RichardKennaway comments on Welcome to Less Wrong! - Less Wrong

48 Post author: MBlume 16 April 2009 09:06AM

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Comment author: RichardKennaway 16 April 2009 04:37:30PM *  4 points [-]
  • Handle: You can see it just above. (Edit: I didn't realise that one can read LW with handles hidden, so: RichardKennaway.)
  • Name: Like the handle.
  • Gender: What the name suggests.
  • Location: Norwich, U.K (a town about two hours from London and 1.5 from Cambridge).
  • Age: Over 30 :-)
  • Education: B.Sc., D.Phil. in mathematics.
  • Occupation: Academic research. Formerly in theoretical computer science; since 10 to 12 years ago, applied mathematics and programming. (I got disillusioned with sterile crossword puzzle solving.)

Like, I suspect, most of the current readership, I'm here via OB. I think I discovered OB by chance, while googling to see if AI was still twenty years away (it was -- still is).

Atheist, materialist, and libertarian views typical for this group; no drastic conversion involved from any previous views, so not much of a rationalist origin story. My Facebook profile actually puts down my religion as "it's complicated", but I won't explain that, it's complicated.

Comment author: RichardKennaway 16 April 2009 07:55:22PM *  1 point [-]

I wrote:

Atheist, materialist, and libertarian views typical for this group; no drastic conversion involved from any previous views, so not much of a rationalist origin story.

Bit of a non sequitur I made there. How did I come to value rationality itself, rather than all those other things that are some of its fruits? I always have, to the extent that I knew there was such a thing. I remember coming across the books of Korzybski, Tony Buzan, Edward de Bono, and the like, in my teens, and enjoyed similar themes in science fiction. OB is the most interesting thing I've come across in recent years. For the same reasons I've also been interested in "mysticism", but still have no idea what it is or any experience of it. Who will found "Overcoming Woo" to write a blog-book on the subject?

Comment author: MrHen 16 April 2009 06:13:01PM 0 points [-]

Edit: I didn't realise that one can read LW with handles hidden

Whoa, you can? Where did I miss that preference?

Comment author: MBlume 16 April 2009 06:26:12PM 2 points [-]

It's not actually a native preference. Marcello wrote us a script which, run under a particular Firefox extension, produces this effect.

Comment author: MrHen 16 April 2009 06:42:41PM *  1 point [-]

Ah, thanks. Is there any chance of this becoming a native preference? I would use it, but do not use Firefox.