much of this type of community in other forums to be biased towards academia (and somehow proud of it). It's a nice contrast here.

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6Paul Crowley
Wow, thanks! It's been said with some justice that LessWrong is ridiculously forbidding, so it's nice that it doesn't always come across that way.
5MartinB
The first few times I got down voted it hurt a bit, but it is a signal (in many cases) that something with my commenting was wrong, and as long as that is the case I prefer to have it pointed out. Note that there are also people being helpful when you commit errors, or write articles. I think the less inviting feeling can come from the higher regard for content. In some atheism forums where I post we have super nice theists posting, and getting respected just for being honest and decent people. Which is fine, but they do not get any flack for the content they write. On LW you don't get additional karma points for being a nice person. PS: welcome
4Spurlock
I think it's pretty intimidating at first glance, but a good bit of effort seems to go towards helping newcomers get to where they ought to start (this post is an example). This seems like the key thing to me, and I think it's done reasonably well. Every time anyone makes a sincere, well-intended, and not condescending "Welcome to Less Wrong" reply comment, I think the community gets a little more inviting.
1madair
: ) It's certainly challenging, and of course leans towards ivory tower, quite reasonably though considering high concept is intrinsic to the subject matter.
[-]abamf150

Hello all, I'm a 17 year old High School senior. I discovered Less Wrong through the author page at HP:MoR. I had considered myself a rational person for some time, but the Sequences here have really opened my eyes to the glaring errors I was making as a Traditional Rationalist. Consequently, this site has already changed my life for the better and I really just want to thank all the main contributors here. Thank You!

Also, I am looking to Major in Cognitive Science in college and any suggestions as to good schools to apply would be appreciated, along with any advice as to reading or preparation I should do before entering this field.

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0Normal_Anomaly
Welcome to less wrong! I don't know enough about you to predict where you could be accepted, but MIT and Caltech are both great schools for anyone who wants to study Cognitive Science.
0demented
I would like to second his request. I too would love some reading material, besides the Sequences which are pretty awesome by themselves, on cognitive science and rationality.
0Kaj_Sotala
Welcome!
[-]playtherapist150

Hi. I've been lurking here for awhile, because my son is a major contributor. I recently confessed that I was reading his posts and he urged me to register and contribute. I made my first comment a few minutes ago, in response to "What hardcore singularity believers should consider doing."

I think I'm probably atypical for this site. I'm a 58 year old, female, clinical social worker. I've worked in mental institutions, foster care for the disabled and, for the past 21 years as a play therapist with children. I'm also a part-time artist and a volunteer executive director of a non-profit organization. I'm not sure that I am a "rationalist".

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[-]jknapka140

Hello, all. I'm Joe. I'm 43, currently a graduate student in computational biology (in which I am discovering that a lot of inference techniques in biology are based on Bayes's Theorem). I'm also a professional software developer, and have been writing software for most of my life (since about age 10). In the early 1990's I was a graduate student at the AI lab at the University of Georgia, and though I didn't finish that degree, I learned a lot of stuff that was of great utility in my career in software development -- among other things, I learned about a number of different heuristics and their failure modes.

I remember a moment early in my professional career when I was trying to convince someone that some bug wasn't my fault, but was a bug in a third-party library. I very suddenly realized that, in fact, the problem was overwhelmingly more likely to be in my code than in the libraries and other tools we used, tools which were exercised daily by hundreds of thousands of developers. In that instant, I become much more skeptical of my own ability to do things Right. I think that moment was the start of my journey as a rationalist. I haven't thought about that process in a sy... (read more)

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0shokwave
If you have the time and inclination to test this, you can use this site to discover your level of under- or over-confidence, and adjust appropriately. In any case, welcome to LessWrong! I look forward especially to hearing about the process of unschooling; there is (very rightly) an impression here on LessWrong that raising a child is one of the hardest tasks; it seems like also taking responsibility for their education is even more daunting!
[-]jrichardliston140

Hello all!

I was pointed to LW by a friend who makes a lot of sense a lot of the time. He suggested the LW community would take some interest in an education project I've been working on for over two years, The Sphere College Project. Before introducing myself I spent a few weeks perusing LW sequences. This could go on for quite some time, so I'll go ahead and jump in.

I'm 50 years old, born and raised in the US in a series of towns throughout South Carolina. I had aptitude for mathematics and music. I pursued music and became a formidable trombonist living in NYC and playing classical and jazz music. I could sight-read anything. In 1982 my girlfriend's father worked for IBM, so I got to play around with his IBM PC. I was hooked (particularly loved "Adventure", but could only fit math/computers into my scant spare time. I did read "Godel, Escher, Bach" while studying trombone at the Eastman School of Music. Later, while doing my DMA in music I observed that most of the musicians I encountered in their 50s, 60s and 70s didn't appear to be loving the life anymore, so I decided I would leave music entirely, and began taking courses in math/physics/computer science at... (read more)

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5Morendil
Welcome to Less Wrong! That's kind of impressive, an application of the "outside view" in just the way recommended by Daniel Gilbert's "Stumbling on Happiness".
7NancyLebovitz
I know someone who compared lifespans of poets vs. prose writers, and went into prose as a result.
0gwern
I'm amused; that's like some twisted literature version of Newcomb's dilemma - if you would seriously consider choosing between prose and poetry on that basis, then Omega filled only one box. Or something like that.
0RHollerith
Agree: the vast majority are not rational enough to be able to do that.
[-]Cthulhoo140

Hi to everyone!

I first arrived to this site several months ago, and I've been a voracious reader since then. So, after this period of "mad and desperate studying" ("studio matto e disperatissmo" as Leopardi would say) I think I am probably ready to stop lurking and start to actively participate. Despite having a scientific background (I have a Ph.D. in theoretical physics, even though I'm doing a completely different job at the moment) I never encountered before the concept of rationality as it's explicitely stated here. In fact, I used to think I was a very "rational" person, in the more generic use of the word, before reading the Sequences and discovering that... well, I wasn't. It's still a long way before I reach the level of many notable members of this community, but I would say that LW helped me make a big step in the right direction. I want to emphasize this concept: there are a lot of good places where you can obtain knowledge, very few that can teach you how you should handle it. It's though to do it on your own, so thanks LW!

Finally, I'm from Italy, and would love to know if there are other fellow LWers that would like to start an italian chapter of the conspiracy. Also, I think it would be great if we could manage to translate some of the Sequences: I managed to raise interest in some of the topics among my friends, but many of them can't read English well enough (or at all). Let me know what you think about it

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6komponisto
Italian translation project. See here. Also, welcome!
0Cthulhoo
Thank you, I wasn't aware that a similar project already existed. I'm more than willing to collaborate! As soon as I have some free time I'll write more in the proper discussion.
[-]Yossarian140

Hello, I found Less Wrong after a friend recommended Methods of Rationality, which I devoured in short order. That was almost a year ago and I've been lurking LW off and on ever since. In June I attended a meetup and had some of the best conversation I've had in a long time. Since then, I've been attacking the sequences more systematically and making solid progress.

I'm in my late 20's, live in Los Angeles, and work in the entertainment industry (after failing miserably as an engineering student). It's my ambition to produce stories and science fiction that raise the sanity waterline of our society. Film and television science fiction has never come close to approaching the depth and breadth of imagination and thoughtfulness of literary science fiction and I'd like to be a part of the effort to close that gap, however slightly.

I have a hypothesis that the sociological function of stories is to communicate lessons about desirable or undesirable human behavior and translate them from an intellectual idea that can't be grasped by us on an intuitive level to an emotional idea that can, in the process making it more likely we'll remember them and apply the lesson to our own behavior. Alm... (read more)

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1Oscar_Cunningham
Welcome! (pneumonic -> mnemonic)
0Yossarian
Thank you, fixed.
0[anonymous]
.
[-]FranFin140

I accidentally posted the following comment earlier today in the May 2009 Introduction page. Hal suggested I re-post it here, where it belongs:

Those of you who were at the 2010 SIngularity Summit in San Francisco last weekend might have seen me. I was hovering around "the guy in the motorized wheelchair." I am Hal Finney's spouse and life partner. Although I am new to Less Wrong, and very ignorant when it come to HTML and computers, I have been a Rationalist ever since I was a child, to the dismay of my mother, teachers, and legions of other people I interacted with. I met Hal while an undergraduate at Caltech. And as they say, the rest is history.

This past year, Hal and I have had to completely alter projections of our future together. Hal was diagnosed with ALS (Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, better known in the US as "Lou Gehrigs Disease"). Since his diagnosis in August of 2009, Hal has physically changed in very obvious ways. His speech has become slow, quiet, and labored. His typing has gone from rapid-fire 120 WPM to a sluggish finger peck. His weekly running (50-60 miles per week in February 2009) stopped being possible in November of 2009, and now Hal g... (read more)

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[-]Aurini140

Well, I never did get around to introducing myself in the original thread, so I might as well post something here.

I spent six years as an infantry soldier, did most of a History degree before dropping out in disgust, have a Post Apocalyptic scifi novel currently in negotiations with a publisher, I used to be a math prodigy but now I can barely remember Calculus, taught myself auto mechanics over the period of one month after buying a car for a pack of cigarettes, I ride a motorcycle, I have some sort of mutant ability to talk cops down when they start feeling violent, and am drastically over skilled and under employed.

I'm hoping to contribute to the community more substantially than just leaving comments; I have a couple of posts I'm working out in my head. The first is a summary of TVTropes - what it is and why it's important - the other being a guide to using the Dark Arts.

I really regret my math not being up to par for this community; I tend to understand things on a gut/instinctual level (ie: I can catch a ball, but have trouble calculating the trajectory) but my math's too rusty to 'prove' most of my ideas.

Despite a deep-seated desire for it to be otherwise, I dwell in the banker-run metropolis of Calgary, Alberta.

Also, I have a blog where I write about how Vile and Unconscionable it is, living in this dystopia: www.staresattheworld.com

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2gwern
Is this along the lines of Robin Hanson's endorsement?
3Aurini
I somehow missed that post of his; the short answer is yes. The world that tropes describe is - I believe - Magic. When you start seeing the dynamics of how that world works, you can pinpoint the roots of many of our biases.
[-]Alejandro1130

Hello everyone,

I am a 31-year-old physicist and have been following LW since before it split from OB. It is one of the sites I spend most time reading, even though I never delurked before - I suspected, probably correctly, that it would induce me to spend even more time in it ("Less Wrong Will Ruin Your Life", as TVTropes might put it). However, I have recently moved into an area where regular meetups are going on, so I thought it would be worthwhile to get involved in the community and try to meet some of its members.

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1Oscar_Cunningham
Welcome! If you can cope with TVTropes, LessWrong shouldn't be too addictive.
4Alejandro1
And who said I am coping well with TVTropes? ;)
[-]kilobug130

Hi everyone,

So well...

I'm a 30-yo french man, working as a Free Software developer (mostly in Python and C) and system administrator, deeply interested in "science" (maths, physics, biology, computer science, ...) since as far as I can remember. I define myself as a rationalist and a humanist.

What I value is not easy to explain in a few lines, but to say in three words I would say : humanity (human beings, or any sentient being able to show the quality of humanity like altruism and curiosity), truth (making the map closer to the territory, to use LW terminology) and progress (the idea that we can make the future a better place than the past).

I discovered Less Wrong through... "Harry Potter and the methods of rationality" which a fellow free software developer pointed me to, and I started reading the sequences since then. I find them deeply interesting. I'm not yet fully convinced about the Singularity (or least, it being in a mater of decades and not of centuries or more) nor about trans-humanism, but I do view them with a positive, if yet doubtful, glance.

As for how I went into rationality... well, I was more or less born into it, my parents being maths teache... (read more)

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0Morendil
Welcome! Great to have one more LWer from France, potentially one more person to talk to at our infrequent meetups. Are you in or near Paris?
0kilobug
Thanks (to you and others) for the welcome ! To answer your question, yes, I'm from Paris' suburbs, so I can easily go to Paris.
0Oscar_Cunningham
Welcome!
[-]Just_a_Human130

I'm just a regular woman, with regular intellectual capabilities who is struggling to complete a degree in physics, math and CS while working part time, taking care of my seven-month old full-time, spending quality time with my husband, satisfying my parents' and inlaws' wishes to keep in touch and see their granddaughter, and trying to pursue the truth and grow in wisdom during the wee hours of the night. I am an orthodox Jew who is currently undergoing a crisis of faith - reading things like LW persuade my intellect, reading things on Judaism persuade some other part of my being. I became an orthodox Jew after doing some independent reading and studying from the age of 14 (before that I thought religion was just an obsolete and irrational barrier to the enlightenment and advancement promised by science). I don't care if I get voted down to hell for saying that (I don't believe in hell anyways). That is just how I'm feeling personally at this point in life. I'm not here to get high karma - just here to read as much as possible learn, perhaps change my mind and act to the best of my knowledge. I have been fascinated by science for as long as I can remember, became intrigued with ... (read more)

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7simplicio
Does that mean you're a convert? I hear that's not a trivial matter... I hear you! =) I've found a useful way to organize my knowledge is to think about the epistemic bases for the various types of knowledge, i.e., "how do I know?" Scientific, common sense, philosophical, mathematical, something I heard at the pub... etc. Well, first of all, I doubt you'll get voted down severely for merely identifying as a theist, but you will if you make arguments for theism that display some obvious mistakes the community recognizes. Don't worry too much about karma anyway. It's mostly for keeping comments relevant to the subject at hand, so we can have a discussion of, say, "ethics from a materialist perspective" that actually gets off the ground, without constantly having to reinvent the wheel and argue materialist vs. theistic ethics from the ground up. That said, however, pay attention when you're downvoted a lot, as it probably means that several members of the community think you made a mistake in reasoning. Welcome! =)
2orthonormal
This is generally relevant and well said. I'm stealing it for the post, if you don't mind.
2simplicio
By all means!
[-]rwmcr29120

Hello, I am a British psychology student (studying out of country, presently). I stumbled upon this website after doing a little research following Eliezer's recent Skepticon talk on Youtube. I have greatly enjoyed learning about rationality within psychology; heuristics, biases, and Bayes rule are central to the course.

I am at that stage where I am beginning to narrow down which areas of research I would like to enter into, and this area is becoming increasingly interesting to me and may one day guide my decision; but while I personally define as a skeptic and have done for some time now, I feel I am new to many areas of rationality, i.e. the "higher level" topics. There is always something more to learn. I apologise if I am I shy contributor at first, I can find such environments of discussion a little daunting when I myself feel inexperienced. I am going to spend some time in the near future exploring here a little more, and familiarizing myself with the articles/sequences on LW; I look forward to achieving a little more knowledge, and hopefully contributing to the community here.

About me personally; I enjoy archery, chocolate, debating and reading. Rebecca

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[-][anonymous]120

Hello, LessWrong.

I am an 18 year old senior in high school interested in evolutionary psychology and cognitive science. I've actually been lurking around this site for over four months before I finally got brave enough to introduce myself. I always considered myself to be rational, but after looking through the core sequences, it slowly dawned on me how horribly wrong I was, and what a ways I have to go to "upgrade" my rationality and hopefully maintain a meaningful conversation with anyone here.

I was raised in a non-religious home where I was encouraged to seek out many different belief systems and see which one fit me the most. I ended up rejecting every mainstream religion I came across, which I suspect is what my parents were hoping for. I officially became an atheist at around age twelve, and I suffered somewhat of an existential breakdown shortly after that as I was desperately searching for a meaning or purpose to the universe and not being able to find one. I didn't like the idea of living in a meaningless universe and I suffered from extreme depression for many years, which worried my friends and family. I was sent to a therapist because my schoolwork and social... (read more)

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2kilobug
Welcome !
[-]Slackson120

Hi, LessWrong.

There isn't too much to say about me. I'm a Kiwi 16 year old high school student who's been interested in a lot of the topics discussed here for a long time. I stumbled across HPMoR a few months ago. After reading through that, I came here and now I've read through pretty much all of the sequences. I'm definitely getting better at decision making and evaluating information, but I don't think I'm at the same level as most of you just yet.

I'm going to be busy for the next couple of months with exams, and then a trip to Ecuador, but hopefully when I get back I'll be able to take part in the community properly. I have a bad habit of being unnecessarily shy, even online, with people I have respect for. I'm going to try to change that this time. It should be easier than it has been in the past, because I have a lot of questions to ask, and sometimes even ideas to add to the conversation.

Cheers.

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0kilobug
Welcome ! And as a personal note : great that you go to Ecuador, I love that country ! I hope you'll enjoy your trip :)
[-]recumbent120

I got a PhD in engineering, but I am interested in many fields, and I will post about my definition of super liberal arts education and ultra liberal arts education. I have an energy, environmental and global poverty background, but I am continuously searching for the most important areas to do research on and to give charity to. I now think this is existential risks, so I am developing a framework for quantifying this. I am an atheist, but I appreciate the community and intellectual discussion of the religion Unitarian Universalism, where many people are atheists. I'm not sure when I identified myself as a rationalist, but I have had many discussions and given many presentations that have provoked much disagreement from the emotional theists and environmentalists. I have been interested in trans-humanism since reading The Age of Spiritual Machines. I came to felicifia and this site through Alan Dawrst when I was researching cost-effectiveness of reducing animal suffering.

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[-]a_mshri120

Hi

My name is Ali and I'm 24 year-old. I graduated in software engineering and currently, I'm in second year of Master of Science in Artificial Intelligence. Machine learning is my primary interest; however, I am extremely enthusiastic about other subfields of AI, cognitive science, psychology, physics and biology. I love to learn the assembly code fragments underlying high level processes in the universe and to see how complexities are decomposed into simple components by science.

Being born in a religious country, my first steps in the way of rationalism began by questioning the religious beliefs in my adolescence. Since then, I learned to live with probabilities, evidences and explanations.

I found Less Wrong by searching about singularity. I'm sure there is a lot here for me to learn, but I hope someday I'll be able to contribute.

(English is not my first language, so I apologize for any error in my writing. :D)

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5lessdazed
Your English is great. If you don't mind could you talk about the use of the article "the" in your native languages? (Standard Arabic, a dialect and perhaps others?) I personally feel strongly (although I am maybe the only one) that people should refrain from talking about "the singularity" since the word "singularity" covers several very different and incompatible ideas. I think it often causes confusion the way people sometimes talk about "evidence for the singularity" or "the likelihood of the singularity". To talk about the idea of "a singularity" is better, much as you said, or sometimes "a technological singularity".
7a_mshri
My native language is Persian (Farsi). There is no definite article in Persian and the specific object/ person/ idea which a noun refers to is determined from the context. I agree with you about the ambiguity of the word "singularity". Not only there are different definitions for "singularity" in AI, the term is also applied in other contexts (e.g. economic singularity, gravitational singularity). I think, as you said, talking about "a singularity" is more appropriate.
1Oscar_Cunningham
Welcome! Your writing is perfect. (Ha! Only just caught myself before I posted "Your writing is prefect." Oops.)
[-]ZankerH120

Hello, I've been reading articles on LW for some time, but even if I've slowly began to grasp what you're teaching, the community in general seemed so far above me in terms of however you want to measure intellectual capacity, I didn't even feel entitled to post. Might as well start here.

We'd love to know who you are, what you're doing

I'm a 21.7 years old university student from Slovenia, Europe. My interests are primarily maths, physics and computer science. Biological sciences interest me somewhat, but my knowledge in that area is on a layman's level. For philosophy, politics or social sciences I've never cared much. My passing interest in arts has been described as true random in taste by those with an affiliation to a particular genre, and I have little artistic talent myself. Professionally, I study electrical engineering and instruct high-school mathematics to pay for my living costs. My hobbies include Free software activism (helping in local communities, mostly), programming, backyard astronomy and mountain biking. I've been reading a lot of science and science fiction material since I was a child.

what you value

This section intentionally left blank.

how you came

... (read more)
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9lessdazed
Advocates of this would have much better results if they never said anything. The next time i sneeze, there's a good chance that I think of descendants, much higher than if I hadn't read this.
0Normal_Anomaly
Welcome to Less Wrong!
[-]A1987dM120

Hello everyone, I'm a 24-year-old graduate student from Italy. I found this site after reading someone quoting Yudkowsky: "Quantum physics is not "weird". You are weird." I've been reading this blog the whole past few days. :-)

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0Oscar_Cunningham
Welcome!
0komponisto
Benvenuto. :-)
0Paul Crowley
That is delightful, welcome! Did you have a look at the quantum physics sequence?
0A1987dM
I've read a few of the posts in it, and I'm going to read the rest in the next few days.
[-]RobertLumley120

Hello, everyone.

Apparently I was supposed to introduce myself here when I joined the site. Looks like I'm about two (?) months late. I'm not really sure when I registered my account, but I just started actually commenting recently.

Anyway, I'm a 21 year old Biomolecular Engineering/Pre-medicine student living in the backward state that just put Intelligent Design in the state curriculum (And also recently proposed outlawing teachers mentioning homosexuality in the classroom before the 9th grade, among other remarkably boneheaded things). I know a marginal amount of programming - most of what I do is visual basic to go along with my Excel spreadsheets or MATLAB work for class, but I really enjoy it. I also know marginal amounts of C++ and PHP, but I'm not entirely sure why I'm telling you this.

I was introduced to Eliezer's work sometime this spring (April?) by a friend who (without having read it herself) posted HP:MOR on my Facebook wall, and said it was right up my alley. I read it in two weeks, and was hungry for more. Since he wrote it under the pen name "LessWrong", it actually took a bit of digging to find out who actually wrote it, but I gradually uncovered it. (I ke... (read more)

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3MixedNuts
On cryonics: For: Alcor's FAQ Against: Sadly, not much. Paul "ciphergoth" Crowley collects anti-cryonics writing, and it sucks. You can almost certainly afford it. Eliezer said he paid less than $200/year. I know how expensive a photography hobby is; you're not dirt poor. For a potentially life-saving treatment, that's pretty cheap - people routinely pay more for treatments with worse odds that'll buy them less than ten years.
1RobertLumley
Well, it's more a question of what my parents are willing to pay for, to be honest. And I don't have any real photography equipment, I just enjoy reading about it, and taking pictures on my point and shoot.
2christina
Hey, I think I've seen you around the forum. I feel similarly about psychoactive drugs. I do consume small amounts of caffeine (via chocolate and the occasional caffeinated tea), but I try to avoid it since even those amounts can make me jittery and thus I don't drink coffee at all. I don't feel any desire to take recreational drugs, legal or otherwise. I suspect this qualifies as an unusual tendency, so it's always interesting to meet people who feel similarly. Nevertheless, I have a tendency not to mention this fact spontaneously for fear that people will feel I'm judging them.
1Normal_Anomaly
Hi, welcome to Less Wrong! There is respectable science backing up various parts of cryonics. This page has some titles of relevant papers. For more specific information, about which of the following are you most skeptical? * the mind is in the brain * the mind's information is preserved by vitrification * it will someday be possible to recover this information and run the mind, either in a brain or elsewhere As for finances, you can get a life insurance policy that's about as expensive as medical insurance, that will pay out to the cryonics org in the event of your death. This is the way most people sign up, and it's apparently feasible on a limited budget. I can't say for myself, because I don't have the control over my own finances I'd need to sign up. Please look into cryonics more carefully. It could save your life, and even if you decide it's not for you, the choice is important enough to make it an informed one.
[-]drc500free120

Hello, My name is Dave Coleman. I was raised Atheist Jewish, and have identified as a rationalist my whole life. Browsing through the sequences, I realized I had failed to recognize some deeply ingrained biases.

I value making myself and others happy. Which others, and how happy, is something I've always struggled with. I used to have a framework with Jewish ethics, but I'm realizing that those are only clear in comparison to Christian ethics. Much of what I learned and considered was about how to make the Torah and Talmud relevant to modern, atheistic life.

I'm realizing the strong bias we had against saying "maybe it's not relevant, since it was written by immature goatherders 3500 years ago who had no knowledge of science or empathy for those outside their tribe." Admitting that wouldn't sound wise, so we twist and turn with answers, cluttering what could be a solid system of ethics.

For a while I've considered myself a reconstructionist Jew, with the underlying ethos of "do all Jewish traditions by default, but don't do anything that has a good reason not to be done." I've realized that not polluting my mind with incorrect and biased thought patterns is a goo... (read more)

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6Eliezer Yudkowsky
e^-x is its own second derivative. sin(x) is its own fourth derivative (note relation to e^ix). And welcome to LW! (he said)
4Eugine_Nier
Causality doesn't have much meaning when applied to mathematics.
1Perplexed
Following up to EY's comment: e^x is its own second derivative too. There are two functions that are their own second derivative, and four which are their own fourth derivative. Cool! So what are the other two (out of three) functions that are their own third derivative? What does their graph look like? And does all this have anything to do with Laplace transforms? Does a sufficiently smooth function have a 1.5th derivative? Yes, welcome to LW.
2ata
I think so.
2Eugine_Nier
More precisely there is a 2-dimensional parameter space of functions that are their own second derivative, i.e., any function of the form Ae^x+Be^-x for any constants A and B.
1drc500free
Is there a generic form of that for any nth derivative?
1JGWeissman
Sum over integers k from 1 to n of A(k)*e^(e^(2*i*pi/k)*x) is its own nth derivative, for all A.
1Eugine_Nier
Yes.
0JGWeissman
Of course, you mean they are the only solutions that satisfy certain initial conditions.
2drc500free
Well, that they are the family of solutions, allowing for various transformations. *-Disclaimer, I haven't looked at a differential equation in 6 years.
[-]biodork120

Hey! Great site - I look forward to reading the archives and new articles.

How did I come to rationalism?

I didn't realize it for a long time, but my first rational response was at a very young age. Some bully girl at school cornered me with her friends as said "You're stupid!". My response: "Nuh-UH!" (pause) "Hey, I get better grades than you! You're stupid, not me!"

I couldn't pick out the fallacies (hers and mine, lol) back then, but even then I knew that she was wrong, that I wasn't stupid just because she said so. I remember being very excited with I found out that my undergrad Philosophy 101 was called "Critical Thinking" and that's where I was formally introduced to logical fallacies. Logical fallacies have always been to me a way of speaking and thinking truthfully, a way to keep myself honest and to make sure others are being honest with me.

I am new to the online critical thinking movement, which I discovered through Pharyngula, the Skeptic's Guide to the Universe, and Brian Dunning's Skeptoid podcast and Here Be Dragons film.

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4wedrifid
I like the anecdote. Was your response effective?
5biodork
Nah. I got pushed into the wall and heckled by the same gang for most of the rest of elementary school. :P
[-]tylercurtain110

Hi, all. My name is Tyler Curtain. I am a theorist with the Department of English and Comparative Literature at UNC Chapel Hill. My training is in computer science (undergrad and grad) and English (grad). I teach graduate and undergraduate courses in theory, as well as courses in science fiction and fantasy. My research interests include philosophy of biology, evolutionary theories of language, linguistics, philosophy of language, and theoretical computer science.

It ain't your professor's humanities any more. The world has shifted.

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[-]Filipe110

Hi, everyone! I'm Filipe, 21, from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. I've dropped out of Chemical Engineering in the 4th semester, and restarted College after one year off with Mathematics, from scratch. I thought redoing the basic subjects, if I worked hard through them, would be a good idea. It probably would, but so far I've studied those subjects with the same sloppiness of before, heheh. Now I'm one semester off College, due to depression, obsessive thoughts and some suicidal tendecies. Some of this is related to a deconversion from Christianity at age of 18: I was really devout and lived for the religion. My father is a pastor and my whole family continues to be serious about Christianity and it's pretty obvious that I'm the greatest source of suffering in my parents' lives, as they believe I'm going to end up suffering eternally if I don't return to my former beliefs. It also relates to having been a sort of a child prodigy (many family members, even those who don't like me a lot, testify that I could read at age of 2) and now not being able to excel academically, because of those problems and because of akrasia. Speaking of which, I have never read the sequences even though I've being reading this site for some months. I guess this may change when I convince my parents to buy me an e-reader. Sorry for the babbling and the sloppy English.

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5shokwave
In this post, your command of English is indistinguishable from a native speaker's. If you have an estimate of how fluent in typing English you are, I suggest you strengthen it :)
0Filipe
I haven't learned how to upvote comments yet. I'll upvote yours when I have.
0shokwave
The little thumbs-up and thumbs-down at the bottom left of each comment. EDIT: how to retract...
2Filipe
Heheh, thanks.
2lessdazed
How can an effect like that have only one cause?
0Filipe
Do you mean that their source of suffering = me + misguided beliefs, not just me?
1lessdazed
Basically, yes.
1Filipe
I agree, but now I'm not sure how I'd rephrase it.
3lessdazed
There's no law that says reality must be describable in simple English. I don't criticize what you wrote! I ask you to not believe a thing merely because the thing is the exact meaning of words you selected, when you selected those imperfectly-fitting words because there were none better.
0Filipe
Ah! I see. Thank you.
[-]daenerys110

Hi All!

Generic Stats: 28 year-old Ohioan; Found LW through HPMoR, and lurked for a while, but finally created a profile after filling out the survey; BA in History. Was halfway through an MS in Human Factors Engineering when I got divorced and couldn't afford it any more. Don't plan on going back in the near future, but I did manage to get published during my time in grad school, which was pretty nifty.

I grew up with Easter-and-Christmas Roman Catholicism, though I also got a bit of Judaism from my dad (a Soviet emigrant). Got more heavily into Christianity in my teens, which lead to becoming an atheist when I was around 17.

I am sensitive to feminist concerns about what our culture teaches young girls, as I fell victim to it myself: I had a complete disregard for science and math, despite a very high aptitude for them. It wasn't until I self-studied my way back through math for my engineering requirements that I actually internalized the belief that I was good at this. The general "Not-Getting-It-ness" of many commenters in regards to gender issues tended to turn me away from LW at first, but there is a lot of good stuff here, besides.

About me personally: I enjoy Joss Whe... (read more)

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8J_Taylor
If it would not be inconvenient to you, could you unpack what you mean by "Not-Getting-It-ness"? That is, specific examples that you find problematic? If you would prefer not do this, could you recommend a source that would assist in understanding the method you used to arrive at this result? That is, a source that would allow one to understand the cognitive-algorithm that produces the result "Not-Getting-It"?
0daenerys
Of course! I tend to agree with orthonormal - in writings by men, women are often talked about as the "Other" and not the audience. EY has written a similar argument . But then in this piece, he makes multiple accusations that women tend to talk about men as "Other" without ever providing any sort of evidence to back it up. He just takes it as some obvious de facto truth that doesn't even need justification. I personally was put off at this. Some more good ones to read include this argument which mentions that you shouldn't forget the historical context/ culture that people are coming into these discussions from, and this piece, which posits that the essence of the "Taking Offense" is a percieved lowering of social status. I also recommend a quick perusal of the comments therein. From my personal experience, one of the early things I did upon finding Less Wrong (after some explorations in the sequences) was to click on the tags of subjects I was interested in (gender, social, etc). Somehow, a vast majority of the articles' comment sections ended up devolving into repetitive arguments about PUA. Looking back, this was probably due to my navigating by clicking on links within the article I was already reading, which lead me to stay within a subject range that could devolve into PUA discussions, and not so much that PUA is in fact mentioned in the vast majority of posts. My opinions on this (although probably more positive than you would expect of an average female) are a whole different subject which I can expound upon if need be, but I assume that you could guess how a female would feel when she goes to a blog supposedly about rationality, and all the comments are about PUA. Finally, I would like you to imagine yourself as the only male in a Women's Studies class. Even if the language always remains respectful and your classmates encourage your participation, I'm sure you can visualize many respectful debates where you would get frustrated that the other members
2Optimind
I realize this post is quite old, but there's clearly a norm of conversation I'm not understanding. I don't want to cross peoples boundaries, but I have a hard time understanding them. Could you be so kind to explain to me why one would be offended by that?
0J_Taylor
Sorry for not responding to this sooner. Thank you for explaining your view. I have only two statements to make. * Apologies for failing to abide by the relevant norms of conversation. (This is not sarcasm. Without body language, it is hard to demonstrate this. However, perhaps I can express myself better with this photograph of a chimpanzee.) http://www.ebookanoid.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/embarrassed-chimp.jpg If I were to anthropomorphize, the chimp would be thinking the chimp equivalent of "D'oh." * After the recent romance thread (which was not qualitatively worse than the previous threads), stating that Lesswrong has a "Not-Getting-It-ness" with regards to gender is perhaps something of an understatement. http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2007/08/27/science/chimp.reach533.jpg If I were to anthropomorphize this chimp, the chimp would be thinking the chimp equivalent of "Really, folks? Really?"
-2daenerys
PS- I really which there were a "Preview" button, or a way to edit posts in Not-A-Tiny-Text-Box. I'll be doing some editing now, but it will only be clarity, not content. :)
4Nornagest
Chrome lets you edit the size of its textboxes by dragging the lower right corner. Don't know if the same goes for any other browsers.
1daenerys
Oh, wow! That's super-helpful! Thanks!
1Desrtopa
You can do it in Firefox, but I didn't realize this until you pointed it out just now.
[-]eggman110

This seems rather unnecessary, but I'm posting here so that other people have a reference to my intro to rationality, if they're so inclined to read about it.

At the time of this posting I'm a 19 year-old male college student of middle class origins living in Vancouver, Canada, if that makes a difference. I was raised in a nonreligious home by politically centrist and humanist parents.

Having friends who were a bit nerdy and considered themselves rational in an irrational world, sane in an insane world, etc. they were very interested in a film called "Zeitgeist: Addendum" which confirmed their worldview at the time. I too watched the film and we were in awe of the Venus Project. http://www.thevenusproject.com http://zeitgeistmovie.com/

The Venus Project sees a bulk of humanity's problems as the result of faulty human psychology being propogated by social stratification in a money economy. The creators of the Venus Project believe that by creating material abundance through the application of technology that the Law of Supply and Demand can be superceded and hence money no longer needs to exist. In a global society with no social stratification, a culture based upon values d... (read more)

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5lessdazed
Welcome! Of all the people other than you that there are, this reference will be most important to eggman_2013.
[-][anonymous]110

Hey, I'm a 20 year old medical student, I've always had almost compulsive need to know the "truth". In retrospective I have been moving towards LW for a long time, first off I came in contact with Aubrey De Grey's campaign against aging, and decided as a 17-year-old that I wanted to dedicate my life to that cause (hopefully the problem gets solved before I die so I don't have to spend whole my life battling aging). Then from that I moved on to other transhuman ideas but got a bit skeptical about Ray Kurzweil's senario, began thinking about brain-uploading meant + morality + meaning of life + free will --> got depressed, read Dennett -> got a lot better, saw a few videos of Eliezer Yudkowsky and "thought he seems like a super-sane person, wonder if he stands on solid ground" found Less Wrong, prioritized becoming a more rational person.

Still a bit skeptical about plausibility the singularity happening any time soon(<50 years), so I right now I'm doing stem cell (hES, IPS) research, when my studies allow. But really enjoying LW (as well as finding it really useful).

Cheers! (And sorry about the "my life story")

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3Normal_Anomaly
Welcome to Less Wrong, Wix! Kudos to you for working in anti-aging research.
[-][anonymous]110

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2Oscar_Cunningham
You seem really good, you haven't made any errors that I've noticed. Welcome!
[-]TuviaDulin110

I'm Tuvia Dulin, and I ended up on these forums after reading Harry Potter fanfiction. I suspect that this is a common story among the membership.

I've tried to be rational ever since I learned what rationality was, but it wasn't until I suffered a psychotic episode that I learned what the true consequences of irrationality were. That was many years ago, and I have since completely recovered, but in some ways I'm glad for the experience; it taught me that without rationality, you have nothing dependable or sane.

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1lessdazed
"Rationality" is defined a bit differently here than in other places. There is good justification for this. It makes me suspicious any time I hear someone discuss the meaning of a word, as it makes it likely they are invalidly trying to argue by definition, but here "rationality" has a close meaning within and without LW, closer than any other word, and also sufficiently close that it is better to use it than use a new word.
0TuviaDulin
I don't have time to read all of those posts right this second (though I will over the next couple of days), but if you could just briefly explain how I'm misusing the word, that would be cool.
3lessdazed
You're not misusing the word. After the local use of "rationality" was established, a second word actually gained a meaning that is nearly as close to "rationality" (as used here) as "rationality" (as used elsewhere) is. That word is "winning", used in the broadest and most general way, as popularized by Charlie Sheen. This doesn't imply an endorsement of any particular thing related to him, but the term "winning" did approach what is meant here by "rationality" around New Years, or whenever that media flurry occurred. Even so, "winning" might be a bit farther from LW "rationality" than standard "rationality". Others might disagree with my assessment.
1MixedNuts
Welcome to Less Wrong! Your name totally rocks. Is it your legal name? Oy, tell me about it! (Actually, do tell me about it, if you want to. I'm interested in developing systematic techniques to cope with mental illness. Or at least in building scientifically sound bases for kvetching about it.)
3TuviaDulin
Yes, Tuvia Dulin is my born and legal name. When I need a pseudonym, I'm known as Blake Alexander Hannon. "Mental illness" is a very broad category, and I'm not sure if my way of dealing with what happened to me would work for other disorders as well. I'll talk about this at length when I have time; for now, I'm afraid I've got to run.
[-]JayDee110

Five quick questions, five fast answers. Fast and perhaps somewhat rambling.

I'm an Australian, a few years shy of thirty, who has generally done things for his own reasons rather than simply going along with everyone else. After secondary school I got a job or two, became heavily involved in a fringe political group for a few years and only then decided to go onto to university. Bachelor of Science (Chemistry) - hopefully the last BS from the education system I'll put up with. I've just very recently dropped out of Honours and moved the 1000km home to Melbourne, which was the most difficult decision I think I've ever faced. Not being easy, it stretched my relevant skills to their limit, and in the end it was quite nice to learn that I can make choices as a rational adult human. Or at least as some approximation thereof.

Every now and then I attempt to express my personal values in a system like those used in the Ultima games. Most recently, my three principles of virtue were Curiosity, Truthfulness, and Playfulness. Curiosity I have valued for as long as I can remember - my primary school motto included "live to learn" which I took to heart. Honesty has been an absolute fo... (read more)

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3Alicorn
Eee, what was it? :D
-1JayDee
The last sentence of these three: "My reasons for preferring to dissuade him [Mike] were entirely about myself. I hadn't yet begun to scratch the surface of what I wanted out of dating or romance or anything in that department. And it seemed like a uniquely hazardous thing to uninformedly test by experiment, both for myself and for anyone else involved. " A concise explanation of my feelings towards courtship and such things.
0Shmi
Hopefully Alicorn got her ego tickled a bit :) Personally, I prefer this one: "I accept your apology," I said. I'd gotten into the habit of saying that instead of "it's okay" when I was fourteen, having noticed that I often wanted to accept apologies for things that were not really okay. I wish I figured that one out by myself at any age.
2shokwave
Welcome to LessWrong, and I look forward to seeing you this Friday!
[-]Fyrius110

Hello, LW-ers.

I'm not exactly new - I've been lurking for a long time, soaking up all the glorious sanity from a few sequences and a lot of individual essays. And I've made a few comments. Still, I'd like to introduce myself properly. : ) (The main reason for this is that I think I need to lighten up and stop thinking of this site as a Sacred Order of Pedestaled Supergeniuses where my humble intellect doesn't belong, in order to grow.)

Insofar as anyone wants to know, I'm a 24 year old fellow, I have a Master's degree in linguistics since last year and now I spend my days as a humble translator. Somehow I fare better with intellectual pursuits if they're a hobby rather than how I make a living.

I think I'm a rationalist for one okay reason and one rather unflattering one.

The okay reason is that I've lived with a psychological diagnosis since I was... maybe 8 or so, so from very early on I've been quite aware of the fact that my brain is broken and needs fixing. I think I made more thinking errors than other people, but also importantly I made unusual thinking errors that stood out. My gut instincts clearly leading me in the wrong direction a lot, my feelings often being noticeably... (read more)

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[-]Micaiah_Chang110

Hello all!

I'm a twenty year old college student studying physics. My introduction to LessWrong has most likely been lost to the ravages of time (although there's this nagging feeling I was linked here by a random forum post on GameFAQs). That was about a year, year and a half ago. I've read about halfway through the sequences via the haphazard method of "Wow that's interesting I guess I'll drop the next hour or so reading it." While I realize that finishing the sequences is highly recommended, I haven't seen a significant amount of large-inferential-distance-statements-oh-geez-what-is-going-on here type posts so I think I'll be fine despite my incompleteness.

As to the more pertinent question of my road to rationality, well, I was raised in China where religion was nearly nonexistent and my first exposure to the Bible was a picture book which I treated more or less like Greek or Egyptian myths (~8 years old). This lead to a natural interest in the New Atheism movement which articulated my unspoken problems with religion and exposing me to the skeptics community as well (15-17 years old). However, a small nag at the back of my mind floated that there was something I was do... (read more)

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[-]Mercurial110

Greetings!

I drafted what is apparently too long an introduction to fit into a comment. Rather than try to work out how to rewrite the whole thing to fit into some unknown maximum length, I'll break it up into parts.

PART 1:

Greetings!

I've been lurking since early 2010. I'll finally take the plunge and actually engage with the community here.

I'm a Ph.D. student in math education. It's a terribly named field, it would seem; everyone seems to think at first that this means I'm training to either (a) teach math or (b) prepare future math teachers. It's actually better thought of as a subfield of psychology that focuses on mathematical cognition as well as on teaching and learning.

I grew up in a transhumanist household. My father signed us all up for cryonics when I was about five years old, I think it was. At the time I was just starting to realize that if death is inevitable for others, then that might mean that death is inevitable for me. I remember going up to my mother and father in the kitchen and asking, "Am I going to die someday?" They looked at me and said, "No, we're signing all of us up for cryonics. That means if we die, they'll just bring us back.&quo... (read more)

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[-]Mercurial150

PART 2 (part 1 here):

I had the pleasure of meeting Eliezer in January 2010 at a conference for young cryonicists. At the time I thought he was just a really sharp Enneagram type Five who had a lot of clever arguments for a materialist worldview. Well, I guess I still think that's true in a way! But at the time I didn't put much stock in materialism for a few different reasons:

  • I've had a number of experiences that most self-proclaimed skeptics insist are a priori impossible and that therefore I must be either lying or deluded. I could pinpoint some phenomena I was probably deluded about, and I suspect there are still some, but I've had some experiences that usually get classified as "paranormal" that are just way too specific, unusual, and verified to be chance best as I can tell. And I'm under the impression that these effects are pretty well-known and scientifically well-verified, even if I have no clue how to reconcile them with the laws of physics. But I've found that arguing with most die-hard materialists about these things is about as fruitful as trying to converse with creationists about biology. They know they're right, and as far as they're concerned, o
... (read more)
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[-]Carwajalca110

First a suggestion: I think it would make sense to change the topic to "Welcome to Less Wrong! (2010&2011)". I was confused whether I should post here or on the original "Welcome to Less Wrong!"

Then to the actual topic of my comment:

Hello!

I've been lurking a couple of months now, the rationality mini camp finally activated me to do something instead of just passively soaking up information. I wasn't selected, but I definitely do not regret applying for the camp.

Some info about myself, I grew up on the south coast of Finland and went to a Swedish-language school. Consequently I'm bilingual (Fin&Swe) and also acquired a strong interest in languages - besides the aforementioned I speak English, German, Russian and French. My other hobbies are skiing (both downhill and cross-country), travelling and car repairing.

LW was the biggest reason why I bought myself a Kindle - namely I wanted to read the sequences during commuting but carrying the laptop arround was too tiresome. Thanks to jb55 for making eBook-versions of them! I've made my way through around 80% of the sequences, although I'll have to reread at least the quantum mechanics one with pen and paper a... (read more)

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1Oscar_Cunningham
Welcome to LessWrong!
[-]Anatoly_Vorobey110

I'm not new here, but I never introduced myself and have recently started participating more; it makes sense to say a few words.

Hi. My username is my full name. I'm 34 years old, male, and live in Tel-Aviv, Israel with my wife and two year old daughter. I've lived the first half of my life so far in the USSR, the second half in Israel; consequently my native language is Russian, and I also speak Hebrew. I'm a secular Jew.

I work as a software engineer in a large corporation, doing interesting things. I try to maintain and extend some knowledge of math and physics (I've studied math in graduate school in the past, but didn't finish the degree). I read books, mainly fiction in English and Russian. I have insatiable curiosity about countless academic fields and disciplines, in hard sciences, social sciences and humanities, and have acquired much shallow knowledge in many of them, very little deep knowledge in any. I have some online presence in English, mostly due to open-source work I did in the past (not much recently), but my primary online presence is through my blog, which is written in Russian.

I've been reading OB/LW since late 2007, mainly lurking, with a few comments. Stopped ... (read more)

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0[anonymous]
I now wish I knew Russian!
[-]mrflick110

Hey everybody, I know I came across this late, but lately I've been becoming a more avid reader of the site, and thought I'd follow with the post's suggestion and give my introduction.

I came here from Overcoming Bias(via various econoblogs), although that doesn't really mark the beginning of my push into becoming a rationalist. The big turning point for me was coming across a NIH article that was linked to by econlog or marginalrevolution. Both of the two introduced me to Baye's Theorem, and how it could explain how so many publications in the medical literature could be statistically significant, yet incorrect(I think the paper estimated nearly half).

I had been struggling with social anxiety and had really screwed things up with a girl I really liked because of a few fundamental misunderstandings. In a clearer state of mind I was able to realize that I had an entirely wrong perception of what people thought of me and this girl in particular. But I couldn't explain why I would have such a skewed view of my world until I learned how to apply Baye's in how we evaluate our decisions.

Starting from the simple introduction into Baye's where one is asked to evaluate the problem of estim... (read more)

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[-]TylerJay110

Hi, my name is Tyler and I've been lurking LW for the last few months. I'm a full-time university student in California. Like others, I've refrained from posting because I feel I'm not yet quite up-to-date on many of the issues discussed here, though i'd considered many of them before ever finding LW.

I found LW through Yudkowski.net which I found through one of Eli's more technical articles that popped up on a google search when I was first becoming interested in Artificial Intelligence. Since then, i've developed an interest in the big R.

As I read the sequences (I'm nearly through and I've been at it a while now) I am often pleasantly surprised when Eli brings up a topic that i'd previously considered, and even more so when he explains it. Overall, the zeitgeist of the LW community really appeals to me. I'm often frustrated at listening to people i know say things that would get torn apart here on LW. I guess i'm just glad to know that there's a community here to which i can both learn tremendously, and hopefully contribute.

I'm working on filling in the holes right now, and the old adage "the more you know, the more you know you don't know" is really having its way with me right now.

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0thomblake
I think I'm missing something. Is this common jargon?
2false_vacuum
Rationality?
0thomblake
Thanks. I can see why nobody felt the need to respond to that one.
0false_vacuum
Well, I didn't find it obvious either. (Or I wouldn't have said anything. Not big on sarcasm.)
[-]Zetetic110

I stumbled over here from Scott Aaronson's blog, which was recommended by a friend. Actually, LessWrong was also recommended, but unfortunately it took a while for me to make it over here.

As far as my descent in to rationality goes, I suppose I've always been curious and skeptical, but I never really gave much direction to my curiosity or my skepticism until the age of 17.

I always had intellectual interests. In 3rd and 4th grade I tought myself algebra. I ceased to pursue mathematics not too long after that due to the disappointment I felt towards the public school system's treatment of mathematics.

After my foray into mathematics, I took a very strong interest in cosmology and astronomy. I still remember being 11 or 12 and first coming to realize that we are composed of highly organized cosmic dust. That was a powerful image to me at that time.

At this point in time I distinctly remember my father returning to the church after his mother and sister had passed away. The first church we went to was supposedly moderate. I was made to attend Sunday school there. I did not fare so well in sunday school. During the second session I attended the subject of evolution was brought up. Now, ... (read more)

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[-]atucker110

Hi! I posted on the other thread that I was around, but I guess I should introduce myself.

I guess the weirdest thing about me (relative to the community) is my age -- I'm still in high school and have been lurking LW since its creation and OB before that... I'm in the Montgomery Blair Magnet program, which has pretty thoroughly taught me that I'm by no means especially smart.

I got interested in the whole rationality thing after reading some of the articles that were tangentially related to the more philosophical articles that I was interested in* and found on Hacker News. The metaethics sequence seemed much less forced than a lot of the other considerations of morality that I had heard (mostly from a Christian background), which only piqued my interest further.

Short note: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality is pretty much the best introduction to rationalist topics for people my age that I've ever seen, I recommended it to a few friends, one of whom started reading it, lurking LW, and convincing others to read as well.

The article most tangibly helpful in my life was http://lesswrong.com/lw/i0/are_your_enemies_innately_evil , mainly in that it helped me realize that everyon... (read more)

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1simplicio
Welcome! "Are your enemies innately evil" is one of my all-time favourite posts too. I now think politics is the single biggest source of rationality failures out there (way bigger than religion). You can find loads of otherwise really good skeptics out there who have a political view (which is fine) that they seem to think is as perfect, scientific and objective as Maxwell's equations (not fine). Politics is epistemically dangerous.
[-]jaymani110

I am new to this site. I am a former Mortgage and Derivatives Trader on Wall Street. I am one of the few ex Wall Streeter’s who has experienced a crisis of conscience. I am an empirical skeptic who is cynical by nature but I have only recently started to sit down and try to figure out why people act stupidly and irrationally. Naseem Taleb, author of the Black Swan & Fooled By Randomness is one of my favorite authors and I truly believe that after all of my years trading it all comes down to random luck not any type of skill.

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0simplicio
Welcome, great intro! Do you think there are any types of traders who are closer to the mark? It's been a while since I read Black Swan, but I seem to recall Taleb was a "quant," and that he made a good deal of money thereby (NB: I have near zero knowledge of finance of any sort).
0adsenanim
jaymani, Have you seen: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/creditcards/ ? Luck may be a small part, but I think cognition is the better part. Sorry, if this is to bold, I'm new at this as well.
[-]cata110

Oh, hi. I'm an autodidact programmer in my early 20s working for a small company. A lot of programmers tend to be hacker sorts who like making things, but I mostly only care about achieving a deeper and more intuitive understanding of the world. I am interested in a lot of things, but I tend to concentrate alternately on math, CS, linguistics, philosophy, history, and literature.

I don't identify as a rationalist or make very rational decisions, but I share a lot of intellectual interests with the community, and there aren't really any other public spots on the web where smart people are discussing a variety of topics without a ton of noise and bullshit.

I don't have enough background in some of the jargon and shared historical discussion here to contribute to many of the more topical discussions, but hopefully as I catch up on the archives I'll be able to comment more often.

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4John_Maxwell
Hacker News is pretty nice: http://news.ycombinator.com/ Does anyone have more recommendations?
8komponisto
My impression is that Hacker News is above average, but still a noticeable notch below LW. Same goes for sites like the Richard Dawkins and JREF forums (perhaps two notches in those cases), and the comments sections of blogs of various academics (such as Overcoming Bias).
8katydee
Skeptical sites are good, but not great, because being a good skeptic is different from being a good rational thinker. You can probably get by as a skeptic knowing only "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" and the basics of the scientific method.
5cata
I agree with this, and in particular, although there are generally smart people on Hacker News, there are a ton of people who are interested in talking about business and startups 24/7, a topic I find extremely boring. I'm a big fan of MetaFilter (http://www.metafilter.com/). The commenters there are charming and often pretty smart, but the spirit of discussion is usually somewhat less serious.
3Spurlock
The key thing here separating Hacker News from LW is the "variety of topics". While HN is officially centered around startup culture (which like cata, I have no particular interest in), the community is happy to link to and discuss just about anything of intellectual interest. Today there's a link about punctuation marks for indicating irony. The level of discourse might not be quite up to LW, but the subject matter is a lot more inclusive.
5RHollerith
I find it strange that you would say that. (And I've read a lot of Hacker News.) Given an arbitrary aspect of reality (e.g., an aspect of human life or of the world around us) I think you are just as likely to be able to start a discussion of it here as on Hacker News if you can meet LW's higher standard for rationality. In other words, I think Hacker News is simply more tolerant of worthless ways of discussing topics, not tolerant of more topics. (Of course, Hacker News is more worthwhile than most places on the web.)
1MichaelVassar
I just found it, and I'll probably be disappointed, but http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/philg/ looks pretty good so far.
0gwern
I've read PG for a year or three now, and he's very one-note - railing against government waste and repression of business, and he's not the most rigorous or deep libertarian thinker I've ever read. I keep reading because every so often he writes about something like more efficient higher-education or why women aren't in STEM fields in large numbers which is worth all the dross.
[-]BT_Uytya100

Hello, good time of day.

My name is Victor, I'm 19. I'm a student of computer science from Russia (so my English is far from perfect, and probably there will be lack of articles; please excuse me).

There wasn't any bright line between rationalist!Victor and ordinary!Victor. If I remember correctly, five years ago I was interested in paranormal phenomena like UFO, parallel worlds or the Bermuda Triangle (I'm not sure I truly believed in it, probably I just had fun thinking about it: but I might have confessed the cached thought about scientists not knowing important things about the world) and liked reading the pop-science books at the same time. Then I realized that there is a beauty, honesty and courage in the scientific worldview and shortly thereafter, I became a person from the Light Side: not because science was true, but because it was fun.

But at least I rejected the Bermuda Triangle. I was too honest to leave inconsistencies in my pool of beliefs; so long, pseudoscience!

Maybe at the same time I discovered the concept of the utility function and blog of a psychologist arguing that there is nothing wrong with an egoism. Something clicked in my mind; the explanation of human beh... (read more)

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1J_Taylor
Welcome, Victor. Perhaps you'll find this funny: http://earthfireinstitute.org/2010/02/a-telepathic-cry-of-the-heart/
4BT_Uytya
It remembered me the elementary particles of monarchy (the "kingons" ) of Terry Pratchett. Since each kingdom can have one and only one king, in the case of death of king his heir becomes a new king instantly. So, if you carefully torture a king, you can use those particles to send a message faster than the speed of light.
[-]False_Solace100

I once thought that the Future was indestructible.

When I was growing up my childhood friends would sometimes say, "I wish I'd been born five hundred years ago" or "It would have been so interesting to live during medieval times". To me this was insanity. In fact it still sounds insane. Who in their right mind would exchange airplanes, democracy and antibiotics for illiteracy, agricultural drudgework and smallpox? I suppose my friends were doing the same thing people do when they imagine their pop culture "past lives": so everyone gets to be Cleopatra, and nobody is ever a peasant or slave. And the Connecticut Yankees who travel back in time to pre-invent industry are men, because a woman traveling alone in those days just invited trouble.

No, I never wanted to live in the past. I wanted to live in the future.

Mostly because I had a keen desire find out what happens next. I mean, just think of the amazing things in store -- space travel, AI, personal immortality. What a fool I was.

I no longer trust the future will be a glorious place. (It was a little painful to give up that belief.) I once studied history and the history of technology so I could writ... (read more)

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[-]listo100

Hello Less Wrong!

First things first: I beg your pardon for my crappy English, this is not my first language.

I'm from Barcelona (no LW community, here, I'm afraid) and I studied telecom engineery, but I work as a teacher and I draw cartoons (you can check http://listocomics.com but they are in Spanish). I'm also a rationalist wanabe. I mean I haven't even read the whole of your major sequences but I have always tried to move myself the rational way. I love Dawkins books and I was amazed the first time I read about logical fallacies at the Wikipedia. I have always been quite interested in phsicology, too, but most of the popular psychology books I've read set my bullshit alarm on, cause most of their content seemed to come from the mind of the author after thinking about it strong while sitting in the sofa, without further research. I'm glad of having found a site that talks aboute the human mind and human behavour in an easy to understand way and with references. It seems like a good place to learn stuff.

Actually, I'm curious about what you, as rationalists, may think about NLP. Is it the right place to ask? NLP: Bullshit or not?

And I would also love to hear some rationalist opinio... (read more)

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1Curiouskid
Welcome to LW! I love your comics. I'm going to use them so that I don't forget my spanish. I'm currently doing a little research (for myself) on NLP-type stuff. If you want a comprehensive source, then this is what I'm going to be purchasing shortly. http://www.amazon.com/Oxford-Handbook-Hypnosis-Handbooks/dp/0198570090/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1320721250&sr=8-1 I'm not expert on yoga (but I've done a bit). I find that pure meditation is better for the mind than yoga (there is a lot of secular research that shows that meditation is good in a lot of ways for the mind). And I find that pure exercise is better for the body than yoga. some people like to mix the two. I don't. Most people have a misconception about meditation where they think you have to be sitting with really straight posture in order to meditate. This just isn't true. I run and meditate all the time. Running is very good for exercise and is very conducive for meditation (especially if you just go in a straight line or on a treadmill). I know that there is quite a bit of research on exercise and the mind. But most of it has to do with cardiovascular and not with weight training. I do both, I personally think running is better for the mind (and doesn't require a lot of technical detail on proper form). Dawkins's "Selfish Gene" was one of my first "rationalist" books.
[-]orbenn100

Hi LessWrongians, I've actually been reading this for a few months since I discovered it through HPMOR, but I just found this thread. I've been a traditional rationalist for a long time, but it's great to find that there is a community devoted to uncovering and eliminating all the human biases that aren't obvious when you're inside them.

I'm 27 with a BS in Business Information Systems and working as an analyst, though I consider this career a stopgap until I figure out something more entrepreneurial to do. I've been slowly reading through the sequences, but my brain can only handle so much at a time.

Mostly I just want to say thanks to everyone who writes/reads/comments on LessWrong. This site is awesome. It's the only place I've found on the internet that consistently makes me stop and think instead of just rolling my eyes.

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0kilobug
Welcome !
[-]DoubleReed100

Hello everyone!

I am a unwitting victim of HP: MoR, and of course it led me here. I'm still reading up on the sequences, which have plenty of intriguing content. My background is in Mathematics (specifically cryptography, not much probability theory) and Music (specifically bassoon and composition). Right now I work for the US government. I grew up as a secular Jew, so I didn't really have that much of a crisis of faith or anything. I must say I found Eliezer's description of Modern Judaism ("you are expected to doubt but not successfully doubt") as surprisingly accurate and amusing.

Though, after reading through things, I don't really think I can call myself a rationalist quite yet. I need more practice, honestly. Maybe I just need to successfully update :D

Perhaps I just need to look around more, but hopefully I can contribute to the more artistic ideas of the site. Reading through what is on the site, it makes me wonder how to apply rationalist methodology to the arts.

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1komponisto
A most sincere welcome, from someone of a very similar background! (And you've walked right in to a discussion you're likely to find interesting...)
0DoubleReed
Cool thanks! I'll check it out.
0mindspillage
Hey, another bassoonist! (Saw your name in another thread, and had to see if you mentioned which double reed.) I've also got a math background (number theory and logic), though I've mostly abandoned it for law. Welcome to LW.
[-]occlude100

Hello everyone, it's so great to be here. I was introduced to LessWrong by a post left by C. Russo on Freedomainradio.com back in late July, which dumped me right into How to Actually Change Your Mind. Since then, I have found myself spending progressively more of my free time here, reading both old and new content.

Over the last several years, I've made a habit of spending my evenings online, blown by the winds of curiosity. While this has led me to the vague sense that I needed to make some adjustments to my map, I didn't have a good sense of the tools I needed to edit it.

I grew up in a religious (Mormon) family (was even a white-shirt-wearing, door-knocking, Book-of-Mormon thumping missionary for two years), but gave up my belief in my mid-twenties after searching for -- and failing to find -- a convincing argument for my belief. I had been taught to identify a specific and powerful feeling with "The Holy Ghost," but when I reflected on my experiences, I realized that I had felt that feeling on many occasions that seemed inconsistent with the idea that God was giving me information in those moments. I have, furthermore, felt that feeling many times since my apostasy, wh... (read more)

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0Normal_Anomaly
Hello and welcome!
[-]christina100

There's a welcome page? I hadn't noticed. I suppose I could give a few details about myself. I've been posting here for a little less than two months now.

On Me

I am a software engineer in my late twenties. I enjoy reading fantasy and science fiction novels, as well as books about physics, mathematics, biology, astronomy, and many other topics. I play no sports, but I bicycle nearly every day. I also enjoy programming, writing, photography, cooking, drawing, winning videogames, and working out mathematical equations for topics of interest.

On How I Found the Site

I occasionally like to peruse David Brin's blog, and wondered while reading a post how it was he came to recommend a Harry Potter fanfiction. So, David Brin's Blog-> HPMOR-> Less Wrong. I then proceeded to lurk and find out what was being discussed to get some context for the message board discussions. Eventually, I decided to see what would happen if I started posting comments.

So far, I've enjoyed the discussion on this site. I think there's a lot to think about here, which exercises my hobby of pondering the nature of society, life, and the universe in general.

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[-]play_therapist100

Hi. I just opened a new account with this user name. My user name was playtherapist. It was pointed out to me that it was still being misinterpreted as play the rapist. I am a child therapist and social worker. I help disturbed children work through their issues while using dolls, action figures, a sand tray, art materials and therapeutic games. This is called play therapy and is the most effective way to do therapy with young children. I would never dream of "playing the rapist." There didn't seem to be a way to just modify my user name, so I opened a new account.

I am the mother of a regular poster and meetup leader. I started reading posts out of curiosity about what he was talking about, etc. Recently I began reading the sequences and top 100 articles. Some of it is quite interesting.

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1juliawise
Hey, another social worker! Great!
4play_therapist
I'm curious how you found this blog and what attracts you to it. I never would have, except for my son. It's definitely geared towards young nerds, and most of the posters are guys.
9juliawise
My intro is a few above yours. I found this blog through my husband, who is a much more typical LWer (male, atheist, computer programmer, sci-fi fan). I guess what attracts me to it is that most people I know write me off as unreasonable or cruel for trying to apply logic to situations where they go by convenience or custom. I would continue more or less doing this even if I never found a community of others, but it is comforting to see a community out there. The main turn-off for me is that most of what I've read here doesn't apply to my life in a useful way (as far as I can tell).
1jsalvatier
Welcome (again)!
[-]chatquitevoit100

I'm a 19-yo female student in the NYC area.

I was mildly ecstatic to find that not only does Less Wrong exist, but it's members have articulated absolute loads of things that my own mind had danced around but not gotten close to putting into words (reservations as to the value of that aside). I actually first became fascinated with Bayesian analysis when I learned about its use in cryptography, and in the pre-computer-age Bomba Machine that helped crack the German Enigma code at Bletchley Park. I saw that it could be used in a much less narrow way, insofar as plain old everyday rationality is concerned and I've been increasingly interested in it since. And along came Less Wrong to just blow open the idea into so, so many tangents and applications. :) Just great.

LW has also sort of managed to shock me by covering almost all of the specific areas into which my autodidactism has ranged, from philosophy and theosophy, to neurology and quantum physics. And seeing as I am (and as I suspect many people who become unhappy with the rate that the universe is 'giving' them information, and decide to SEEK it) 'educated' in a very deep but very patchy manner, LW's holistic approach to knowled... (read more)

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1Vaniver
Welcome! Glad to have you here.
[-]TheOtherDave100

My name's Dave.

I got here through the MoR fic a week or so ago, thence the Babykillers/HappyFunPeople fic, thence the Overcoming Bias archive, which I'm currently working my way through. Created an account to comment on a post there, then found this post.

I'm not sure I do identify as a rationalist, actually. It seems to me that a necessary condition to justify my making such a claim is valuing habits of thought and behavior that lead to accuracy over other kinds of habits -- for example, those that lead to peace or popularity or collaboration or productivity or etc. -- and I'm not sure I do.

(I don't mean to suggest that they are incompatible, or even mutually inhibitory. It might work out that someone primarily motivated by rationalism also ends up being maximally peaceful, popular, collaborative and/or productive, just as it might work out that someone primarily motivated by pacifism also ends up being maximally rational. But I don't see any good reason to believe it.)

That said, there are habits of thought and behavior I value and see well represented here. Precision in speech is one of them -- saying what you mean, requesting clarification for ambiguous statements, etc. Argument... (read more)

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[-]rabidchicken100

Hello. I found out about Harry Potter and the methods of rationality while browsing TV tropes, which eventually led me to this site. I have never thought much about how i make choices before, but after reading a couple sequences, it looks like many of the things i am most inquisitive about are discussed on this site, and for at least the last couple years i have been reinventing the wheel on some of the ideas listed here about rationality. It is convenient to be able to learn things by reading this site, that otherwise might have required me to live a long, interesting life to discover :p

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[-]majus100

I've been lurking on LW for a couple of months, trying to work through all of the major sequences. I don't remember how I discovered it; it might have been a link in the BadAstronomy blog. I studied astronomy in school and grad school and end up becoming a software engineer, which I've done for almost 30 years now. Most of the content here resonates powerfully with the intellectual searching I've been doing my whole life, and I'm finding it both stimulating and humbling. Spurred by what I've read here, I've just acquired Judea Pearl's "Causality" and Barbour's "The End of Time", and I'm working through the Jaynes book on bayesian probability (though the study group seems pretty inactive). There's a lot of synchronicity going on in my life; much of my software work over the last decade has involved causality graphs and Bayesian belief networks, but I hadn't taken the time to delve very deeply into understanding the underlying fundamentals. I recently read Lee Smolin's "The Trouble With Physics", and he mentioned Barbour's work as a possibly promising new direction, so reading Eliezer's comments on it struck a chord. Finally, I'm becoming increasingl... (read more)

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-1Clippy
You look to be very capable of using correct reasoning, based on your extensive software experience and familiarity with causal nets! I recently asked question here about timeless physics, but no one seems to want to answer it... I think you might have some good insight on that matter.
[-]DSimon100

Hiya, thanks to everybody here for making this such a welcoming and fun community.

I've identified as a skeptic and an atheist for a few years now, but I was intrigued by the way that the Less Wrong articles I saw seemed to kick it up a notch further. "Weapons-grade rationality" I think I saw one article put it.

I'm (as of the moment) somewhat skeptical of singularity theory, but as an activist I'm interested in helping to raise the rationality waterline. My education and professional experience are in computer programming. Currently I'm serving as a Peace Corps volunteer in Jamaica.

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[-]DanR100

Hi I found Less Wrong a few days ago when someone pointed me towards your recent list of recommended books. I followed the comment thread (particularly nodding my head at the mentions of Marcus Aurelius' Meditations which I want to read) and had a look around the rest of the blog. I liked what I saw.

I'm an American living in Cyprus, and into learning more about the Epicurean, Skeptic, Stoics and Platonic philosophies. I'm also a molecular biologist by training, and interested in ecology, ornithology, birdwatching, cooking, and philosophy of science.

For my rationality, I grew up always thinking that Christianity was a nice metaphor for issues relating to the human condition, but never thinking that anything in the Bible happened literally the way it was said. I suppose you could say that I believed in the value of belief. Watching Bill Moyers' interview with Joseph Campbell in The Power of Myth changed that for me 15 or so years ago. It just clicked with my view of religion: it served as a mythic narrative, and you don't need a mythic narrative to be religious... Star Wars or any other epic myth will do nicely. So I severed the only reason I ever had to value religion and never looked back, being skeptical of dubious claims ever since by nature.

If there are any skeptics, stoics, Epicureans or other rational minds in Cyprus, please contact me!

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5Oligopsony
My understanding is that Campbell was never well-regarded by the relevant academics and that time hasn't helped his reputation any. This reminds me, by the by, of my own "conversion" experience: a book by the name of the Lucifer Principle by a one Howard Bloom. I read it at a young age and was dazzled by the basic idea of evolution, which had been taught to me in school and was never disputed by my church, but never with such power: I finally Got It; that from random processes patterns always emerge and are implicit, humans are just a complex pattern operating on the basis of laws mostly beyond our comprehension, &c. Years later, I re-read it, expecting to re-unite with the wonder of my past and... was struck by how stupid it was. The arguments were moronic, the facts were wrong half the time, and so on. But I owe it a debt for making me a materialist, even if I would have dismissed it after perusing it at the library today.
0Daniel_Burfoot
Arrgh!! Totally meaningless!
[-]Oligopsony120

No, it's a good heuristic. It's good enough reason for the lay to accept anthropogenic global warming, the Holocaust, and the fact that HIV causes AIDS, to gesture at obvious examples.

Obviously not everyone can use that heuristic. Like any other, it will be wrong sometimes. But it's good enough for Bayesian updating.

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5wedrifid
(So perhaps "Arrgh!! Sometimes overrated!")
0DanR
Oh I'm not saying that Campbell was well-regarded by his peers in academia - I'm not a scholar in that field by any means and don't know anything about that. I was just saying that it woke me up to see that a developing mind can learn useful values and ideals from any kind of epic story. IOW a religion isn't necessary for our morals to take shape.
2MichaelVassar
I'm pretty sure I understand what Campbell was doing, and given that it was something totally cool and fundamentally opposed to what academia is about, this just shows that they could identify what he was. Ditto Tolkein and Lewis. Basically, these are people who are intentionally creating a misleading conception of history in order to shape the identities of children who encounter it towards identifying with mankind as a whole rather than with some smaller group, NOT people who are trying to explain how things are to their readers, framed neutrally.
[-]tomme90

Hi there,

I am a high school senior who is interested in science, particularly in natural sciences. One day I hope to further our understanding of...well, anything you can think of!

My lifestyle, which I adopted after carefully analyzing my goals, is pretty spartan: I eat a strict diet, I exercise often, I only read certain things and so forth.

I discovered the transhumanist movement a few months ago. I have decided to join lesswrong.com because I think that I stand to learn a lot from this community and, maybe, even bring something to the table.

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1Bugmaster
What kinds of things, out of curiosity, and why do you read them and not other things ?
4tomme
Nonfiction because: my faulty brain sometimes mistakes fiction for reality(e.g., I used to believe that Santa is real) and cognitive economy - there is a finite amount of knowledge I can store, so I would rather make sure it's accurate, truthful, useful knowledge.
1Bugmaster
In this case, how do you know what is fiction (and therefore you shouldn't read it) and what is not (and therefore you should read it) ? Can you elaborate ? I'm curious about the topic because I've heard this statement from several of my friends, but I can't quite wrap my head around it. In the interests of full disclosure, I personally do read fiction: primarily because I find it enjoyable, but also because it sometimes enables me to communicate (and receive) ideas much more effectively than nonfiction (f.ex., HPMoR).
3Incorrect
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interference_theory New memories can interfere with the recall of old ones if they are similar. That doesn't necessarily mean fiction is likely to cause problems.
0Bugmaster
I guess it depends, in part, on how similar the knowledge you deem important is similar to works of fiction. To use a trivial example, I doubt that any work of fiction would cause me to forget what 2 + 2 is equal to.
0tomme
I look for background info on the piece I consider reading and read its abstract. See the reply below. I'm not good at explaining this stuff. Horace wrote that the purpose of literature is "to delight and instruct". It delights precisely because it's instructive and it's up to you to decide whether you only need precise information(nonfiction) or embedded information(fiction).
1Bugmaster
What about pieces that blend truth and fiction, such as historical novels or most newspaper articles ? Fair enough, but I'm still curious. Do you participate in any activities that you find enjoyable, but ultimately not very useful in the long term ? I'm not trying to be glib here; I genuinely want to learn about your way of thinking.
2tomme
I don't usually read those kinds of pieces. No, I only take part in activities that have some long-term benefit.
0Bugmaster
That makes sense. What algorithm are you using to decide which activities have some long-term benefit ?
0tomme
Pros&Cons and projected outcomes.
3Bugmaster
Right, but how do you evaluate pros and cons, and project outcomes ? Obviously you wouldn't take an action that has more cons than pros, and therefore has a poor projected outcome, but that doesn't tell me much. For example, what made you decide to begin spending time on writing posts on Less Wrong, as opposed to spending that time on reading quantum physics books, or lifting weights, or something ?
0tomme
I assign an util to each possible outcome. I do read quantum physics and lift weights and whatnot! :) As to why I decided to spend time here, see my original post.
0Peacewise
tomme, welcome to lesswrong, gday I'm Peacewise. re Fair crack mate, "Santa" is a standard fiction/lie perpetrated by society and parents, hardly something to be used as evidence of a "faulty brain". In fact its more likely to be evidence that your brain was and is functioning in a developmentally normal state. I suggest you reconsider your position on fiction, since you state there is indeed plenty of accurate, truthful and useful knowledge within the realm of fiction. Shakespeare has plenty of accurate and useful knowledge about the human condition, just to give you one counter example. "Out damned spot, out " by lady Macbeth is an example of how murder and the guilt caused by the act of murder affects the human mind. (Macbeth, Act 5, scene 1.) Lady Macbeth cannot get the imagined blood stains off her hands after committing murder. Humans are subjective creatures, by experimenting with fiction you'll be looking into the human condition, by avoiding fiction you are dismissing a large subset of truth - for truth is subjective as well as objective.
0tomme
I now believe that fiction could be useful because it conveys experience. For example, The Walking Dead, the Tv series I am watching at the moment, has a complex interplay characters, as it shows how humans interact in a plethora of situations. Most people don't have that in mind when they bump into fiction. But, as I said, if you don't have enough experience, and you need a quick dose, sometimes fiction can help you.
[-]rlp1090

Hi, I'm Richard. I'm a lawyer, practising in Norwich, England. I've been 'lurking' on lesswrong, and working my way through the sequences, for some time.

I have an interest in technology, and particularly open source projects. For example, I'm writing this right now in Emacs.

I hope I will be able to contribute positively to this community, which has certainly already helped me a great deal.

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[-]imbatman90

Hello All. I came across Less Wrong via Common Sense Atheism a few weeks ago. I have enjoyed it so far, but I have yet to put in the time to get up to speed on the sequences. Plan to, though.

I'm a Financial Accountant in Birmingham, AL. I'm not sure I would (yet) identify myself as a rationalist, but as for what I value, I value truth above all. And if I'm not mistaken, valuing truth seems a big step toward becoming a rationalist. I also value life, liberty, happiness, fun, music, pizza, and many other things.

Here's a little more about me:

Height: 6'0... (read more)

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[-]Burrzz90

Hi Less Wrong, I’m Burr a retired commutations consultant and Entrepreneur. I’m just watching and listening. I’m taking the online AI course from Stanford.

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[-]Gust90

Hello. My name is Gustavo Bicalho, I'm from Brazil, I'm 20 years old today. I intended to introduce myself here after I finished the sequences (I'm half way through the Fun Theory Sequence) but I thought I should give me this as a birthday gift. Heh.

I have some background in computer programming, having done a technical course of three years during high school. Although I don't know much of computer science (I know just a little about algorithm analysis and that was self-thaught from wikipedia), I think programming has helped me reshape my way of thinking,... (read more)

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3MixedNuts
Happy birthday!
0Gust
Thank you!
2Morendil
Most recent previous instance I could find: ten days ago. You could say it's not unusual. :)
0Suryc11
Do you go to law school in the U.S.? I ask because I have been considering that route.
[-]brazil84110

P.S. Since the focus of this discussion board is rationality, I will throw out a couple extra questions, with my own answers.

  1. Law school entails an investment of 3 years of your life and perhaps $150k in tuition. How much time and energy should you spend studying and researching the pros and cons of law school and lawyering before you make the decision to attend?

  2. If you attend a law school where only X% of the class finds suitable employment and career prospects, what is the probability that you will end up in that group?

As to the first question, law school cost about $60k to attend when I went. To my credit, I worked for many months with an attorney family member and satisfied myself that I wanted to be an attorney before attending law school. However, I spent just 5 minutes or so researching my subsequent job and career prospects before attending. In hindsight, this was pretty boneheaded.

As to the second question, that probability is probably a lot lower than your gut is telling you. See, law school is much more competitive than college; which in turn is much more competitive than high school. It's natural to forget this fact and assume that you will be one of the... (read more)

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1Suryc11
Thank you for a well thought-out reply. I have had misgivings about the law path for essentially the reasons you mention, and especially after much research. I know that being an attorney is not as glamorous as television shows make it out to be and I realize that the high income figures often reported for lawyers are skewed (as in the top law firms pay the most to the top law school grads, and the rest are stuck with little to nothing). I also understand that with the American economy the way it is and the large surplus of aspiring lawyers, the field is even more competitive today. I appreciate you confirming this first-hand. The only problem is that at this point in my life, I feel like I have no other choice. I am currently a sophomore in college at a relatively good private liberal arts college. I have little aptitude (at least, little in terms of a comparative advantage) in the traditional hard sciences - biology, chemistry, physics - so medical school or grad school in those fields is not an option. I also am not especially talented at math and have never taken a computer science class, so computer programming (I mention it because it is frequently lauded here on LW as a lucrative career choice) is not an option either. Grad school in the fields I am interested in - political science, economics, and philosophy - is not particularly appealing due to the glut of grad school graduates in the social sciences and the large time investment. My comparative advantages lie in being able to read quickly with high comprehension, write analytically, and think logically. I want to make enough money to live well and to be able to donate to the cause(s) I am/will be interested in. What do I have left besides law school? (not purely a rhetorical question, by the way) One other question: In your personal, but informed, opinion, would graduating from a top-14 or top-20 law school in the top 25-50% of my class 'guarantee' me a job? In this economic climate and in the near f
5brazil84
I think this is a good question and unfortunately I don't have an answer. For like 50 or 60 years, law school was a good way for a reasonably smart person to have a reasonably prestigious well-paying career. Most importantly, if it didn't work out you would not be facing financial ruin. But now it seems the law school train has left the station. Actually, it seems like higher education in general is not the good deal it once was. Quite possibly there are more opportunities now than ever before but they require more creativity to find. I am not really informed on this question since I graduated law school 15 years ago. It's also really hard to get good information on this sort of question since so many people have an agenda or an axe to grind. You might try asking on a few of the law school discussion boards. I do think it's worth considering if you get a bona fide scholarship. In that case, your main risk is 3 years of your life. Just beware of the "section stacking scam." That's where the law school gives you a scholarship contingent on maintaining a certain grade point average and then puts all the scholarship students in the same section. Guaranteeing that a very large percentage will lose their scholarship. Going to a top-rated law school is still a bit dangerous. You may land a high-paying job only to get laid off or discover that you hate your high paying job.
2TimS
If you are accepted into the top three schools (Yale >>> Harvard, Standford), you are very likely to be employed as a lawyer. Especially since the economy will have improved a bit during the passage of time at law school. If you in admitted into the top 4-8, you can feel somewhat comfortable. The rest of the top tier is unclear. If you are not admitted into a first-tier school (the definition is a bit amorphous), then it is unclear whether law school makes economic sense. Everything I've heard says that third or fourth-tier schools are a terrible economic decision. I'm not sure if brazil's reference to section stacking actually occurs, but he is right that most find law school much harder than college. Much, much harder. If you want gossip on Bigfirm life, you could search this blog but be aware that their target audience is associates at those types of firms (and most lawyers do not work at those types of firms).
8brazil84
I am a practicing attorney in the United States. I would suggest you think long and hard before going to law school. There have been big changes in the state of legal education over the last 10 years and the consequences of those changes are only recently coming to light. Most importantly (1) in real dollars the cost of attending law school has pretty much doubled in the last 10 or 15 years; and (2) at the same time, the bankruptcy code has been amended to make it practically impossible to get student loans discharged in bankruptcy. The upshot is that if graduate law school and cannot find a high-paying job, you are screwed. To make matters worse, most law schools have a tendency to "gild the lilly" as far as their placement statistics go.
0Gust
No, I study in Brazil. I don't know how's the job market and the quality of law schools there in the U.S.... I guess I could tell you what I think about the experience I'm having here, but I suspect it would be wildly different from what you'd have there.
[-]Ron_Fern90

Hello I am a philosophy student in north Jersey. I'm 20 years old, and am very familiar with LW and the sequences. I've been reading LW now for about a year, and it has completely changed my life. I am very grateful to Eliezer and all of you for letting me have my Bayesian enlightenment at 20. When I first read the twelve virtues my life changed forever. I am definitely one of those that considers the sequences to be one of the most important works i have read, at least as far as having a personal influence.

I want to work on the hard questions of philosop... (read more)

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3wedrifid
A kinda nifty blog.
2komponisto
I would like to see it become this. And not just for AI ethics/decision theory either. I'd like to see an entire "LW science" movement, where we tackle things like quantum gravity. Yes, I know it's a dream. For now.
1[anonymous]
That would be fun.
2[anonymous]
Welcome! That's a huge amount of philosophy to look at. Might I suggest narrowing your interests down a bit, at least at first? It's very easy to read a little bit of everything, but much harder to contribute something non-trivial to every field. It seems to be a little bit of all of those things. Some people here are rabidly anti-philosophy, and so if LW overtly called itself a philosophical movement, those people would probably end up evaporating off. On the other hand, some people would very much like to see the self-help aspects of LW become secondary to the more philosophical or technical aspects. Like everything else, it's a bit hard to pin down to a distinct category.
1Ron_Fern
Being anti-philosophy is something philosophy needs. Not in a boring, the field is dead Rorty sense. In a, these are scientific questions with definite right and wrong answers, kind of way. I don't think anyone is ever really anti-philosophy; perhaps my imagination is so daft that I can't imagine someone with different tastes. I think philosophy has really frustrated a lot of truth seekers because it was being done poorly. Even in analytic philosophy, only ever so rarely does a tool from analytic philosophy come about that could not be compared to using a stick to break apart and probe matter. Lesswrong needs to solve philosophical problems to do its job, whether to build AI, or systematically cause rationality. It needs to solve scientific problems too, but lesswrong's practice seems to consist primarily in long winded, immersive, and concentrated discussion, using previously established technical terminology and calculi, with the aim of settling the truth value of some claim. The method of argument is the method of philosophy. This mixed with the philosophical nature of much of the content here on LW, are enough for me to think of LW as a philosophical movement. But a philosophical movement separated from the long western tradition stretching back to plato. I like to think of LW as a philosophical movement, analogously to that famous internet meme about that statistician which goes something like this: Derp was late to his probability class, and quickly jotted down the HW for that week's class. He worked on it for quite a while. When he got there next week, he told his professor that he found the HW harder than usual. Derp's professor informed him that what he had jotted down was not the HW, it was three unsolved conjectures. Derp then presented those proofs with the help of his professor as his dissertation. LW solves some seemingly unsolvable philosophical dilemmas in a similar fashion; and if the average LW user is somehow helped in solving open and VERY D
2steven0461
It would be badderass in a dead language. "Minorifalsianism" or something.
0Ron_Fern
"Minorfalsology" is totally the best word for it.
0Ron_Fern
Narrowing my interests is probably not an option. The fact that I can practically work on anything and still be a philosopher is one of the things that appeals to me about the field, but maybe that has something to do with why it so rarely done competently :/ My only other option is to work my butt off, but I know that to be a generalist and contribute takes lots of work. I do specialize in what I like to call algorithmic philosophy, and philosophy of mathematics, but that is only because I think they are of great import to my other fields of interest.
0[anonymous]
When I was your age (and how much I rue the saying of this) I also felt this way. I hope it works out better for you than it did for me.
[-]Ezekiel90

Hi, everyone.

I'm currently finishing a first degree in CS, and I've been reading LW for a few months now (since June). I've read through most of the Sequences and check the front page of the site for anything that looks interesting whenever I want to put off doing something, which is usually several times a day. I also need to get round to finishing Godel, Escher, Bach some time (I'm kinda slow).

I am, at the moment, a terrible rationalist - my goals aren't even clearly defined, let alone acted on, and I have a strong background in tournament debating, whic... (read more)

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2cousin_it
Maybe Kevin T. Kelly's work will fit your bill? Also see the discussion on LW.
2beoShaffer
http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Occam's_razor Not sure if thats in depth enough, but I think it does a pretty good job. -edit the apostrophe seems to break the link, but the url is right.
0Ezekiel
Thanks, but that proof doesn't work for the formulation of Occam's Razor that I was talking about. For example, if I have a boolean-output function, there are three "simplest possible" (2 bit long) minimum hypotheses as to what it is, before I see the evidence: [return 0], [return 1], and [return randomBit()]. But a "more complex" (longer than 2 bit) hypothesis, like [on call #i to function, return i mod 2] can't be represented as being equivalent to [[one of the previous hypotheses] AND [something else]] so the conjunction rule doesn't apply. I think the conjunction-rule proof does work for the "minimum entities" formulation, but that one's deeply problematic because, among other things, it assigns a higher prior probability to divine explanations (of complex systems) than physics-based ones.
0lessdazed
What if instead of assigning prior probabilities to rules governing the universe in inverse proportion to the rules' length, we assigned equal prior probabilities to rules governing the universe and assigned probabilities to states of the world based on the sum of the probability of each universe that could produce that state of the world times the probability that universe would produce it (as many universes would have randomized bits in their description)? I think the likelihood of outputting a string of a hundred ones in a row would then be greater than that of outputting 0001010010100110100010000100100010100100110101101000000101101111110110111101001001100010001011110000. We could then revisit our assumption that in the rules' world, all are equally likely regardless of length. After all, if there is a meta-rule world behind the rule world, each rule would not be equally likely as an output of the meta-rules because simpler rules are produced by more meta-rules; their relationship is as that of states of the world and rules above. This would reverberate down the meta-rule chain and make simpler states of the world even more likely. However, this might not make any sense. There would be no meta-meta-...meta-rule world to rule them all, and it would be turtles all the way down. It might not make sense to integrate over an infinity of rules in which none are given preferential weighing such that an infinite series of decreasing numbers can be constructed, nor to have effects reverberate down an infinite chain to reach a bottom state of the world.
0PhilosophyTutor
I suspect you will never find one. To get the scientific process off the ground you have to start with the linked assumptions "the universe is lawful" and "simpler explanations are preferable to more complex ones". Those are more like mathematical axioms than positions based on evidence. The reason being, you can explain absolutely any observation with an unboundedly large set of theories if you are allowed to assume that the laws of the universe change or that complex explanations are kosher. The only way to squeeze the search space down to a manageable size is to check the simplest theories first. Fortunately it turns out we live in a universe where this is a very fruitful strategy. ETA: I'm relatively new here: Whoever downvoted this could you perhaps explain your thinking?
1[anonymous]
As I understand it, that is the justification.
0Ezekiel
Upvoted for pointing out that Yudkowsky already dealt with the issue. I'd forgotten. I'm still not completely happy, but I guess sometimes you do hit rock bottom...
[-]niokin90

Hi all.

I'm a 21 year old junior at Bryant University, and I am currently majoring in marketing and minoring in legal studies. I discovered lesswrong through Lukeprog's CSA website; however I have been spending more time as of late reading lesswrong than CSA.

First and foremost, I am hoping that lesswrong helps me become a more instrumentally rational person. I currently struggle with a number of issues including akrasia, effectively controlling my emotions, and goal setting. I don't think lesswrong has had a noticeable positive or negative effect on my... (read more)

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[-][anonymous]90

I'm 22 years old, and currently a fourth-year college student, studying Philosophy and minoring in Computer Science at a very small, Christian school. I found a link to LW while searching for open, online scholarship combining analytic philosophy with algorithmic analysis. After glancing over the resources here, I am extremely excited about the prospect of participating. Philosophical logic, formal epistemology, and functional programming are my passions, and I am thrilled whenever I see interdisciplinary progress being made in cognitive science research. ... (read more)

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[-]thescoundrel90

Greetings,

I am 32 year old middle class male from the Kansas City area. I grew up on a farm in south-central Kansas, in an evangelical christian family. From an early age I was identified as having above average intelligence. I also have ADD, although it went undiagnosed though my elementary and middle-school years, as I was easily able to complete my work in a short enough time frame that I was not distracted. During this time, I was also heavily indoctrinated in the church. During my high school years, it became apparent to me that there was something wr... (read more)

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5kilobug
Welcome to Less Wrong, and good luck in your quest for bettering yourself ! Or hum... how do you wish "good luck" in a rational way ? ;)
9thomblake
A: Don't worry about it too much and get on with something more important.
3Oscar_Cunningham
Say something surportive but actually meaningful, like "I'm impressed by your achievement." or "Keep going awesome person!" or even just "I hope you do well."
0Oscar_Cunningham
Awesome.
[-]Velorien90

Greetings, all. I've spent most of my life (being 24 now) longing for the sort of clarity provided by rationalist thought, but only discovered a few months ago that there was such a thing as empirically verifiable truth accessible to me, and that it was possible to build a belief system with solid foundations. I'm still going through the resulting lengthy process of reassessing my beliefs in light of actual evidence.

My partner recently introduced me to this site, and I dived right in - only to hit a concrete wall. My mathematical skills, unused since schoo... (read more)

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9[anonymous]
Don't worry, you're definitely not the only one who found the Intuitive Explanation difficult. Have you seen Visualizing Bayes' Theorem? If that doesn't help, there are some other explanations on this LessWrongWiki page. As far as the sequences are concerned, you'll probably be fine as long as you have a basic understanding of what probability is and how to use Bayes' Theorem; fortunately, there isn't too much math in the Core Sequences.
2kilobug
Welcome ! The "Intuitive Explanation" is very interesting, but not always the easiest to grasp. The most important thing to understand the Sequences is the beginning, understanding how to compute (even if you do it manually, by "counting" women of each possible cases) the chance of having cancer knowing you have a positive mammography. For the rest, I would advise you to start reading the Sequences, and stopping when you find something that you don't understand, and then trying to learn that part of maths. You're free to ask for pointers or hints when you find such a "blocker". What you'll need is base of probability theory, a tiny bit of vector algebra (or anything that can help you grasp the concept of n-dimensional space, with a huge n) for the quantum mechanics sequence, and the understanding of what a "function" is in maths. The rest should go easily.
0lessdazed
I have a unique way of explaining Bayes' Rule that has so far helped zero people out of the one who has looked at it. The advantage is that it is very different than other ways, so if those are confusing, you could give it a try.
0Normal_Anomaly
Welcome to Less Wrong!
0jsalvatier
Welcome!
[-][anonymous]90

Greetings everyone; I recently found this website and immediately witnessed a great abundance of intellect and informed stream of thought-forms in a numerous of interesting topics, something- I might add, relatively rare in many forums 'out there' on my previous personal experience. In a brief response to the interest in: "know who you are, what you're doing, what you value, how you came to identify as a rationalist or how you found us."

My name is Steven. A senior undergraduate student majoring in psychology, with a fair concentration in cognitiv... (read more)

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0Oscar_Cunningham
It seems like LessWrong was essentially made for you! Welcome!
0Morendil
Welcome here!
[-]EphemeralNight90

Hello LessWrong.

We'd love to know who you are, what you're doing, what you value, how you came to identify as a rationalist or how you found us.

In order then,

I would consider myself to be on the line between an aspiring and burgeoning Artistic Polymath; a storycrafter not picky about means or medium, but very picky about what I would call Extrapolated Contextual Detail. For my part, I treat stories very much like thought-experiments, and as such I've invested a lot of effort in expunging from my mind the defaultness of the environment in which I was ra... (read more)

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3Oscar_Cunningham
Welcome! That's very cool.
0lessdazed
Welcome! Someone with the stamina to go through half the sequences should take a relatively brief detour and read Yvain's posts. Finishing them isn't as time consuming and the content is dense in value. Disease.
1Vladimir_Nesov
(That post assumes Eliezer's sequence about words though.)
[-]Xece90

Hello there,

I am a 16-year-old high school student in Vancouver, Canada. I discovered Less Wrong several months ago through HP:MoR, which deeply captured my interest. After finishing the then released chapters, I knew I wanted to learn more. Upon reading the sequences, I felt enlightened. I discovered a new way of thinking, of making decisions that would benefit myself and others more. I delved through articles and eventually started to use Anki, learning fallacies and cognitive biases. As a result, I am more mentally organized, I am doing better in school... (read more)

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5Vladimir_Nesov
Just make sure to focus your effort on setting up opinions to reflect facts, not on making opinions appear convincing or on your side. In particular, lots of things are confusing, uncertain and unstable under potential evidence; or offending, or supporting policies you believe wrong, or "improper" for your "identity". Reality doesn't care, so you shouldn't either.
1lessdazed
Welcome! Careful now. Excellent. Tangentially relevant. I think I used to overestimate the importance of this.
[-]anotheruser90

Hello Less Wrong.

I am 19 years old and have been interested in philosophy since I was 13. Today, I am interested in anything that has to do with intelligence, such as psychology and AI and rationality.

I believe in the possibility of the technological singularity and want to help make it happen.

I hope that the complex and unusual ways of thinking that I have taught myself over the last years while philosophizing will allow me to tackle this problem from directions other people have not yet thought of, just like they enabled me to manipulate my own psyche in... (read more)

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2NancyLebovitz
I hope you'll be reading more of this site-- a lot of the point is that we don't just want a technological singularity, we want a singularity that's good for human beings. I hope you'll post more about the ways of thinking you've developed.
[-]Snowyowl90

Hello. I'm Snowyowl, or Christopher if you're interested in my real name. (Some people are.) I first discovered this site on Friday 14th August, when a friend of mine (who calls herself Kron) pointed me in the direction of the story "Harry Potter and the Methods Of Rationality".

I don't consider myself a rationalist, because that seems like a sure-fire way of feeling superior to 90% of the world. Also, I have realised in the past week that a lot of my beliefs and opinions are contradictory - in LessWrong lingo, my Bayesian network isn't internall... (read more)

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[-][anonymous]90

Hi, I've been reading Less Wrong since about January this year, I got interested in the site because of the Baby eating aliens fiction which someone recommended, I had before coming here read a few posts at Overcoming Bias.

At the time I read most of the Yudkowsky coming of age sequence and was also especially interested in the Luminosity sequence. I've recently started thinking about Timeless Decision theory and reading with great interest this sites take on the blind idiot god.

The thing I think this site helped me most with was to impart on me how import... (read more)

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5Morendil
Now you have me wondering what the Female Physics classes are like. ;)
6Risto_Saarelma
I hear the fluid mechanics course taught by Dr. Irigaray is really good.
[-]paulfchristiano90

I am an undergraduate mathematician currently headed towards a life of doing theoretical computer science research. Several unrelated friends mentioned LW to me at one point or another in my life, so I read an arbitrary well-liked post every so often for a while. Eventually I concluded that visiting the site somewhat regularly would make me happy (although I have thought enough about how I think, and am easily arrogant enough, to doubt that I will become a better person or learn too much about myself) and so here I am.

I am an (almost) Bayesian utility ma... (read more)

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[-]isaaclyman90

Hello rationalists (I'm tempted to shorten that word, but neither "rats" nor "rashes" is very complimentary),

I'm a sophomore in college, studying English. I've always been interested in getting smarter than the general population, and websites like this never fail to give me some productive reading/thinking material.

I'm very religious, which some would say is a serious fluke in an otherwise freethinking person. I disagree, but I won't waste your time with my irrational arguments in favor of my own methods of worship.

I love intelligent a... (read more)

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3RobinZ
Good site! I didn't know that it linked here - was it a comment on a post, link in a post...?
2orthonormal
There was a link in the illusion of transparency post. I wonder if the You Are Not So Smart Guy is one of our veterans, though the writing style isn't one I recognize.
2simplicio
I shan't press you any further on this because you don't appear to want to go there, but you may wish to consider why this one part of your life apparently has its own independent epistemology. People here tend to see rationality as globally applicable to all domains of knowledge, so a claim that one area of your life is off limits sounds to us like "numbers are good for counting apples, but not oranges."
0DSimon
More candidates for cutesie short forms of "rationalist": rashie, ratie (RAY-TEE, or more likely RAY-DEE given typical English pronunciation habits), rasho, nalist, ratnist, tionlist (SHUN-list), Rashomon. I'd also voting you up for "rationalati", even though it's not shorter. :-)
[-]RowanE90

I think I first came to this site via a link on another forum to the "Three Worlds Collide" story... or the "That Alien Message" one. And then I read more articles. I find rationality, cryonics and the singularity to be very interesting, and most of the articles I've seen so far are about those topics.

I'm in the UK, and I'll be in sixth form in september, will do maths, electronics, chemistry and physics.

I don't yet feel I can identify as a rationalist, but I don't think I'll be able to assess this until I catch myself thinking irrationally in response to something, either before or after the fact. I'm not sure how I can even define "me as a rationalist"...

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[-]Craig_Heldreth90

Hi all.

I have lurked on Less Wrong since Day 0. I found Overcoming Bias from Economics blogs I used to follow closely (Marginal Revolution, &c.) I now have my toe in the water here, having been unable to resist joining the Jaynes Probabiity Language of Science study group.

I came to Rationalism firstly by way of Physics and Mathematics, secondly by way of Philosophy. In college I used to do my problem sets in the Philosophy section of the library and my break time was devoted to Plato and to Aristotle and to Hume and the rest of those dead white guys.

Af... (read more)

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1Daniel_Burfoot
Me too, but why would someone who knows something about AI applications for finance and quantitative analysis teach anyone else about the subject?
0Craig_Heldreth
Teaching and learning do not have to be restricted to one direction. Two heads might be better than one! Have you ever heard a college course Teaching Assistant tell you he learned more from classes where he TA'd than from most classes where he was a student?
0gwern
As the old Latin saying goes, Qui docet, discit. ("He who teaches, learns.")
1Oligopsony
I don't know how isomorphic the cases are, but Francis Spufford's Red Plenty, fresh off the presses, is about the attempt by 60s-era Soviet reformers to implement cybernetic planning. While I haven't read it, I've seen glowing reviews from both opponents and proponents of planning.
[-]mstevens90

Hello!

I think I may have posted on a welcome thread before, but I still consider myself pretty new so saying hi again.

I've long thought rational thought is underrated. I find LW very interesting but quite difficult to get into.

Things I'd like to see:

Better introductory content.

Things I find particularly interesting:

Discussion of akrasia and strategies for avoiding it.

Buddhism - is it compatible with rationality? Personally I think some aspects yes, some aspects no.

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3mstevens
Further comments, which I'm making in the safe haven of this topic rather than the wilds of the rest of LW: I'm moderately sympathetic to all the cryonics / singularity stuff that's often talked about here, but also suspicious. I haven't come up with a properly argued response, (or even read all the very long posts about it!), but LW in general gives me a feeling of twisting things to fit already chosen conclusions on these topics. Cryonics: I view it as a long-shot option with a possible big payoff. The part I have my doubts about is the feeling I get that it's seen as a particularly good long-shot that's important to focus on. Singularity stuff: This has all very possibly been discussed at length in a long post I haven't read, and I'm quite happy to get references. Two areas of this make me uncomfortable: * For me a key problem seems to be the rate at which people can adapt to new technologies. I'm sure I've seen this raised either in Marooned in Realtime (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marooned_in_Realtime) or in very standard commentary on it, so I'm sure this has been addressed somewhere. This seems likely to me to stop acceleration in technology once we reach the stage of significant change within a human lifetime. * Someone still has to do all the thinking. Assuming the singularity happens, and as yet undefined entities can solve major problems in short timespans, this will be because they are thinking very fast. They will be operating on a much faster time scale and to them, the apparent rate of progress won't be much greater. The singularity will only appear to solve all our problems by handwaving from the point of view of the un-accelerated. Which around here seems to be viewed as an unpleasant state of existence, to be escaped as soon as the technology is available.
1David_Allen
I think it would be possible to dump the mystical elements of Buddhism, and combine the rest with Bayesianism. I could see the ideal of optimal enlightenment.
0mstevens
I see some very promising trends in some of the Western Zen stuff, eg Brad Warner ( http://hardcorezen.blogspot.com/)(before anyone says it, I also see big problems with him!) There's a lot of dumping of mysticism, and some of the more unfortunate bits like gods and reincarnation. And there are Buddha quotes like: "Be lamps unto yourselves. Be refuges unto yourselves. Take yourself no external refuge. Hold fast to the truth as a lamp. Hold fast to the truth as a refuge. " (intermediate source http://www.sapphyr.net/buddhist/buddhist-quotes.htm, I'm pretty sure there are primary sources but too lazy to dig them up) Which I think is very compatible with rationalism. And a lot of Buddhism seems to me to make nice testable claims "do these things and you will experience a greater frequency of desirable mental states", for example. However there's also other stuff I'm somewhat sympathetic to, but have doubts about, which seem to suggest giving up on rational thought.
[-]Irgy80

Hi all.

I'm 30, live in Sydney and work on image processing. I also have a wife and two beautiful daughters, currently nine months and two and a half years old.

I have a strong background in pure maths and an ongoing interest in philosophy. I've been a rationalist since before I even knew what one was. Discovering ET Jaynes' "Probability Theory" was the closest thing I'll probably ever have to a religious revelation.

I finally wrote down a large explanation of some quite fundamental philosophy I'd had in my head for quite a while and sent it to a co... (read more)

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[-]Suryc1180

Hello!

I'm 18 years old, American, and a sophomore in college.

I discovered this site through HPMoR in December of last year, but did not seriously start reading the Sequences and other posts until the past half year or so. This site played an instrumental role in de-converting me; I had grown up in the Midwest in a very fundamentalist Christian household. After becoming firm in my atheism (untheism + antitheism), I sadly stopped lurking on here, until I became interested in philosophy and the rationality as espoused on LW.

I have always been considered "... (read more)

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1kilobug
Welcome here !
[-]uzalud80

Hello everyone.

I live in Croatia, currently working as an IT consultant after working some years at the University. Along with software development I was always interested in psychology, particularly evolutionary psychology, social psychology and human rationality.

I guess I've been a rationalist for as long as I can remember. My interest in science and (oddly) my exposure to catechism at an early age - in a then socialist country - made me question people's approach to knowledge and reasoning.

I hope to find ways to effectively communicate facts and ideas a... (read more)

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0Oscar_Cunningham
Welcome!
[-]gforce12180

Hi, I'm a college student in Portland, and I'm planning to major in either Physics or Math and Physics. Although rationalism relates fairly obviously to those fields, that's not my where my interest stems from. I'm interested in rationalism because it can be used to explain things less obviously in its domain such as politics and literature. Additionally it provides a structure for interpreting knowledge about the physical world, which is not as self-evident as it sounds. I first heard about Less Wrong from HP:MoR and discovered it through a comment on Reddit.

I'm not sure if this is at all coherent, but I'm psyched to be here and be a part of this website.

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0Oscar_Cunningham
Welcome!
[-]Nectanebo80

I also found Less Wrong after reading the Harry Potter fanfiction. Becoming a more rational person is something that I like to think I have strived towards for most of my life, even if I wasn't aware of what it was called a lot of the time.

A lot of people who surround me in life aren't very rational, so I looked towards the internet for a place to discuss things where a rational viewpoint is considered the optimal viewpoint. This is because I am aware of my ignorance across many fields and of the world, and I am also aware of my tendency towards irrationa... (read more)

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[-]jsbennett8680

My name's Joshua Bennett, and I also came here after reading the Harry Potter fanfiction. I made a commitment to pursuing rationality after reading Richard Mitchell's book The Gift of Fire, and seeing even a fictional example of applied rational thinking got me excited. I know that, despite my best efforts, I am a terribly irrational person; I want to fix that.

In the past year or so I've thrown off (among other things) my fundamentalist Christian beliefs in pursuit of truth, and I now call myself an atheist and anti-theist. When people ask how I lost my fa... (read more)

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0komponisto
Well, you've got Steven Weinberg. Not to mention a number of people here on LW.
0jsbennett86
There was an atheist picnic at the park where I work. They were celebrating the rapture that was supposed to take place back in May (needless to say, they weren't too surprised when the rapture was called off). I got to speak with a few people, but most of the meetup groups were rather far for me to drive to on a regular basis. Thanks for the links. I'm located in the DFW metroplex, but I could make a drive to a meetup elsewhere once in a while.
[-]D22780

I'm a 28-yo male in the SF area previously from NYC.

This site is intimidating and I think there are many more just like me who are intimidated to introduce themselves because they might not feel they are as articulate or smart as some of the people on this forum. There are some posts that are so well written that I couldn't write in a 100 years. There is so much information that it seems overwhelming. I want to stop lurking and invite others to join too. I'm not a scientist and I didn't study AI in college, I just want to meet good people and so do yo... (read more)

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[-]paul_watcher80

Hello. Please call me Paul Watcher. Watcher is not my real name, but I do know someone named Watcher, and it is what I've been doing. I'm a medical student.

I've recently finished all the sequences (except the luminosity one still), and my head still hurts. I'm really happy I found them, though. It was painful, but I call myself better now.

I'm now relearning as much as I can. I'm trying to use divia's Anki deck to memorize the sequences: basic things worth memorizing. I still have yet to actually understand lot of what I read here, so I hope that helps.

I re... (read more)

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8LucasSloan
If you have a question, and don't particularly care if others after you see the answer, asking in the Open Thread probably will get more people looking at your question. On the other hand, people do look at the recent comment page, and try to answer questions, so I can't say that's a bad option. If it's not time critical, I'd ask in the article, then, if no one answers, link to your question from the open thread.
1NancyLebovitz
It might also make sense to raise the question as a new topic in the discussion section. I think it's the way to bet that if you're confused by something here (especially if it's at all technical or about using the site), you aren't the only one.
0paul_watcher
Thank you both for the answers. I don't have much time right now to think about this, but I think I'll comment in the article itself. It's pretty specific. Bonne journée.
[-]TomM80

Hello! You have another victim via MoR.

I am already a bit conflicted about the site - I am finding the content inspiring, useful and helpful, given that I am going through a bit of a life 'directional re-evaluation' at the moment, but it is also sucking away a lot of time that I could be devoting to actual analysis and practical action...

Oh, well, when I finish reading every post, I can carry on from there!

Reply
3Document
Related: Self-Improvement or Shiny Distraction: Why Less Wrong is anti-Instrumental Rationality. It's also one of the reasons I (and other people) wish it were easier to download the site or portions of the site (like the Sequences plus comments) for offline reading.
[-]UnclGhost80

Hi! I first came here a couple of months ago through MoR (through TV Tropes), which seems to have been a gateway drug of sorts for many of us here. Right now I'm reading my way through the sequences and other posts. I find it surprising how much difference it's made in my thought processes in just the short time I've been reading to just have the Litany of Gendlin available and verbalized, or making my beliefs pay rent. I think I've always been very analytical, but the most helpful things I've read on Less Wrong so far have been ways to focus that analysis... (read more)

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0jsalvatier
Meaning you work on Folding@Home or you contribute your cycles?
0UnclGhost
I contribute cycles, as part of team #186453 (Less Wrong).
[-]David_Gerard80

Lured in by ciphergoth, who successfully irritated me into looking. Finally irritated into creating a login to comment on a post that wasn't listing its sources.

I also write a lot on RationalWiki, with subjects of local interest being the cryonics and LessWrong articles. Please remember that we love you really, we're just annoying about it.

Having given it some thought, I don't label myself "rationalist". "Whatever-works-ist" is probably more accurate. LessWrong's ambit claim upon the word "rationalist" is very irritating.

LessW... (read more)

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9Paul Crowley
We call "whatever-works-ism" instrumental rationality.
[-]Elizabeth80

My name is Elizabeth, and I made my way here through "Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality," but quickly found myself fascinated. I've been reading intermittently for a few months, and would likely not be posting here today due to an unfortunate personal tendency towards lurking and the sheer daunting nature of the volume and intelligence of discussion, but when I was reading about narrowness I came across a comment I couldn't help responding to, and decided my newfound positive karma score was worth overcoming my trepidation about perman... (read more)

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[-]roryokane80

Hi, I’m Rory O’Kane. I’ve been reading Less Wrong for a few months. I first came across it a year or two ago, when a Hacker News comment linked to the AI-in-a-box experiment description. I followed some links from that and liked each Less Wrong post I read. A few more times in the next months, I stumbled across a random comment or article pointing to a Less Wrong post that I also enjoyed, until I finally decided to read the About page and see just what Less Wrong was all about anyway. Every so often, I came to the site, read posts, and followed links from ... (read more)

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6orthonormal
Hmm, fair point. Quick poll below:
[-]orthonormal140

Vote for me if you would prefer the post stay as is. (Karma balance below.)

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6komponisto
Voting for original wording. In context, "we" clearly refers to the "core" of LW, which, just as clearly, is the collection of people whose atheism needs explanation to new readers. Changing to "most of us" implies there is a notable subset of participants who haven't given full consideration, and draws attention to that subset ("well, most of us have...[but there are a few people who haven't]"). There isn't any need to weasel-word around the atheism here; it's not anything we need to be apologetic about.
2orthonormal
Vote for me if you would prefer the post edited as suggested. (Karma balance below.)
-3orthonormal
Karma balance. Vote me down to satisfy your sense of justice. PHLOGISTON FOREVER!!!
[-]ricketson80

Hi. I just joined the site yesterday to post a comment. I've been tracking the feed for about a week, having recently decided to re-engage with the Internet. I learned of the site about three months ago, by way of a blogger who was blogging about social issues. I disagreed with him very strongly on those issues, but I checked out his other posts and he mentioned a discussion over here (I think he's a participant).

I think that the post that originally attracted my attention was something relating to the singularity idea. Being a geek myself, I'm kinda inter... (read more)

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3simplicio
This is precisely how I feel. Sometimes I daydream about starting a political party that has no ideology apart from vague consequentialism, commitment to rationality & empirical testing of policy proposals. Call us the "Whatever the Hell Works" party.
3NancyLebovitz
Some niches might be opening up in US politics. Unfortunately, sensible people don't seem to be rushing to fill those niches.
0DBonar
There are at least 3 things going on in "politics" though. 1) Public discussion about the problems facing society including possible solutions and value debates. 2) Getting the "right" people in the right places so that upcoming problems can be addressed well. 3) People making sure they and theirs get a "fair" share of the pie including making their living through politics. Unfortunately, the "Whatever the Hell Works" party probably doesn't do well on that third aspect which probably means it would have a hard time getting and keeping people working for it. Ride a tide of dissatisfaction into power, but then it is really tempting to become just the latest version of the same old politics.
0simplicio
Oh, I agree! It's only a daydream. =P
[-]aribrill80

Hello! I've been a reader of Less Wrong for several months, although I never bothered to actually create an account until now. I originally discovered LW from a link through some site called "The Mentat Wiki." I consider myself an atheist and a skeptic. I'm entering my senior year of high school, and I plan on majoring in Physics at the best college I can get into!

Actually, I had come across EY's writings a few months earlier while trying to find out who this "Bayes" was that I had seen mentioned a couple different blogs I read. That w... (read more)

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6CronoDAS
Particle Man, Particle Man, does whatever a particle can! What's he like? It's not important. Particle Man! Sorry, couldn't resist.
0[anonymous]
I'm sorry, I'm not.
0ata
Welcome! Would you happen to be the same Particleman from LDF/Stonehenge?
0aribrill
I'm sorry, I'm not.
1ata
Ah, okay. Welcome nevertheless. :)
[-]David_Allen80

My search began when I realized that I was confused. I was confused by what people did and what they said. I was confused by my responses to other people, how interacting with other people affected me. And I was confused about how I worked. Why I did the things I did, why I felt the way I did, why sometimes things were easy for me, and sometimes they were hard.

I learned very early in my life that I needed to critically analyze what other people told me. Not simply to identify truth or falsehood, but to identify useful messages in lies and harmful messages ... (read more)

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1Perplexed
Some examples: In programming, an argument or message can be passed only if sender and receiver agree on the datatype of the argument (i.e. on how the bits should be interpreted). In Bayesian inference, all probabilities are conditional on background knowlege. In natural deduction (logic), complex sentences in simple contexts are decomposed into simple sentences in complex contexts. In all cases, there are rules for transferring information between context and "content". But you can never completely eliminate the context. You are always left with a residual context which may take the form of assumed axioms, rules of inference, grammars, or alphabets. That is, the residual is our way of representing the simplest possible context. I think that it is an interesting research program to examine how more complex contexts can be specified using the same core machinery of axioms, alphabets, grammars, and rules.
2David_Allen
Absolutely. The interpretation of the evidence depends entirely on its meaning, within the context at hand. This is why different observers can come to different conclusions given the same evidence; they have adopted different contexts. For example: "...humans are making decisions based on how we think the world works, if erroneous beliefs are held, it can result in behavior that looks distinctly irrational." So when we observe a person with behavior or beliefs that appear to be irrational, we are probably using a different context than they are. If we want to understand or to change this person's beliefs, we need to establish a common context with them, creating a link between their context and ours. This is essentially the goal of Nonviolent Communication. I also see ideas in Buddhism that can be phrased in terms of the context principle. Suffering (dukkha) is context dependent. We may suffer under conditions that bring another joy. My wife, for example dislikes most of the TV shows I watch. If she realizes that I am happy to put on headphones to spare her from exposure, she can experience gratitude instead of resentment. This is a key insight. If you can split a system arbitrarily between context and content, how do you decide where to make the split? In programming, which part of the problem is represented in the program, and which part in the data? This task can be arbitrarily hard. As I stated above: The Daily WTF contains many examples of simple ideas implemented poorly. In computer science you can ground certain abstractions in terms of themselves. For example the XML Schema Definition Language can be used to define a schema for itself. The observable universe appears to be our residual common context. If we want to come up with a TOE that explains this context, perhaps we need to look for one that can be defined in terms of itself. This sounds similar to what I am working on. I am working on a methodology for creating a network of common contexts t
-4adsenanim
"The implications extend far beyond computer science" In one way they do, in another they are very simple. "The problem rests in the nature of knowledge and meaning" Some things have simple answers, others are complex, but, if there is a mind to ask the question, then?
[-]Crouching_Badger70

Hello, my name is Brett, and I am an undergraduate student at the University of North Texas, currently studying in the Department of Anthropology. In this semester, my classmates and I have been tasked with conducting an ethnographic study on an online community. After reading a few posts and the subsequent comments, LessWrong seemed like a great community on which to conduct an ethnography. The purpose of this study is to identify the composition of an online community, analyze communication channels and modes of interaction, and to glean any other inform... (read more)

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[-]UngnsCobra70

Hi!

I'm a 3rd year Economics Undergrad student at the University of Glasgow. I found LessWrong, by reading a Profile on Peter Thiel, my interest are: economics (obviously, used to be macro but now gearing towards more experimental area's.) philosophy, mostly stoic; not Seneca etc but Aurelius 'Meditations', history of maths and risk. Financial markets to an extent, but it's not something I'm pursuing religiously. I have always been interested in self-development but though that the literature would need to be seriously scrutinized, so I'm very happy that I... (read more)

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4Mass_Driver
Welcome to Less Wrong! Your interests sound interesting. What does it mean to look at the Singularity from an economic point of view?
3UngnsCobra
I'm fairly new to singularity etc. but from what I have read so far. Looking at singularity as a if scenario through Brain Emulation's (uploading). How would this affect the economy regarding, emplyment, growth etc. So far I have found papers looking at economics of singularity from Robin Hanson. I'm struggling finding other source's so I would be very grateful if someone would like to contribute.
3gwern
I don't really know of any myself. It's hard to do economics about such divergent and unclear scenarios, and economists typically do them as jokes (eg. Paul Krugman's paper on investing in a relativistic time travel framework). And there seem to be penalties - that Hanson paper from 2008 still has not been published 4 years later, for example.
7Will_Newsome
For those who are interested.
1UngnsCobra
(To gwern and Will_Newsome) Haha that's great, it's a somewhat juvenile undertone in Krugman's writing in this paper. that's exactly the kind of paper's i'm looking for - paper's that are something of a outlier in the field of economics, if any other paper's come's to mind in the same direction it would be appreciated.
[-]kmdouglass70

Hello everyone, I'm a 27 year old graduate student pursuing a degree in optics from the University of Central Florida. I perform experimental research in optical sensing of biological and random materials. Though I enjoy my research, I'm more interested in the philosophy of science. By philosophy of science I mean the framework of logical structures that scientists use to identify problems and arrive at solutions. Most of my colleagues, myself included, received no formal education of this type; rather, our educations were limited to the theory and applic... (read more)

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1[anonymous]
Do you do any photoacoustic tomography, or is your work purely optical? I'm a math grad student in that area. I'm also from Ohio, the Cincinnati area. Hi!
2kmdouglass
No, I do not do any work in that area, though I am vaguely familiar with it, having attended a few talks on the subject. However, the mathematics of solving the associated inverse problem is extremely relevant to the type of work that I do. It's great to meet another Ohioan. I was just driving through Cincinnati a few days ago. Cheers, -kmd
[-]jcolvin70

Hi Less Wrong! My name is Jonathan, I'm 43, from Vancouver Canada, background in physics and philosophy (no longer professional), with interests in the Anthropic Principle, philoscience, Tegmarkian metaphysics, mutliverse theories, observer selection and assorted Bostromian subjects, and much else besides. I've been a proponent (shill) of the multiverse for many a year and am now gratified that it's reaching mainstream acceptance.

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[-]Sophivorus70

Hi everyone!

My name is Felipe, from Argentina. I've been studying philosophy for the last five years or so, especially logic and philosophy of science, but this last year I also started learning web programming, and before that I was a very active editor in the spanish Wikipedia.

I learned about Less Wrong because I had just finished an experimental website, and I posted it on the imageboard of science and mathematics /sci/ (which some of you probably know), and there someone mentioned that people on Less Wrong would probably like it. So I came here, and I ... (read more)

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0Sophivorus
I just uploaded the evolution of FormalForum: http://ergoforum.org/ Any feedback appreciated!
[-]Sam_Jaques70

Hello,

I was introduced to Less Wrong by a friend about a year ago. My first impression was of thoughts and opinions that I already had, or had half-thought, but expressed much more clearly. How could I not love it? I eventually read all of the sequences, finding novel but brilliant ideas. I now recommend them to almost everyone I meet. Coincidentally, after I'd started reading the sequences, I found HP:MOR, and had my mind blown when I found out most of them were written by the same person. Currently, I'm trying to read E.T. Jaynes', "Probability The... (read more)

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0Oscar_Cunningham
Welcome!
[-]cadac70

Hi everybody! More than half a year ago, I came across LessWrong via Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, and have since read around half of the sequences. I'm so glad I found this site. I had a sense that more is possible, but I didn't even know the word "philantrophy" existed before I got here, although that might be because that word is less common in German (which is my first language). At the few meetups I've been to, I've met some very awesome folks – I can't remeber feeling so comparatively uninteresting ever before. I hope my experience with this site continues to be this eye-opening.

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5Prismattic
It's "philanthropy", but "philantrophy" would be an awesome neologism for the chaos that results from well-intentioned but ill-conceived humanitarian aid.
6pedanterrific
Philentropy: (noun) measure of the decrease of the utility/dollar ratio as a function of distance to recipient. Edit: Here I thought I just made this up whole cloth, and what does google tell me but that it's the name of an album older than I am. Nothing new under the sun, etc and so on. Relevant.
0Normal_Anomaly
Welcome to LW, cadac!
[-]Alerik70

Hello all.
My name is Alerik. I'm a 29 year old Civil Engineering student and father of one (so far). I'm hoping to graduate within the next year. I've been in school forever, changing schools several times, and majors from naval architecture to physics to applied math and computer science to civil engineering. I've been a terrible student much of the time, and a poor organizer of my time much of the time. I was raised very religious, broke away from my church when my grandfather's death revealed the enormous corruption within the church, and broke wit... (read more)

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0Normal_Anomaly
Hi, Alerik! Welcome to less wrong. Congratulations on the progress you've made, and good luck in your future endeavors.
[-]tog70

Hi all, I've just started reading Less Wrong, having long seen links to it on utilitarian communities online and through philosopher friends in Oxford. If you want to know more about me you could read the 'about me' page on my http://www.philosofiles.com/ website, though I won't bore you with the details here! I'm always more than happy to discuss my beliefs though, so I look forward to eventually engaging with the discussions here :)

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0lessdazed
Welcome here! Beware of things that are fun to argue, and don't forget to win!
0Oscar_Cunningham
Welcome!
[-]Clarica70

Hello! I'm here because a reference to Less Wrong that Nancy Lebovitz made on another forum intrigued me, and I love the last line of the FAQ: there's nothing in the laws of physics that prevents reality from sounding weird.

I disagree that perfectionism as described on the About page is always a good idea, but my imagination can easily come up with an ideal standard which no living person can actually meet. And stay alive. Usually because of slippery-slope arguments, but if an ideal cannot be taken to the extreme example, can it really be that ideal?

I do ... (read more)

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1Oscar_Cunningham
Welcome!
[-]crazy8870

Hi,

I've been lurking on LW/OB for a while but thought I'd sign up. I'm currently doing a philosophy degree which you might expect would make me feel unwelcome on LW (which is often fairly anti-philosophy) but it's actually really great to come across a group with a similar view about how to do philosophy as me - I tend to come across more interesting philosophy ideas here than I do in classes.

Anyway, just thought I'd say hello.

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1Normal_Anomaly
Welcome to Less Wrong! Don't worry too much about our being anti-philosophy. We're more against the common views held and methodologies used by philosophers than against the field itself. That is, the areas philosophy investigates are worth investigating; the bashing is reserved for the way philosophers go about it.
0crazy88
Thanks for the welcome. And yes, my opinions re: philosophy are much the same so it seems like I'll fit in fine.
0MatthewBaker
at which school?
3crazy88
My comments before weren't intended to reflect poorly on philosophy at my specific university. From what I can tell, they're a good university for philosophy but I simply find a lot of philosophy to be of dubious value and my views on which philosophy is useful aligns to a reasonable extent with views expressed on LW. So despite the ability of this specific department I find that not all classes cover stuff that I find to be useful.
0MatthewBaker
College in Australia = should be fun ;) Welcome to LW
[-]Caravelle70

Hello all !

I'm a twenty-seven years old student doing a PhD in vegetation dynamics. I've been interested in science since forever, in skepticism and rationality per se for the last few years, and I was linked to LessWrong only a few months ago and was blown away. I'm frankly disconcerted by how every single internet argument I've gotten into since has involved invoking rationality and using various bits of LessWrong vocabulary, I think the last time I absorbed a worldview that fast was from reading "How the Mind Works", lo these many years ago. S... (read more)

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2naritai
Welcome to LessWrong!
[-]soundchaser70

Hi. I've been a lurker since before Less Wrong existed, reading though the sequences as they existed on Overcoming Bias. I regularly read new posts on Less Wrong and have made it through a couple of the sequences, but have failed to internalize much.

I am very interested in the topics discussed here and have recently decided to take a more active role in the community as well as really learning the existing material.

A little about me personally. I'm a 23, male, computer programmer ('software engineer') that has essentially slacked off his entire life. I ha... (read more)

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0AdeleneDawner
Hey, that makes two of us. Where about?
2soundchaser
Raleigh, what about you?
0AdeleneDawner
Durham, here, right by Duke University, though I'll be moving to another part of the city early next year, with some luck. I don't drive, but if we scare up a couple more people nearby and start a meetup group, it'd be worth taking a cab to, I bet.
0soundchaser
Having a meetup here would be great. I know a couple people that would attend, but I'm not too sure of the overall readership here.
[-]JohnDavidBustard70

Hi all, I'm John Bustard. I was suggested this site by a friend and I've just started getting into it. I'm a PhD student in computer vision, with a basic need for intellectual discussions (nice food and good debates are pretty close to heaven for me). I'm also very keen on improving my knowledge of statistical learning, which I feel is the key to understanding truth (the formalisation of understanding). I'm a fan of the singularity with a preference for brain scanning and simulation as the triggering event. Above all, however, I'm attracted by the sense ... (read more)

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[-]Perplexed70

Hi. I've been reading and posting here for 3 weeks or so, and am working my way through the sequences, so it's time to introduce myself.

My full nym is Perplexed in Peoria (PiP for short.) I am a retired computer engineer (software simulation of hardware designs). My checkered undergrad career included majors in chemistry, physics, poly sci, and finally economics. My recent reading interests include molecular biology, evolutionary biology, formal logic, philosophy, game theory, and abiogenesis. Currently I am reading Pearl on Causality, Wimsatt on ph... (read more)

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1rabidchicken
You recently bought a Mac? (must control Linux and computer building evangelism...) Anyway, welcome. I look forward to your post, and seeing your reasons for doubting the possibility of singularity. With my limited research so far, I am nearly certain it is inevitable, if not imminent. Now I need to go rant on a computer hardware site to get expensive pre-built computers out of my system....
[-]Perplexed110

Also bought a Ubuntu disk and book, intending to go dual-boot on the Mac, but haven't installed it yet. Yeah, the Mac cost too much, but I bought it because I had never owned an Apple and I have worked with a variety of Unix systems. Currently, I am trying for nerdish breadth rather than depth. And having built an Altair, my computer build-it-yourself hunger is already satiated.

I recently published my FOOM-denialist rant as a comment on the "Why trust SIAI" thread. But that was two days ago. I don't much agree with what I wrote there. The singularity seems to me to be much closer now.

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[-]JamesAndrix100

I recently published my FOOM-denialist rant as a comment on the "Why trust SIAI" thread. But that was two days ago. I don't much agree with what I wrote there. The singularity seems to me to be much closer now.

An LW semi-tradition I try to encourage: When one changes one's mind after a discussion, go back and add a note to the original post stating your new position and what led you to change it. Hopefully this will help us build a map of what arguments are correct and convincing.

I try to always upvote such things. Changing your mind should be a party.

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3Perplexed
I edited the rant adding my second thoughts. Thx for reminding me to do so.
1xamdam
this would be very welcome, as I just read that chapter.
[-]rahul70

Hi, I'm Rahul. I've intermittently visited LW for more than a year, refraining from commenting as it seemed optimal to shut up and update my beliefs regarding ideas I wasn't very well informed about. I feel I'm better prepared to contribute now.

I studied engineering and physics at school, moving on to work at trading floors of investment banks where I got a real, ringside view of decision making under uncertainty. Today, I work as a social venture capitalist looking to help disadvantaged micro-entrepreneurs rise out of poverty.

Despite my life's digression... (read more)

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[-]meta_ark70

Hello! My name's Adam. I've been reading LessWrong since April, but I think this might be my first comment. I usually feel like I don't have much to add :)

I think my awakening as a rationalist can be traced back to reading Plato's Republic when I was 15. While not the typical rationalist text, it did open my eyes to the world of philosophy and logic, and first gave me the hunger for truths.

I found Less Wrong when a rationalist friend of mine badgered me for ages to visit it. This was after a weekend I'd spent in a particularly foul mood because of the shor... (read more)

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4simplicio
Just how I felt. Like I had stumbled across the intellectual equivalent of Callahan's Crosstime Saloon.
[-]Houshalter70

I was here a month or two ago, left for a while, and now I'm back. I found this site on a google search for an old AI project I was trying to research out of curiosity. I have been interested in AI since I was 13 and found this old dusty book at a library book sale titled simply "artificial intelligence". I read it cover to cover several times, and that's really how I got into all of this. Anyways, after finding this site, it really hooked me in, although I guess I was kind of resistant to the general opinion of the community here at first, which is how I got voted down so much. Now I have to wait 10 minutes to post this >=/

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8Clippy
Don't be discouraged. When I first started to post on this internet website, I was frequently voted down, usually to the point that I had to wait before submitting comments. However, by persisting, and making informative, reasoned comments, I was able to raise my Karma well above that needed to submit an article. And this is despite significant disagreement with other Users!
[-]anateus70

Have been a long time reader of Overcoming Bias, but haven't gone over to LW after the split.

I've been a rationalist as far back as I can remember, but I really became serious when I was 12. I grew up in Israel, and I was being prepared for my Bar Mitzvah by a Hasidic Rabbi. As Hasidim are prone to do he was telling me some mystical story, wherein he mentioned that the Sun orbits the Earth. I correct him offhand that this must be wrong. He countered with what I now know to be a classic "Have you ever been to space yourself?" followed by the even ... (read more)

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4cousin_it
Ouch. So this is how "but not that particular proof" feels from the other side.
3anateus
Very much so. I spent the next 10 minutes twisting myself up in knots: "Astronauts went up in space", etc. Always getting "But you yourself never went in space!". In my 12 year old naivete I replied that the mystical story he was just telling me was not witnessed by him in person. At which point he grabbed some old book that was nearby and mentioned that since it was written there it was true. That's when I knew to give up.
3simplicio
Ah, the beloved 'appeal for humility.' It's the gift that keeps on giving... Welcome! I was in linguistics too, for a while.
[-][anonymous]70

Hi, I lurked on OB and, until recently LW. I've since poked my head out a bit and asked a few questions to try to figure some things out. Like a lot of people here, my areas of interest are varied.

My main hope with starting to post on the site is that I might be able to provide some more introductory material trying to introduce people to LW - partly because I'm learning it myself so I'd find writing such posts challenging whereas many of the people who have been posting here for longer are excited by more complex things.

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2Randaly
I've had the same experience- thanks for the introduction!
[-][anonymous]60

My name is not Stuart David. I use a pseudonym online as a means to completely sidestep the issue being branded with a view I don't necessarily hold but have simply argued for or posted about. I am also an extremely private person and wish to remain so.

I am in my mid 20s and I am still working on my B.S. in Physics. On and Off university for the past few years. I have been involved in the promotion of reason, science and skepticism via CFI (Center for Inquiry) and I have personally pursued rationality for the past 10 years or so. Preferred activities in my... (read more)

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3pedanterrific
Wow, that must be some kind of record.
[-]Gunrunnermusic60

Hi my name is Krish Sharma. I am a recording record producer and recording engineer, with several small music-related businesses. I have degrees in economics and computer science, but as far as music I am self-taught. I feel a strong connection to the idea of the pursuit of human rationality, but many times feel I lack the processing power to really make sense of our environment on my own. In my ad-hock voyage through the information biosphere I have felt at times very discouraged by the general "triumph of irrationality". For the most part ... (read more)

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[-]Sush60

Hi everyone, I've been following this site for a long time and I really feel like it's had a huge impact on me, if not just because I've discovered a huge community of people who seem to have the answers to the questions I've always been asking myself (or at least the cognitive apparatus for reaching them!)

Me

I'm a 20 year old male from the UK and have been working for two years in a private hospital with the aged, terminally ill and cancer sufferers. The job requires me to work 12-14 hours a day with little human contact other than with patients and nursi... (read more)

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[-]Optimind60

Greetings fellow user & producer of thoughts!

My parents named me Jonathan, I'm 20 and born in Copenhagen. I'm honored to find such a high quantity, high concentration of high quality minds. My dad (not very generous with compliments) told me recently that I've always been wierd, much more conscious about everything since very young. I'm also about the fastest learner I know of. Two major weaknesses would be that I'm mortal and my English is very unpracticed in terms of output. I value: Consciousness, Intelligence, Practicality, Good decision making, We... (read more)

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5beoShaffer
Hi, Optimind. I'd suggest starting with either An Intuitive explanation of Bayes Theorem or An Intuitive Explanation of Eliezer Yudkowsky’s Intuitive Explanation of Bayes’ Theorem. After that all of the sequences(except maybe the quantum mechanics one) are worth reading.
1Optimind
Thanks! Bayes theorem seems very useful, though I haven't gotten through it all yet. I'm not a good reader yet. Have you got any idea how far is my goal from everybody elses in here?
1Bugmaster
FWIW, my own intuitive explanation of Bayes' Theorem -- which may be inaccurate and wrong -- usually begins somewhat like this: Let's say that, one morning, you walk outside your front door, and immediately slip in a puddle of water and twist your ankle. Did CIA agents put the puddle there just to hurt you ? Well, according to the theorem, a). That's the wrong question to ask; a better question is, "how likely is it that CIA agents made that puddle ?" b). To answer that question, you need to keep in mind that puddles can happen for all kinds of reasons (rain, sprinklers, etc.), not just due to the machinations of CIA agents. Of course, no intuitive explanation is a substitute for math...
[-]JQuinton60

Hey everyone. I found out about Less Wrong via Common Sense Atheism a couple of months ago and I've been reading up on the Sequences and trying to learn more about Bayes' Theorem so that I can think more like a Bayesian in everyday life. It was only recently that I decided to actually make an account and contribute a bit.

I'm a software engineer for the Army. I'm not uniformed military (I used to be, for the Air Force) but a government civilian. My hobbies include swing dancing, playing guitar (mostly metal), learning about religion and studying Koine Greek (I might try to get an MA and possibly even a PhD in religious studies eventually), working out, and of course studying rationalism.

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4gwern
Interesting combination. Coming via CSA, I'm guessing you're the 'understand the enemy to defeat it' or 'how could such a strange thing as religion work' kind of atheist?
1JQuinton
Yeah, I think it's probably a combination of both. Maybe somewhere down the road I'll be sneaking in rationalism while talking or teaching about religion? That's the goal, anyway.
-8Peacewise
[-]fsopho60

Good afternoon, morning or night! I'm a graduate student in Epistemology. My research is about epistemic rationality, logic and AI. I'm actually investigating about the general pattern of epistemic norms and about their nature - if these norms must be actually accessed by the cognitive agent to do their job or not; if these norms in fact optimize the epistemic goal of having true beliefs and avoiding false ones, or rather if these norms just appear to do so; and still other questions. I was navigating through the web and looking for web-based softwares to ... (read more)

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[-]Curiouskid60

WARNING: long post. I detail my entire intellectual development and how I came to be interested in LW. More posts on LW should have short summaries like this one (IMO).

Hello! I'm a 17 year old high school student. I was raised a lukewarm christian (I went to church maybe 5 times a year). Around 3rd grade I deduced Santa Clause could not exist. Around 9th grade I first HEARD the word atheism (and shortly thereafter agreed). I've always wanted to have some big impact on the planet. When I was younger (5th-8th grade), I thought I would try to become a profes... (read more)

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7lessdazed
When I was younger (three years old), I thought I would try to become a helicopter.
0[anonymous]
You have no idea how hard I'm laughing.
0Optimind
We sound alike. I'm curious where are you from? "On the other hand, I would have to take care of myself which would take a lot of time." Borrow 4 Hour Work-Week (by Timmothy Ferris) at your local libary, then that shouldn't be a problem if your just closely as smart as you seem. Yes, the title sounds like a get-rich-quick scheme (he has even made fun of it later himself.). But he's actually very sensible and practical minded, not very brilliant philosophically though.
0wedrifid
Alike indeed.
0Curiouskid
I've decided I'm going to tackle the sequences one at a time. I'm going to create a folder on my desktop for each sequence. I'm going to have a word document with all the insights I've had relating to a particular topic within the sequence. I think I'm going to start with "the craft and the community", "Yudkowsky's coming of age", and "fun theory" (These seem to directly answer my question of how I can help create a utopia).
0lessdazed
One reason to post what one is going to do is to establish a form of accountability for oneself. That's a good reason to post something like this, there are also other good reasons to post something like this. There are even bad rasons to post something like this. Do you mind sharing your reasons?
0Curiouskid
Not at all, first of all, it's useful for me to write all this out because then I can see the driving force behind all the books I choose to read whereas normally I don't go through this entire through process every time I choose something to read. second, I did ask for some specific advice for how navigate this forum. Obviously I asked because I wanted to know the answer. third, I want to learn, so if somebody has already read similar material for similar reasons, I want them to comment and give me some advice on which books to read and which ones not to read and to tell me if they see any flawed reasoning in my post. fourth, I'd love to make some friends on these forums. There are people here who are graduating early from high school (something I might do) and they could offer some advice when it comes time for me to make that decision. fifth, I've been talking about how little I know for a while, but if there were any way I could help the forum or offer up some insight that hadn't been thought of, I will do so.
0lessdazed
One good way to set about learning something is to start with the specific sub-section you are most motivated to learn. It's good you have identified those. Nonetheless, there are tradeoffs involved - some things might build on others, for example, so all else equal there might be a best order to read things in. I recommend the first five subsequences of How To Actually Change Your Mind, A Human's Guide to Words, and Reductionism).
0Curiouskid
Thanks for the tip. I wish I weren't in high school right now. So much busywork.
2thomblake
In my experience, it only gets worse.
1Curiouskid
I would think that if I were in college, I wouldn't have to take classes that are incredibly slow paced. Also, I wouldn't have to be physically present in the school for 8 hours. The classes would be more specific to my interests. On the other hand, I would have to take care of myself which would take a lot of time.
0thomblake
Right, I forgot about college. If you do that right, it can be idyllic.
1MatthewBaker
In college I'm taking it slow because I have the luxury of money and time and a wonderful environment in silicon valley. I feel like if i was taking as many units as i could and not just a comfortable amount above full time status there would be a TON of busywork but so far I'm greatly enjoying my idyllic experience :) I think it all depends what you wanna optimize for.
[-]buybuydandavis60

I found this list after finding and loving EY's Harry Potter series.

I have a background in statistical pattern recognition, and quickly found that most of the writers I found real value in during graduate school were canon here - Jaynes, Pearl, Wolpert, Korzybski, to name a few. I'm hoping to pick up more, like Kahneman.,

Way back in early 90s, I was on the extropians list as well, and think I've seen a familiar name or two. Quality discussion groups are hard to find, and I'm very happy to have found this place.

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[-]Peacewise60

G'day friends,

who you are - that's a question far too involved for a first post. My name is not who I am, nor my job, nor my place of birth, nor what I do for leisure, nor what I find interesting, if you could see me, you might consider that my body is who I am, and I'd agree with that... online I am Peacewise, and that's a name I'm proud and respectful of, so you can expect that I'll maintain the dignity of those who interact with me.

What you're doing - I'm operating a business and studying a teaching degree. Along the way I'm being consistent with my b... (read more)

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[-]asparisi60

Hello all,

I've put off coming here for as long as I have been able (not due to not wanting to join the community, but due to the fact that my obligations make it so that I often have to drop communities, which I feel regret about) but I think I finally have time to be a quasi-active participant in the community here, so we'll see what happens.

I first saw this site, following it from Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality about a year or two ago, and followed that up with reading the sequences. (Which were instrumental in helping me push away a whole h... (read more)

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0Normal_Anomaly
Welcome to Less Wrong!
[-]TWIM60

Hi all. Nothing really fancy to say about myself. I like writing webcode and dabble in the basics: PHP, CSS, HTML/XHTML, maybe a little JavaScript here and there. Lately I've been teaching myself PERL on account of it's quick and dirty utility. I got pulled in to Less Wrong while reading Eliezer's sequence on Quantum Physics. I wanted to see what this community was all about, so I created an account, read the introductory articles, and left this comment.

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0Normal_Anomaly
Welcome to Less Wrong!
[-]Shmi60

Hi, as requested, here is my introduction: I ended up here thanks to HPMoR, I have a physics degree and frequent the relevant freenode channels. I have observed that scientists are not significantly more likely to behave rationally than anyone else, not even in their area of expertise and this site appears to explain some of that. Ironically, it appears that this community is less wrong not much more often than an average person,either, though this might be just my initial impression. In any case, I hope to improve my personal rationality quotient, despite the overwhelming odds against it.

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0Vladimir_Nesov
If there are indeed overwhelming odds against, you shouldn't hope (and conversely).
0orthonormal
Why do you think there are overwhelming odds against any significant improvement? After all, most people in the world aren't even trying.
[-]James_H60

Hi everyone, I'm a 25 year old Olfactory Psychology student, hopefully about to start my phd soon. I have a blog myself at http://freeze43.wordpress.com/ that's mostly about atheism and philosophy. I was here after a link by a friend pointed out some stuff by Eliezer Yudowsky and I was really excited about it.

I got into rationality fairly early by enjoying religion and philosophy classes and being concerned with a desire to find truth. As I progressed through my Psych undergrad I found myself changing my career preferences as scientific understanding bec... (read more)

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[-][anonymous]60

Hey, I'm Jon. I've been reading Overcoming Bias for probably about 3 years and only recently discovered Less Wrong. (IIRC, OB was getting more and more into AI, then it split into OB and LW. I stayed with OB but never looked at LW.) I have a bachelor's in Mathematics and Economics, and was getting a PhD in Economics before I dropped out after my second year. (I became severely disenchanted with the discipline and arrogant and hostile with my program.)

Some post (I don't remember which) from OB lead me here maybe two weeks ago, and I read "Generali... (read more)

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[-]IanV60

Hi, Living in Montreal, Quebec, Canada and studying in the equivalent of college. Lazy is a word describing me well. Seeking consonnance and being lazy, most of the time I think and do not act. I seek to act free of pointless things, opinions, biases and ?

And it is difficult. LW is breeze of fresh air to my mind. I want it to help me change myself. I want to be more congruent and rational.

Discovering new possibilities makes me see my inadequacies and now I feel I have to do something about it.

This is a step.

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[-]Nornagest60

Howdy. I've been reading this blog for several months, but I'm hoping that having an identity on this site will provide incentives to internalize its logic; I've found in the past that it's easy for knowledge to fly away when you don't have a short-term stake in understanding it. Of course, that introduces its own potential for bias, but you've got to start somewhere.

Demographically, I'm a software engineer in my mid-to-late twenties living in the SF Bay Area. I spent some time studying classical AI while I was working on my undergraduate degree, but I'... (read more)

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[-]Phil_Reinhold60

Hello LW. I'm Phil, I've been reading Less Wrong for a little over a year now. One of my most prominent "ugh-fields" is that surrounding my (very low) content consumption/production ratio, and I, somewhat baselessly, hope that posting here will help me become a more thoughtful and disciplined writer.

Currently, I'm an undergraduate studying physics and computer science in Chicago. I am highly torn between pursuing a career in science or one in engineering. Several articles here have helped me understand the difference between the two better, but t... (read more)

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[-]AstroCJ60

I'm a student; I value education and intellectual freedom for all sentient entities. I was told I would enjoy the Sequences after asking someone "Do you think that any 'good' society is inherently hierarchical?" over drinks.

I've always identified as a rationalist since I remember being conscious; I became a stated atheist approximately age four when I literally rejected the notion of a loving God along with the idea of Father Christmas and the Easter Bunny.

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2simplicio
Good on you! I was raised what I call funeral-Christian. We would sort of half-assedly pray whenever anybody got sick or died, but my family was totally uninterested in religion otherwise. My sister asked if we were catholic at age 16 or so, to the amusement of all adults concerned. I sort of vaguely thought we were freemasons because I found my granddad's old masonic junk in a drawer. Not sure why I never thought to just ask... But I was a total moron about Santa. I actually managed to invent belief-in-belief in Santa ("maybe Santa doesn't actually exist, but does that really fundamentally matter?") at about age 7. So I'm working off a huge rationalist karmic debt.
[-]Nick_Tourville60

Hi everyone,

I'm an undergraduate at the University of Minnesota majoring in Philosophy and Mathematics and minoring in Economic Theory. I'm most interested in logic-related subjects (mathematical logic, philosophy of logic, philosophy of math, etc.) and moral philosophy (including meta-ethics, ethical theory, and some issues in applied ethics), but I'm also interested in various issues in the philosophy of mind, decision theory, and epistemology. I've been participating in competitive debate since I started high school and I now coach my old team.

I found... (read more)

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[-]gwern60

A note for theists: you will find LW overtly atheist. We are happy to have you participating, but please be aware that other commenters are likely to treat religion as an open-and-shut case. This isn't groupthink; we really, truly have given full consideration to theistic claims and found them to be false. If you'd like to know how we came to this conclusion you may find these related posts a good starting point.

An objective standard might be good here. I'd suggest something like 'if your theist arguments aren't roughly as sophisticated and carefully reasoned as those of Alvin Plantinga, you probably shouldn't bring them up'.

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[-]cousin_it220

I remember stumbling across Plantinga's modal argument and going "what?" For convenience of onlookers, here it is in a more digestible form.

Premise 1: Besides our world, there are other "logically possible" worlds.

Premise 2: Some cheeseburgers are totally awesome.

Premise 3: To be totally awesome, a cheeseburger has to exist in all possible worlds, because being "logically necessary" sounds like a totally awesome quality to have.

Conclusion: Therefore, if a totally awesome cheeseburger is possible at all (exists in one possible world), then it exists in all possible worlds, including ours.

(facepalm happens here)

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3dclayh
A.k.a., ontology with some bells and whistles.
2RobinZ
This introductory philosophy class syllabus links to a statement of the ontological argument by Platinga, if anyone wants to read the argument in the words of the proponent.
1Matt_Simpson
the entire enterprise of modal logic seems facepalm worthy to me
5fiddlemath
I understand that when folks say "modal logic" in this context, they're generally referring to model logics that implicitly quantify over poorly-defined spaces. However, that's not what all modal logics are like, and so I hate to see them maligned with a broad brush. Consider, say, dynamic logic), which I actually use as a tool in my research on program analysis. When my set of "actions" are statements in a well-defined programming language, I can mechanically translate any dynamic logic statement into a non-modal, first-order statement. I almost never do this, because the modal viewpoint is usually clearer and closer to the way we actually think about programs. Equivalently: you can use whatever logical operators you like, if you can define the operator's meaning without reference to the operator. It can help you say what you're trying to say, rather than spending all of your time with low-level details. It's like a higher-level programming language, but with math.
1Matt_Simpson
Consider my eyes opened. This is my problem with the modal logics I have encountered - bad or unclear definitions of the modal operators.
4Oligopsony
Modal logic is actually quite useful. If modal realism turns you off you can just accept it as a language game (which any sort of formal logic is going to be.) The non-sequitur in Plantinga's argument, as presented by cousin it, is P3. (Plantinga's own argument is a bit more subtle, and its ultimate error is in eliding between different meanings of the term "possible." He successfully shows that under formal logic if possibly necessarily x then necessarily x, and then ascribes possible necessity to God because God is one of the most few things that often is argued to be necessary, and that God seems like the sort of sufficiently abstract thing that it might be necessary. But this isn't the sort of possibility that's germane to formal logic.)
1false_vacuum
Haven't read Plantinga and not going to, but 'possibly necessarily P' does not imply 'necessarily P' in all modal logics.
0cousin_it
I agree with Eliezer's critique of the value of modal logics: 1, 2.
3thomblake
Eh. He didn't really show they're not valuable, just that they haven't reduced the notions they work with to something other than black boxes. Modal operators can mean all sorts of things, aside from "possibility" and "necessity", and black boxes are fine as long as they work properly - if you need to know what their internals look like, that's just a project for some other formalism.
[-]dxCUDA50

Greetings, I'm Simon, 23, I study Bsc Computer Games Technologies, currently focusing on rendering pipelines and AI. My scientific interests include physics, computer science and, 3D rendering techniques(C++ is my weapon of choice).

Cheers

-dxCUDA

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0thomblake
A google group has just started recently for Lw folks interested in making games: http://groups.google.com/group/lesswrong-gamemakers
[-]alex_zag_al50

Hi, I'm Alex. I study biochemistry at Rutgers University. I think I was linked to Three Worlds Collide through a TVTropes page. In the past few days I have been curious about

Kolmogorov complexity,

how to derive the formula “y = 1/x” by slicing a cone with a plane,

and when it's appropriate to generalize laboratory results in psychology to human interactions outside the laboratory. Like, the original result on Hold Off On Proposing Solutions was probably done with groups of strangers; is it still true of groups of friends or coworkers? I think so.

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1daenerys
Hi Alex! Welcome to Less Wrong. I'm pretty new here also, so if you want someone to work through Sequences with, let me know. Three Worlds Collide is great! I also recommend Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, which was also written by Yudkowsky.
[-]Tasky50

Hello folks! I am a 18 year old italian Student who will start studying Mathematics in Germany this year. I was always interested in the way of the rational/scientific method, and since I remember tried to use it to reason about almost everything.

A month ago some friends showed me HPMoR, which I read in like 3 days and really enjoyed it. So finally I came here. I read some subsequences and various single topics, including a lot of the comments, which I found almost always very interesting.

This blog opened my eyes especially on cognitive biases thing. Often... (read more)

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0Oscar_Cunningham
Welcome!
[-][anonymous]50

Hello! tkocian is my name. Philosophy is my game. I am a former fudagelical minister who had a massive de-conversion ten years ago after balancing the house of cards that is faith for 6 years. I am 34. I am drawn to reasonable discourse because I want to be shown where I am wrong. I am on the side of the truth and follow the logic and evidence wherever it leads me. I have no dogmas and cross all paths in my pursuit of reality. I found lesswrong at the behest of a good friend, who, after I raved to him about the podcast Conversations From the Pale Blue Dot... (read more)

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1lessdazed
Welcome to lesswrong! At the risk of other optimizing, I have decided to attack you with a tab explosion. Here is the CPBD guy's top fifteen list for Yudkowsky's posts, of which (now these have been recommended by two people) I recommend this this and this. It may be that other writers than Yudkowsky write most in consonance with how you think, in which case you might want to look at Yvain's posts, of which this, this and this are some of my favorites. It may be best to start by reading the material easiest to digest, which may be in story format - similarly, dialogues are often relatively very easily accessible. Here are some links to some posts I think would make a good introduction.
2[anonymous]
Thanks, that should keep me busy for a bit.
0Document
Link for "very" is broken.
1lessdazed
Fixed. It was two links. I had to add a word...the link sentence is no longer the finest specimen of prose! The whole sentence grew clumsily through this process, with me writing it with just a few links and words, then finding a link and inserting a word.
[-]quinsie50

Hello! quinesie here. I discovered LessWrong after being linked to HP&MoR, enjoying it and then following the links back to the LessWrong site itself. I've been reading for a while, but, as a rule, I don't sign up with a site unless I have something worth contributing. After reading Eliezer's Hidden Complexity of Wishes post, I think I have that:

In the post, Eliezer describes a device called an Outcome Pump, which resets the universe repeatedly until the desired outcome occurs. He then goes on to describe why this is a bad idea, since it can't understa... (read more)

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4dbaupp
This creates a universe where the Accept Outcome button gets pressed, not necessarily one that has a positive outcome. e.g. if the button was literally a button, something might fall on to it; or if it was a state in a computer, a cosmic ray might flip a bit.
2quinsie
True enough, but once we step outside of the thought experiment and take a look at the idea it is intended to represent, "button gets pressed" translates into "humanity gets convinced to accept the machine's proposal". Since the AI-analogue device has no motives or desires save to model the universe as perfectly as possible, P(A bit flips in the AI that leads to it convincing a human panel to do something bad) necessarily drops below P(A bit flips anywhere that leads to a human panel deciding to do something bad) and is discountable for the same reason why we ignore hypothesises like "Maybe a cosmic ray flipped a bit to make it do that?" when figuring out the source of computer errors in general.
2dbaupp
P(A bit flips in the AI that leads to it convincing a human panel to do something bad) is always less than P(A bit flips anywhere that leads to a human panel deciding to do something bad), (the former is a subset of the latter). The point of the cosmic ray statement is not so much that that might actually happen, but is just demonstrating that the Outcome-Pump-2.0-universe doesn't necessarily result in a positive outcome, just that it is a universe that has had the "Outcome" accepted, and also that the Outcome being accepted doesn't imply that the universe is one we like.
1Normal_Anomaly
In this document from 2004 Yudkowsky describes a safeguard to be added "on top of" programming Friendliness, a Last Judge. The idea is that the FAI's goal is initially only to compute what an FAI should do. Then the Last Judge looks at the FAI's report, and decides whether or not to switch the AI's goal system to implement the described world. The document should not be taken as representative of Yudkosky's current views, because it's been marked obsolete, but I favor the idea of having a Last Judge check to make sure before anybody hits the red button.
1lessdazed
Welcome! So no more problem if it kills you! But what if it kills you and destroys itself in the process?
2quinsie
The answer to that depends on how the time machine inside works. If it's based on a "reset unless a message from the future is received saying not to" sort of deal, then you're fine. Otherwise, you die. And neither situation has an analoge in the related AI design.
0[anonymous]
I don't think it prevents the wireheading scenario that many people consider undesirable. For instance, if an AI modifies everybody into drooling idiots who are made deliriously happy by pressing "Accept Outcome" as often and forcefully as possible, it wins.
1nshepperd
Or more mundanely, if it achieves a button-press by other means, such as causing a building to collapse on you, with a brick landing on the button.
[-]Peter Wildeford50

I'm a 19 year old college student (rising sophomore) who is studying political science and economics. Throughout my entire life that I can remember, I've been extensively interested in how people work, why they do the things they do, and how these things could be done better. This seems to make me a natural fit for the content of Less Wrong.

I'm personally involved in Political Science research, specifically dealing with the political psychology of how people acquire opinions, use them to make decisions, and update them with new information. Since encoun... (read more)

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[-]Fergus_Mackinnon50

Greetings Lesswrong

My name is, well, my username. I'm sixteen, currently in my final year of high school, male, and living in Inverness, Scotland.

I first became interested in Lesswrong and it's philosophy after reading some very good fiction here, although many of the references took me time to understand. After sporadically reading the occasional article for a few months, and doing some serious thinking about where I want to be in a few years, I decided to register to better network a few weeks ago. I haven't made notable progress on the sequences yet, a... (read more)

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1Alicorn
I'm currently in neither Scotland nor its university system, but I spent a semester at the University of Edinburgh! Yay! Welcome.
1Fergus_Mackinnon
I'm thinking Stirling university might suit me the best for now, it's outside town, has a good economics department, and is closest to where I live after Aberdeen. Still, I'm not set, did Edinburgh have a decent Economics faculty when you were there?
1Alicorn
No idea, I was in philosophy. (...That, and I stopped showing up to classes partway through the semester. Turns out when nobody notices if I go to a thing or not, I rarely go to the thing.)
1Fergus_Mackinnon
But how can you even be sure you really exist?! Maybe you're just a figment of someone else's imagination? I've always wondered, what do people do in the philosophy course? Is it all ancient greek poetry, or is that image outdated?
3Alicorn
In Edinburgh, I was taking three classes: philosophy of language (we discussed Superman a lot), moral and political philosophy (I most clearly remember covering Rawls), and philosophy of mind (philosophers of mind love pain). I took one course my entire academic career that was entirely about something Greek (a graduate course on the Republic). We read it in English.
1Fergus_Mackinnon
And lo, she did answer the question concisely and effectively! I doubt Bayesianism is available in any of the universities I might be going to though, so I think Economics, minoring in Sociology and Psychology would suit me best.
1Alicorn
Who? (I am a she.)
2Fergus_Mackinnon
Ah, edited. Perhaps I shouldn't have made the assumption.
[-]J_Taylor50

Greetings.

I am 20 years old, male, and graduating college this fall with a BA in Philosophy. I am aiming to go to grad-school, specializing in something to help bring about a friendly singularity. I have been reading Lesswrong for about two years and it has been of enormous use in regulating my thought-patterns. Unfortunately, I am currently in a small Bible-Belt city, far away from any meetup groups. I am currently working on my studies in 20th century philosophy, while trying to incorporate useful subjects which many contemporary philosophers ignore. (My... (read more)

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[-]tfo50

Greetings, Lessrs. Wrong.

By coincidence, my career led me do some consulting for a company with which Robin Hanson was affiliated, and I discovered Overcoming Bias as a result and ultimately wound up here.

At this point, I'd describe myself as a long-time listener, occasional caller.

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[-]TerminalAwareness40

LessWrong community, I say hello to you at last!

I'm a first year chemical engineering student in Canada. At some point in time I was linked to The AI-Box Experiment by Yudkowsky, probably 3-1/2 years ago. I'm not sure. The earliest record I have, of an old firefox history file, is Wed Jun 25 20:19:56 ADT 2008. I guess that's when I first encountered rationality, though it may have been back when I used IE (shudders). I read a lot of his site, and occasionally visited it and againstbias. I though it was pretty complicated, and that I'd see more of that guy ... (read more)

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5Nectanebo
Welcome to LessWrong! I would say that if you're interested in rationality, you belong here. It doesn't matter if you're not that good at it yet, as long as you're interested and want to improve then I would say this is where you should be. Be careful of the priming effects of calling yourself bad at rationality, questioning your place here, saying you'll never escape a drug addiction, etc. etc. The article on cached selves might be somewhat relevant.
4thomblake
This suggests to me that you don't understand ethics. While I'm occasionally convinced of the existence of akrasia, it would be an odd thing to note that one fighting to the death was caused by it.
1thomblake
I'd just like to point out that recently someone asked (doubtfully) whether anyone here still has strong feelings regarding three worlds collide. It seems indeed to have a prominent place in the popular consciousness.
0TerminalAwareness
Well, I am new here, and I suppose it was a slightly presumptive of me to say that. I was just trying to introduce myself with a few of the thoughts I've had while reading here. To attempt to clarify, I think that this story is rather like the fable of the Dragon-Tyrant. To live a life with even the faintest hint of displeasure is a horrific crime, the thought goes. I am under the impression that most people here operate with some sort of utilitarianist philosophy. This to me seems to imply that unless one declares that there is no objective state for which utilitarianism is to be directed towards, humanity in this example is wrong. (In case someone is making the distinction between ethics and morals, as an engineer, it doesn't strike me as important.) To the issue of akrasia, I don't see this as a case. My own judgement says that a life like theirs is vapid and devoid of meaning. Fighting to the death against one's own best judgement probably isn't rare either; I expect many, many soldiers have died fighting wars they despised, and who had options other than fighting them. In effect, I feel like this is multiplication by zero, and add infinity. You have more at the end; you're just no longer the unique complex individual you were, and I could not bear to submit to that.
5Nornagest
The general thrust of the Superhappy segments of Three Worlds Collide seems to be that simple utilitarian schemas based on subjective happiness or pleasure are insufficient to describe human value systems or preferences as they're expressed in the wild. Similar points are made in the Fun Theory sequence. Neither of these mean that utilitarianism generally is wrong; merely that the utility function we're summing (or averaging over, or taking the minimum of, etc.) isn't as simple as sometimes assumed. Now, Fun Theory is probably one of the less well-developed sequences here (unfortunately, in my view; it's a very deep question, and intimately related to human value structure and all its AI consequences), and you're certainly free to prefer 3WC's assimilation ending or to believe that the kind of soft wireheading the Superhappies embody really is optimal under some more or less objective criterion. That does seem to be implied in one form or another by several major schools of ethics, and any intuition pump I could deploy to convince you otherwise would probably end up looking a lot like the Assimilation Ending, which I gather you don't find convincing. Personally, though, I'm inclined to be sympathetic to the True Ending, and think more generally that pain and suffering tend to be wrongly conflated with moral evil when in fact there's a considerably looser and more subtle relationship between the two. But I'm nowhere near a fully developed ethics, and while this seems to have something to do with the "complexity" you mentioned I feel like stopping there would be an unjustified handwave.
5Desrtopa
And you think that not being able to bear submitting to that is wrong? Personally, I'm one of those who prefers the assimilation ending, there are quite a few of us, and I certainly wouldn't be tempted to fight to the death or kill myself to avoid it. But for a person who would fight to the death to avoid it to say that assimilation is optimal and the True Ending is senseless seems to me to be incoherent.
4KPier
I think the confusion comes from what you mean by "utilitarian." The whole point of Three Worlds Collide (well, one of the points), is that human preferences are not for happiness alone; the things we value include a life that's not "vapid and devoid of meaning", even if it's happy! That's why (to the extent we have to pick labels) I am a preference utilitarian, which seems to be the most common ethical philosophy I've encountered here (we'll know more when Yvain's survey comes out). If you prefer not to be a Superhappy, then preference utilitarianism says you shouldn't be one. When you catch yourself saying "the right thing is X, but the world I'd actually want to live in is Y," be careful - a world that's actually optimal would probably be one you want to live in.
1TheOtherDave
If you're able to summarize what makes the superhappies' lives vapid and devoid of meaning, I'd be interested.
0KPier
TerminalAwareness's words, not mine. I prefer the true ending but wouldn't call the Superhappies' lives meaningless.
1TheOtherDave
(nods) Gotcha.
0TerminalAwareness
I know it's been some time, but I wanted to thank you for the reply. I've thought considerably, and I still feel that I'm right. I'm going to try to explain again. Sure, we all have our own utility functions. Now, if you're trying to maximize utility for everyone, that's no easy task, and you'll end up with a relatively small amount of utility. Would you condone someone for forcing someone else to try chocolate, if that person believed it tasted bad, but loved it as soon as they tried it? If someone mentally deranged set themselves on fire and asked you not to save them, would you? If someone is refusing cancer treatment because "Science is evil", I at least would force the treatment on them. Would you force transhumanity on everyone who refused it, is probably a better question for LessWrong. I feel that, though I may violate others' utility functions, we're all mentally deranged, and so someone should save us. Someone should violate our utility preferences to change them. Because that would bring an enormous amount of utility. I'm struggling how to reconcile respecting preferences with how much of society today works. Personally, I don't think anyone should ever violate my utility preferences. But can you deny that there are people you think should have theirs changed? I'm inclined to think that a large part of this community is.
2KPier
If you haven't, you should read Yvain's Consequentialism FAQ, which addresses some of these points in a little more detail. Preference utilitarianism works well for any situation you'll encounter in real life, but it's possible to propose questions it doesn't answer very well. A popular answer to the above question on LessWrong comes from the idea of coherent extrapolated volition (The paper itself may be outdated). Essentially, it asks what we would want were we better informed, more self-aware, and more the people we wished we were. In philosophy, this is called idealized preference theory. CEV probably says we shouldn't force someone to eat chocolate, because their preference for autonomy outweighs their extrapolated preference for chocolate. It probably says we should save the person on fire, since their non-mentally-ill extrapolated volition would want them to live, and ditto the cancer patient. Forcing transhumanity on people is a harder question, because I'm not sure that everyone's preferences would converge in this case. In any event, I would not personally do it, because I don't trust my own reasoning enough. I think all people, to the extent that they can be said to have utility functions, are wrong about what they want at least sometimes. I don't think we should change their utility function so much as implement their ideal preferences, not their stated ones. is what? Is willing to change people's utility functions?
0pedanterrific
What does this even mean? Forcing immortality on people is at least a coherent notion, although I'm pretty sure most users around here support an individual's right to self-terminate. But if that was what was meant, calling it 'transhumanism' is a little off. On the other hand, is this referring to something handled by the fun theoretic concept of a eudaimonic rate of intelligence increase? Yes, I know, "jargon jargon jargon buzzword buzzword rationality," but I couldn't think of a better way to phrase that. Sorry.
2KPier
You're right. I don't know what Terminal Awareness meant, but I was thinking of something like uploading someone who doesn't want to be uploaded, or increasing their intelligence (even at a eudaimonic rate) if they insist they like their current intelligence level just fine.
0pedanterrific
If it actually is coherent to speak of a "eudaimonic rate" of doing something to someone who doesn't want it done, I need to significantly revise my understanding of the word "eudaimonic".
0KPier
I'm thinking that an eudaimonic rate of intelligence increase is one which maximizes our opportunities for learning, new insights, enjoyment, and personal growth, as opposed to an immediate jump to superintelligence. But I can imagine an exceedingly stubborn person who insists that they don't want their intelligence increasing at all, even after being told that they will be happier and lead a more meaningful life. Once they get smarter, they'll presumably be happier with it. Even if we accept that Fun Theory as outlined by Eliezer really is the best thing possible for human beings, there are certainly some who would currently reject it, right?
0Optimind
It seems to me like your trying to enforce your values on others. You might think your just trying to help, or do something good. I'm just a bit skeptical of anyone trying to enforce values rather than inspire or suggest.
0pedanterrific
Quote: :s/happy/intelligent
2KPier
I'm not sure if we have a genuine disagreement, or if we're disputing definitions. So without talking about eudaimonic anything, which of the following do you disagree with, if any? 1. What we want should be the basis for a better future, but the better future probably won't look much like what we currently want. 2. CEV might point to something like uploading or dramatic intelligence enhancement that lots of people won't currently want, though by definition it would be part of their extrapolated preferences. 3. A fair share of the population will probably, if polled, actively oppose what CEV says we really want. 4. It seems unlikely that the optimal intelligence level is the current one, but some people would probably oppose alteration to their intelligence. This isn't a question of "Don't I have to want to be as intelligent as possible?" so much as "Is what I currently want a good guide to my extrapolated volition?"
0pedanterrific
Most of these give me the heebie-jeebies, but I don't really disagree with them.
0Incorrect
But why would you want to live in a world where people are less happy than they could be? That sounds terribly evil. I don't think bland happiness is optimal. I'd prefer happiness along with an optimal mixture of pleasant quales.
3KPier
Human values are complex; there's no reason to think that our values reduce to happiness, and lots of evidence that they don't. Let's imagine two possible futures for humanity: One, a drug is developed that offers unimaginable happiness, a thousand times better than heroin or whatever the drug that currently creates the most happiness is. Everyone is cured of aging and then hooked up to a machine that dispenses this drug until the heat death of the universe. The rest of our future light cone is converted into orgasmium. They are all maximally happy. Two... I think an eternity of what we've got right now would be better than number one, but I imagine lots of people on LessWrong would disagree with that. The best future I can imagine would be one where we make our own choices and our own mistakes, where we learn more about the world around us, get smarter, and get stronger, a world happier than this one, but not cured of disappointment and heartbreak entirely... Eliezer's written about this at some length. Some people honestly prefer future 1, and that's fine. But the original poster seemed to be saying he accepts future 1 is right but would hate it, which should be a red flag.
0Incorrect
I don't think a drug would be adequate. Bland happiness is not enough, I would prefer a future with an optimal mix of pleasurable quales. This is why I prefer the "wireheading" term. I don't understand how you could possibly prefer the status quo. Imagine everything was exactly the same but one single person was a little bit happier. Wouldn't you prefer this future? If you prefer futures where people are happier as a rule then isn't the best future the one where people are most happy? I don't understand how he could hate being happy. People enjoy being happy by definition.
7Desrtopa
Choosing a world where everything is the same except that one person is a bit happier suggests a preference for more happiness than there currently is, all else being equal. It doesn't even remotely suggest a preference for happiness maximizing at any cost. I would prefer to this one a world where everything is exactly the same except I have a bit more ice cream in my freezer than I currently do, but I don't want the universe tiled with ice cream.
-2Incorrect
So you would prefer a world where everyone is maximally happy all the time but otherwise nothing is different? Just like, making the ridiculous assumption that the marginal utility of more ice cream was constant, you would prefer a universe tiled with ice cream as long as it didn't get in the way of anything else or use resources important for anything else?
[-]Desrtopa130

So you would prefer a world where everyone is maximally happy all the time but otherwise nothing is different?

I think this has way too many consequences to frame meaningfully as "but nothing otherwise is different." Kind of like "everything is exactly the same except the polarity of gravity is reversed." I can't judge how much utility to assign to a world where everyone is maximally happy all the time but the world is otherwise just like ours, because I can't even make sense of the notion.

If you assign constant marginal utility to increases in ice cream and assume that ice cream can be increased indefinitely while keeping everything else constant, then of course you can increase utility by continuing to add more ice cream, simply as a matter of basic math. But I would say that not only is it not a meaningful proposition, it's not really illustrative of anything in particular save for how not to use mathematical models.

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5KPier
I would prefer "status quo plus one person is more happy" to "status quo". I would not prefer "orgasmium" to "status quo", because I honestly think orgasmium is nearly as undesirable as paperclips. Doesn't follow. I generally prefer futures where people are happier; I also generally prefer futures where they have greater autonomy, novel experiences, meaningful challenge... When these trade off, I sometimes choose one, sometimes another. The "best future" I can imagine is probably a balance of all of these. Present-him presumably is very unhappy at the thought of becoming someone who will be happily a wirehead, just as present-me doesn't want to try heroin though it would undoubtedly make me happy.
1Nectanebo
It really does seem like either you don't really believe that the assimilation ending is optimal and you prefer the true ending, or you are suffering from akrasia by fighting against it despite believing that it is. You haven't really explained why it could be anything else.
[-]pragmatist40

I've been posting here for a couple of months and haven't introduced myself yet. Unconscionably rude. Anyway, I'm 29 years old and hoping to get my Ph. D. in a few months. I started out studying physics, then realized I was interested in more foundational questions than I'd be encouraged/allowed to work on as a young physicist, so I switched to philosophy. I guess I would characterize myself as a naturalistic metaphysician; I tackle traditional philosophical problems using modern physics (as opposed to the 17th-century physics still used to by all too many... (read more)

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[-]Grognor40

ahoy.

I have much to say about myself, but I don't consider it worth most people's time, so I'll spare most of it.

I am currently going through the sequences and had no intention of commenting on any post or writing anything until I had finished all of them. I have to admit, though, it's really quite difficult to "stay on" the sequences. I have a hundred-something tabs of lesswrong open right now, and it has come to a point where I am understanding them all pretty fully.

EDIT: Issue is under control. All is going well.

I would have preferred a better welcome for myself, but this is acceptable!

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1lessdazed
This is unfortunately not me yet. Nonetheless, I offer an entirely different way of explaining it. The explanation goes with the visual: http://www.freeimagehosting.net/4dd80 (color coding: A is red and B is blue, so when A and B are the case this is represented in purple, when neither are it is black). The four possibilities are: A&B, -A&B, A&-B, and -A&-B. They are represented in the grid as 1, 2, 3, and 4. Added together they will sum to 100%. What's the probability that out of 1, 2, 3, and 4, scenario 1 (A&B) is the case? (1) / (1+2+3+4) Whatever it is, it's the same as the probability that out of 1, 2, 3, and 4, either 1 or 2 is the case, and it is 1 that is the case out of 1 and 2. ((1) / (1+2)) * ((1+2) / (1+2+3+4)) Likewise, it's the same as the probability that out of 1, 2, 3, and 4, either 1 or 3 is the case, and it is 1 that is the case out of 1 and 3. ((1) / (1+3)) * ((1+3) / (1+2+3+4)) The numerators and the denominators cancel in the two above cases to amount to (1) / (1+2+3+4), just like in the first of the three ways of phrasing the probability of 1 out of 1, 2, 3, and 4. We see that they are equal and set them against each other. We won't actually use the first part of the equation, just the last two. We replace ((1) / (1+2)) with P(A|B) (probability that A is the case, given that B is the case), ((1+2) / (1+2+3+4)) with P(B) (probability that B is the case), ((1) / (1+3)) with P(B|A) (probability that B is the case, given that A is the case), and ((1+3) / (1+2+3+4)) with P(A) (probability that A is the case). (1) / (1+2+3+4) is P(A&B) (probability that A and B are the case), but this won't be used in the usual way of writing the rule, which isolates one term by dividing both sides of the equation by P(B). We divide by P(B) so that when we know the three terms on the right, we can solve for the one on the left: P(A|B)=P(B|A)*P(A)/P(B) So, suppose we know that P(A)=40%, P(B|A)=30%, P(B|-A)=10%, and we want to find P(A|B). Looking at the gr
0Oscar_Cunningham
(I can't help you in any useful way, but I can say "Welcome!") Welcome!
[-]Willami40

Hi everyone, my name is Wil, I live in the UK, I love Sci-Fi and how it inspires people to think differently or ahead of their time, and am a member of the working class but spend a lot of time on benefits, due to the effects of being rather strongly bipolar, having a very faulty short-term memory, and having intermittent extremes of varying states of mind that at times leads to sleeplessness and agoraphobia, which then gives me LOTS of time to think with very little else to do but read up online about the things that I've found myself thinking about, whic... (read more)

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0Oscar_Cunningham
Welcome!
[-]Multipartite40

Greetings. I apologise for possible oversecretiveness, but for the moment I prefer to remain in relative anonymity; this is a moniker used online and mostly kept from overlapping with my legal identity.

Though in a sense there is consistency of identity, for fairness I should likely note that my use of first-person pronouns may not always be entirely appropriate.

Personal interest in the Singularity can probably be ultimately traced back to the fiction Deus Ex, though I hope it would have reached it eventually even without it as a starting point; my experie... (read more)

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0Normal_Anomaly
Welcome to Less Wrong! Nobody minds if you keep your information secret; I keep my legal identity pretty separate from my Normal_Anomaly identity as well, and I'm not alone in this.
[-]BlackNoise40

hello lesswrong!

I'm a 20 y.o. student two years in studying EE & physics, though I self-identify more as a scientist than an engineer.

currently I'm juggling about 3 'big' goals - general education (in progress), lucid dreaming (more of a side project; might as well use those sleep-hours for something more fun than being unconscious), and rationality (which is why im here).

I found this site (and the concept and usefulness of rationality) via some of Eliezer's writing as i was scouring the Internet in my eternal quest for vanquishing boredom. that was s... (read more)

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7Vladimir_Nesov
Capital letters. Please use them.
[-]lessdazed120

BUT NOT EXCLUSIVELY!

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2shokwave
Yes! This is the single most important reading, from which all others flow. You miss out on comments, but reading them like a book is the way to go for this. Many LWers found this much easier. Here is the latest epub collection. As for comments - I think they are around an order of magnitude less important than the posts themselves, and so trading away the comments in order to, y'know, actually read the sequences is well worth it. My recollection is that important comments were addressed in later top-level posts, so you'll get to read the most important ones anyway. Oh, and welcome to LessWrong!
1BlackNoise
Thanks for crushing my last line of retreat, no more excuses to prevent me from (finally) reading the sequences. As for books, funny how archive panic activates even when you expect and have pecommited to overcome it. Will try.
0lessdazed
Books No tabs Welcome! I read through the sequences by opening all tabs in order and reading through the comments by CTRL+F "Yudkowsky" and reading other comments when they interested me. Here was my advice to another person, it has links to some of my favorite posts. The OP there is relevant for advice in general.
[-]DavidPlumpton40

Hi there!

I'm a 43 year old software Developer in New Zealand. I've found this site through the Quantum Physics sequence, which has given me an enormous improvement in my understanding of the subject, so a huge thank you to Eliezer. (I'd like to know the detailed maths, but I don't hold much hope of that happening). I've since managed to do the double-slit experiment using a laser pointer, Blu-tack and staples, which was great fun. I'm currently trying to think through the Schrödinger's cat experiment, which seems to me to be described slightly incorrectly.... (read more)

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3Normal_Anomaly
Hi, welcome to LW! Neat! Details? The I.J. Good/Yudkowsky/Singularity Institute version, aka the "Intelligence Explosion," doesn't require Moore's law. It requires enough understanding of intelligence and decision theory to write up a self-modifying algorithm of human intelligence or higher. This algorithm can then write better ones, a process which can be repeated up to some high level of intelligence. The main things one needs to believe to believe the Intelligence Explosion hypothesis are: * Artificial General Intelligence (a piece of software as intelligent as a person) is possible and will be invented * An AGI able to rewrite its own code can improve its intelligence, including its ability to find ways to improve itself * This process can be repeated enough times to result in a superintelligent AI * A superintelligent AI will be able to make major changes to the world to satisfy its goals Obviously, this is a very brief summary. Try here for a better and more detailed explanation.
0DavidPlumpton
Here's a picture of the double slit experiment http://imgur.com/a/2Uyux I think achieving Human level intelligence is tough but doable. I suspect that self-improvement may be very difficult. But either way I strongly suspect that the power required to keep society ticking along will not be sustained. I think an AGI is 30 years away and that society does not have 30 years up its sleeve. I hope I am wrong.
1TheOtherDave
"I think an AGI is 30 years away and that society does not have 30 years up its sleeve." The outside view, treating your prediction as an instance of the class of similar predictions made for centuries, suggests this is false. Do you have compelling reasons to override the outside view in this case?
-1DavidPlumpton
The compelling reason is that this is what geologists believe, i.e. Peak Oil. Previous centuries of predictions are not relevant as they do not relate to decline (or not) in the production rate of the today's dominant power sources.
[-]Joey_Goldman40

Salutations, Less Wrong,

My name is - surprisingly enough - Joey Goldman. Well, at least that is the name I ask people to call me...but I digress. I am 17 years old and - for the next two weeks - a junior in high school. Despite the fact that I was born and raised in London town, I attend an American school.

I was raised in a quasi-Jewish family. As far as I could tell during my younger childhood, neither of my parents had strong ties to the Jewish faith. Nevertheless, we observed the High Holidays and Shabbat and I was bar mitzvahed. Over time, however, I... (read more)

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0Alexei
Hi Joey, and welcome to LW!
[-]cjemmott40

Hello all -

My name is Colin, and I am a long time lurker / RSS reader. Thanks for posting this welcome message, as it gave me motivation to finally get registered.

I stumbled onto LW from Eliezer Yudkowsky's "An Intuitive Explanation of Bayes' Theorem", which I found when trying to explain to my mother what I was up to in graduate school, and why I was so excited about it. I have been interested in science and epistemology for as long as I can remember, so finding that there are principled ways to reason about uncertainty was pretty amazing to m... (read more)

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[-]b1shop40

Hello, LW.

I'm almost finished with an undergrad degree in economics, and I'm currently trolling for actuary jobs. I used to write opinion columns for my school's newspaper, and I look forward to being an LW contributor so I can keep the writing parts of my brain active.

Two years ago I finished thinking about religion, and a year ago I finished thinking about politics. I'm ready to learn some more things.

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4JoshuaZ
You finished thinking about them? What do you mean by that?
2b1shop
I'm fairly certain there is no god, and there's no marginal benefit to learning more about the philosophy of religion. No matter how much or little I think about politics, the chances of me being the marginal vote are negligible. There are better uses for my time than that mind-killer.
[-]Vladimir_M210

b1shop:

No matter how much or little I think about politics, the chances of me being the marginal vote are negligible. There are better uses for my time than that mind-killer.

That's true as far as voting goes, but politics is about much more than voting. It is rational to ignore politics only assuming that the situation will remain stable and tolerable where you live. If more interesting times come to pass, then the ability to recognize early signs of trouble and plan accordingly will be extremely valuable (which I can confirm from personal experience). Now of course, you may believe that this is highly unlikely, but to have any certainty about it, you must have a certain level of knowledge about politics and keep track of political developments to at least some minimal extent. So in any case, complete cessation of thinking about politics cannot be rational.

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[-]RHollerith150

I would be interested, Vladimir, in what developments would increase your probability that it is time for American LWers to exit the United States. In particular, how sharply would increases in racial tension and racial conflict increase that probability?

ADDED. I ask the second question because I tend to believe that ethnic conflict was a major cause of the extremely-bad time in former Yugoslavia.

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[-]Vladimir_M290

I would be interested, Vladimir, in what developments would increase your probability that it is time for American LWers to exit the United States. In particular, how sharply would increases in racial tension and racial conflict increase that probability?

Honestly, this is one of the most difficult questions I've ever been asked! From my own experience, I can say that the scariest thing about outbreaks of mass violence is how hard it is to realize how bad the situation is getting until you're already in big trouble. I will try to answer your question to the best of my knowledge, though. (Since your question got strongly upvoted, I trust that my answer won’t be condemned for dealing with an overly political topic.)

For start, ethnic tensions and incidents are by themselves not necessarily a sign of impending social breakdown, even if there are significant local outbreaks of violence and mayhem. In the U.S., in particular, there have been periods of intense racial tensions and conflicts, some which caused fairly large casualties and wide-area devastation (like e.g. the 1967 riots in Detroit, Newark, and elsewhere, or the 1992 riots in LA). However, as bad as these were locally, the... (read more)

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1RHollerith
Thanks, Vladimir M, for this long and valuable reply to my question.
5MixedNuts
As well as non-American-specific analysis.
7Daniel_Burfoot
To paraphase Trotsky: "You may not be interested in politics, but politics is interested in you."
2RHollerith
In the U.S. many important functions are handled by the individual states. For example, most legal matters, including for example murder trials, are handled in "state court". Also, the organizations most involved in taking licenses away from bad doctors, dentists and lawyers are state-based rather than Federal-based (and heavily intertwined with state politics). Of course the effectiveness of these organizations has a big effect on a resident's quality of life. So, in addition to the question of whether it is a good idea to exit the U.S., another relevant political question for U.S. residents is whether it is time to exit his or her state of residence. At least one highly-rational person I know has decided to end a long residence in California. (He moved to Florida.)
0Bongo
It is also rational to ignore politics assuming that it's not possible for you to "recognize early signs of trouble and plan accordingly" easily and reliably enough.
4DSimon
Here you run into an ethical dilemma. Do you think that it's generally better for voter turnout to be high than low? If not, that would seem to be inconsistent with a desire for the US to continue being fairly politically stable (if you don't have such a desire, please explain). [Note: previous statement about stability withdrawn, but I still think there's a remaining point here in the following sentence] Among other advantages, the threat of being voted out of office is a significant check against politicians doing more than a certain amount of visibly bad things. If so, then it's unethical for you not to vote yourself, because you'd be contributing to a tragedy of the commons that you don't want. It would be like being against music piracy but torrenting songs anyway since, after all, your individual downloads will have near-zero impact by themselves. Even if you ignore broader ethical principles like behaving as you would want people in general to behave, you specifically not voting has knock-on effects on those around you, and in diminished amounts on those around them.
6komponisto
This is a non-sequitur, despite its status as cached wisdom. I see no reason to expect that higher voter turnout implies greater political stability. In fact, my intuition is exactly the opposite: assuming a genuine freedom to vote, low turnout is a marker of stability, since it signals that voters don't much care who wins, which suggests that not much of importance depends on the outcome. You wouldn't want to live in a country where it really, truly mattered who won an election. Furthermore, the political class has a transparent interest in spreading the meme that high voter turnout is good, since a faction that wins an election with high turnout has a greater mandate to assume more power.
2DSimon
This is a really good point, so I'm withdrawing my statement about stability. To pick another standard meme, what about popular involvement in the political process as a way of promoting just policies over unjust? That is, by unjust policies I mean policies that provide insufficient benefits to people who have little power. This is a separate question from stability, as a stable government can still have extremely unjust policies (or vice versa, though I can't think of examples as easily).
-2b1shop
I, sometimes proudly, do ignore the broad "ethical principle" of behaving as I would like others to behave. I don't hold that as a moral belief. Also, you can't win this argument by appealing to negative consequences, because there are none. Yes, you did list some alleged benefits to democracy, but these benefits don't go away for the nation if me (or even me + all my friends) stop participating. I don't have any fantasies about the marginal effect of my personal participation.
1DSimon
(Note: I didn't vote you down.) Well, then to go back to the basics of ethics: if you were in the market for a bicycle, and had an opportunity to steal a really nice one from a stranger without any possibility of getting caught, would you steal it?
2b1shop
I'm saying I don't always act a certain way. Producing a counterexample where I do act that way doesn't disprove my position. I used to have a reasoned moral code that favored consistency, but I slowly dropped these when I moved into the real world and witnessed lots of people not following my precious moral system. There's no point cooperating if others don't cooperate, too. For iterated games, tit-for-tat >= always cooperate. There are some moral beliefs (i.e. don't steal/lie) I usually feel a compulsion to follow regardless of the utility. I blame/thank evolution. In small circles, I lean more towards the golden rule (i.e. don't overbill). But in larger circles, playing the cooperate card because you would want others to is not a strategy I endorse.
0DSimon
What do you think causes the difference between your behavior in small groups vs. in large groups? Perhaps if voting had small-group consequences you'd be more likely to. For example, suppose it were easy on social networks to see an overall "political participation score" for any given person, based on how many of the elections available to them they voted in.
0b1shop
There's already big signalling benefits to voting. I think it explains why most people do it. However, it feels dirty for me to do something out of concern for my image, so I abstain. Back when Elinor Ostrom won the Nobel prize, I remember reading a summary of her work that says self-management of the commons is possible when communities are a certain size. I forget the magic number, but I think it was something like 120,000.
0AlexM
You can say the same about astronomy, biology, chemistry, history and just any part of human knowledge that does not interfere with your daily life. Imagine someone who could not find his country on map, does not know who is president or PM, does not know how his government functions, does not vote because he does not understands what are elections. Is such person worthy of admiration or respect? I do not think so.
1b1shop
I'm concerned with margins, not extremes. I can find my country on the map. I have an idea of how close my country is to revolution. I can come up with impressive-sounding political theories to discuss with others that signal the personality traits I value. But I think I'd benefit more by studying the details of physics than the details of politics.
-4AlexM
Why? You cannot change the laws of physics and they have no impact of your daily life either.
[-][anonymous]30

Hello. I'm Michael. I'm an English major, still in undergrad, but my passion is library science. I'm not as big on research as I am on systems of research and information exchange. I prefer work to thought but I don't like mindless labor either, so I've tried to squeeze into the narrows of academic librarianship, hoping for a happy medium where I can do something that helps people learn and keeps me from growing unread and "set in my ways."

I'm only stopping here because it's the next interesting, "honest" place I've come across and I wa... (read more)

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0TimS
Welcome to LessWrong. If you have anything you'd like to talk about, may I suggest the current open thread.
[-]Deanushka30

Hi, I am Dean

I am a software developer with many years experience in web based design and development. I think of myself as a ideas person and am deeply interested in AGI. My only real experience is that of research such as reading and youtube so I am something of an armchair AI investigator. I have a few ideas of my own and hope to contribute one day.

Look forward to interacting with you all in a positive way.

Regards, Dean

Reply
0komponisto
Wow. It scares me that the internet has now been around long enough that one can speak of "many years' experience" in such domains.
[-]Chalybs_Levitas30

Hello, I am Alexander, and also a number of variations on Chalybs Levitas (depending on the screenname parameters of the site I'm signing up to).

I don't consider myself a rationalist, yet. I still have a lot to learn, but I've started working my way through the Sequences, and I've started my walk through the other articles, by opening a new tab at each new link.

I value language, and I am practicing my craft as a writer (I'm terrible) as well as studying Japanese (also terrible there).

I chose Japanese as the foreign language to study first in part because I... (read more)

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[-][anonymous]30

doublepost how'd I miss that :(

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[-]Curiouskid30

Anyone care to be my chavruta? I think this thread is a good place for finding people of similar ability levels (considering how recently we've found this site, not our education levels).

http://lesswrong.com/lw/6j1/find_yourself_a_worthy_opponent_a_chavruta/

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5daenerys
Why don't you write a bit more about yourself? This is an introduction thread, after all! :) I might be interested in exploring and discussing this site. I often feel like I missed the boat on being able to engage in the discussions of the sequences. I generally just don't bother commenting on them, even when I have something to say, since it seems like the discussions on them are pretty much dead. I am doing the sequence re-read threads, but they only post about 1-2 a day. I wouldn't mind someone to go through them faster with, and actually have discussions about! Either way, welcome to Less Wrong!
2Curiouskid
I have introduced myself already. Sounds like a plan! I'm going to have to catch up with where they are in the sequence reruns, but I can start in medias res.
[-]RonPisaturo30

I came to Less Wrong in 2009 because of posts I noticed on the Doomsday Argument, which I have written about in the peer-reviewed literature. Recently, I self-published a short e-book which addresses the subject along with other subjects that I think would be of interest to this community. But the book is not free—the price is $4—and I am concerned that I might be violating etiquette if I self-promote it in a Discussion post. (I do have four karma points.)

In a post I have drafted (but not submitted) for Less Wrong, I summarize part of my book; I also invi... (read more)

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4gwern
My own personal take is that if the summary is enough to grapple with and fairly evaluate, so that people who don't buy the book or get it for free can get still something out of that post (something comparable to your average Discussion post), then it's fine. Good material is good material wherever it comes from - Gary Drescher's Good and Real was not available for free but discussing it here with him was still fine because the material was very good. (The last author to get bitten here was promoting a book that the LWer who read it described as extremely fluffy, uncomprehensive, and a good example of bad business books.)
[-]gershom30

Hello all.

New user here, so far extremely gratified at what I have encountered. I've had a sort of a fetish for feedback/self-referential systems ever since reading Hoffstadter's "Godel, Escher, Bach" as a kid. While I no longer really agree with much in this work, at the time it was mind-blowing. I remember clearly the vision I had of the all-but-unlimited power of feedback loops and iterated functions.
What I'm trying to get at is that, while all* online forums, etc, are intrinsically self-referential, this one seems to be so in a special s... (read more)

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0Normal_Anomaly
Welcome to Less Wrong! I don't know that the forum itself is self-referential, but you'll certainly find other fans of self-referentiality here, myself included.
[-]nigeldk30

Lurker for many years, I've decided to join up to be more involved in what up until now has been one of the more interested RSS feeds. These days I'm onto my second career as a cognitive scientist and work for a research organisation. In a previous life I have worked as an engineer, mechanical, electrical and robotics, as well as setting up a dotcom which did some work in the VR area. I have worked with computers daily for over 30 years in various forms although these days I don't do any development or programming. The change in careers was brought about b... (read more)

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[-]AShepard30

Long-time reader, only occasional commenter. I've been following LW since it was on Overcoming Bias, which I found via Marginal Revolution, which I found via the Freakonomics Blog, which I found when I read and was fascinated by Freakonomics in high school. Reading the sequences, it all clicked and struck me as intuitively true. Although my "mistrust intuition" instinct is a little uncomfortable with that, it all seems to hold up so far.

In the spirit of keeping my identity small I don't strongly identify with too many groups or adjectives. Howeve... (read more)

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[-][anonymous]30

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2Alexei
Hi, chimera, and welcome to LW! I think you are on the right track! The most important question is "What do I believe and why do I believe it?" Being a rationalist is essentially answering that question correctly.
[-]analyticsophy30

Hello Less Wrong.

I am a philosopher that is apparently concerned with precisely your mission statement. To improve the art of human rationality, I am here to help an be helped towards that aim

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0NancyLebovitz
Welcome. Can you be more specific about what you'd like to be doing differently?
0analyticsophy
There are a couple things, I would like to apply my informationalist ontology to the vast variety of issues that are being considered here, I think it would be of great help but i won't do that till I have some massive charma. I think it's a novel ontology and i would like for it be used by others. I also hope to see if I can't use some Dennett to help out all of the qualiaphiles that seem to hang out here. I love Yudcowsky (w/e his name is) but I can't help but feel like he's a little naive to modern philosophy's success. I think Quine and Davidson could definitely present some useful positions on human cognition and reasoning, even stronger ones than Dennett. But I doubt that they would really factor into this side of the debate which is unfortunate. They were both hard naturalists, and even both considered themselves to be just a special sort of scientist. The problem with philosophy is clear, it lacks a method of hard inference by which to systematically dissolve competing hypothesis. But that problem is not universal through out the entire feild, there are certainly schools of philosophers that do have agreed upon formal methods by which to decide what hypothesis to eliminate. The problem is simply that they are not cross disciplinary methods. You can't convince Zizek the same way you convince Pinker, and that is truly no surprise if you have ever read the two, but it is a problem that philosophers must overcome if they ever plan to become a serious feild of knowledge. I think the standard view of philosophers is of them as not considering the issue of peer reviewed verifiability in philosophy important, and that is not true. We have made a lot of progress as philosophers and logicians towards figuring out ways of classifying deductive and inductive arguments, and formalizing our competing hypothesis into deductive systems. The only problem is that that stuff isn't popular because its formal, but let us not forget that it was a philosopher that made principia m
-2Peterdjones
Schools, plural. You can solve the Agrippa trilemma by appeal to arbitrary rules--but whose arbitrary rules? Maybe you can justify non arbitrary hypothesis selection rules--but how? Circularly? With regress? There are reasons why philosophy remains "unsolved"
[-]CuSithBell30

So, I'm way past due for posting in this thread. But I'm here now, and that's what's important!

I found LW via a link to the Methods of Rationality, and hopping around the wiki I didn't see anything mind-blowing (at first!), but I was delighted to see that there were other people who thought about this stuff.

I live in Worcester right now, working on my Master's degree, but I'm a Cantabrigian originally. I'm studying social factors for (non-fooming) AIs, and shoring up my CS skills.

To be highly topical, I score extremely low on those autism tests that have ... (read more)

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0khafra
What are social factors for AIs? My top two guesses are "social acceptance of machine intelligence taking more and larger roles in everyday life," and "data mining social graphs."
1CuSithBell
Well, in this case what I mean by that is "how can a current-technology AI agent semi-competently navigate social situations", and in particular "how should interactions with such an agent change over time / with the development of a relationship". It is related to social acceptance, from the direction of AIs being their own advocates.
[-]Savant30

Hi, everyone;

I saw this invitation and decided that it was finally time for me to register and say hello. I was led here by reading Eliezer's excellent website, and have since really gotten quite a wake-up call from Less Wrong and the Sequences. So, thank you to all of you who have participated in this community and the craft. I hope that I will be able to learn a lot and contribute a little.

My focus and interest is artificial intelligence, but I've always known that I just don't know enough to make an attempt yet. Thus, I've been studying other complicate... (read more)

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[-]Balofsky20

Hi!

I'm Balofsky (keeping first name blank), and I am a 24 year old undergraduate student in St. Paul, Minnesota. Interests include anything liberal art-ish, Judaism, politics and memorizing random facts I'll probably never need in real life.

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2beoShaffer
Have you tried Anki?
0Balofsky
Interesting, I'll look into it. I didn't meant to retract my introduction, by the way- hit the wrong button.
0beoShaffer
It happens.
0gwern
Re beoShaffer's mention of Anki, if you haven't heard of it before, it's a suggestion to use spaced repetition.
[-]LaisteBreen20

Hi, I'm Laiste. I have been on a inner search to find myself, my meaning, my life..my happiness. I have found so many people speak in ways that make no sense to me - overly positive, self deceptive and the list goes on and on. In my search for understanding, I happened along this site, and for the first time, what I am reading, I GET. I do not hold any degrees or formal education, but my mind is my greatest asset. I am very much interested in many of the articles as it all relates to lifes journeys, but what brought me here was "The Science of Winning at Life"

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[-]yissar20

Hello,

I am Yissar, living and working out of the UK. I assert that the human condition has many flaws due to biases: cognitive, cultural, emotional, biological, behaviour, ethical.

I think and believe that dealing with the biases is the only way to solve the human condition and create a mind fot for the future. It is time for guided evolution.

Reply
[-]Apteris20

Hello LessWrong,

I've been reading the website for at least the past two years. I like the site, I admire the community, and I figured I should start commenting.

I like to think of myself as a rationalist. LW, along with other sources (Bertrand Russell, Richard Dawkins) has contributed heavily (and positively) to my mental models. Still, I have a lot of work to do.

I like to learn. I like to discuss. I used to like to engage in heated debates, but this seems to have lost some of its appeal recently--either someone is wrong or isn't, and I prefer to figure out... (read more)

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[-]Phocion20

I'm a relative novice to rationality studies, but have become fascinated with this site. I'd like to take a part in the discussions here to explore my own views and open my mind to what others have discovered. I have many friends who have read Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, but I haven't looked at it yet. Maybe I will, after seeing how many people here found this site through it. My academic background is mathematics, with a focus on logic and set theory, so rationality seems a logical next step in my personal growth. I look forward to interacting with all of you!

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2naritai
welcome to lesswrong!
[-]tyrsius20

Hi LW,

I joined this site not too long ago, but I missed this page and its request for an introduction. Better late than never, I guess.

I am 24, a Jr. Software Developer, and I live in Portland, OR. I was raised in a Baptist family, and left the Church during my junior year in high school over their stance on the Oregon Gay marriage bill. Once outside of the daily Sunday indoctrination, it took only a few short weeks to reason my way to atheism. I only wish I could have seen the truth sooner. I spent the next year or so on forums gaining a real variety of p... (read more)

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1MixedNuts
In his Bloggingheads videos, he says "Eh-lee-eh-zer".
[-]Jolima20

Hello, I'm John Lindberg a 26 year old Computer Scientist from Stockholm, Sweden. I've been reading this site for almost a year now. I'm a lurker by habit, preferring to listen rather than writing, but I really like this community, so I'll see if I can fit myself in.

I originally found Less Wrong through Stumble Upon to the Ureshiku Naritai article, liked it enough to browse the front page and found that I liked almost all of the articles there. That set of a long bout of tab explosion as I followed links from those to other articles. Eventually started rea... (read more)

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1Emile
Welcome to LessWrong! Is it a coincidence if this reminds me of Gamist, Narrativist and Simulationist roleplaying?
1Jolima
Thanks. I wasn't consciously inspired by it, but was aware of the terms. I'd still discount it as a coincidence though. (Or being a natural division to make.) The terms kind of grew on me from using them separately in expressions. ("That's just story" when discounting some evidence, ""Life is" when being stoical (Or "Life is beautiful" when being happy.) and "What's his game?" and similar when reasoning about entities (people, organizations, myself). Then they just fitted as words to partition the world around.
[-]Abbey10

I am 29 and i am working as self empoyed and I am single high school graduate but also in teaching business I am from Ethiopia, East Africa. Anyone interested to get me any legal job in Australia please do so!

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[-]Saladin10

Hello.

I've only been checking this site for a short while and after reading all these interesting thoughts I posted something myself.

I'm interested in objective, rational thoughts about the ultimate reality of our existence (and Existence itself) and coming from a religious family - I also try to rationalize the notions I have about God.

I see that modal realism and Plantingas ontological argument don't go down well in here and I concur - by themselves they are underwhelmingly weak.

But what if You combine these two views, based one assumption alone - that E... (read more)

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[-]cousin_it110

Yep, looks like rubbish. Sorry.

In general, looking to justify your existing beliefs doesn't work. Say this to yourself: "If God exists, I want to believe that God exists. If God doesn't exist, I want to believe that God doesn't exist."

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0Saladin
Well, it's not that I believe in a Posthuman God - but I do believe in a past eternal universe (multiverse, Existence,..). "Believing" just in that is IMO a rational belief (until proven otherwise, of course). Past eternity neccesarily leads to a kind of modal realism - all possible worlds are (or have been) real worlds. If there is a possible world that allows for a God (to evolve) - then it is neccesarily true. So the only guestion left is "is there a possible universe where God (-like entity) can evolve"? That's complicated - but I noted one oversimplified idea that "might" show such a possibility. i'd like to discuss this in more detail.
[-]Emile150

"Believing" just in that is IMO a rational belief (until proven otherwise, of course).

Bad epistemology.

If a completely trustworthy person rolled a normal six-sided die, and told you the result is an even number - is it "rational" to believe that the result was 6 ? After all, it hasn't been proven otherwise. No, the ONLY rational belief in that situation is assigning an equal probability to 2, 4 and 6.

If you go around asking "am I allowed to believe this?" for things you want to believe, and "am I forced to believe this?" for things you don't, you're shooting yourself in the foot.

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5cousin_it
I cannot imagine what evidence you could have for such a belief.
-9Saladin
4NancyLebovitz
Tentatively offered--- check out Spinoza. He came to the conclusions that God is completely identical with everything that exists, and that everything is determined. To put it mildly, Spinoza's God isn't what most people are looking for when they want a God.
4Vladimir_Nesov
You don't fight confusion with confusion.
-6Clippy
2Houshalter
Don't bring up you're religious beliefs here or you will be voted to hell, like me. Just saying, as I am sure this comment will cost me a few more votes X(
2Perplexed
Yes, there is a lot of hostility to religion here. Folks here are into "rationality", and they have somehow gotten the impression that much religious thinking is irrational. "Somehow gotten the impression". Ok, lets be honest here. They got that impression because a lot of religious thinking really is irrational. You will have a tough job convincing folks here that your own religious thinking is any different. So, I think that "Just lay low" is pretty good advice. There is a lot to be learned here, stuff about how to think clearly and about why we don't always think as clearly as we would like to. So, I bet it will do you, Saladin, some good to stick around. But I don't think you will get much useful feedback regarding your thinking about a deity or eternal first cause. There are probably better places on the web for that.
2RobinZ
That's an interesting question, actually. I would have been inclined to agree - I agree that a lot of religious thinking is irrational - but when I tried to think of places to send people, most of them are communities like the FRDB. These are not precisely dispassionate. Did you have an Internet community in mind?
1Perplexed
No, I don't, though Googling is always worth a try. Using search strings containing words like discussion, theology, agnostic, first cause, and apologetics, I found a variety of resources and communities in which at least the spelling, grammar, and punctuation were tolerable. In trying to work your way through these kinds of questions, you obviously need to avoid sites where a consensus exists that "The truth is already known". But, I suspect that you also need to avoid getting too deeply emersed in communities like this one where the consensus is that "The way to the truth is known". In my experience, people who believe they know the way are even more passionate, evangelical, and just plain impolite than are the self-satisfied folk who think they have already arrived at the truth. Which, of course, is not to say that passionate impolite evangelists are not worth listening to occasionally.
8simplicio
I would recommend totally eliminating your impressions of "the kind of people who think X" from your considerations about X, unless the X-ites are actually torturing babies. By paying attention to their personal characteristics, you're essentially guaranteeing that your opinions will be hijacked by how socially comfortable you feel with their group, which has nothing to do with truth. New agers are great people to hang out with, very... undogmatic, but I wouldn't recommend swallowing any of their truth claims. If LW thinks it knows the Way to the Truth, then the thing to evaluate is what exactly our way is, and why we think it leads to the truth.
2Perplexed
Oh, I agree. I am busy evaluating exactly that. But I will point out that a large fraction of the techniques taught here have to do with how to communicate clearly, rather than simply how to think clearly. One presumes that the reason we wish to communicate is that we wish to be understood. If certain "personal characteristics" (I mentioned passion and etiquette) either promote or interfere with successful communication, then I think that both sender and receiver have some responsibility to make adjustments. In fact, in a broadcast model, with one sender and many receivers, the onus of adjustment lies mainly on the sender. [Edit: spelling]
0[anonymous]
Aha. Agreed, in that case; the onus is on us. Really? A quick survey of recent posts suggests that we care a lot more about thinking than communication. To the extent that communicating clearly affects one's explicit verbal reasoning with oneself, the two are not at odds. Understanding why using words with excessively strong connotations is a cheap move in an argument will also help you understand why it's a bad mode of thinking.
1Houshalter
I was raised a believer and I never thought about it being irrational or not until I met the creationist crowd. After debating enough of them, mainly over the internet, I was appaled at their ignorance and butchering of science for some IDiotic predetermined conclusion. I still believe, but I certainly respect the atheists for trying to be rational. I have heard some pretty convincing evidence of stuff in the bible, but after meeting the creationists I had to think twice as to whether that is objective or not. I was going to go do some research on it and never got around to it because I'm lazy.
9orthonormal
Most people in a crisis of faith find themselves especially lazy when it comes to seeking information that contradicts their (preferred) beliefs, and surprisingly diligent when it comes to seeking evidence that reaffirms them. (This isn't just about religion, but it happens pretty clearly there. A religious friend of mine recently went through a crisis of faith, decided that he needed to study more to decide on the truth of Christianity, and only read books by traditional Christians until I convinced him to add a few more, only one of which he read. I believe you can guess as easily as I did how his crisis turned out.)
[-]adsenanim10

Hi All,

I'm here for the most part because of my interest in the idea of singularity and the mechanical relation of creating consciousness in a non-traditionally-organic form. I can't list here all of the books I've read on the subject, though I might be able to add a few to the list before I'm done, such as Piers Anthony's Macroscope (haven’t checked the list yet).

I would not call myself an atheist, but a sub-proselytized human with autodidactic qualities. I do not deny religion off hand, because of the correlation with the development of science, but, o... (read more)

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4sketerpot
I read this paragraph twice, and I know all the words, but I still have no idea what you're saying here. Could you elaborate on any of this, or give links to a web site that does?
0adsenanim
I'm sorry, I cannot give one link that would explain this well. I think the key may be with the idea of abductive reasoning, that the mind can relate multiple sensory observations and come up with a correlation (a derivative if you will) of the experiential world. I'm being short...
[-]erspringer00

Hello everyone. Erik here. A while back I've realized that there's a lot a don't know. Just wanting to know more. Not sure of what I want to know more of. I just want to learn more.

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[-]TheFalseProphet00

I am an animator, writer, comic book maker by trade.

However I have a deep interest in psychology, mental illness and the brain.. As these themes surround the art I make and so I am interested in engaging in discussion to learn current scientific theories about these issues...

You can see the type of animation I make here: http://vimeo.com/26954632

Look forward to participating in good discussions soon.

Gwynn.D.Earl

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[-][anonymous]00

Hi, I'm Alison. I was once a professional tarot reader and astrologer in spite of having a science degree. I recovered from that over 15 years ago and feel it would be valuable for more people to understand how I came to do it and how I changed my mind. I'm also a 45 year old woman, which makes me feel in a tiny minority on LW - though I may be mistaken.

I spent some time trying and failing to fit into a skeptic community and have been reading large chunks of the sequences for the last year or so, as well as books like Risk: The Science and Politics of Fea... (read more)

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[-]Filipe00

Hi, everyone! I'm Filipe, 21, from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. I've dropped out Chemical Engineering in the 4th semester, and restarted College after one year off, with Mathematics, from scratch. I thought redoing the basic subjects, if I worked hard through them, would be a good idea. It probably would, but so far I've studied those subjects with the same sloppiness of before, heheh. Now I'm six semesters off College, due to depression, obsessive thoughts, and some suicidal tendecies. Some of this is related to a deconversion from Christianity at age of 18: I was really devout, and lived for the religion. My father is a pastor and all my family continues to be serious about Christianity, and I'

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[-]Ron_Fern00

So what if anything is the standard lesswrong approach to Nelson Goodman's grue problem? If there is any paradox I could imagine someone posing against LW, I would imagine it would be the Grue problem.

(damn down voters edit): Not that I think it would pose any real threat. Just curious, I'm sure LW has a brilliant solution. And if not it can def be made by assembling the bits of other posts. I would really like to know why this got down voted.

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2KPier
There's a fair bit of discussion here, but I wouldn't say it's the standard approach to the problem. If you haven't read Occam's Razor or some of the stuff on hypothesis complexity, reading that might help.
[-]naritai00

Hi all,

I found out about LessWrong thanks to the MoR stories. I am interested in AI and becoming rational. Have been reading the site on and off for years and enjoying it and learning a lot!

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[-][anonymous]00

Hi. I made an account here because I wanted to make a post. Subsequently, I found this thread. This is my second post here. I may or may not make many posts on this site at all.

I identify more with Christianity than rationalism. I have already heard that this community is going to jump on me if I say too much, so I plan on limiting on my comments accordingly. As far as I know, I have an internally consistent belief structure inside the context of Christianity, and I see my ideal belief structure to be that presented in the Bible. I enjoy this site o... (read more)

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0Normal_Anomaly
Welcome to Less Wrong! I'm going to restate your dilemma in my own words to make sure I'm understanding you before I advise: you are aware of two different mutually exclusive things you could believe. You believe that the belief you currently hold is true, but you also believe that the other one makes better predictions. Is that correct?
[-]kilo_kevin00

Can't use it

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2beoShaffer
Can't use what?
[-]StefanDeYoung00

Greetings, LessWrong.

I'm a 21 y/o Physics undergrad at the University of Waterloo. I'm currently finishing a coop work-term at the Grand River Regional Cancer Centre. I'm also trying to build a satellite.

My girlfriend recommended that I read HPMoR - which I find delightful - but I thought LessWrong a strange penname. I followed the links back here, and spent a month or so skimming the site. I'm happy to find a place on the internet where people are happy to provide constructive criticism in support of self-optimization. I'm also particularly intrigued by t... (read more)

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[-]StefanDeYoung100

I'm having trouble with formatting. Here is what I was trying to write, less my attempts to include links:

Greetings, LessWrong.

I'm a 21 y/o Physics undergrad at the University of Waterloo. I'm currently finishing a coop work-term at the Grand River Regional Cancer Centre. I'm also trying to build a satellite www.WatSat.ca.

My girlfriend recommended that I read HPMoR - which I find delightful - but I thought LessWrong a strange penname. I followed the links back here, and spent a month or so skimming the site. I'm happy to find a place on the internet where people are happy to provide constructive criticism in support of self-optimization. I'm also particularly intrigued by this Bayesian Conspiracy you guys have going.

I tend to lurk on sites like this, rather than actually joining the community. However, I discovered a call for a meetup in Waterloo http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/790/are_there_any_lesswrongers_in_the_waterloo/, and I couldn't help myself.

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0dbaupp
It sounds like it's an unfamiliar system to you so it's no problem. There should be a little help link to the bottom right of the comment box, and there is a more extensive article on the wiki.
[-]thomblake00

However, it can feel really irritating to get downvoted, especially if one doesn't know why. It happens to all of us sometimes, and it's perfectly acceptable to ask for an explanation.

A note: Some of us disagree about the degree of acceptability of asking for explanations for downvotes, so your requests for explanations might also get downvoted.

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7Morendil
Maybe especially so if they consist only of the interjection "WTF". I'd hazard that a request for a downvote explanation has a better chance of being answered satisfactorily if it is framed nicely, and perhaps an even better chance if you first think about why the comment might have been downvoted in the first place and offer a hypothesis. And I'd strongly recommend not downvoting anyone who answers a request for a downvote explanation. Think about how that comes across.
-2komponisto
* That was an edit to an existing comment about something else. * The grandparent of that comment contained a parenthetical, polite discussion of a previous downvote. A sense of beleaguerment should have been understandable in that context. EDIT: That edit has now been removed. Anyone still think -2 is an appropriate score for that comment?
[-]Zetetic00

I stumbled over here from Scott Aaronson's blog, which was recommended by a friend. Actually, LessWrong was also recommended, but unfortunately it took a while for me to make it over here.

As far as my descent in to rationality goes, I suppose I've always been curious and skeptical, but I never really gave much direction to my curiosity or my skepticism until the age of 17.

I always had intellectual interests. In 3rd and 4th grade I tought myself algebra. I ceased to pursue mathematics not too long after that due to the disappointment I felt towards the pub... (read more)

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[-]Nick_Tarleton00

If you'd like to connect with other LWers in real life, we have periodic meetups in various parts of the world. So far there have been meetups in the following places:

I wonder if this should list contact people for those areas, especially the ones besides SF and NYC. (I can serve for Pittsburgh.)

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[-][anonymous]00

Hiya, thanks to everybody here for making this such a welcoming and fun community.

I've identified a skeptic and an atheist for a few years now, but I was intrigued by the way that the Less Wrong articles I saw seemed to kick it up a notch further. "Weapons-grade rationality" I think I saw one article put it.

I'm (as of the moment) somewhat skeptical of singularity theory, but as an activist I'm interested in helping to raise the rationality waterline. My education and professional experience are in computer programming. Currently I'm serving as a Peace Corps volunteer in Jamaica.

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[-]Tomthefolksinger-10

Tom the Folksinger. My basic theory is "Everything is true in context". I'm still sorting context. Myspace.com/tomloud

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[-]EJakobi-30

Hello Sirs and Mademoiselles. One of my many pseudonyms is Elijah Jakobi, and I have been directed toward this system of beautiful postings through (I believe) one of its members, certainly one of its followers, and due to my surplus of spare time (no redundancy intended), I have decided to become a member and speak what I see to those who are interested in listening (including myself). I suppose you may be interested in who I am, and what I may write about. I apologize if I may come off as rather vague or incomprehensible, but every single action that I... (read more)

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9Emile
Welcome to LessWrong! If you don't want all your posts to be downvoted to oblivion, you may want to switch to a less self-centered, ornate and verbose writing style. As a rule of thumb, nobody on the internet cares about you (generic "you") until given a reason to.
6MarkusRamikin
Not to make you feel unwelcome, but paragraphs are your friends. A little thing to remember if you want people to read what you say.
3dbaupp
How can we know what you mean other than through what you say?
1Normal_Anomaly
Welcome to Less Wrong! Is English not your first language? You are having some difficulties with it. Studying writing will help you make yourself understood.
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