My name's Normal Anomaly, and I'm paranoid about giving away personal information on the Internet. Also, I don't like to have any assumptions made about me (though this is likely the last place to worry about that), so I'd rather go without a gender, race, etc. Apologies for the lack of much personal data. I can say that my major interest is biology, although I am not yet anything resembling an expert. I eventually hope to work in life extension research. I’m an Asperger’s Syndrome Sci Fi-loving nerd, which is apparently the norm here.

I used to have religious/spiritual beliefs, though I was also a fan of science and was not a member of an organized religion. I believed it was important to be rational and that I had evidence for my beliefs, but I was rationalizing and refusing to look at the hard questions. A couple years ago, I was exposed to atheism and rationalism and have since been trying to make myself more reasonable/less insane. I found LW through Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality a few months ago, and have been lurking and reading the sequences. I'm still scared of posting on here because it’s the first discussion forum where I have known myself to be intellectually outclassed.

I chose the name Normal Anomaly because in my everyday meatspace life I feel different from (read: superior to) everyone around me, but on LW I feel like an ordinary mortal trying to keep up with people talking over my head. Hopefully I've lurked long enough to at least speak the language, and I won't be an annoyance when I comment. I want to socialize with people superior to me; unfortunately for me, they tend to want the same.

In the time I've been lurking, I've started seriously considering cryonics and will probably sign up unless something else changes my mind. I think it's pretty likely that an AGI will be developed eventually, and if it ever is it definitely needs to be Friendly, but I have no idea when other than that I hope it’s in my lifetime, which I want to end only of my own choosing and possibly never.