I came to Less Wrong via Overcoming Bias. I heard a talk by Eliezer around 2004-2005, and I've run into him a couple times since then.
I've been interested in rationality as long as I can remember. I obsessively see patterns in the world and try to understand it better. I use this ability to get good at stuff.
I once had social anxiety disorder, no social skills, and no idea what to do with women (see love-shyness; I'm sure there are people on here who currently have it). Thanks to finding the seduction community, I figured out that I could translate thinking ability into social skills, and that I could get good at socializing just like how I got good at everything else. Through observation, practice, and theories from social psychology, evolutionary psychology, and the seduction community, I built social skills and abilities with women from scratch.
Meanwhile, I attempted to eradicate the disadvantages of my personality traits and scientific approach to human interaction. For instance, I learned to temporarily disable analytical and introverted mental states and live more in the moment. I started identifying errors and limiting aspects of the seduction community's philosophy and characterization of women and female preferences. While my initial goal was to mechanistically manipulate people into liking me by experimenting on them socially, an unexpected outcome occurred: I actually became a social person. I started to enjoy connecting with people and emotionally vibing. I cultivated social instincts, so that I no longer had to calculate everything cognitively.
In the back of my head, I've been working on a theory of sexual ethics, particularly the ethics of seduction.
I will write more about heuristic and the seduction community as I've promised, but I've been organizing thoughts for a top-level post, and figuring out whether I'm going to address those topics with analytical posts, or with more of a personal narrative, and whether I would mix them. Anyone have any suggestions or requests?
It sounds like you are currently very much pushing your personality where you want it to go. I would be interested in hearing about your transition from being shy to being comfortable with people. Do you still remember how you were?
I more or less consciously pushed myself into sociability when I was 12 and made a lot of progress. Previously I was much shyer. I've changed so much since then, it feels strange to connect with my earlier memories. I've also experienced "calculating" social situations, emulating alien behaviors - and then later findin...
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