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Comments (288)
I looked around for an FAQ link and didn't see one, and I've gone through all my preferences and haven't found anything relevant. Is there any way to arrange for followup comments (I suppose, the contents of my account inbox) to be emailed to me?
Not that I know of, I'm afraid. There are lots of requested features that we would implement if we had the programmatic resources, but alas, we don't. One just has to check if the envelope is red once in a while.
I go by Clarisse and I'm a feminist, sex-positive educator who has delivered workshops on both sexual communication and BDSM to a variety of audiences, including New York’s Museum of Sex, San Francisco’s Center for Sex and Culture, and several Chicago universities. I created and curated the original Sex+++ sex-positive documentary film series at Chicago’s Jane Addams Hull-House Museum; I have also volunteered as an archivist, curator and fundraiser for that venerable BDSM institution, the Leather Archives & Museum. Currently, I'm working on HIV mitigation in southern Africa. I blog at clarissethorn.wordpress.com and Twitter at @clarissethorn.
Besides sex, other interests include gaming, science fiction and fantasy, and housing cooperatives.
I've read some posts here that I thought had really awful attitudes about sexuality and BDSM in particular, so I'm sure I'll be posting about those. I would like it if people were more rational about sex, inasmuch as we can be.
?? Not any of mine, I hope.
EDIT: I see, Phil Goetz on masochism. Well, I downvoted it. Not much else to say, aside from noting that it had net 4 points and that karma rules do make it easier to upvote than downvote.
This is a community blog and I think it's pretty fair to say that what has not been voted high or promoted ought not to be blamed on "Less Wrong".
That's fair. And I'll add that for a site populated mainly by entitled white guys (I kid, I kid), this site does much better at being generally feminist than most within that demographic.
PS It's kind of exciting to be talking to you, EY. Your article on heuristics and biases in the context of extinction events is one of my favorites ever. I probably think about it once a week.
Hello.
My name is Dan, and I'm a 30 year old software engineer living in Maryland. I was a mostly lurking member of the Extropian mailing list back in the day and I've been following the progress of the SIAI sporadically since it's founding. I've made a few donations, but nothing terribly significant.
I've been an atheist for half my life now, and as I've grown older I've tended more and more to rational thinking. My wife recently made a comment that she specifically uses rational argument with me much more so than anyone else she has to deal with, even at work, because she knows that is what will work. (Obviously, she wins frequently enough to make it worth her while.)
I hope to have something minor to contribute to the akrasia discussion, although I haven't fully formulated it yet. I used to be an avid video game player and I don't play anymore. The last few times I played any games I didn't even enjoy it. I plan to describe the experiences that led to this state. Unfortunately for general applicability, one of those experiences is "grow older and have a child."
It's not the most altruistic of motives, but what most draws me to this community is that I enjoy being right, and there seem to be lots of things I can learn here to help me to be right more often. What I would dream about getting out of this community is a way to find or prepare for meaningful work that helped reduce existential risk. I have a one year old daughter and I was recently asking myself "What is most likely to kill my children and grandchildren?" The answer I came up with was "The same thing that kills everyone else."
Hi! Vectored here by Robin who's thankfully trolling for new chumps and recommending initial items to read. I note the Wiki would be an awesome place for some help, and may attempt to put up a page there: NoobDiscoveringLessWrongLeavesBreadcrumbs, or something like that.
My immediate interest is argument: how can we disagree? 1+1=2. Can't that be extrapolated to many things. I have been so happy to see a non-cocky (if prideful) attitude in the first several posts that I have great hopes for what I may learn here. We have to remember ignorance is an implacable enemy, and being insulting won't defeat it, and we may be subject to it ourselves. I've notice I am.
First post from me is coming shortly. - mark krebs
Aaahhh. Now I see. RobinZ.
I usually read 'Robin' as Robin Hanson from Overcoming Bias, the 'sister site' from the sidebar. That made me all sorts of confused when I saw that you first found us when you were talking to a biased crackpot.
Anyway, welcome to Lesswrong.com.
Let's see:
Some combination of the above usually applies, where obviously I mean "at least one of us" in all cases. Of course, each of those dot points can be broken down into far more detail. There are dozens of posts here describing how "one of use could be stupid". In fact, you could also replace the final bullet point with the entire Overcoming Bias blog.
So do I, actually. He got here first, is the thing.
Hello All,
my name is Markus, and just decided, after, well, years? of lurk-jumping from sl4 to OvercomingBias to LessWrong that maybe I should participate in the one or another discussion; not doing so seems to lead to constant increase of things I have a feeling I know but actually fall flat on the first occasion of another person posing a question.
The process of finding to (then non-existing) LW started during senior high, when I somehow got interested into philosophy, soon enough into AI. The interest in AI lead to interest in Weiqi (Chess was publicly shot already a handful years ago), lead to an interest into eastern philosophy, lead to (interest, not really doing) Zen, lead to frustration, back to start. I was playing trumpet during those times, too; as a consequence of all interests, I did, well, not so much productive stuff. Procrastination is an often discussed topic here; I was and I am of type-A: do nothing. Well, I played Quake. Now I click links on Facebook.
I would still not call myself a rationalist by execution, but just by aspiration. However, from my philosophical gut-level feeling, just everything else does not make any sense.
I am somehow missing the real-life link; for people with IQ << 160, who are not working on AI or similarly hard topics, I cannot see the potential of the full-blown Bayesian BFG; just doing what is consensus being the best choice is most often the only thing one can do, lacking any data, even more often competence. I really do have a hard time seeing the practical benefits.
So, this one is getting too long already, I'm a chatty person...
Just for completeness, on "what you're doing": I'm currently working as a part-time software developer, and am a philosophy/math/computer science/electrical engineering college-dropout.
BTW, as English is not my mother-tongue, I often fall-back to the dictionary when writing in it; if some things seem to be taken from an overly strange thesaurus, or of especially unorthodox style, you now know why.
I wonder how many of us play Weiqi/Igo/Baduk? I only play sporadically now but it was a bit of an obsession for a time.
There's a few people who have reported liking Go. Is that the same game?
Yep. Peter de Blanc and I are currently "playing for a cause", the game is here.
Hi. My name's Derrick.
I've been reading LW and HN for a while now but have only just started to learn to participate. I'm 23, ostensibly hold a bachelor's in economics, and interested in way too much - a dilettante of sorts. Unfortunately I have the talent of being able to sound like I know stuff just by quickly reading around a subject.
Pretty much have always been a Traditional Rationalist; kind of treated the site discussions as random (if extremely high impact) insights. Getting interested in Bayesian modeling sort of sent me on a path here. Lots of Eliezer's Coming of Age sequence reminds me of myself. Is 23 the magical age for Bayesian Enlightenment?
My current interest is in the Art of Strategy, in the way Musashi set down.
Just discovered the sequences and some recommended books! Think I'm going to be sidetracked for a while now...
Hi everyone.
My name is Alan Godfrey.
I am fascinated by rational debate and logical arguments, and I appear to have struck gold in finding this site! I am the first to admit my own failings in these areas but am always willing to learn and grow.
I'm a graduate of mathematics from Trinity Hall, Cambridge University and probability and statistics have always been my areas of expertise - although I find numbers so much more pleasant to play with than theorems and proofs so bear with me!
I'm also a passive member of Mensa. While most of it does not interest me the numerical, pattern spotting and spatial awareness puzzles that it is associated with have always been a big passion of mine.
I have a personal fascination in human psychology, especially my own in a narcissistic way! Although I have no skill in this area.
I currently work for a specialist insurance company and head the catastrophe modelling function, which uses a baffling mixture of all of the above! It was through this that I attended a brief seminar at the 21st Century School in Oxford which mentioned this site as an affiliation although I had already found it a few months previously.
I come to this site with open eyes and an open mind. I hope to contribute insightful observation, engage in healthy discussion and ultimately come away better than I came in.
Out of curiosity, are you an actuary?
Actually no I am not. I began studying the Actuarial exams when I started work and have passed the ones that I took but stopped studying 3 years ago.
I found them very interesting but sadly of only minor relevance to the work that I was doing and, since I was not intending on becoming an Actuary and therefore was not being afforded any study leave in which to progress in them, I decided to focus my spare time on my own career path instead.
Why do you ask?
Name: Karl Smith
Location: Raleigh, North Carolina
Born: 1978
Education: Phd Economics
Occupation: Professor - UNC Chapel Hill
I've always been interested in rationality and logic but was sidetracked for many (12+) years after becoming convinced that economics was the best way to improve the lives of ordinary humans.
I made it to Less Wrong completely by accident. I was into libertarianism which lead me to Bryan Caplan which lead me Robin Hanson (just recently). Some of Robin's stuff convinced me that Cryonics was a good idea. I searched for Cryonics and found Less Wrong. I have been hooked ever since. About 2 weeks now, I think.
Also, skimming this I see there is a 14 year-old on this board. I cannot tell you how that makes burn with jealousy. To have found something like this at 14! Soak it in Ellen. Soak it in.
Awesome. I'd love to hang with you if I'm there next year; you don't have any connections to BIAC do you? I just applied for a postbac fellowship there..
What's your specialty in econ?
I don't have any connection to BIAC.
My specialty is human capital (education) and economic growth and development
Ah. I know something of the former and little of the latter. I'd presume your interests are much more normative than mine.
Does the term 'normative' work in that context?
Yes,
I could try to say that my work focuses only on understand how growth and development take place for example but this in practice this it doesn't work that way.
A conversation with students, policy makers, even fellow economists will not go more than 5 - 10 mins without taking a normative tact. Virtually everyone is in favor of more growth and so the question is invariably, "what should we DO to achieve it"
Hi all, my name's Drew. I stumbled upon the site from who-knows-where last week and must've put in 30-40 hours of reading already, so suffice to say I've found the writing/discussions quite enjoyable so far. I'm heavily interested in theories of human behavior on both a psychological and moral level, so most of the subject matter has been enjoyable. I was a big Hofstader fan a few years back as well, so the AI and consciousness discussions are interesting as well.
Anyway, thought I'd pop in and say hi, maybe I'll take part in some conversations soon. Looks like a great thing you've got going here.
Hello.
Call me Thomas. I am 22. The strongest force directing my life can be called an extreme phobia of disorder. I came across overcoming bias and Eliezer Yudkowsky's writings, around the same time, in high school, shortly after reading GEB and The Singularity Is Near.
The experience was not a revelation but a relief. I am completely sane! Being here is solace. The information here is mostly systematized, which has greatly helped to organize my thoughts on rationality and has saved me a great amount of time.
I am good at tricking people into thinking I am smart, which you guys can easily catch. And I care about how you guys will perceive me, which means that I have to work hard if I want to be a valuable contributor. Something I am not used to (working hard), since I do good enough work with minimal effort.
My greatest vices are romantic literature, smooth language, and flowery writing. From Roman de la Rose, to The Knight's Tale, to Paradise Lost, to One Hundred Years of Solitude. That crap is like candy to me.
Bad music repulses me. I get anxious and irritable and will probably throw a fit if I don't get away from the music. Anything meticulous, or tedious, will make me antsy and shaky. Bad writing also has the same effect on me. Though, I am punctilious. There's a difference.
My favorite band it Circulatory System, which speaks directly to my joys and fears and hopes. If you haven't listened to them, I highly recommend you do so. The band name means "Human." It is about what is means to be us, about the circular nature of our sentience, and about the circles drawn in history with every new generation. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a_jidcdzXuU
I have opted out of college. I do not learn well in lectures. They are too slow, tedious, and meticulous. Books hold my attention better.
My biggest mistake? In school, never practicing retaining information. I do not have my months memorized and my vocabulary is terrible. It was much funner to use my intelligence to "get the grade" than it was to memorize information. Now, this is biting me on the butt. I need to start practicing memorizing stuff.
I am currently in a good situation. My mom got a job far from her house, and she has farm animals. I made a deal with her, where I watch her house and the animals for free if she lets me stay there. I will be in this position for at least another year.
I have enough web design skills to be useful to web design firms, which brings me my income. I am also a hobbyist programmer, though not good enough yet to turn that skill into money.
I want to teach people to be more rational; that's what I want to do with my life. I am far from being the writer I want to be, and I have not yet made my ideas congruent and clear.
Anybody with good recommendations on how to best spend this year?
Thomas.
Hello, and welcome to the site!
Thank you, I'll be seeing you around :) .
Anyway, I have been thinking of starting my year off by reading Chris Langan's CTMU, but I haven't seen anything written about it here or on OB. And I am very wary of what I put into my brain (including LSD :P).
Any opinions on the CTMU?
Google suggests you mean this CTMU.
Looks like rubbish to me, I'm afraid. If what's on this site interests you, I think you'll get a lot more out of the Sequences, including the tools to see why the ideas in the site above aren't really worth pursuing.
Introduction to the CTMU
Yeah, I know what it looks like: meta-physical rubbish. But my dilemma is that Chris Langan is the smartest known living man, which makes it really hard for me to shrug the CTMU off as nonsense. Also, from what I skimmed, it looks like a much deeper examination of reductionism and strange loops, which are ideas that I hold to dearly.
I've read and understand the sequences, though I'm not familiar enough with them to use them without a rationalist context.
Being very intelligent does not imply not being very wrong.
You can't rely too much on intelligence tests, especially in the super-high range. The tester himself admitted that Langan fell outside the design range of the test, so the listed score was an extrapolation. Further, IQ measurements, especially at the extremes and especially on only a single test (and as far as I could tell from the wikipedia article, he was only tested once) measure test-taking ability as much as general intelligence.
Even if he is the most intelligent man alive, intelligence does not automatically mean that you reach the right answer. All evidence points to it being rubbish.
Many smart people fool themselves in interesting ways thinking about this sort of thing. And of course, when predicting general intelligence based on IQ, remember to account for return to the mean: if there's such a thing as the smartest person in the world by some measure of general intelligence, it's very unlikely it'll be the person with the highest IQ.
However intelligent he is, he fails to present his ideas so as to gradually build a common ground with lay readers. "If you're so smart, how come you ain't convincing?"
The "intelligent design" references on his Wikipedia bio are enough to turn me away. Can you point us to a well-regarded intellectual who has taken his work seriously and recommends his work? (I've used that sort of bridging tactic at least once, Dennett convincing me to read Julian Jaynes.)
"Convincing" has long been a problem for Chris Langan. Malcolm Gladwell relates a story about Langan attending a calculus course in first year undergrad. After the first lecture, he went to offer criticism of the prof's pedagogy. The prof thought he was complaining that the material was too hard; Langan was unable to convey that he had understood the material perfectly for years, and wanted to see better teaching.
Eh, I'm smart too. Looks to me like you were right the first time and need to have greater confidence in yourself.
More to the point, you do not immediately fail the "common ground" test.
Pragmatically, I don't care how smart you are, but whether you can make me smarter. If you are so much smarter than I as to not even bother, I'd be wasting my time engaging your material.
I should note that the ability to explain things isn't the same attribute as intelligence. I am lucky enough to have it. Other legitimately intelligent people do not.
If your goal is to convey ideas to others, instrumental rationality seems to demand you develop that capacity.
Considering the extraordinary rarity of good explainers in this entire civilization, I'm saddened to say that talent may have something to do with it, not just practice.
I can learn from dead people, stupid people, or by watching a tree for an hour. I don't think I understand your point.
I didn't use the word "learn". My point is about a smart person conveying their ideas to someone. Taboo "smart". Distinguish ability to reach goals, and ability to score high on mental aptitude tests. If they are goal-smart, and their goal is to convince, they will use their iq-smarts to develop the capacity to convince.
Hi. My name's Kevin. I'm 23. I graduated with a degree in industrial engineering from the University of Pittsburgh last month. I have a small ecommerce site selling a few different kinds of herbal medicine and I buy and sell sport and concert tickets. Previously I started a genetic testing startup and I am gearing up for my next startup.
I post on Hacker News a lot as rms. kfischer &$ gmail *^ com for email and IM, kevin143 on Twitter, kfischer on Facebook.
I signed up for Less Wrong when it was first started but have just recently reached the linguistic level where I feel I can almost keep up with the conversation. 9 months ago I found myself bored by the nearly exclusive focus on meta-conversation and rationality. I would just read Eliezer's less meta stuff. But since graduating from school and having a job that requires me to work no more than 2 hours a day, I've been able to dedicate myself to social hedonism/relationship building and philosophy. I've learned more in one month of posting here than I did in my last two years of college classes.
I posted my rationalist origin story a while ago. http://lesswrong.com/lw/2/tell_your_rationalist_origin_story/74
I'm sure you're not surprised by this question :-) but if you're a rationalist, how come you sell herbal medicines?
Herbal medicine is a polite euphemism for legal drugs. The bulk of our business comes from one particular leaf that does have legitimate medical use and is way, way more effective than a reasonable prior says it should be.
We were actually planning on commercializing the active ingredient (called 7H), based on this gap we found in the big pharma drug discovery process, and it would have been a billion dollar business. However, it would have required us to raise money for research, so we could iterate through all of the possible derivatives of the molecule and it's nearly impossible to raise money for research without having a PhD in the relevant area. We tried but kept hitting catch 22's.
At the most recent Startup School, I met someone who introduced me to a young CEO funded by top VCs who assured me that this idea fit the VC model perfectly, that he was pretty confident we could raise a million dollars for research and a patent, and that for something with potential like this, it did not matter at all that our team was incomplete, the VCs would find us people. I told him to give me a day to revise our one pager. I did a quick patent search and found that the Japanese discoverers of 7H had just filed a patent on all possible derivatives of 7H -- and they found some really awesome derivatives. They discovered 7H in 2001 and filed for the patent of the derivative molecules in 2009. For various reasons, we believed that their funding was not for all derivatives of 7H and that they were chasing an impossible pharmaceutical dream, but in retrospect we believe they were selectively publishing papers of their discoveries to throw others off of their tracks, why else would they have published the discovery of a medically useless derivative?
We came so close, but it always seemed a little too good to be true. There's always the next thing. For now, selling the leaf itself pays the rent.
PM or email for more details about the herb/molecule in question; I think it's probably inappropriate to post the links to my business or even the relevant Wikipedia page here.
OK, that makes sense, thanks!
Male, 26; Belgrade, Serbia. Graduate student of software engineering. Been lurking here for a few months, reading sequences and new stuff through RSS. Found the site through reddit, likely.
Self-diagnosed (just now) with impostor syndrome. Learned a lot from reading this site. Now registered an account to facilitate learning (by interaction), and out of desire to contribute back to the community (not likely to happen by insightful posts, so I'll check out the source code).
I have been lurking LW and OB since summer and finally became motivated/bored enough to post. I do not remember exactly how I came to find this site, but it was probably from following a link on some atheist blog or forum.
I became interested in rationality after taking some philosophy classes my freshman year and discovering that I had been wrong about religion. Everything followed from that.
Interests that you probably do not care about: Gaming and game design in particular. I have thus far made a flash game and an iPhone game, both of which are far too difficult for most people.
I'm Ellen, age 14, student, planning to major in molecular biology or something like that. I'm not set on it, though.
I think I was browsing wikipedia when I decided to google some related things. I think I found some libertarian or anarchist blog that then had a link to Overcoming Bias or Lesswrong. Or I might've seen the word transhumanism on the wiki page for libertarianism and googled it, with it eventually leading here somehow. My memory is fuzzy as it was pretty irrelevant to me.
I'm an atheist, and have been for a while, as is typical for this community. I wasn't brought up religiously, so it was pretty much untheism that turned into atheism.
My rationalist roots... I've always wanted to be right, of course. Partly because I could make mistakes from being wrong, partly because I really, really hated looking stupid. Then I figured that I couldn't know if I was right unless I listened to the other side, really listened, and was careful. (Not enough people do even this. People are crazy, the world is mad. Angst, angst.) I found lesswrong which has given me tools to much more effectively do this. w00t.
I'm really lazy. Curse you, akrasia!
It should be obvious how I came up with my username. Aren't I original?
Some other hobbies I have are gaming and anime/manga. Amusingly enough, I barely ever watch any anime. The internet is very distracting.
I strongly recommend people go to school for something they find interesting, but since I don't think it's commonly known information, I would like to note that salaries for biologists are lower than for other scientists. Lots more people graduate with PhDs in biology than PhDs in physics which really drives down the salaries for biologists that don't have tenure. Though if you plan on going to professional school (medical school, business school, etc.), a molecular biology degree is a good thing to have if you enjoy molecular biology. Again, I really think people should go to school for something they like, but if you want to make a lot of money, don't become a researching biologist. Biology researchers with MD's do a lot better financially.
Welcome on board! You're a key segment of my target audience, so please speak up if you have any thoughts on things I could have done better in my writing.
Apparently not. O, but welcome!
Hi,
I am FeministX of FeministX.blogspot.com. I found this blog after Eliezer commented on my site. While my online name is FeministX, I am not a traditional feminist, and many of my intellectual interests lie outside of feminism.
Lately I am interestedin learning more about the genetic and biological basis for individual and group behavior. I am also interested in cryonics and transhumanism. I guess this makes me H+BD.
I am a rationalist by temperament and ideology. Why am I a rationalist? To ask is to answer the question. A person who wishes to accurately comprehend the merits of a rationalist perspective is already a rationalist. It's a deeply ingrained thinking style which has grown with me since the later days of my childhood.
I invite you all to read my blog. I can almost guarenteee that you will like it. My awesomeness is reliably appealing. (And I'm not so hard on the eyes either :) )
Welcome!
Edit: I don't know if you were around when Eliezer Yudkowsky was posting on Overcoming Bias, but if you weren't, I'd highly, highly recommend Outside the Laboratory. Also, from Yudkowsky's own site, The Simple Truth and An Intuitive Explanation of Bayes' Theorem.
And do check out some of the top scoring Less Wrong articles.
Name: Matt Duing Age: 24 Location: Pittsburgh, PA Education: undergraduate
I've been an overcoming bias reader since the beginning, which I learned of from Michael Anissimov's blog. My long term goal is to do what I can to help mitigate existential risks and my short term goals include using rationality to become a more accurate map drawer and a more effective altruist.
Eh. Might as well.
Chris Capel (soon to be) Mount Pleasant, TX (hi MrHen!) Programmer
I've been following Eliezer since the days of CFAI, and was an early donor to SIAI. I struggle with depression, and thus am much less consistently insightful than I wish I'd be. I'm only 24 and I already feel like I've wasted my life, fallen permanently behind a bunch of the rest of you guys, which kind of screws up my high ambitions. Oh well.
I'd like to see a link explaining the mechanics of the karma system (like how karma relates to posting, for instance) in this post.
Welcome, Chris!
It's poor form of me to analyze you from outside, but this reminds me of the discussion of impostor syndrome we've been having in another thread. I definitely identify with this kind of internal monologue, and it's helped me to recognize that others suffer it too (and that it's typically a distorted view).
I second this, especially now that the karma threshold for posting has been changed.
I don't think I have a problem with imposter syndrome in particular. I believe I'm appropriately proud of some of my real accomplishments.
As well you should be. Great idea, and (reading the comments) well executed!
Hello! I'm Oliver, as my username should make evident. I'm 17 years old, and this site was recommended to me by a friend, whose LW username I observe is 'Larks'. I drift over to Overcoming Bias occasionally, and have RSS feeds to Richard Dawkins' site and (the regrettably sensationalist) NewScientist magazine. As far as I can see past my biases, I aspire to advance my understanding of the kinds of things I've seen discussed here, science, mathematics, rationality and a large chunk of stuff that at the moment rather confuses me.
I started education with a prominent interest in mathematics, which later expanded to include the sciences and writing, and consider myself at least somewhat lucky to have escaped ten years of light indoctrination from church-school education, later finding warm comfort in the intellectual bosom of Richard Dawkins. I've also become familiar with the likes of Alan Turing, Steven Pinker and yet others, from fields of philosophy, mathematics, computing and science.
I'm currently at college in the UK studying my second year of Mathematics, Philosophy, English Language and entering a first year of Physics (I have concluded a year of Computing). As much as I enjoy and value philosophy as a mechanism for genuine rational learning and discovery, I often despise the canon for its almost religious lack of progression and for affixing value to ultimately meaningless questions. It is for this reason that I value having access to Less Wrong et alia. Mathematics is a subject which I learned (the hard way) that I cannot live without.
I think I've said as much here as I can and as much as I need to, so I'll conclude with a toast: to a future of enlightenment, learning, overcoming biases and most importantly fun.
I came to LW through OB, which I found as a result of Bryan Caplan's writing on Econlog (or should it be at Econlog?). I fit much of the standard pattern: atheist, materialist, economist, reductionist, etc. Probably my only departure is being a Conservative Liberal rather than a libertarian; an issue of some concern to me is the disconnect between the US/Econlog/OB/LW/Rationalist group and the UK/Classical Liberal/Conservative Party group, both of which I am interested in. Though Hayek, of course, pervades all.
In an impressive display, I suppose, of cognitive dissidence, I realised that the Bible and Evolution were contradictory in year 4 (age:8), and so came to the conclusion that the continents had originally been separated into islands on opposite sides of the planet. Eden was on one side, evolution on the other, and then continental drift occurred. I have since rejected this hypothesis. I came to Rationalism partly as a result of debating on the NAGTY website.
There are probably two notable influences OB/LW have had on my life. Firstly, I've begun to reflexively refer to what would or would not be empirically the case under different policies, states of affairs, etc., thus making discourse notably more efficient (or at least, it makes it harder for other people to argue back. Hard to tell the difference.)
Secondly, I've given up trying out out-argue my irrational Marxist friend, and instead make money off him by making bets about political and economic matters. This does not seem to have affected his beliefs, but it is profitable.
I suspect you mean "cognitive dissonance". Perhaps you meant "cognitive dissidents", though, which is closer in spelling and would be a charming notion.
Edit: I looked it up and apparently, unbeknownst to me, "dissidence" is a word. But I still suspect that "dissonance" was meant and that "dissidents" would have been charming.
Dissidence (i.e. dissent/the state of being a dissident) actually seems to fit the context better than dissonance. I thought it was a nice turn of phrase.
I'm glad that my word has caused such joy. I've now read the line so many times I can't for the life of me work out which one I intended, or is correct, or recall if it was simply a typo!
I am interested in reason, how it works and how I can improve my own abilities. I have been an AI/Singularity skeptic but am reconsidering these ideas on reading Jaynes over the past year. Working on integrating the work of Rand, Aristotle, Jaynes, Turing, Godel and Shannon because I think all the essentials are covered in these author's work. Love the blog, especially the commitment to clear understanding but also clearly identifying that which we don't understand. Unfortunately many of the topics are too technical for me but I enjoy the discussion anyway.
Hello.
I've been reading Less Wrong from its beginning. I stumbled upon Overcoming Bias just as LW was being launched. I'm a young mathematician (an analyst, to be more specific) currently working towards a PhD and I'm very interested in epistemic rationality and the theory of altruist instrumental rationality. I've been very impressed with the general quality of discussion about the theory and general practice of truth-seeking here, even though I can think of places where I disagree with the ideas that I gather are widely accepted here. The most interesting discussions seem to be quite old, though, so reviving those discussions out of the blue hasn't felt like - for lack of a better word - a proper thing to do.
There are many discussions here of which I don't care about. A large proportion of people here are programmers or otherwise from a CS background, and that colors the discussions a lot. Or maybe it's just that the prospect of an AGI in recent future doesn't seem at all likely to me. Anyway, the AI/singularity stuff, the tangentially related topics that I bunch together with them, and approaching rationality topics from a programmer's point of view I just don't care about. Not very much, at least.
The self-help stuff, "winning is everything" and related stuff I'd rather not read. Well, I do my best not to. The apparent lack of concern for altruism in those discussions makes me even wish they wouldn't take place here in the first place.
And then there are the true failings of this community. I had been thinking of registering and posting in some threads about the more abstract sides of rationality, but I must admit I eventually got around to registering and posting because of the gender threads. But there's just so much bullshit going on! Evolutionary psychology is grossly misapplied (1). The obvious existence of oppressive cultural constructs (2) is flatly denied. The validity of anecdotes and speculation as evidence is hardly even questioned. The topics that started the flaming have no reason of even being here in the first place. This post pretty well sums up the failures of rationality here at Less Wrong; and that post has been upvoted to 25! Now, the failings and attitudes that surfaced in the gender debate have, of course, been visible for quite some time. But that the failures of thought seem so common has made me wonder if this community as a whole is actually worth wasting my time for.
So, in case you're still wondering, what has generously been termed "exclusionary speech" really drives people away (3). I'm still hoping that the professed rationality is enough to overcome the failure modes that are currently so common here (4). But unfortunately I think my possible contributions won't be missed if I rid myself of wishful thinking and see it's not going to happen.
It's quite a shame that a community with such good original intentions is failing after a good start. Maybe humans simply won't overcome their biases (5) yet in this day and age.
So. I'd really like to participate in thoughtful discussions with rationalists I can respect. For quite a long time, Less Wrong seemed like the place, but I just couldn't find a proper place to start (I dislike introductions). But now as I'm losing my respect for this community and thus the will to participate here, I started posting. I hope I can regain the confidence in a high level of sanity waterline here.
(Now a proper rationalist would, in my position, naturally reconsider his own attitudes and beliefs. It might not be surprising that I didn't find all too much to correct. So I might just as well assume that I haven't been mind-killed quite yet, and just make the post I wanted to.)
EDIT: In case you felt I was generalizing with too much confidence - and as I wrote here, I agree I was - see my reply to Vladimir Nesov's reply.
(1) I think failing to control for cultural influences in evolutionary psychology should be considered at least as much of a fail as postulating group selection. Probably more so.
(2) Somehow I think phrases like "cultural construct", especially when combined with qualifiers like "oppressive", trigger immediate bullshit alarms for some. To a certain extent, it's forgivable, as they certainly have been used in conjunction with some of the most well-known anti-epistemologies of our age. But remember: reversing stupidity doesn't make you any better off.
(3) This might be a good place to remind the reader that (our kind can't cooperate)[http://lesswrong.com/lw/3h/why_our_kind_cant_cooperate/]. (This is actually referring to many aspects of the recent debate, not just one.)
(4) Yes, I know, I can't cooperate either.
(5) Overcoming Bias is quite an ironic name for that blog. EDIT: This refers exclusively to many of Robin Hanson's posts about gender differences I have read. I think I saw a post linking to some of these recently, but I couldn't find a link to that just now. Anyway, this footnote probably went a bit too far.
The evils of in-group bias are getting at me. I felt a bit of anger when reading this comment. Go figure, I rarely feel noticeable emotions, even in response to dramatic events. The only feature that could trigger that reaction seems to be the dissenting theme of this comment, the way it breached the normal narrative of the game of sane/insane statements. I wrote a response after a small time-out, I hope it isn't tainted by that unfortunate reaction.
I don't think it's in-group bias. If anything, people are giving mni extra latitude because he or she is seen as new here.
If an established member of the community were to make the same points, that much of the discussion is uninteresting or bullshit, that the community is failing and maybe not worth "wasting" time for, and to claim to have interesting things to say but make excuses for not actually saying them, I bet there would be a lot more criticism in response.
As I wrote, anger is an improbable reaction for me, and there doesn't seem to be anything extraordinarily angering about that comment, so I can't justify that emotion appearing in this particular instance. The fact that the poster isn't a regular might be a factor as well.
I appreciate your honest criticisms here, as someone who participated (probably too much) in the silly gender discussion threads.
I also encourage you to stay and participate, if possible. Despite some missteps, I think there's a lot of potential in this community, and I'd hate to see us losing people who could contribute interesting material.
Upvoted for this in particular.
Interesting. You provide one counterexample to my opinion that the biased language wasn't driving away readers. I now have reason to believe I might have been projecting too much.
Welcome. :)
One thing I hope you have noticed is that there are different subgroups of people within the community that like or dislike certain topics. Adding content that you prefer is a good way to see more growth in those topics.
Oh, please stay!
Hi,
I'm Alex and I'm studying computer vision at Oxford. Essentially we're trying to build AI that understands the visual world. We use lots of machine learning, probabilistic inference, and even a bit of signal processing. I arrived here through the Future of Humanity Institute website, which I found after listening to Nick Bostrom's TED talk. I've been lurking for a few weeks now but I thought I should finally introduce myself.
I find the rationalist discussion on LW interesting both on a personal interest level, and in relation to my work. I would like to get some discussion going on the relationship between some of the concrete tools and techniques we use in AI and the more abstract models of rationality being discussed here. Out of interest, how many people here have some kind of computer science background?
Hi Alex, welcome to LessWrong. You can find some info about the people here in the survey results post. Quite a lot are with CS background, and some grok machine learning.
Hi
I am Ajay from India. I am 23. I was a highly rebellious person(still am i think), flunked out college, but completed it to become a programmer. But as soon as i finished college, i had severe depression because of a woman. I than thought of doing Masters degree in US, and applied, but then dropped the idea.Then i recaptured a long gone passion to make music, so i started drumming. I got accepted to berklee college of music, but then i lost interest to make a career out of it, i have some reasons for it. Then i started reading a lot(parallel to some programming). I face all the problems that an average guy faces(from social to economic problems). I graduated from one of the top colleges in india and now don't do my degree any justice. sometimes i think about the fact that all my colleagues are happy working with companies like google, oracle, etc. In a spur to make a balance, i gave gmat and applied and got admit to some supposedly TOP MBA schools. But i again lost interest for pursuing that thing. Now i write a bit, and read and i teach primary school mathematics in a local school. I love music ranging from art tatum to balamurlikrishna to illayraja to blues. I have been to US once when i was working with Perot systems bangalore(i was campus placed there). I would like to travel more, but i dont see that happening in near future because of financial contraints and constraints by governments of this world.
So, i always keep searching for some interesting "cures" on internet. One fine day i found paul grahams website through some Ajax site. Then i was reading something on hacker news, something related to cult following and stuff. There was a name mentioned there--Eliezer yudkowsky(hope i spelled it right). So i wikied that name. i found his site and then from there to less wrong and overcoming bias. Since 2 months, i am really obsessed by this blog. I dont know how will this help me "practically", but i am quite happy reading and demystifying my brain on certain things.
One thing: I have noticed that this forum has people who are relatively intellectual. Lot of them seem to be from developed countries, who have got very less idea about how things work in a country like India. Sitting here, all these things that are happening in "developed" world seem incredulous to me. I get biased like lot of indians who think US or Europe is a better place. I dont need to say that there are millions of indians in these regions. Then i think some more. So far, i dont think anybody is doing things any differently when it comes to living a life. Even in this community i dont see we are living differently, i dont know whether we even need to!!
We are born, we live and we die, that is the only truth that appeals me so far. One might think that a different state of my mind would give different opinion about what my brain thinks is "truth", but i doubt that. But i love this site, if anybody doubts that whether this site has practical benefits or not---I say that it is very useful. Onething stands out, people here are open to criticism. Even if we don't get truth from this site, we have so many better routes to choose from!! This site seems to be a map. For a timeless travel. Dont give a shit about what others have to say. People can come with theories about everything it seems. And i dont like when people have -ve stuff to say about this forum. I am and would like to loyal to the forum which serves me good.
I hope something happens that we are able to live for atleast 500 years. I think that would be a good time to know few things( my fantasy)
i have recently started writing at http://ajayjetti.com/
thanks for reading if u have reached here!!
Greetings. To this community, I will only be known as "Whisper". I'm a believer in science and rationality, but also a polythiest and a firm believer that there are some things that science cannot explain. I was given the site's address by one Alicorn, who I've been trying to practice Far-Seeing with...with much failure.
I'm 21 years old right now, living in NY, and am trying to write my novels. As for who I am, well, I believe you'll all just have to judge me for yourself by my actions (posts) rather than any self-description. Thankee to any of you who bothered to read.
I think this is a common enough epistemic position to be in, though some of us might define our terms a bit differently.
For any decent definitions of 'explain' and 'science', though, whatever "science can't explain" is not going to be explained by anything else any better.
Hello.
I'm Antoine Valot, 35 years old, Information Architect and Business Analyst, a frenchman living in Colorado, USA. I've been lurking on LW for about a month, and I like what I see, with some reservations.
I'm definitely an atheist, currently undecided as to how anti-theist I should be (seems the logical choice, but the antisocial aspects suggest that some level of hypocrisy might make me a more effective rational agent?)
I am nonetheless very interested in some of the philosophical findings of Buddhism (non-duality being my pet idea). I think there's some very actionable and useful tools in Buddhism at the juncture of rationality and humanity: How to not believe in santa, but still fulfill non-rational human needs and aspirations. Someone's going to have to really work on convincing me that "utility" can suffice, when Buddhist concepts of "happiness" seem to fit the bill better for humans. "Utility" seems too much like pleasure (unreliable, external, variable), as opposed to happiness (maintainable, internal, constant).
Anyway, I'm excited to be here, and looking forward to learning a lot and possibly contributing something of value.
A special shout-out to Alicorn: I read you post on male bias, and I dig, sister. I'll try to not make matters worse, and look for ways to make them better.
Hello.
My name is Joni Hanski, I'm 21 years old, I study mathematics at Helsinki University, Finland, I'm male...
So, yeah. Reason behind my interest in rationality would probably be something that is likely to earn me ADHD-diagnosis in near future. Since I've been mentally impaired to some weird degree, I've tried to find a Way to overcome that. My earlier efforts weren't all that effective, but now that I found a site that gathers results of systematic study around this field, I expect a lot.
My school grades were about medium throughout my life. I enjoy a board game called "go" a lot, and I used it to find and eliminate some biases and cognitive mistakes(I'm Finnish shodan). Other than math, I like psychology, I also find transhumanism very interesting topic, and I have many times thought that I could make my own super-AI. I like computers, I know superfically some programming languages, but I haven't had any larger projects on any real languages(Some 500 line scripts occasionally).
I found this site through irc-channel for Finnish transhumanist movement. Whole notion of "refining the art of human rationality" was like a dream come true. I try to avoid commenting to avoid quality of discussion dropping, so for the months to come, I'll be mostly doing my homework to gather some basic knowledge.
Ignoring the more obvious jokes people make in introduction posts: Hi. My name is Robin. I grew up in the Eastern Time Zone of the United States, and have lived in the same place essentially all my life. I was homeschooled by secular parents - one didn't discuss religion and the other was agnostic - with my primary hobby being the reading of (mostly) speculative fiction of (mostly) quite high quality. (Again, my parent's fault - when I began searching out on my own, I was rather less selective.) The other major activity of my childhood was participation in the Boy Scouts of America.
I entered community college at the age of fifteen with an excellent grounding in mathematics, a decent grounding in physics, superb fluency with the English language (both written and spoken), and superficial knowledge of most everything else. After earning straight As for three years, I applied to four-year universities, and my home state university offered me a full ride. At present, I am a graduate student in mechanical engineering at the same institution.
In the meantime, I have developed an affection for weblogs, web comics, and online chess, much to the detriment of my sleep schedule and work ethic. I suspect I discovered Overcoming Bias through "My Favorite Liar" like everyone else, but Eliezer Yudkowsky's sequences (and, to a lesser extent, Robin Hanson's essays) were what drew me in. I lost interest around when EY jumped to lesswrong.com, but was drawn back in when I opened up the bookmark again in the past day or so, particularly thanks to a few of Yvain's contributions.
Being all of twenty-four and with less worldly experience than the average haddock, I imagine I shan't contribute much to the conversation, but I'll give it my best shot.
(P.S. I am not registered for cryonics and I'm skeptical about the ultimate potential of AI. I'm an modern-American-style liberal registered as a Republican for reasons which seemed good at the time. Also, I am - as is obvious in person but not online - both male and black.)
What gave you the idea that anyone cares about age and experience around here? ;)
Welcome! As Alicorn pointed out, age and experience don't count for much here, as compared to rationality and good ol'fashioned book-learnin'. If it helps any, you even have more education than a lot of the folks about (though we have a minor infestation of doctors)
Hi, I'm James, 24, male, and a Information Technology student in my last year of my degree, and live in Australia, Central Queensland. I have been trying to answer big questions like "What is the meaning of life?", "What is Intelligence?", and trying to come up with a Grand Theory Of Everything, for as long as I can remember. I have written a lot on my theory's and hypotheses but everything I have ever written is saved on my computer and I have never shared any of my ideas with anyone, it has just been a private hobby of mine. I'm hoping I'll be able to learn so more by reading the posts on Less Wrong and maybe eventually post some of my own ideas.
I have read on here that a few people are signed up for cryonics, I think cryonics sounds interesting and I might sign up for it as well one day, but I think more of my self living on through knowledge. By that I mean If you say a person is made up by there knowledge and experience and not by there body, then if I can write my knowledge and experiences down, and then once I die people read and learn that knowledge and about my experiences, then I see it as a ship of theseus paradox, my knowledge and experience still exists just in a different body.
Hi, I'm Hrishi, 26, male. I work in air pollution modelling in London. I'm also doing a part-time PhD.
I am an atheist but come from a very religious family background.
When I was 15, I once cried uncontrollably and asked to see God. If there is indeed such a beautiful supreme being then why didn't my family want to meet Him? I was told that their faith was weak and only the greatest sages can see God after a lot of self-afflicted misery. So, I thought nevermind.
I've signed up for cryonics. You should too, or it'll just be 3 of us from LW when we wake up on the other side. I don't mind hogging all the press, but inside me lives a shiny ball of compassion which wants me to share the glory with you.
I wish to live a happy and healthy life.
(This is in response to a comment of brynema’s elsewhere; if we want LW discussions to thrive even in cases where the discussions require non-trivial prerequisites, my guess is that we should get in the habit of taking “already discussed exhaustively” questions to the welcome thread. Or if not here, to some beginner-friendly area for discussing or debating background material.)
brynema wrote:
Kind of. The idea is that:
That was terribly condensed, and may well not make total sense at this point. Eliezer’s OB posts fill in some of this in considerably better detail; also feel free, here in the welcome thread, to ask questions or to share counter-evidence.
Hi all,
I spent the first 25 years of my life in a christian quasi-fundamentalist environment. As time went by I was increasingly struggling to reach a consistent mindset within the christian belief-constraints. Over time, I kept removing elements of the belief system while nominally retaining the fundamentals even if simply as shells. At some point, I lost someone deeply important to me due to not providing her definition of a spiritual relationship, a situation similar to MBlume's even if predating my explicit conversion to atheism. This led me to distance myself from the christian circles, as I considered being truly accepted without effectively leading a double life an impossibility. About a year later, discovering Eliezer's writings provided me with the mature articulation of many thoughts that had existed in embryonic unexpressed form in my mind and added many others. In this sense it provided the coup de grâce to my theistic beliefs.
Simultaneously to the above, I am a programmer who has not seriously written code in the last three years. This is because I have hit on a problem the solution to which I need to thoroughly formulate before resuming my efforts. The essence of the problem is that whenever I code, my intuition is to take soft-coding to the extreme. That is, I see each (algorithm/process/program) as a compilation of items of source knowledge and try to factor each item out. Taken to its logical conclusion, this leads to something that could be called knowledge-oriented programming or some such. I did not consider this related to artificial intelligence but I am now not entirely certain.
Additionally, I am involved in Digital Ecosystem research, what I consider the effort to make control the property of networks rather than individual agents in the network. As an extension of this field, is my interest in social computing and the goal to make an unmoderated online community that allows freedom from coercion to its members while at the same time is able to collectively control itself. However, among the three, if I had to state only one goal, it would certainly be the effort to achieve 'extreme soft coding'
I recently have grown increasingly unsatisfied by the contents of my feed reader, I find in this community a higher a satisfaction-to-noise ratio than even Hacker News, and intend to try and participate as much as I can, although I don't expect to have any major contributions any time soon.
Howdy.
My name's Schuyler. I'm a 22 year old 1st year law student in NYC, with my undergraduate degree in Economics and Philosophy. I spend my free time as a volunteer fireman/EMT out on Long Island.
Stumbled over to OB in the beginning of September, as I fleshed out my Google Reader in preparation for the upcoming year of law school (gotta kill time in class somehow). The Babyeaters got me hooked, and when LessWrong opened up I started lurking here, as well. Never posted or commented on either site, except to express my appreciation for the Babyeaters series. Always been kind of intimidated, to be honest.
I suppose I became interested in rationality when I started taking my Econ theory courses. The first assumption of economics is that people are rational - and in my class, as well as all the others I've TA'ed for, the students invariably respond 'No, they aren't.' Immediately. So when I branched out into my second major, and reading Friedman and Nozick, I tried to both understand why people aren't rational, and try to bring myself closer to that ideal.
I don't think I've done such a good job, all told. But I am grateful to the contributors on this website and over at OB for helping so frequently.
Hello all. I don't think I identify myself as a "rationalist" exactly -- I think of rationality more as a mode of thought (for example, when singing or playing a musical instrument, that is a different mode of thought, and there are many different modes of thought that are natural and appropriate for us human animals). It is a very useful mode of thought, though, and worth cultivating. It does strike me that the goals targeted by "Instrumental Rationality" are only weakly related to what I would consider "rationality" and for most people things like focus, confidence, and other similar skills far surpass things like Bayesian update for the practical achievement of goals. I also fear that our poor ability to gauge priors very often makes human-Bayesianism provide more of the appearance of rationality than actual improvement in tangible success in day-to-day reasoning.
Still, there's no denying that epistemic and instrumental rationality drive much of what we call "progress" for humanity and the more skilled we are in their use, the better. I would like to improve my own world-modeling skills.
I am also very interested in a particular research program that is not presently an acceptable topic of conversation. Since that program has no active discussion forum anywhere else (odd given how important many people here think it to be), I am hopeful that in time it will become an active topic -- as "rationality incarnate" if nothing else.
I thank all of the authors here for providing interesting material and hope to contribute myself, at least a little.
Oh, I'm a 45-year-old male software designer and researcher working for a large computer security company.
James Cole
31, Brisbane Australia
Bachelor of info tech. Worked for a few years in IT research, now undertaking PhD on what information is.
I've always been interested in 'flawed thinking' and how to avoid it, and I've always thought flawed thinking was a great contributer to so many of the world's ills. Most of my life I hadn't come across many others with similar views, so it has been great to come across this community.
I came across this through Overcoming Bias, which I think I originally found via a link on reddit.
Occupation: statistical programmer (would be a postdoc if I were actually post the doc) at the Ottawa Institute of Systems Biology
I'm principally interested in Bayesian probability theory (as applied in academic contexts as opposed to rationalist ones). I don't currently attempt to apply rationalist principles in my own life, but I find the discussion interesting.
I discovered OB in early 2007, after my interest in transhumanism led me to Eliezer Yudkowsky's other works. I care about preventing the future from being lost, and think that Eliezer is right about how to do this. I also care plenty about being less wrong for its own sake.
I don't feel like I have much to share in this thread; my beliefs and values are probably pretty typical for Singularitarian Bayesian-wannabes (atheist, consequentialist, MWI, ...), and there's not much more to my origin story (not raised religious or anything like that, although I did have a difficult time figuring out a sane metaethic after being forced to seriously consider the issue for the first time). I do have quite a few ideas stored up to post on when I have the time this summer, though.
I would appreciate contact with any other undergraduates interested in existential risk and/or Friendly AI.
I found OB/LW through Eliezer's Bayes tutorial, and was immediately taken in. It's the perfect mix of several themes that are always running through my head (rationality, atheism, Bayes, etc.) and a great primer on lots of other interesting stuff (QM, AI, ev. psych., etc). The emphasis on improving decision making and clear thinking plus the steady influx of interesting new areas to investigate makes for an intoxicating ambrosia. Very nice change from many other rationality blogs, which seem to mostly devote themselves to the fun-but-eventually-tiresome game of bashing X for being stupid/illogical/evil (clearly, X is all of these things and more, but that's not the point). Generally very nice writing, too.
As for real-life impact, LW has:
I'll put some thought into my rationalist origins story, but it may have been that while passing several (mostly enjoyable) summers as a door-to-door salesman, I encountered the absolutely horrible decision making mechanisms of lots and lots of people. It kind of made me despair for the world, and probably made me aspire to do better. But that could be a false narrative.
Any advice on how to become this good?
Several studies[1] have concluded that you need to spend at least 10,000 hours doing something to become a top expert. 10,000 hours is equivalent to 5 years of working full-time, but don't think you can count each work hour as one hour towards this total, since you are much more likely to be forced to work on mundane tasks than when you're doing this as a hobby. Enrolling in a university without mandatory attendance for 3-5 years without caring about your grades can give you enough spare time to accomplish this. If you don't already have one, a university degree with poor grades can still be useful for visa purposes, when traveling or emigrating.
Regarding programming specifically, I would do a broad spectrum of "hard" stuff that most programmers avoid, as part of your learning. For example: writing video decoders (H.264 uses several delightfully complex algorithms), transactional databases, implementations of several Internet standards and software for embedded devices.
Finally, I find that it's easiest to get paid your worth if you work as a freelancer for several companies that have prior experience with outsourcing programming tasks to freelancers.
If you're literate in Python, we've got some free software programming tasks going here on Less Wrong...
I'm Daniel Reeves (not that other Daniel Reeves who I've seen comment on OvercomingBias, although conveniently I think every post by him I've seen I've agreed with!), a research scientist at Yahoo in New York City. I work on game theory and mechanism design though I'm a computer scientist by training. At the moment I'm particularly interested in anti-akrasia tools and techniques.
PS: You pointed out a handy inbox link -- lesswrong.com/message/inbox -- but I can't seem to find that anywhere else on the site.
I find minds to be the most beautiful objects in the known universe; at once, natural and artifact, localized and distributed, intuitively clear and epistemically ephemeral the mind continually beguiles, delights and terrifies me. Of particular personal interest is a mind's propensity and capability for creativity and, separately, wisdom.
Like the majority of artists, I dream of creating beautiful and profound reflections of reality through a human lens. I believe the creation of a mind would be the ultimate expression of this desire.
Like the majority of parents, I dream of my creation surpassing me in all aspects. I believe the design of a mind could be the ultimate expression of this desire.
But a mind is no passive statue or oil painting. The very dynamic nature of the mind that makes it so beautiful also implies grave ethical concerns both for humanity and for the artificial intelligence itself (a subject I am sure you're all familiar with).
It is in ethical decisions that rationality is most needed, and yet least practiced: where one is continually admonished to follow one's “gut” and not one's “brain”. As such, rationality as it pertains to ethics is my primary concern.
As far as contributing goes, I don't imagine that I'm yet expert enough on any particular topic to be of much use, but I have been reading up on the wisdom literature with the intention of tying cognitive mechanisms associated with wisdom to concepts in machine learning, so there is some hope...
I read LW and OB in part as procrastination. It's interesting stuff. I don't spend a lot of time implementing the LW/OB rationality techniques right now, and I am not sure I ever will. What drew me in in the first place was the discussion of AIs. However, I am more interested in the implementation of AGI than in the development of rationality that seems to be dominating at LW. Introspection can be interesting and useful, but I have a lot more fun building and tinkering.
Within my domains of specific knowledge, software and electrical engineering, I am interested in creating systems with novel uses that were impossible five or ten years ago, e.g., I am trying to get involved with the nascent GandhiCam project. Ambient intelligence, autonomous systems, things of that nature. I see a world of data all around us almost entirely unprobed and unanalyzed, and I want to collect that data. I am an inveterate generalist and interested in almost everything.
I suppose within the jargon of OB/LW, I would be considered an instrumental rationalist. I have little interesting in anything of a purely theoretical nature; I want to see something happen in reality. As a result, I pursue rationality with the intent of understanding the world and making things to expand our human abilities.
Currently, LW is losing interest for me. This is probably not a problem with LW, just a mismatch of interests. I probably won't participate much, but I do hope to see the cause succeed. However, I think I'd be more happy with the entire world being somewhat less irrational, rather than a few of us being extremely more rational.
EDIT: i suck at formatting
I'm driven towards rationality by three psychological factors— first, that I love to argue on philosophical and related matters, secondly that I'm curious about most fields of intellectual endeavor, and thirdly that it pains me to realize I'm being less than fully honest with myself.
Ye gods, that sounds like a personals ad. Should compensate by adding that I'm rather selfish compared to the standards of altruism espoused here; my typical desire is to observe and comprehend, not necessarily to help.
I discovered OB some months ago (don't remember how) and reads both OB and LW. For now, I am mostly a lurker.
I have been raised as a Catholic Christian and became atheist midway through high school. I think that Science should take a clear position on the topic of religions, for the good of mankind.
I plan to write top-level posts on some of the following topics when I will have the time (and the karma) to do so.
By the way, does the "be half accessible" request holds for LW too?
For those wondering what this conversation is about:
Contributors: Be Half Accessible, Overcoming Bias, December 21, 2006
Re: be half accessible - I'd say no. There are accessible posts aplenty here. But "don't be gratuitously inaccessible" is still good advice.
I came to Less Wrong via Overcoming Bias. I heard a talk by Eliezer around 2004-2005, and I've run into him a couple times since then.
I've been interested in rationality as long as I can remember. I obsessively see patterns in the world and try to understand it better. I use this ability to get good at stuff.
I once had social anxiety disorder, no social skills, and no idea what to do with women (see love-shyness; I'm sure there are people on here who currently have it). Thanks to finding the seduction community, I figured out that I could translate thinking ability into social skills, and that I could get good at socializing just like how I got good at everything else. Through observation, practice, and theories from social psychology, evolutionary psychology, and the seduction community, I built social skills and abilities with women from scratch.
Meanwhile, I attempted to eradicate the disadvantages of my personality traits and scientific approach to human interaction. For instance, I learned to temporarily disable analytical and introverted mental states and live more in the moment. I started identifying errors and limiting aspects of the seduction community's philosophy and characterization of women and female preferences. While my initial goal was to mechanistically manipulate people into liking me by experimenting on them socially, an unexpected outcome occurred: I actually became a social person. I started to enjoy connecting with people and emotionally vibing. I cultivated social instincts, so that I no longer had to calculate everything cognitively.
In the back of my head, I've been working on a theory of sexual ethics, particularly the ethics of seduction.
I will write more about heuristic and the seduction community as I've promised, but I've been organizing thoughts for a top-level post, and figuring out whether I'm going to address those topics with analytical posts, or with more of a personal narrative, and whether I would mix them. Anyone have any suggestions or requests?
It sounds like you are currently very much pushing your personality where you want it to go. I would be interested in hearing about your transition from being shy to being comfortable with people. Do you still remember how you were?
I more or less consciously pushed myself into sociability when I was 12 and made a lot of progress. Previously I was much shyer. I've changed so much since then, it feels strange to connect with my earlier memories. I've also experienced "calculating" social situations, emulating alien behaviors - and then later finding them to have become natural and enjoyable.
For the past few years, I've just been coasting - I haven't changed much and I don't know how to summon up the drive I had before.
Yes, though the painfulness of the memory is fading.
Do you have a particular example? For me, one of them is smalltalk. I don't necessarily enjoy all smalltalk all the time, but I enjoy it a lot more than I ever thought that I would, back when I viewed it as "pointless" and "meaningless" (because I didn't understand that the purpose of most social communication is to share emotions, not to share interesting factual information and theories). Similar story with flirting.
With such social behaviors, everyone "learned" them at some point. Most people just learned them during their formative experiences. Some people, due to a combination of biological and social factors, learn this stuff later, or not at all. The cruel thing is that once you fall off the train, it's harder and harder to get back on. See the diagram here for a graphic illustration.
I've gone through periods of growth, and periods of plateaus. Once I got to a certain level of slightly above average social skills, it became easy to get complacent with mediocrity. I start making progress again when I keep trying new things, going new places, and focusing on what on what I want.
I am also interested in gender politics. I started off with reflexively feminist views, yet I soon realized flaws in certain types of feminism. Like with religions, I think that there some really positive goals and ideas in feminism, and some really negative ones, all mixed together with really bad epistemic hygiene.
There are more rational formulations of some feminist ideas, yet more rational feminists often fail to criticize less rational feminists (instead calling them "brilliant" and "provocative"), causing a quality control problem leading to dogmatism and groupthink. I am one of the co-bloggers on FeministCritics.org, where we try to take a critical but fair look at feminism and start dialogues with feminists. I'm not very active there anymore, but here's an example of the kind of epistemic objections that I make towards feminism.
My eventual goal is to formulate a gender politics that subsumes the good things about feminism.
When I registered I didn't consider that my handle might not be the most apt for this community, it is simply who I have been online for over fifteen years (though I have been participating in online communities since 1983). The original reasons for my handle have faded, but my attachment to the name has remained. So please, don't read more into my handle than my having a preference for the way it sounds.
I was pushed away from mathematics and the sciences from an early age by the limitations of our public school system, though I had the ability to excel in both. I was not encouraged to develop the habits of intellectual discipline that would have carried me beyond those limitations. I was content to glide through my classes, doing only the minimum necessary to maintain my A average without bothering to push much beyond that. My social life, outside activities, and connections were more important to me. This isn't something I have any regrets over, I bring it up to somewhat explain my intellectual inertia and lack of familiarity with certain standard concepts found here.
The immediate circumstance that led me to LW is that a close friend found this site and forwarded the link to my husband. My husband forwarded the link to me. However, the path that led me here started much earlier. I was of a skeptical nature from an early age, though I have only come to realize this in the course of years of self-examination. I go through periods of studying things, then leaving them behind in favor of other, less stringent pursuits. Yet, as I age my brain gets mushy more easily, so I've been looking for ways to stave that off. In researching the issue, I found that the effects of aging on the brain can be mitigated through intellectual exercise. Not much of a surprise, really. So that has me poking around for ways to exercise my brain.
There is, of course, so much more to the story of how I got here. I could fill pages that I suspect most would find uninteresting. So I'll stop here.
philosophical influences - vivekananda, ayn rand, nietszche, pirsig, eliyahu goldratt, the economist/technophile cluster, yudkowsky
Short term goal - Lose fat, keep job
I am not sure whether I am a newcomer, since I read OB regularly more than a year and comment occasionaly. I have found OB almost randomly, via link from other website.
Handle: Nanani
Location: Japan
Age: 25
Gender: Female (not that it matters)
Education: BSc Astrophysics
Occupation: Interpretation/Translation (Mostly English and Japanese, in both directions)
Goal : To Win.
I found this site through Overcoming Bias, and had already been lurking at the latter for years beforehand. When I first came across Overcoming Bias, it was for too difficult for me. I have since become stronger, enough to read most of its archives and become even stronger. I intend to keep this positive cycle active.
I must say that I hardly feel like a newcomer due to those years of lurking in the shadows. Let's see how the light feels.
But what does a win look like to you?
Not "A" win, but winning in general, Winning at Life if you will.
To me, this means :
Staying true to myself, becoming only what I decide I want to be (which is in turn based on achieving sub-goals)
Achieving my lesser and short-term goals.
Being able to constantly improve myself
Not Dying (I'm only not signed up for cryo because I live in Japan and have trouble with the creation of a suitable policy. Ideally, I'd like to go transhuman.)
Explicit failure scenarios involve becoming a future self that stays still instead of moving forward. If I became a person who was satisfied with the status quo without any desire to expand her horizons, that would be a dramatic failure. Another possibility to avoid is giving in to biology, blindly following urges and, yes, succumbing to biases.
In other words, Winning is Future-Bending to get to be the Me I want to be.
So does your name mean "seven two"? (n00b student of Japanese here)
Yes it does, but only incidentally. It's been my nickname since before I realized I could write it as 72 (七二).
How are your studies progressing?
Hi! I'm a J-E translator in Japan as well. Both directions? Wow.
Oh really? Where are you based, if you don't mind my asking? I'm in Kansai myself.
Yes, both directions, mostly out of necessity. Being in-house, sometimes it isn't possible to have someone on hand with the right native language. Working into my non-native language is hard, but also a great a learning experience.
I'm in Kansai as well.
I work freelance, so I'd probably never be asked to translate into my non-native language, given that other freelancers could do it much better and more cheaply. Sometimes I wish I had the chance, though, because I'd surely learn a lot.
I found OB through Marginal Revolution, which then led to LW. A few here know me from my previous job as a professional Magic: The Gathering player and writer and full member of the Competitive Conspiracy. That job highly rewarded the rationality I already had and encouraged its development, as does my current one which unfortunately I can't say much about here but which gives me more than enough practical reward to keep me coming back even if I wasn't fascinated anyway. I'm still trying to figure out what my top level posts are going to be about when I get that far.
While I have told my Magic origin story I don't have one for rationality or atheism; I can't remember ever being any other way and I don't think anyone needs my libertarian one. If anything it took me time to realize that most people didn't work that way, and how to handle that, which is something I'm still working on and the part of OB/LW I think I've gained the most from.
I'm Mike, I'm a grad student, research assistant, and teacher's aide at UC Santa Barbara.
I got here by way of OB (as many of us did), got there by way of a Reddit link to, if memory serves, Explainers Shoot High. Aim Low!, though my memory is pretty hazy, since I wound up reading a lot of posts very quickly. I got to Reddit by way of XKCD, and got to XKCD by way of my roommate sending me an amusing comic about string theory.
Let's see. I'm car-free, and a lifestyle biker. I love to ride, and enjoy the self-sufficiency of getting everywhere by my own muscle.
I'm currently a pescatarian, and haven't eaten any land-critters since I was 11. I continue to do this because I remain uncertain about the nature of consciousness, and thus am not certain to what extent animals suffer or experience morally significant pain. I suspect that morally significant consciousness is limited to the primates, but having not yet been fully convinced, I accept the (relatively minor) inconvenience of avoiding meat. If anyone would like to help me resolve this uncertainty, I'd certainly enjoy the conversation.
I've been an atheist for about a year now -- Eliezer's OB writing, along with some other writings I found through Reddit, pushed me in that direction throughout the end of 2007, but I did not accept the matter as fully determined until February 2008. This was not without personal consequences.
I have been rather addicted lately to the music of Tim Minchin -- I'd recommend him to anyone here.
I'm currently working in high-energy particle physics under the direction of professor Jeff Richman and in collaboration with the good folks at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN I'm hoping to, in this way, gain some first-hand experience with how science progresses, and then spend the bulk of my life trying to explain this to the world -- trying to convey a gut-level understanding of what it is scientists do, and why they can be trusted when they tell you how old a rock is, or what's likely to happen if you keep putting the same amount of carbon in the atmosphere every day for the next 50 years.
That's the plan, anyway.
I was a serious fundamentalist evangelical until about age 20. Factors that led me to deconvert included Bible study, successful simulations of evolution, and observation of radical cognitive biases in other Christians.
I was active on the Extropian mailing list, and published a couple of things in Extropy, about 1991-1995.
Like EY, I think AI is inevitable, and is the most important problem facing us. I have a lot of reservations about his plans, to the point of seeing his FAI as UFAI (don't ask in this thread). I think the most difficult problem isn't developing AI, or even making it friendly, but figuring out what kind of possible universes we should aim for; and we have a limited time in which we have large leverage over the future.
I prioritize slowing aging over work on AI. I expect that partial cures for aging will be developed 10-20 years before they are approved in the US, and so I want to be in a position to take published research and apply it to myself when the time comes.
I believe that rationality is instrumental, and repeatedly dissent when people on LW make what I see as ideological claims about rationality, such as that it is defined as that which wins; and at presenting rationality as a value-system or a lifestyle. There's room for that too; I mainly want people to recognize that being rational doesn't require all that.
I found Less Wrong through http://transhumangoodness.blogspot.com/ I don't remember what link brought me there though. I read the Extropians list (quietly) for a few years staring in maybe 2002. I've been reading assorted transhumanist sites ever since.
I'm always happy when I find new sources of dense, high quality thinking on the internet. The TED talks have been one such treasure trove for instance. I really like Eliezer's writing and think Less Wrong will be a great source.
For the last few years I've been paying the most attention to politics. I think now is a good time for me to reengage with transhumanism. I have very rarely posted or commented in the past, preferring to just read and learn instead. Maybe with Less Wrong I'll have a reason to write. Hi!
I'm here because of SoullessAutomaton, who is my apartment-mate and long term friend. I am interested in discussing rhetoric and rationality. I have a few questions that I would pose to the group to open up the topic.
1) Are people interested in rhetoric, persuasion, and the systematic study thereof? Does anyone want a primer? (My PhD is in the History and Theory of Rhetoric, so I could develop such a primer.)
2) What would a rationalist rhetoric look like?
3) What would be the goals / theory / overarching observations that would be the drivers behind a rationalist rhetoric?
4) Would a rationalist rhetoric be more ethical than current rhetorics, and if so, why?
5) Can rhetoric ever be fully rational and rationalized, or is the study of how people are persuaded inevitably or inherently a-rational or anti-rational (I would say that rhetoric can be rationalized, but I know too many scholars who would disagree with me here, either explicitly or implicitly)?
6) Question to the group: to what degree might unfamiliar terminology derived from prior discussions here and in the sister-blog be functioning as an unintentional gatekeeper? Corollary question: to what degree is the common knowledge of math and sciences--and the relevant jargon terms thereof--functioning as a gatekeeper? (As an older woman, I was forbidden from pursuing my best skill--math--because women "didn't study math". I am finding that I have to dig pretty deeply into Wikipedia and elsewhere to make sure I'm following the conversation--that or I have to pester SoullessAutomaton with questions that I should not have to ask. sigh)
I rather like Eliezer's description of ethical writing given in rule six here. I'm honestly not sure why he doesn't seem to link it anymore.
1) Yes, I'm interested.
2) I suspect that the study of rhetoric is already fairly rationalist, in the sense of rationality being about winning. Rhetoric seems to be the disciplined/rational study of how to deliver persuasive arguments. I suspect many aspiring rationalists attempt to inoculate themselves against the techniques of rhetoric because they desire to believe what is true rather than what is most convincingly argued. A rationalist rhetoric might then be a rhetoric which does not trigger the rationalist cognitive immune system and thus is more effective at persuading rationalists.
3) From my point of view the only goal is success - winning the argument. Everything else is an empirical question.
4) Not necessarily. Since rationalists attempt to protect themselves against well-sounding but false arguments, rationalist rhetoric might focus more on avoiding misleading or logically flawed arguments but only as a means to an end. The goal is still to win the argument, not to be more ethical. To the extent that signaling a desire to be ethical helps win the argument, a rationalist rhetoric might do well to actually pre-commit to being ethical if it could do so believably.
5) I think the study of rhetoric can absolutely be rational - it is after all about winning. The rational study of how people are irrational is not itself irrational.
6) My feeling is that the answer is 'to a significant degree' but it's a bit of an open question.
Working in AI, cognitive science and decision theory are of professional interest to me. This community is interesting to me mostly out of bafflement. It's not clear to me exactly what the Point of it is.
I can understand the desire for a place to talk about such things, and a gathering point for folks with similar opinions about them, but the directionality implied in the effort taken to make Less Wrong what it is escapes me. Social mechanisms like karma help weed out socially miscued or incompatible communications, they aren't well suited for settling questions of fact. The culture may be fact-based, but this certainly isn't an academic or scientific community, it's mechanisms have nothing to do with data management, experiment, or documentation.
The community isn't going to make any money(unless it changes) and is unlikely to do more than give budding rationalists social feedback(mostly from other budding rationalists). It potentially is a distribution mechanism for rationalist essays from pre-existing experts, but Overcoming Bias is already that.
It's interesting content, no doubt. But that just makes me more curious about goals. The founders and participants in LessWrong don't strike me as likely to have invested so much time and effort, so much specific time and effort getting it to be the way it is, unless there were some long-term payoff. I suppose I'm following along at this point, hoping to figure that out.
I suspect we're going to hear more about the goal in May. We're not allowed to talk about it, but it might just have to do with exi*****ial r*sk...
Having never been interested in AI before, I became obsessed with it about 2 years ago, after getting impressed with its potential. Got a mild case of AI-induced raving insanity, have been recuperating for a last year or so, treating it with regular dosage of rationality and solid math. The obsession doesn't seem to pass though, which I deem a good thing.
I found OB through StumbleUpon.
I never knew I had an inbox. Thanks for telling us about that, but I wonder if we might not want to redesign the home page to make some things like that a bit more obvious.
Yeah, I've been looking at my user page not realizing that it didn't show replies to comments. Now I see I have four replies I didn't know about.
I'm here by way of Overcoming Bias which attracted me with its mix of topics I'm interested in (psychology, economics, AI, atheism, rationality). With a lapsed catholic mother and agnostic father I had a half-heartedly religious upbringing but have been an atheist for as long as I can remember thinking about it. Politically my parents were left-liberal/socialist and I would have described myself that way until my early 20s. I've been trending increasingly libertarian ever since.
I'm particularly interested in applying rationality to actually 'winning' in everyday life. I'm interested in the broad 'life-hacking' movement but think it could benefit from a more rigorously rational/scientific approach. I hope to see more discussion of this kind of thing on less wrong.
My career as a rationalist began when I started doing tech support, and realized the divide between successful troubleshooting and what most customers tried to do. I think the key to "winning" is to challenge your assumptions about how to win, and what winning is. I think that makes me an instrumental rationalist, but I'm not quite sure I understand the term. I'm here because OB and LW are among the closest things I've ever seen to an honest attempt to discover truth, whatever that may turn out to mean. And because I really like the phrase "Shut up and calculate!"
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This belongs in the Welcome post, thank you for reminding me!
I read the "Meaning of Life FAQ" by a previous version of Eliezer in 1999 when I was trying to write something similar, from a Pascal’s Wager angle (even a tiny possibility of objective value is what should determine your actions). I've been a financial supporter of the Organization That Can't Be Named and a huge fan of Eliezer's writings since that same time. After reading "Crisis of Faith" along with "Could Anything Be Right?" I finally gave up on objective value; the "light in the sky" died. Feeling my mind change was an emotional experience that lasted about two days.
This is seriously in need of updating, but here is my home page.
By the way, would using Google AdWords be a good way to draw people to 12 Virtues? Here is an example from the Google keyword tool:
[Edit: added basic info/clarification/formatting]
Perhaps take out the "describe what it is that you protect" part. That's jargon / non-obvious new concept.
Oh, I thought it was nice, because it linked newcomers to one of my favorite posts as one of the orienting-aspects of the site (if people come here new). Maybe if linking text was made transparent, e.g. "describe what it is you value and work to achieve"?
I also like the idea of implicitly introducing LW as a community of people who care about things, and who learn rationality for a reason.
Done, but I wonder if there's another way of saying the same thing. A discussion of what it is we each strive towards would, I think, be a good way of getting to know one another.
A couple of possible additions to the page which I'm still a bit unsure of:
and
Any thoughts?
Maybe single out the theists? Buddhism and Taoism are "religions" too - by most accounts - but they are "significantly" less full of crap.
I'm not convinced Buddhism has less crap. It's just more evasive about it. The vast majority of Buddhist practitioners have no idea what Buddhism is about. When you come right down to it, it's a religion that teaches that the world is bad, love is bad, and if you work very hard for thousands of lifetimes, you might finally attain death.
I vote definitely yes to the first.
As to the second the message isn't a bad idea. But there are so many OB posts being linked to I'm not sure linking to more is the right idea. Maybe once the wiki gets going there can be a summary of our usual reasons there?
The Wiki is going =)
I'll start thinking about a short intro.
I think the first one's good to have: it's positive, and gets people somewhat acclimated to the whole karma thing. I really don't know what to say about the 2nd; if there were a perfect boilerplate response to religious criticism of rationalism, I suppose this forum probably wouldn't exist. Yours is still as good an effort as any, though could we possibly take debating evolution completely off the table? That and calling any scientific theory "just a theory"?
After the note to the religious, perhaps a nice, comforting "you are still welcome here as long as you don't cause trouble." That is, of course, assuming they are still welcome here. Because they are, right?
We are all looking to be "less wrong", so I can't imagine why anyone would be barred.
I wonder if those of us on the younger end of things will be dismissed more after posting our age and education. I admit to be a little worried, but I'm pretty sure everyone here is better than that. Anyway, I was a late joiner to OB (I think I got there after seeing a Robin Hanson bloggingheads) and then came here. I'm an atheist/materialist by way of Catholicism- but pretty bored by New Atheism. I was raised in a pretty standard liberal/left wing home but have moved libertarian. I'm very sympathetic to the "liberaltarian" idea. Free markets with direct and efficient redistribution are where its at.
Don't worry - the top contributor and minor demigod 'round these parts doesn't have a degree, either.
ETA: Since Lojban doesn't think it's clear, I'm somewhat snarkily referring to Eliezer Yudkowsky.
Actually, I'm a bit afraid of the opposite--as an older fart who has a degree through an English Department... I'm often more than a little unsure and I'm concerned I'll be rejected out of hand, or, worse, simply ignored.
I suspect, though, that this crowd is inherently friendly, even when the arguments end up using sarcasm. ;-)
Skeptic and atheist by default, aspiring rationalist since my first psychology course. I only got on the fast track after finding OB about a year ago. I'm trained as a cognitive scientist, and strive to be rational in business and relationships. I'm also an aspiring mystic and believe that continuous transcendence of your goal system is the best leverage point.
Confession: I have little to protect.
Most mystics reject science and rationality (and I think I have a pretty good causal model of why that is) but there have been scientific rational mystics, e.g., physicist David Bohm. I know of no reason why a person who starts out committed to science and rationality should lose that commitment through mystical training and mystical experience if he has competent advice.
My main interest in mystical experience is that it is a hole in the human motivational system -- one of the few ways for a person to become independent from what Eliezer calls the thousand shards of desire. Most of the people in this community (notably Eliezer) assign intrinsic value to the thousand shards of desire, but I am indifferent to them except for their instrumental value. (In my experience the main instrumental value of keeping a connection to them is that it makes one more effective at interpersonal communication.)
Transcending the thousand shards of desire while we are still flesh-and-blood humans strikes me as potentially saner and better than "implementing them in silicon" and relying on cycles within cycles to make everything come out all right. And the public discourse on subjects like cryonics would IMHO be much crisper if more of the participants would overcome certain natural human biases about personal identity and the continuation of "the self".
I am not a mystic or aspiring mystic (I became indifferent to the thousand shards of my own desire a different way) but have a personal relationship of long standing with a man who underwent the full mystical experience: ecstacy 1,000,000 times greater than any other thing he ever experienced, uncommonly good control over his emotional responses, interpersonal ability to attract trusting followers without even trying. And yes, I am sure that he is not lying to me: I had a business relationship with him for about 7 years before he even mentioned (causally, tangentially) his mystical experience, and he is among the most honest people I have ever met.
Marin County, California, where I live, has an unusually high concentration of mystics, and I have in-depth personal knowledge of more than one of them.
Mystical experience is risky. (I hope I am not the first person to tell you that, Stefan!) It can create or intensify certain undesirable personality traits, like dogmatism, passivity or a messiah complex, and even with the best advice available, there is no guarantee that one will not lose one's commitment to rationality. But it has the potential to be extremely valuable, according to my way of valuing thing.
If you really do want to transcend the natural human goal system, Stefan, I encourage you to contact me.
Not so. You don't assign value to your drives because they were inbuilt in you by evolution, you don't value your qualities just because they come as a package deal, just because you are human [*]. Instead, you look at what you value, as a person. And of the things you value, you find that most of them are evolution's doing, but you don't accept all of them, and you look at some of them in a different way from what evolution intended.
[*] Related, but overloaded with other info: No License To Be Human.
They indeed have an aura of Awesome.
AFAIK only without a teacher, or if you stop when the going gets tough.
First I'm going to read some of your stuff, it looks interesting.
I've always thought of a mystic as someone who likes mysterious answers to mysterious questions - I guess you mean something else by it?
"Mystic" is indeed often used derogatorily in that sense, as a justified accusation of Dark Side Epistemology. I pursue this path in a course I link to in a recent comment of mine. The course is a synthesis of several schools of mysticism, including Zen.
It takes some judgment to separate a fraud from a Zen master, and there seems to be consensus here that the real thing can be matched with rationalism. I might post on this when I have sufficient ranks in both Conspiracies.
Like, I suspect, most of the current readership, I'm here via OB. I think I discovered OB by chance, while googling to see if AI was still twenty years away (it was -- still is).
Atheist, materialist, and libertarian views typical for this group; no drastic conversion involved from any previous views, so not much of a rationalist origin story. My Facebook profile actually puts down my religion as "it's complicated", but I won't explain that, it's complicated.
I wrote:
Bit of a non sequitur I made there. How did I come to value rationality itself, rather than all those other things that are some of its fruits? I always have, to the extent that I knew there was such a thing. I remember coming across the books of Korzybski, Tony Buzan, Edward de Bono, and the like, in my teens, and enjoyed similar themes in science fiction. OB is the most interesting thing I've come across in recent years. For the same reasons I've also been interested in "mysticism", but still have no idea what it is or any experience of it. Who will found "Overcoming Woo" to write a blog-book on the subject?
Hi, I've been lurking for a few weeks and am likely to stay in lurker mode indefinitely. But I thought I should comment on the welcome thread.
I would prefer to stay anonymous at the moment, but I'm male, 20's, BS in computer programming & work as a software engineer.
As an outsider, some feedback for you all:
Interesting topics -- keep me reading Jargon -- a little is fine, but the more there is, the harder it is to follow. The fact that people make go (my favorite game) references is a nice plus.
I would classify myself as a theist at the moment. As such (and having been raised in a very christian environment), I have some opinions on how you guys could more effectively proselytize--but I'm not sure it's worth my time to speak up.
Thanks for commenting, if this thread gives cause to you and more like you to stick their heads above the parapet and say hello it will have been a good thing.
People here have mixed feelings about the desirability of proselytization, since the ideas that are most vigorously proselytized are so often the worst. I think that we will want to do so, but we will want to work out a way of doing it that at least gives some sort of advantage to better ideas over worse but more appealing ones. I think we'll definitely want to hear from people like you who probably have more real experience in this field than many of us put together.
And since you're a theist, I'm afraid you'll be one of the people we're proelytizing to, so if you can teach us how to do it without pissing people off that would help too :-)
lava, You aren't the only one on LW that feels the same way. I have similar background and concerns. We are not outsiders. LW's dedication to attacking the reasoning of a post/comment, but not the person has been proved over and over.
This is very good to hear; I wouldn't put it quite that strongly, but I had the impression it was an axis we did well on and it's nice to know someone else sees it that way too.
If you post about things that are interesting to you, we'll talk about them more.
If you act like you have something valuable to say, we'll read it and respond. We would all be likely to learn something in the process.
I read Less Wrong for the insight of the authors, which on other blogs would be buried in drivel. Unlike most blogs, Less Wrong has both norms against sloppy thinking and a population of users who know enough to enforce it. Many other blogs have posts that are three-fourths repetition of news stories that I've already seen, and comments that are three-fourths canned responses and confabulation.
Atheist by default, rationalist by more recent inclination and training. I found OB via Stumbleupon and followed the yellow brick road to Less Wrong. In the spare time left by schoolwork and OB/LW, I do art, write, cook, and argue with those of my friends who still put up with it.
Added the note for theists. At the moment, the set of links is extremely subjective and mostly reflects what, historically, got the job done for me. Please feel free to make edits to the Wiki page.
don't forget to do your own introduction too...
As long as I can remember, I've been an atheist with a strong rationalist bent, inspired by my grandfather, a molecular biologist who wanted at least one grandchild to be a scientist. I discoverd Overcoming Bias a year or so ago and became completely enthralled by it: I felt like I had discovered someone who really knew what was going on and what they were talking about.
Handle: zaph Location: Baltimore, MD Age: 35 Education: BA in Psychology, MS in Telecommunications Occupation: System Performance Engineer
I'm mostly here to learn more about applied rationality, which I hope to use on the job. I'm not looking to teach anybody anything, but I'd love to learn more about tools people use (I'm mostly interested in software) to make better decisions.
About a year ago, I have found Eliezer''s article about cognitive biases and from there googled my way to OB. My interest in rationality lies primarily in learning to make better decisions and better understanding of "how the world works". So far I am mostly reading OB and LW trying to see if topics I would like to write about have already been covered or actually are worth writing about.
If you'd like to tell us about them, we might be able to give you an idea of what's already been said.
OK, let's get this started. There seems to be no way of doing this that doesn't sound like a personal ad.
As well as programming for a living, I'm a semi-professional cryptographer and cryptanalyst; read more on my work there. Another interest important to me is sexual politics; I am bi, poly and kinky, and have been known to organise events related to these themes (BiCon, Polyday, and a fetish nightclub). I get the impression that I'm politically to the left of much of this site; one thing I'd like to be able to talk about here one day is how to apply what we discuss to everyday politics.
What would it look like to apply rationalist techniques to sexual politics? The best guess I have is "interesting", but I don't know in what way.
Yes, it would be interesting. It would involve massively changing the current gender political programs on all sides, which are all ideologies with terrible epistemic hygiene. I'll try to talk about this more when I can.
I started following this site when it was introduced on Overcoming Bias. I came across OB while doing some refresher work on statistical analysis, more particularly how I could help some clients who were struggling with how to use statistical analysis to make better decisions - or in other words they were ignoring data and going with a gut feel bias. I stuck around because I found the conversations interesting, though I find it more difficult to make them useful.
On the religious front ... atheist from about the same time I figured out Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny.
I found LW via OB via a Google search on AI topics. The first few OB posts I read were about Newcomb's paradox and those encouraged me to stick it on my blogroll.
Personal interests in rationality stem from a desire to eliminate "mental waste". I hold pragmatic principles to be of higher value than Truth for Truth's sake. As it turns out, this means something similar to systemized winning.
I have no strong desire to be a rationalist, just interested in the talk here.
This is the first group I've been in where Vladimir is the most common name.
My Rationalist Origin Story
In this context, I think of "rational" as being open to questioning your assumptions. (I adore Simulacra's first step described as "separation of ideas from the self".) I agree with the general view here that being rational is a result of cognitive dissonance -- if your map doesn't fit the landscape then you're motivated to find a new map. The amount of cognitive dissonance throughout my life has been really extraordinary. I suspect that this is true for most people here.
I think I am rational enough, in the sense of being open to new ideas, as I have somewhat fewer assumptions than I need to get by comfortably already. As a small kid scaring myself with extreme philosophical views, I happily observed that afterwards I could just go downstairs and have a turkey sandwich.
I don't feel very well adapted to the real world. I often feel like everyone got a rule book and I didn't. (I recall once in elementary school that some kids said that when God was passing out brains I was hold holding the door open. I had a reputation for asking stupid (obvious) questions and, bewilderingly, I was holding the door open.) So from my point of view, LW is an amazing social micro-niche where it is OK to ask about the rulebook. In fact, you guys are analyzing the rulebook.
That’s the over-arching (hopeful) goal for being here. On a local level, I really enjoy debating and learning about stuff. Regarding learning, I don’t think we are pooling our resources in the most efficient way to get to the bottom of things. I think it would be cool to develop some kind of group strategy to effectively answer questions that should have answers:
“Given a controversial question in which there are good and bad arguments on both sides, how do you determine the answer when you’re not yourself an expert in the subject?”
I've notice time and time again that, if you ask a teacher a lot of questions, most people will assume you're incompetent.
Interesting -- my experience was that they (the class, but sometimes also the teacher) found me annoying, instead.
During my (brief) venture in college, taking a beginning calculus class, I tended to run way behind the teacher, trying to figure out why he'd done some particular step, and would finally give in and ask about it.
Invariably, he would glance at that step, and go, "Oh, you're right. That's wrong, I should have done..." And trailing off, he would erase nearly half the blackboard, back to the place where I was, and start over from there. About half the class would then glare at me, for having made them have to get rid of all the notes they just took.
Apparently, they were copying everything down whether they understood it or not, whereas I was only writing down what I could actually do. Craziest damn thing I ever saw. (But then, I didn't spend very many years in school, either before or after that point.)
Really? I'd expect that (1) most teachers would like lots of questions; (2) the teacher's opinion would be visible to the class; and (3) the class would trust the opinion of the teacher.
Where am I going wrong?
1) is true for good teachers, and increasingly as one progresses through education, but not always. My physics teacher imposed a 5 question/day limit on me, albeit somewhat in jest.
2) is probably true, but may harm the student before they're saved by college/ banding by ability, as 3) becomes increasing true with time.
Your last question is of towering importance.
I'd slightly rephrase that as "...in which both sides have arguments that a non-expert might be convinced by..." - there's no barrier to such a problem arising even where there are no inherently good arguments at all on one side, such as the MMR-autism scare.
This community is too young to have veterans. Since this is the first such post, I think we should all be encouraged to introduce ourselves.
Thanks for doing this!
I started with OB after being linked to Eliezer's series on quantum physics, and I've been absorbed with OB and now LW ever since. I'm more of a lurker, and I've never really commented at OB for fear that my input would be deemed useless. Perhaps I'll begin commenting here on LW now that we have a voting system.
I'm interested in rationality on a personal level and it's relevance in economics. I lurked at OB since its beginning, and am rather surprised I've been active on this site. I have a tendency to over analyse social situations, even over the internet, which resulting in lurking. I've been very impressed by the cooperative nature of this community, its openness to beginners, and the prominent lack of a bystander effect here.
Other interests include: programming (some experience in Java, Scala, and Scheme), political philosophy (left-libertarian, somewhere between Kevin Carson and Will Wilkinson), ethics, science fiction, math, linguistics, conlangs (experience with Quenya, Esperanto, and lojban), and more of the typical nerd interests.
My origin story has more detail on how I ended up here.
OB reader/lurker. not much of a commenter -- i often don't get around to reading posts thoroughly until they're a bit old (at least in 'blog time') and the discussion has moved on...
am i an "aspiring rationalist"? maybe. i want to be alert to irrational behavior/decisions in my life. i'm not yet ready to commit that i will consistently abandon those behaviors and decisions, but i at least want to acknowledge when they're not rationally defensible.
Enough of us read the comments feed that you can often see new discussions spark in old posts; give it a go.
Found on the web at http://thomblake.com and http://thomblake.mp. Twitter: @thomblake
My dissertation is on the philosophical foundations of building ethical robots. It's not quite done.
I'm trained as a philosopher, with special emphasis on virtue ethics/ ethical individualism and computer ethics. I've often characterized myself as a Romantic and an irrationalist. Nietzsche and Emerson FTW.
ETA: link to my origin story and closet survey
OK, let's continue with the introductions.
Lifelong rationalist, at least in principle, though I somehow managed to remain (actively) religious for many years. Political leftie (especially by US standards). Interests include: everything. "Found" LW by being a regular at OB since long before LW was mooted. Gently skeptical about cryonics, imminent technological singularities, and suchlike.
I've been lurking since May 2009. My views on some issues that are often brought up on LW are:
I feel like I should pad out this intro with more information, but that'll have to do for now.
No, this is fine - thanks for commenting!
I grew up in India but in a family where religion was never forced on the individual. I think I became a rationalist the day I started countering superstition and its evils through reasoning. Now as a scientist I find myself rationalising every experimental outcome. As a chemist, I get angry every so often when I have to settle for an empirical outcome over a rational one.
I was introduced to less wrong by alexflint with whom I co-author a blog. I have always been interested in philosophy and hope to take it up as a subject of study very soon.
Welcome! I'm sure we'll be glad to get your input.
Incidentally, if you're interested in checking out some of the posts, there are a couple places which are quite good to start:
Thanks for the welcome. I had a few simple questions. How to get bullet points in comments? How to make text into hyperlinks? and How to get that blue line on the left margin when quoting something?
Much of it is explained by the text that appears when you click the "Help" link below the comment. (Look below the text window at the right.) But to do those three things specifically:
The full specification of the Markdown Syntax has more detail.
Comments use markdown formatting. It's very similar to how one might format an email.