I was reflecting the other day about how I learned about LessWrong. As best as I can recall/retrace, I learned about LessWrong from gwern, who I met in the #wikipedia IRC channel via an essentially chance meeting. I'm wondering how typical my experience is. How did you come to LessWrong?
EDIT: Optional follow-up question: Do you think that we (the community) are doing enough to bring in new users to LessWrong? If not, what do you think could be done to increase awareness of LessWrong amongst potential rationalists?
Discovered Graham's Number. Realized how fucking huge it was. Googled around for a coherent explanation. Found this. Thought, "This guy is a motherfucking genius. Too bad he disappeared from the internet." Months later, I came back to this essay and started thinking about how messed up it was. (2005, really?) I found Eliezer Yudkowsky's homepage and it was like "WOAH, THIS GUY IS A MOTHERFUCKING GENIUS! FUN THEORY? WHAT'S THAT?" Then BAM, he's talking about shit and I'm not getting it and I conclude "I will never understand any of this."
Cue September 2011. Rediscover Less Wrong. Realize that fun theory is one of the last in a series of interdependent sequences. Begin reading the sequences sequentially.
Fuck.
As for attracting new people to Less Wrong, man, I don't know. Eliezer and Luke both seem to want lots of people here, but there aren't all that many people here, and I'm not sure it would really help all that much.
I've personally tried to get people interested in Less Wrong to no avail. It's not easy, so there's that.