Hi everyone!
I'm graduating law school in May 2010, and then going to work in consumer law at a small firm in San Francisco. I'm fascinated by statistical political science, space travel, aikido, polyamory, board games, and meta-ethics.
I first realized that I needed to make myself more rational when I bombed an online confidence calibration test about 6 years ago; it asked me to provide 95% confidence intervals for 100 different pieces of numerical trivia (e.g. how many nukes does China have, how many counties are in the U.S., how many species of spiders are there), and I only got about 72 correct. I can't find the website anymore, which is frustrating; I like to think I would do better now.
I am a pluralist about what should be achieved -- I believe there are several worthy goals in life, the utility of which cannot be meaningfully compared. However, I am passionately convinced that people should be consciously aware of their goals and should attempt to match their actions to their stated goals. Whatever kind of future we want, we are flabbergastingly unlikely to get it unless we identify and carry out the tasks that can lead us there.
Despite reading and pondering roughly 80 LW articles, together with some of their comments, I continue to believe a few things that will rub many LW readers the wrong way. My confidence in these beliefs has gone down, but is still over 50%. For example, I still believe in a naturalistic deity, and I still believe in ontologically basic consciousness. I am happy to debate these issues with individuals who are interested, but I do not plan on starting any top-level posts about them; I do not have the stamina or inclination to hold the field against an entire community of intelligent debaters all by myself.
I am not sure that I have anything to teach LW in the sense of delivering a prepared lecture, but I hope to contribute to discussions about how to best challenge Goodhart's Law in various applied settings.
Finally, thanks to RobinZ for the warm welcome!
If you've recently joined the Less Wrong community, please leave a comment here and introduce yourself. We'd love to know who you are, what you're doing, or how you found us. Tell us how you came to identify as a rationalist, or describe what it is you value and work to achieve.
If you'd like to meet other LWers in real life, there's a meetup thread and a Facebook group. If you've your own blog or other online presence, please feel free to link it. If you're confused about any of the terms used on this site, you might want to pay a visit to the LW Wiki, or simply ask a question in this thread. Some of us have been having this conversation for a few years now, and we've developed a fairly specialized way of talking about some things. Don't worry -- you'll pick it up pretty quickly.
You may have noticed that all the posts and all the comments on this site have buttons to vote them up or down, and all the users have "karma" scores which come from the sum of all their comments and posts. Try not to take this too personally. Voting is used mainly to get the most useful comments up to the top of the page where people can see them. It may be difficult to contribute substantially to ongoing conversations when you've just gotten here, and you may even see some of your comments get voted down. Don't be discouraged by this; it happened to many of us. If you've any questions about karma or voting, please feel free to ask here.
If you've come to Less Wrong to teach us about a particular topic, this thread would be a great place to start the conversation, especially until you've worked up enough karma for a top level post. By posting here, and checking the responses, you'll probably get a good read on what, if anything, has already been said here on that topic, what's widely understood and what you might still need to take some time explaining.
A note for theists: you will find LW overtly atheist. We are happy to have you participating but please be aware that other commenters are likely to treat religion as an open-and-shut case. This isn't groupthink; we really, truly have given full consideration to theistic claims and found them to be false. If you'd like to know how we came to this conclusion you may find these related posts a good starting point.
A couple technical notes: when leaving comments, you may notice a 'help' link below and to the right of the text box. This will explain how to italicize, linkify, or quote bits of text. You'll also want to check your inbox, where you can always see whether people have left responses to your comments.
Welcome to Less Wrong, and we look forward to hearing from you throughout the site.
(Note from MBlume: though my name is at the top of this page, the wording in various parts of the welcome message owes a debt to other LWers who've helped me considerably in working the kinks out)