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Vive-ut-Vivas comments on Welcome to Less Wrong! - Less Wrong
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Hi, everyone, you can call me Gigi. I'm a Mechanical Engineering student with a variety of interests ranking among everything from physics to art (unfortunately, I know more about the latter than the former). I've been reading LW frequently and for long sessions for a couple of weeks now.
I was attracted to LW primarily because of the apparent intelligence and friendliness of the community, and the fact that many of the articles illuminated and structured my previous thoughts about the world (I will not bother to name any here, many are in the Sequences).
While the rationalist viewpoint is fairly new to me (aside from various encounters where I could not identify ideas as "rationalist"), I am looking forward to expanding my intellectual horizons by reading, and hopefully eventually contributing something meaningful back to the community.
If anyone has recommendations for reading outside LW that may be interesting or relevant to me, I welcome them. I've got an entire summer ahead of me to rearrange my thinking and improve my understanding.
Why "unfortunately"? I'd love to see more discussion about art on Less Wrong.
Hah, the relative lack of discussion on art was exactly why it seemed to me as if the physics was more useful here. But who knows, I may be able to start up some discussion once I've gotten into the swing of things.
There was Rationality and the English Language and Human Evil and Muddled Thinking a while ago that brought in a literary angle (George Orwell, to be specific) - but I think Yudkowsky talked about how people talk about wanting "an artist's perspective" disingenously before. That there is a relative lack of discussion on art is not a reflection of the particular lack of interest in art, but the fact that we do not know what to say about art that is relevant to rationality.
(Although commentary spinning off of the drawing-on-the-right-side-of-the-brain insight into failure modes of illustration could be illuminating...)
I've been thinking on that, actually. So far all I've come up with is the fact that learning to exercise your creativity and think more abstractly can help very much with finding new ways of approaching problems and looking at your universe, thereby helping to shed new light on certain subjects. The obvious flaw is, of course, that you can learn to be creative without art; there are legions of scientists who show it to be so.
If I happen to come up with something that I think is particularly relevant or interesting I will definitely show it to the community, though.
I was thinking about recommending Effortless Mastery by Kenny Werner-- it's about the hard work of eliminating effort so as to become an excellent jazz musician, but has more general application. For example, it's the only book I've seen about getting over anxiety-driven procrastination.
It seemed too far off topic, but now that you mention art....
I've been trying to use drawing as a test case in this thread:
http://lesswrong.com/lw/2ax/open_thread_june_2010/23am
Just Ctrl+F my name and you'll find my derails and their replies.