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.
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