Hello there!

I think I first saw LessWrong about three years ago, as it frequently came up in discussions on KW, the forum formerly linked to the Dresden Codak comic. This makes mine one of the longer lurking periods, but I've never really felt the urge to take discussion to the actual posts being discussed and talked about them elsewhere when I felt the need to comment. All this changed when Alicorn told me that when I was asked to make a post relevant to LessWrong that meant I actually had to post it on LessWrong (a revelation which I should have probably anticipated). So it has come to this.

The simplest place to start describing myself is by saying that I'm the type of person that skims through the 200 most recent comments to see which ones are well liked before writing anything.* In real life terms, I've finished up my bachelor's degree in December, after making various errors. Unfortunately, with it finished, I have discovered that I lack motivation to pursue a standard career, since just about the only things I find myself caring about are stories, knowing the future (in the general, not the personal, respect), and understanding things, particularly things related to people. (This is probably not normal for a human, but I can't say I mind it.) Fortunately, these things are fairly similar to the things LW is interested in, so it shouldn't be a problem!

These atypical weights in my utility function do, however, leave me with opinions that I think are largely a lot "darker" than the typical poster (and I don't just write that for sexy bad-boy appeal). For example:

• I think utilitarianism is a terrible system to base anything on, and is basically what you adopt if you want to say "I think being nice is good" and want to make it sound like a well-reasoned ethical system. I'd like it better if you just said "I think being nice is good".
• I think democracy and equality under the law merely look like good ideas because we don't yet have the computational power to implement actually good ideas of which these are at best extremely simplified approximations.
• I think that seemingly obvious statements such as "we are all agreed that [it] is wrong to kill people (meaning, fully conscious and intelligent beings)", from a highly rated comment by Alejandro1 down the page, are not very obvious and require serious justification. I think there are cases in our world where it is completely acceptable to kill people (although admittedly he probably meant his comment to apply only to a very specific subset of killing people), and there are many possible worlds where such cases would be far more frequent.

Well, the first two of those don't even have much to do with my personal preferences. And yet, I'm not a scary person, I promise! While maybe my utility function makes it easier for me to accept these conclusions, the overwhelming majority of my beliefs actually arose from oodles of thinking about the topics, and they are just things that I think are true, regardless of whether I want them to be true or not. That said, when the enraged zealots come for us, I'm pretty sure I'm going to be one of the first to burn at the stake! I also wish that using smiley faces was more acceptable here, since I would not mind adding an equals sign-three one to the end of that sentence to convey the intended mood a little better.

Well, this has already gone on too long already, but I hope you were not too bored. I might as well mention that at the moment, I'm trying to write a realistic post-apocalyptic novel (where the recovery has set in enough that they're ahead of the previous all-time high), and applying for a Center for Modern Rationality helper position, since I think these things are interesting, and I'd like to explore them before moving on to uninteresting survival strategies if necessary.

Bye for now, and I hope we have illuminating conversations together!

*If you're curious what I found, here are the general conclusions (although some of these are fairly low confidence):

• introductions that include the person's real name are a little bit better liked, but not significantly
• there is no particular correlation between length and upvotes
• most introductions reach a rating of 5 over time, even if they're relatively content-free
• including something that praises LW or HPMoR or the community has a small positive correlation with upvotes
• introductions which trigger responses of any sort are generally upvoted more (not surprising since they're more visible and overall upvotes per view seem almost universally positive)
• introductions that describe something fairly unique get noticeably more upvotes
• general good writing style helps (big surprise there)
• posts that primarily promote something unrelated to introductions are rated lower
• mentioning having a PhD or other real-world qualifications seems to be fairly karma-neutral
• other minor things I have even less confidence in