Rain comments on Welcome to Less Wrong! - Less Wrong

48 Post author: MBlume 16 April 2009 09:06AM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (1953)

You are viewing a single comment's thread.

Comment author: Rain 21 March 2010 03:02:25PM *  10 points [-]
  • Persona: Rain
  • Age: 30s
  • Gender: Unrevealed
  • Location: Eastern USA
  • Profession: Application Administrator, US Department of Defense
  • Education: Business, Computers, Philosophy, Scifi, Internet
  • Interests: Gaming, Roleplaying, Computers, Technology, Movies, Books, Thinking
  • Personality: Depressed and Pessimistic
  • General: Here's a list of my news sources

Rationalist origin: I discovered the scientific method in highschool and liked the results of its application to previously awkward social situations, so I extended it to life in general. I came up with most of OB's earlier material by myself under different names, or not quite as well articulated, and this community has helped refine my thoughts and fill in gaps.

Found LW: The FireFox add-on StumbleUpon took me to EY's FAQ about the Meaning of Life on 23 October 2005, along with Max More, Nick Bostrom, Alcor, Sentient Developments, the Transhumanism Wikipedia page, and other resources. From there, to further essays, to the sl4 mailing list, to SIAI, to OB, to LW, where I started interacting with the community in earnest in late January 2010 and achieved 1000 karma in early June 2010. Previous to the StumbleUpon treasure trove, I had been turned off the transhumanist movement by a weird interview of Kurzweil in Wired, but still hopeful due to scifi potentials.

Value and desire to achieve: I'm still working on that. The metaethics sequence was unsatisfactory. In particular, I have problems with our ability to predict the future and what we should value. I'm hoping smarter than human intelligence will have better answers, so I strongly support the Singularity Institute.