And many of the people in this community rub me the wrong way.

Yes, like you, for stealing my post idea! Kidding, obviously.

At the risk of contributing to this community becoming a bit too self-congratulatory, here are some of the more significant concepts that I've grokked from reading LW:

• No Universally Compelling Arguments and Ghosts in the Machine. Shamefully, it never even occurred to me to de-anthropomorphize the idea of a mind.

• You Provably Can't Trust Yourself and No License To Be Human, along that same theme.

• The Luminosity sequence is a bit under-celebrated, I think, with relation to its value. I've found that to be one of the most important things I've read here, and applying those concepts has aided me in improving my life in not-insignificant ways.

• Affective Death Spirals! I cannot praise this enough for giving me the skills to recognize this phenomenon and keep myself from engaging in this at the negative end.

Most of all, LW has taught me that being the person that I want to be takes work. To actually effect any amount of change in the world requires understanding the way it really is, whether you're doing science or trying to understand your own personality flaws. Refusing to recognize said flaws doesn't make them go away, reality doesn't care about your ego, etc.

And apparently there was this Bayes guy who had a pretty useful theorem...