What is it about your beliefs that so many people disagree with? I haven't seen anything particularly extreme so far.

Oh there's various things, but the main issue is people just plain don't already know stuff (like Popper's philosophy) and learning a lot of material is a big challenge most people won't approach. Not knowing stuff leads to many disagreements with all the ideas they don't.

It's not exactly their fault not to already know a lot. I don't usually expect to find people who already do (though someone who had already read, say, all of Popper's books would certainly be possible to run into). The key issue for me is their attitude to changing this. Learning a lot is a big project. One has to have patience and tolerance for disagreeing. For example, one has to react rationally to new ideas that he misunderstands or misreads rather badly. He needs to get the misunderstanding sorted out instead of get offended. If he doesn't, he's going to misread something sooner or later and give up.

One thing I've noticed is a lot of people refuse to ask questions. They don't know what I mean, and they won't ask, they just argue with a (pretty silly) misconception of what I mean (usually based on what many people in our culture would mean, and ignoring that there's a few contradictions between what I literally said and their interpretation). Conversations without questions usually don't go anywhere good.

On the other hand, a lot of people react badly to questions. I'll often not know quite what someone meant, or think there is some ambiguity, and ask them to clarify, or say more. Lots of people don't like that and won't give good answers -- like, often they will just start talking but not directly engage with specifically what question you asked. Another common reaction, once conversations have been going a while, is "i already answered that" with no quote or link. Some people think my questions are hair splitting and won't answer -- they don't have an attitude of wanting to improve one small step at a time (Popperian piecemeal, gradual improvement). Another common result of asking questions is people are in the mindset of arguing (not explaining) and so they will keep trying to argue with me. And since I'm asking questions, not expressing a position, they will have to make rather wild guesses and assumptions about what my position is and argue with that...

When people don't agree with me on issues like the right attitude to questions, and in general what a rational discussion consists of, and how much time and effort one should put into learning over a long period, and what are good criteria for giving up on someone and losing patience, then it's hard.

What's your psychological analysis of my comments?

You seem pretty culturally normal so far, except without saying anything ridiculously dumb in the first 5 minutes (which is perhaps more common. so, maybe you're better than average. for the self-selected group of non-lurkers on public internet discussion places. and the non-lurker group is already better than average, i think). Nothing much jumped out at me.

I could say something like you have good empathy skills since you were thinking about what I was saying and why, which most people here haven't really done. Maybe that would sound like convincing psychological analysis. But I don't really know if it's true. The same behavior could be explained by good rationality skills. Or by getting lucky -- maybe you have a bunch of buttons to push but happened not to read my comments that would have annoyed you.

My psychological knowledge is more focussed on what I actually use: noticing stuff relevant to some argument. It's not exactly personality analysis in the way those personality tests do it. You seem pretty calm so far, no big danger signs, though it's hard to tell if you'll continue replying much. It's hard to explain why I have some doubt there. A lot of agreeable people don't like to push issues into too much depth to the point of bringing out disagreements and then discussing them.

Just checked your karma though. With that much you must discuss a fair amount, unless you're account is really old or you're good at writing popular top level posts that get 10 points per vote. That's something I have less experience with. Usually it's the confrontational people who get in arguments and post a ton.

One of my least favorite things about most of my friends is they don't reply very much to stuff they agree with. If you post something dumb most of them can argue with it. They can talk with idiots quite well. But post something high quality and many usually don't discuss in any way at all. I figure they should have options. Too advanced for them? Ask a question. Too simple? Post a further implication I left out. Exactly on their level? Elaborate on a tangent, or explain it in their own words to get a better grasp on it. When I try explaining this issue itself, I get few to no replies.

Do you know anything about that issue?

There was your comment:

suspect much of the LW community is genuinely smarter than me

This kind of humility can be a virtue. But, if this and your other comments about wanting to learn and be open minded are representative, it easily puts you in the top 20%, especially counting lurkers. Maybe far higher.

There's some dangers here. I think it's literally a false statement (though it could be the case that you have less math knowledge than the average person here, or something. But less pre-existing knowledge is different than being less smart which is more about attitudes to learning and some non-subject-specific stuff.) When people say false things, it can be revealing. Do they want to believe it? Are they under pressure to believe it? Maybe you think that kind of statement makes you a good person. Maybe you have the common psychological attitude where people think "I'm no one special. Not very important. My arguments can be sloppy since I'm no expert and not expected to be. I won't and don't have to meet world class standards. I won't pursue a project of trying to get to the top since that's not me." I'm not especially suggesting this is accurate. I don't see enough evidence to rule out other possibilities. With a lot of people guessing very culturally normal flaws is really reliable. But since you're reacting to me somewhat better than most people, so far, and haven't said a bunch of false stuff, I'm less inclined to assume a bunch of flaws.

Considering that I was raised in pretty much the same environment as my brother and sister, I think there's got to be some genetic influence on why my personality is so drastically different.

This is not a precise statement. You were not raised in "pretty much the same environment". You were raised in an environment sharing some common features at a high level. There were also many, many subtle differences. As William Godwin pointed out, if you go to a meadow with your sibling, you'll be standing in different places and thus get different visual input. Another factor is that parents in our culture often have different attitudes to first children vs later children.

You may be making an assumption like, "small differences in environment probably don't matter much". But they can snowball if they start at a very young age. There can be feedback loops. A small difference in environment creates a small difference in you. That small difference in you inspires a small difference in your parent's parenting behavior. That small difference in parenting behavior causes another small difference in you. Which causes another small change in parenting behavior. And so on.

I doubt I can change that

I think this kind of thing (combined with your attitude to genetic traits) is a common attitude here. But having investigated the field, basically none of the science for it is correct. Most is blatantly irrelevant: not capable of reaching the conclusions it purports to reach based on the evidence it purports to be using. Would you be interested in discussing that? If so I would suggest either you post what you think is a good argument (be it a cite of a study, or something else). Or if you prefer, you read and comment on this: http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/weblog/520.html

For example: I don't wear makeup

Oh you're a girl? I hadn't noticed lol (I was reading your comment partially out of order and just got here). I wonder if there was any evidence in your previous discussion with me that should have tipped me off. Girls in our culture are under pressure to be less ambitious and not too smart, and more non-confrontational. And to have more empathy. Maybe I should have taken those as evidence, but they're all pretty common with men too.

I really hope there are people on LW who are mature enough to look past the way something is phrased, but I don't know so I don't take the risk.

I tested that some. Results not promising. But anyway this reminds me of an important issue. Most conformists conform more than necessary. If you really want to get to the very top of a social hierarchy, over achieving can be good. But if you want to do enough to fit in, but would also like the maximum risk-free freedom, then it's important. The reason they do more than necessary is they never test where the borderline is. If they found it's 200 units away, then maybe they could go 100 units closer with plenty of margin for error. You have to sometimes offend people to find out where the limits are (or watch someone else test it).