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Hello everyone,
My name is Allison, and I'm 15 years old. I'll be a junior next year. I come from a Christian background, and consider myself to also be a theist, for reasons that I'm not prepared to discuss at the moment... I wish to learn how to view the world as it is, not through a tinted lens that is limited in my own experiences and background.
While I find most everything on this site to be interesting, I must confess a particular hunger towards philosophy. I am drawn to philosophy as a moth is to a flame. However, I am relatively ignorant about pretty much everything, something I'm attempting to fix. I have a slightly above average intelligence, but nothing special. In fact, compared to everyone on this site, I'm rather stupid. I don't even understand half of what people are talking about half the time.
I'm not a science or math person, although I find them interesting, my strengths lie in English and theatre arts. I absolutely adore theatre, not that this really has much to do with rationality. Anyway, I kind of want to get better at science and math. I googled the double slit experiment, and I find it.. captivating. Quantum physics holds a special kind of appeal to me, but unfortunately, is something that I'm not educated enough to pursue at the moment.
My goals are to become more rational, learn more about philosophy, gain a basic understanding of math and science, and to learn more about how to refine the human art of rationality. :)
LessWrong is basically a really good school of philosophy.
And while you may hear some harsh words about academic philosophy ( that stuff, at least most of what's written in the 20th century, is dull anyway), reading some of the classics can be really fun and even useful for understanding the world around you (because so many of those ideas, sometimes especially the wrong ones, are baked into our society). I started with Plato right after my 15th birthday, continued reading stuff all through high school instead of studying, and occasionally still taking some time to read some old philosophy now that I'm in college.
Concerning intelligence, do not be mislead by the polls that return self-reported IQs in the 140~ range, for active participants its probably a good 20 points lower and for average readers 5 points bellow that.
As for relevant math, or studying math in general just ask in the open threads! LWers are helpful when it comes to these things. You even have people offering dedicated math tutoring, like Patrick Robotham or as of recently me.