= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Jandila comments on Welcome to Less Wrong! - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (1953)
Greetings, LessWrong!
I'm Saro, currently 19, female and a mathematics undergraduate at the University of Cambridge. I discovered LW by the usual HP:MoR route, though oddly I discovered MoR via reading EY's website, which I found in a Google search about Bayes' once. I'm feeling rather fanatical about MoR at the moment, and am not-so-patiently awaiting chapter 78.
Generally though, I've found myself stuck here a lot because I enjoy arguing, and I like convincing other people to be less wrong. Specifically, before coming across this site, I spent a lot of time reading about ways of making people aware of their own biases when interpreting data, and effective ways of communicating statistics to people in a non-misleading way (I'm a big fan of the work being done by David Spiegelhalter). I'm also quite fond of listening to economics and politics arguments and trying to tear them down, though through this, I've lost any faith in politics as something that has any sensible solutions.
I suspect that I'm pretty bad at overcoming my own biases a lot of the time. In particular, I have a very strong tendency to believe what I'm told (including what I'm being told by this site), I'm particularly easily inspired by pretty slogans and inspirational tones (like those this site), and I have, and have always had, one of those Escher-painting brains, to the extent that I was raised very atheist but am now not so sure. (At some level, I have the thought that our form of logic should only apply to our plane of existence, whatever that means.) But hey, figuring all that out is what this site's about, right?
Welcome!
I wouldn't necessarily call that a failing in and of itself -- it's important to notice the influence that tone and eloquence and other ineffable aesthetic qualities have on your thinking (lest you find yourself agreeing with the smooth talker over the person with a correct argument), but it's also a big part of appreciating art, or finding beauty in the world around you.
If it helps, I was raised atheist, only ever adopted organized religion once in response to social pressure (it didn't last, once I was out of that context), find myself a skeptical, materialist atheist sort -- and with my brain wiring (schizotypal, among other things) I still have intense, vivid spiritual experiences on a regular basis. There's no inherent contradiction, if you see the experiences as products-of-brain and that eerie sense that maybe there's something more to it as also a product-of-brain, with antecedents in known brain-bits.
Thanks for the welcome!
I'm certainly not going to join organised religion any time soon, seeing as I think I'm much better off without them. However, it's proving pretty difficult to argue myself out of a general, self-formed religion because of the hangups I have about our logic only applying to our world. I mean, if there is a supreme being for whom "P and ¬P"...
Fortunately, any beings that use logic that is above and beyond my own, and cares about my well-being, will probably want me to just try my best with my own logic. It's not a belief that gets in the way of life much, so I don't think about it all the time, but it would be interesting to sit down and just poke all of that bit of my thoughts with a rationalist stick at some point.