Welcome to Less Wrong!

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

If you've recently joined the Less Wrong community, please leave a comment here and introduce yourself. We'd love to know who you are, what you're doing, or how you found us. Tell us how you came to identify as a rationalist, or describe what it is you value and work to achieve.

If you'd like to meet other LWers in real life, there's a meetup thread and a Facebook group. If you've your own blog or other online presence, please feel free to link it. If you're confused about any of the terms used on this site, you might want to pay a visit to the LW Wiki, or simply ask a question in this thread.  Some of us have been having this conversation for a few years now, and we've developed a fairly specialized way of talking about some things. Don't worry -- you'll pick it up pretty quickly.

You may have noticed that all the posts and all the comments on this site have buttons to vote them up or down, and all the users have "karma" scores which come from the sum of all their comments and posts. Try not to take this too personally. Voting is used mainly to get the most useful comments up to the top of the page where people can see them. It may be difficult to contribute substantially to ongoing conversations when you've just gotten here, and you may even see some of your comments get voted down. Don't be discouraged by this; it happened to many of us. If you've any questions about karma or voting, please feel free to ask here.

If you've come to Less Wrong to teach us about a particular topic, this thread would be a great place to start the conversation, especially until you've worked up enough karma for a top level post. By posting here, and checking the responses, you'll probably get a good read on what, if anything, has already been said here on that topic, what's widely understood and what you might still need to take some time explaining.

A note for theists: you will find LW overtly atheist. We are happy to have you participating but please be aware that other commenters are likely to treat religion as an open-and-shut case. This isn't groupthink; we really, truly have given full consideration to theistic claims and found them to be false. If you'd like to know how we came to this conclusion you may find these related posts a good starting point.

A couple technical notes: when leaving comments, you may notice a 'help' link below and to the right of the text box.  This will explain how to italicize, linkify, or quote bits of text. You'll also want to check your inbox, where you can always see whether people have left responses to your comments.

Welcome to Less Wrong, and we look forward to hearing from you throughout the site.

(Note from MBlume: though my name is at the top of this page, the wording in various parts of the welcome message owes a debt to other LWers who've helped me considerably in working the kinks out)

Comments (1953)

Comment author: ciphergoth 16 April 2009 09:44:34AM 7 points [-]

This community is too young to have veterans. Since this is the first such post, I think we should all be encouraged to introduce ourselves.

Thanks for doing this!

Comment author: MBlume 16 April 2009 09:49:20AM 0 points [-]

Since this is the first such post, I think we should all be encouraged to introduce ourselves.

Wonderful idea =)

Comment author: ciphergoth 16 April 2009 12:58:30PM *  6 points [-]

OK, let's get this started. There seems to be no way of doing this that doesn't sound like a personal ad.

As well as programming for a living, I'm a semi-professional cryptographer and cryptanalyst; read more on my work there. Another interest important to me is sexual politics; I am bi, poly and kinky, and have been known to organise events related to these themes (BiCon, Polyday, and a fetish nightclub). I get the impression that I'm politically to the left of much of this site; one thing I'd like to be able to talk about here one day is how to apply what we discuss to everyday politics.

Comment author: Alicorn 16 April 2009 04:35:17PM 4 points [-]

What would it look like to apply rationalist techniques to sexual politics? The best guess I have is "interesting", but I don't know in what way.

Comment author: HughRistik 16 April 2009 05:03:41PM 3 points [-]

Yes, it would be interesting. It would involve massively changing the current gender political programs on all sides, which are all ideologies with terrible epistemic hygiene. I'll try to talk about this more when I can.

Comment author: gjm 16 April 2009 02:04:06PM 2 points [-]

OK, let's continue with the introductions.

  • Handle: gjm (gjm11 on the wiki)
  • Name: Gareth McCaughan
  • Location: Cambridge, UK
  • Age: 38
  • Occupation: mathematician (in industry), though I've done a fair bit of programming in my time too.

Lifelong rationalist, at least in principle, though I somehow managed to remain (actively) religious for many years. Political leftie (especially by US standards). Interests include: everything. "Found" LW by being a regular at OB since long before LW was mooted. Gently skeptical about cryonics, imminent technological singularities, and suchlike.

Comment author: thomblake 16 April 2009 02:05:17PM *  2 points [-]
  • Handle: thomblake
  • Name: Thom Blake
  • Location: New Haven, CT (USA)
  • Age: 30
  • Occupation: Programmer, doctoral candidate in computer ethics

Found on the web at http://thomblake.com and http://thomblake.mp. Twitter: @thomblake

My dissertation is on the philosophical foundations of building ethical robots. It's not quite done.

I'm trained as a philosopher, with special emphasis on virtue ethics/ ethical individualism and computer ethics. I've often characterized myself as a Romantic and an irrationalist. Nietzsche and Emerson FTW.

ETA: link to my origin story and closet survey

Comment author: MrHen 16 April 2009 02:44:13PM 4 points [-]
  • Handle: MrHen
  • Name: Adam Babcock
  • Location: Tyler, TX
  • Age: 24
  • Education: BS in Computer Science, minors in Math and Philosophy
  • Occupation: Software engineer/programmer/whatever the current term is now

I found LW via OB via a Google search on AI topics. The first few OB posts I read were about Newcomb's paradox and those encouraged me to stick it on my blogroll.

Personal interests in rationality stem from a desire to eliminate "mental waste". I hold pragmatic principles to be of higher value than Truth for Truth's sake. As it turns out, this means something similar to systemized winning.

Comment author: Alicorn 16 April 2009 03:15:53PM *  8 points [-]
  • Handle: Alicorn
  • Location: Amherst, MA
  • Age: The number of full years between now and October 21, 1988
  • Gender: Female

Atheist by default, rationalist by more recent inclination and training. I found OB via Stumbleupon and followed the yellow brick road to Less Wrong. In the spare time left by schoolwork and OB/LW, I do art, write, cook, and argue with those of my friends who still put up with it.

Comment author: Jack 16 April 2009 04:30:38PM 0 points [-]

Do you know your what areas you want to focus on in philosophy?

Comment author: Alicorn 16 April 2009 04:32:48PM *  3 points [-]

Not sure yet. I have a fledgeling ethics of rights kicking around in the back of my head that I might do something with. Alternately, I could start making noise about my wacky opinions on personal identity and be a metaphysicist. I also like epistemology, and I find philosophy of religion entertaining (although I wouldn't want to devote much of my time to it). I'm pretty sure I don't want to do philosophy of math, hardcore logic, or aesthetics.

Comment author: Jack 16 April 2009 06:48:02PM 0 points [-]

I hope we get to hear your wacky opinions on personal identity some time, I think my senior thesis will be on that subject.

Comment author: Alicorn 16 April 2009 10:37:41PM 3 points [-]

I think I have to at least graduate before anyone besides me is allowed to write a thesis on my wacky opinions on personal identity ;)

In a nutshell, I think persons just are continuous self-aware experiences, and that it's possible for two objects to be numerically distinct and personally identical. For instance (assuming I'm not a brain in a vat myself) I could be personally identical to a brain in a vat while being numerically distinct. The upshot of being personally identical to someone is that you are indifferent between "yourself" and the "other person". For instance, if Omega turned up, told me I had an identical psychological history with "someone else" (I use terms like that of grammatical necessity), and that one of us was a brain in a vat and one of us was as she perceived herself to be, and that Omega felt like obliterating one of us, "we" would "both" prefer that the brain in a vat version be the one to be obliterated because we're indifferent between the two as persons, and just have a general preference that (ceteris paribus) non brains-in-vats are better.

Persons can share personal parts in the same way that objects can share physical parts. We should care about our "future selves" because they will include the vast majority of our personal parts (minus forgotten tidbits and diluted over time by new experiences) and respect (to a reasonable extent) the wishes of our (relatively recent) past selves because we consist mostly of those past selves. If we fall into a philosophy example and undergo fission of fusion, fission yields two people who diverge immediately but share a giant personal part. Fusion yields one person who shares a giant personal part each with the two people fused.

Comment author: michaelhoney 16 April 2009 11:47:11PM 2 points [-]

I think you're on the right track. There'll be a lot of personal-identity assumptions re-evaluated over the next generation as we see more interpenetration of personal parts as we start to offload cognitive capacity to shared resources on the internet.

Semi-related: I did my philosophy masters sub-thesis [15 years ago, not all opinions expressed therein are ones I would necessarily agree with now] on personal identity and the many-world interpretation of quantum physics. Summary: personal identity is spread/shared along all indistinguishable multiversal branches: indeterminacy is a feature of not knowing which branch you're on. Personal identity across possible worlds may be non-commutative: A=B, B=C, but A≠C.

Comment author: Nick_Tarleton 19 April 2009 02:09:03AM 1 point [-]

Personal identity across possible worlds may be non-commutative: A=B, B=C, but A≠C.

I think I understand (and agree with) the other parts, but how is this possible?

Comment author: RobinZ 20 July 2009 07:51:36PM 1 point [-]

Technically, that's non-transitive - non-commutative would be A=B but B≠A.

(Also, it is mildly confusing to use an equality symbol to indicate a relationship which is not a mathematical equality relationship - i.e. reflexive, commutative, and transitive.)

(Also, a Sorites-paradox argument would suggest that identity is a matter of degree.)

Comment author: Jack 17 April 2009 07:08:06AM 0 points [-]

See, now I'm going to block quote this :-P

Comment author: loqi 18 April 2009 09:04:46PM 2 points [-]

In a nutshell, I think persons just are continuous self-aware experiences, and that it's possible for two objects to be numerically distinct and personally identical.

I've found this position to be highly intuitive since it first occurred/was presented to me (don't recall which, probably the latter from Egan).

One seemingly under-appreciated (disclaimer: haven't studied much philosophy) corollary of it is that if you value higher quantities of "personality-substance", you should seek (possibly random) divergence as soon as you recognize too much of yourself in others.

Comment author: Alicorn 19 April 2009 01:52:41AM 2 points [-]

Not really. Outside of philosophy examples and my past and future selves, I don't actually share any personal parts with anyone; the personal parts are continuity of perspective, not abstract personality traits. I can be very much like someone and still share no personal parts with him or her. Besides, that's if I value personal uniqueness. Frankly, I'd be thrilled to discover that there are several of me. After all, Omega might take it into his head to obliterate one, and there ought to be backups.

Comment author: loqi 19 April 2009 03:41:35AM 0 points [-]

I don't actually share any personal parts with anyone; the personal parts are continuity of perspective, not abstract personality traits. I can be very much like someone and still share no personal parts with him or her.

The term "continuity of perspective" doesn't reduce much beyond "identity" for me in this context. How similar can you be without sharing personal parts? If the difference is at all determined by differences in external inputs, how can you be sure that your inputs are effectively all that different?

Frankly, I'd be thrilled to discover that there are several of me. After all, Omega might take it into his head to obliterate one, and there ought to be backups.

I think the above addresses a slightly different concern. Suppose that some component of your decision-making or other subjective experience is decided by a pseudo-random number generator. It contains no interesting structure or information other than the seed it was given. If you were to create a running (as opposed to static, frozen) copy of yourself, would you prefer to keep the current seed active for both of you, or introduce a divergence by choosing a new seed for one or the other? It seems that you would create the "same amount" of personal backup either way.

Comment author: MBlume 17 April 2009 02:59:36AM 0 points [-]

bookmarking improvisational soup =)

Comment author: arthurlewis 16 April 2009 04:13:56PM 7 points [-]
  • Handle: arthurlewis
  • Location: New York, NY
  • Age: 28
  • Education: BA in Music.
  • Occupation: Musician / Teacher / Mac Support Guy
  • Blog/Music: http://arthurthefourth.com

My career as a rationalist began when I started doing tech support, and realized the divide between successful troubleshooting and what most customers tried to do. I think the key to "winning" is to challenge your assumptions about how to win, and what winning is. I think that makes me an instrumental rationalist, but I'm not quite sure I understand the term. I'm here because OB and LW are among the closest things I've ever seen to an honest attempt to discover truth, whatever that may turn out to mean. And because I really like the phrase "Shut up and calculate!"

Note to new commenters: The "Help" link below the comment box will give you formatting tips.

Comment author: MBlume 16 April 2009 05:48:42PM 1 point [-]

Note to new commenters: The "Help" link below the comment box will give you formatting tips.

This belongs in the Welcome post, thank you for reminding me!

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: 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.

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: [deleted] 16 April 2009 04:48:12PM *  5 points [-]

deleted

Comment author: ciphergoth 16 April 2009 04:59:53PM 1 point [-]

I've always thought of a mystic as someone who likes mysterious answers to mysterious questions - I guess you mean something else by it?

Comment author: [deleted] 16 April 2009 05:16:30PM *  2 points [-]

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Comment author: rhollerith 16 April 2009 06:40:01PM *  4 points [-]

Most mystics reject science and rationality (and I think I have a pretty good causal model of why that is) but there have been scientific rational mystics, e.g., physicist David Bohm. I know of no reason why a person who starts out committed to science and rationality should lose that commitment through mystical training and mystical experience if he has competent advice.

My main interest in mystical experience is that it is a hole in the human motivational system -- one of the few ways for a person to become independent from what Eliezer calls the thousand shards of desire. Most of the people in this community (notably Eliezer) assign intrinsic value to the thousand shards of desire, but I am indifferent to them except for their instrumental value. (In my experience the main instrumental value of keeping a connection to them is that it makes one more effective at interpersonal communication.)

Transcending the thousand shards of desire while we are still flesh-and-blood humans strikes me as potentially saner and better than "implementing them in silicon" and relying on cycles within cycles to make everything come out all right. And the public discourse on subjects like cryonics would IMHO be much crisper if more of the participants would overcome certain natural human biases about personal identity and the continuation of "the self".

I am not a mystic or aspiring mystic (I became indifferent to the thousand shards of my own desire a different way) but have a personal relationship of long standing with a man who underwent the full mystical experience: ecstacy 1,000,000 times greater than any other thing he ever experienced, uncommonly good control over his emotional responses, interpersonal ability to attract trusting followers without even trying. And yes, I am sure that he is not lying to me: I had a business relationship with him for about 7 years before he even mentioned (causally, tangentially) his mystical experience, and he is among the most honest people I have ever met.

Marin County, California, where I live, has an unusually high concentration of mystics, and I have in-depth personal knowledge of more than one of them.

Mystical experience is risky. (I hope I am not the first person to tell you that, Stefan!) It can create or intensify certain undesirable personality traits, like dogmatism, passivity or a messiah complex, and even with the best advice available, there is no guarantee that one will not lose one's commitment to rationality. But it has the potential to be extremely valuable, according to my way of valuing thing.

If you really do want to transcend the natural human goal system, Stefan, I encourage you to contact me.

Comment author: [deleted] 16 April 2009 07:14:23PM *  1 point [-]

deleted

Comment author: Vladimir_Nesov 16 April 2009 09:07:07PM *  3 points [-]

Most of the people in this community (notably Eliezer) assign intrinsic value to the thousand shards of desire, but I am indifferent to them except for their instrumental value.

Not so. You don't assign value to your drives because they were inbuilt in you by evolution, you don't value your qualities just because they come as a package deal, just because you are human [*]. Instead, you look at what you value, as a person. And of the things you value, you find that most of them are evolution's doing, but you don't accept all of them, and you look at some of them in a different way from what evolution intended.

[*] Related, but overloaded with other info: No License To Be Human.

Comment author: rhollerith 16 April 2009 10:13:14PM *  0 points [-]

Nesov points out that Eliezer picks and chooses rather than identifying with every shard of his desire.

Fair enough, but the point remains that it is not too misleading to say that I identify with fewer of the shards of human desire than Eliezer does -- which affects what we recommend to other people.

Comment author: Bongo 17 April 2009 12:15:46PM *  1 point [-]

I would be interested to know what it is then that you desire nowadays.

And does everyone who gives up the thousand shards of desire end up desiring the same thing?

Comment author: rhollerith 17 April 2009 10:11:09PM *  0 points [-]

Bongo asks me what is it then that I desire nowadays?

And my answer is, pretty much the same things everyone else desires! There are certain things you have to have to remain healthy and to protect your intelligence and your creativity, and getting those things takes up most of my time. Also, even in the cases where my motivational structure is different from the typical, I often present a typical facade to the outside world because typical is comfortable and familiar to people whereas atypical is suspicious or just too much trouble for people to learn.

Bongo, the human mind is very complex, so the temptation is very great to oversimplify, which is what I did above. But to answer your question, there is a ruthless hard part of me that views my happiness and the shards of my desire as means to an end. Kind of like money is also a means to an end for me. And just as I have to spend some money every day, I have to experience some pleasure every day in order to keep on functioning.

A means to what end? I hear you asking. Well, you can read about that. The model I present on the linked page is a simplification of a complex psychological reality, and it makes me look more different from the average person than I really am. Out of respect for Eliezer's wishes, do not discuss this "goal system zero" here. Instead, discuss it on my blog or by private email.

Now to bring the discussion back to mysticism. My main interest in mysticism is that it gives the individual flexibility that can be used to rearrange or "rationalize" the individual's motivational structure. A few have used that flexibility to rearrange emotional valences so that everything is a means to one all-embracing end, resulting in a sense of morality similar to mine. But most use it in other ways. One of the most notorious way to use mysticism is to use it to develop the interpersonal skills necessary to win a person's trust (because the person can sense that you are not relating to him in the same anxious or greedy way that most people relate to him) and then once you have his trust, to teach him to overcome unnecessary suffering. This is what most gurus do. If you want a typical example, search Youtube for Gangaji, a typical mystic skilled at helping ordinary people reduce their suffering.

I take you back to the fact that a full mystical experience is 1,000,000 times more pleasurable than anything a person would ordinarily experience. That blots out or makes irrelevant everything else that is happening to the person! So the person is able to sit under a tree without moving for weeks and months while his body slowly rots away. People do that in India: a case was in the news a few years ago.

Of course he should get up from sitting under the tree and go home and finish college. Or fetch wood, carry water. Or whatever it is he needs to do to maintain his health, prosperity, intelligence and creativity. But the experience of sitting under the tree can put the petty annoyances and the petty grievances of life in perspective so that they do not have as much influence on the person's thinking and behavior as they used to. Which is quite useful.

Comment author: zaph 16 April 2009 04:49:24PM 4 points [-]

Handle: zaph Location: Baltimore, MD Age: 35 Education: BA in Psychology, MS in Telecommunications Occupation: System Performance Engineer

I'm mostly here to learn more about applied rationality, which I hope to use on the job. I'm not looking to teach anybody anything, but I'd love to learn more about tools people use (I'm mostly interested in software) to make better decisions.

Comment author: Jack 16 April 2009 04:50:31PM 4 points [-]
  • Handle: Jack
  • Location: Washington D.C.
  • Age: 21
  • Education: Feeling pretty self-conscious about being the only person to post so far without a B.A. I'll finish it next year, major is philosophy with a minor in cognitive science and potentially another minor/major in government. After that its more school of some kind.

I wonder if those of us on the younger end of things will be dismissed more after posting our age and education. I admit to be a little worried, but I'm pretty sure everyone here is better than that. Anyway, I was a late joiner to OB (I think I got there after seeing a Robin Hanson bloggingheads) and then came here. I'm an atheist/materialist by way of Catholicism- but pretty bored by New Atheism. I was raised in a pretty standard liberal/left wing home but have moved libertarian. I'm very sympathetic to the "liberaltarian" idea. Free markets with direct and efficient redistribution are where its at.

Comment author: thomblake 16 April 2009 05:40:33PM *  5 points [-]

I wonder if those of us on the younger end of things will be dismissed more after posting our age and education.

Don't worry - the top contributor and minor demigod 'round these parts doesn't have a degree, either.

ETA: Since Lojban doesn't think it's clear, I'm somewhat snarkily referring to Eliezer Yudkowsky.

Comment author: Lojban 16 April 2009 07:21:15PM 0 points [-]

I think you are referring to Eliezer Yudkowsky.

Comment deleted 16 April 2009 05:45:57PM [-]
Comment author: MBlume 16 April 2009 05:47:42PM 0 points [-]

I've seen a slight community norm against "just chatty" comments, and strongly oppose it myself. In any case, this thread is an excellent place for chatty comments =)

Comment author: ThoughtDancer 16 April 2009 06:03:04PM 1 point [-]

Actually, I'm a bit afraid of the opposite--as an older fart who has a degree through an English Department... I'm often more than a little unsure and I'm concerned I'll be rejected out of hand, or, worse, simply ignored.

I suspect, though, that this crowd is inherently friendly, even when the arguments end up using sarcasm. ;-)

Comment author: MBlume 16 April 2009 06:50:18PM 0 points [-]

We do our best =)

Comment author: MorgannaLeFey 17 April 2009 01:47:59PM 0 points [-]

I was sitting here thinking "Wow, I think I'm older than anyone here" and wondering if I might be dismissed in some way. Funny, that.

Comment author: MBlume 16 April 2009 04:53:04PM *  4 points [-]

A couple of possible additions to the page which I'm still a bit unsure of:

You may have noticed that all the posts and all the comments on this site have buttons to vote them up or down, and all the users have "karma" scores which come from the sum of all their comments and posts. Try not to take this too personally. Voting is used mainly to get the most useful comments up to the top of the page where people can see them. It may be difficult to contribute substantially to ongoing conversations when you've just gotten here, and you may even see some of your comments get voted down. Don't be discouraged by this. If you've any questions about karma or voting, please feel free to ask here.

and

A note for theists: you will find a pretty uniformly atheist community here at LW. You may assume that this is an example of groupthink in action, but please allow for the possibility that we really truly have given full consideration to theistic claims and have found them to be false. If you'd like to know how we came to this conclusion, you might be interested to read (list of OB posts, probably including Alien God, Religion's Claim, Belief in Belief, Engines of Cognition, Simple Truth, Outside the Lab etc.) In any case, we're happy to have you participating here, but please don't be too offended to see other commenters treating religion as an open-and-shut case

Any thoughts?

Comment author: MrHen 16 April 2009 04:59:22PM 1 point [-]

After the note to the religious, perhaps a nice, comforting "you are still welcome here as long as you don't cause trouble." That is, of course, assuming they are still welcome here. Because they are, right?

Comment author: MBlume 16 April 2009 05:03:07PM 0 points [-]

I'd like to think so, yes, though they shouldn't be too offended if people poke and prod them a bit.

Comment author: zaph 16 April 2009 05:09:22PM 3 points [-]

We are all looking to be "less wrong", so I can't imagine why anyone would be barred.

Comment author: MBlume 16 April 2009 07:50:48PM 0 points [-]

In any case, we're happy to have you participating here, but please don't be too offended to see other commenters treating religion as an open-and-shut case.

Something like that?

Comment author: MrHen 16 April 2009 10:42:42PM 1 point [-]

Yeah, that works. If I had to edit it myself I would do something like this:

A note to the religious: you will find LW overtly atheist. If you'd like to know how we came to this conclusion you may find these related posts a good starting point. We are happy to have you participating but please be aware that other commenters are likely to treat religion as an open-and-shut case. This isn't groupthink; we really, truly have given full consideration to religious claims and found them to be false.

Just food for thought. I trimmed it up a bit and tried being a little more charitable. I also started an article on the wiki but someone else may want to approve it or move it. The very last sentence is a bit aggressive, but I think it is the softest way to make the point that this is an unmovable object.

Comment author: MBlume 16 April 2009 11:18:35PM 0 points [-]

Blinks well that'll save me a lot of work, thank you =)

Comment author: Bongo 17 April 2009 12:07:39PM 1 point [-]

Shouldn't just assert that it isn't groupthink. Maybe it is. Let them judge that for themselves. Now it sounds defensive, even.

It's probably always dangerous and often wrong to assert that you, or your group, is free of any given bias.

Otherwise I do like the paragraph.

Comment author: zaph 16 April 2009 05:05:43PM 1 point [-]

I think the first one's good to have: it's positive, and gets people somewhat acclimated to the whole karma thing. I really don't know what to say about the 2nd; if there were a perfect boilerplate response to religious criticism of rationalism, I suppose this forum probably wouldn't exist. Yours is still as good an effort as any, though could we possibly take debating evolution completely off the table? That and calling any scientific theory "just a theory"?

Comment author: Jack 16 April 2009 05:07:12PM 1 point [-]

I vote definitely yes to the first.

As to the second the message isn't a bad idea. But there are so many OB posts being linked to I'm not sure linking to more is the right idea. Maybe once the wiki gets going there can be a summary of our usual reasons there?

Comment author: MBlume 16 April 2009 05:15:40PM 1 point [-]

The Wiki is going =)

I'll start thinking about a short intro.

Comment author: timtyler 16 April 2009 05:21:22PM 1 point [-]

Maybe single out the theists? Buddhism and Taoism are "religions" too - by most accounts - but they are "significantly" less full of crap.

Comment author: PhilGoetz 16 April 2009 11:31:10PM 2 points [-]

I'm not convinced Buddhism has less crap. It's just more evasive about it. The vast majority of Buddhist practitioners have no idea what Buddhism is about. When you come right down to it, it's a religion that teaches that the world is bad, love is bad, and if you work very hard for thousands of lifetimes, you might finally attain death.

Comment author: timtyler 17 April 2009 10:54:35PM 0 points [-]

I'm not sure where you are getting that from. A more conventional summary:

"Buddhists recognize him as an awakened teacher who shared his insights to help sentient beings end their suffering by understanding the true nature of phenomena, thereby escaping the cycle of suffering and rebirth (saṃsāra), that is, achieving Nirvana. Among the methods various schools of Buddhism apply towards this goal are: ethical conduct and altruistic behaviour, devotional practices, ceremonies and the invocation of bodhisattvas, renunciation of worldly matters, meditation, physical exercises, study, and the cultivation of wisdom."

Comment author: thomblake 16 April 2009 05:38:53PM 0 points [-]

The first paragraph seems good.

Despite the vocal atheist and nonreligious majority, I wouldn't doubt that there are many religious people here. Is the second paragraph really helpful? Any religious folks (even pagans, heathens, unitarians, buddhists, etc) here to back me up on this?

Comment author: John_Maxwell_IV 16 April 2009 06:06:42PM 1 point [-]

I know one evangelical christian who reads but does not post to Less Wrong.

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Comment author: ciphergoth 16 April 2009 10:46:19PM 0 points [-]

I like both of these (though yes, theism rather than religion will avoid some nitpicking).

Comment author: ektimo 16 April 2009 04:54:06PM *  6 points [-]
  • Name: Edwin Evans
  • Location: Silicon Valley, CA
  • Age: 35

I read the "Meaning of Life FAQ" by a previous version of Eliezer in 1999 when I was trying to write something similar, from a Pascal’s Wager angle (even a tiny possibility of objective value is what should determine your actions). I've been a financial supporter of the Organization That Can't Be Named and a huge fan of Eliezer's writings since that same time. After reading "Crisis of Faith" along with "Could Anything Be Right?" I finally gave up on objective value; the "light in the sky" died. Feeling my mind change was an emotional experience that lasted about two days.

This is seriously in need of updating, but here is my home page.

By the way, would using Google AdWords be a good way to draw people to 12 Virtues? Here is an example from the Google keyword tool:

  • Search phrase: how to be better
  • Cost per click: $0.05
  • Approximate volume per month: 33,100

[Edit: added basic info/clarification/formatting]

Comment deleted 16 April 2009 04:57:26PM [-]
Comment author: jamesnvc 16 April 2009 05:04:52PM 4 points [-]
  • Handle: jamesnvc
  • Location: Toronto, ON
  • Age: 19
  • Education: Currently 2nd year engineering science
  • Occupation: Student/Programmer
  • Blog: http://jamesnvc.blogspot.com

As long as I can remember, I've been an atheist with a strong rationalist bent, inspired by my grandfather, a molecular biologist who wanted at least one grandchild to be a scientist. I discoverd Overcoming Bias a year or so ago and became completely enthralled by it: I felt like I had discovered someone who really knew what was going on and what they were talking about.

Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 16 April 2009 05:15:45PM 4 points [-]

Perhaps take out the "describe what it is that you protect" part. That's jargon / non-obvious new concept.

Comment author: MBlume 16 April 2009 06:59:37PM 1 point [-]

Done, but I wonder if there's another way of saying the same thing. A discussion of what it is we each strive towards would, I think, be a good way of getting to know one another.

Comment author: AnnaSalamon 16 April 2009 07:51:16PM *  5 points [-]

Oh, I thought it was nice, because it linked newcomers to one of my favorite posts as one of the orienting-aspects of the site (if people come here new). Maybe if linking text was made transparent, e.g. "describe what it is you value and work to achieve"?

I also like the idea of implicitly introducing LW as a community of people who care about things, and who learn rationality for a reason.

Comment author: MBlume 16 April 2009 11:16:44PM 0 points [-]

done =)

Comment author: ThoughtDancer 16 April 2009 05:59:46PM *  10 points [-]
  • Handle: thoughtdancer
  • Name: Deb
  • Location: Middle of nowhere, Michigan
  • Age: 44
  • Gender: Female
  • Education: PhD Rhetoric
  • Occupation: Writer-wannabe, adjunct Prof (formerly tenure-track, didn't like it)
  • Blog: thoughtdances Just starting, be gentle please

I'm here because of SoullessAutomaton, who is my apartment-mate and long term friend. I am interested in discussing rhetoric and rationality. I have a few questions that I would pose to the group to open up the topic.

1) Are people interested in rhetoric, persuasion, and the systematic study thereof? Does anyone want a primer? (My PhD is in the History and Theory of Rhetoric, so I could develop such a primer.)

2) What would a rationalist rhetoric look like?

3) What would be the goals / theory / overarching observations that would be the drivers behind a rationalist rhetoric?

4) Would a rationalist rhetoric be more ethical than current rhetorics, and if so, why?

5) Can rhetoric ever be fully rational and rationalized, or is the study of how people are persuaded inevitably or inherently a-rational or anti-rational (I would say that rhetoric can be rationalized, but I know too many scholars who would disagree with me here, either explicitly or implicitly)?

6) Question to the group: to what degree might unfamiliar terminology derived from prior discussions here and in the sister-blog be functioning as an unintentional gatekeeper? Corollary question: to what degree is the common knowledge of math and sciences--and the relevant jargon terms thereof--functioning as a gatekeeper? (As an older woman, I was forbidden from pursuing my best skill--math--because women "didn't study math". I am finding that I have to dig pretty deeply into Wikipedia and elsewhere to make sure I'm following the conversation--that or I have to pester SoullessAutomaton with questions that I should not have to ask. sigh)

Comment author: mattnewport 16 April 2009 08:33:16PM 1 point [-]

1) Yes, I'm interested.

2) I suspect that the study of rhetoric is already fairly rationalist, in the sense of rationality being about winning. Rhetoric seems to be the disciplined/rational study of how to deliver persuasive arguments. I suspect many aspiring rationalists attempt to inoculate themselves against the techniques of rhetoric because they desire to believe what is true rather than what is most convincingly argued. A rationalist rhetoric might then be a rhetoric which does not trigger the rationalist cognitive immune system and thus is more effective at persuading rationalists.

3) From my point of view the only goal is success - winning the argument. Everything else is an empirical question.

4) Not necessarily. Since rationalists attempt to protect themselves against well-sounding but false arguments, rationalist rhetoric might focus more on avoiding misleading or logically flawed arguments but only as a means to an end. The goal is still to win the argument, not to be more ethical. To the extent that signaling a desire to be ethical helps win the argument, a rationalist rhetoric might do well to actually pre-commit to being ethical if it could do so believably.

5) I think the study of rhetoric can absolutely be rational - it is after all about winning. The rational study of how people are irrational is not itself irrational.

6) My feeling is that the answer is 'to a significant degree' but it's a bit of an open question.

Comment author: MBlume 16 April 2009 09:24:01PM *  5 points [-]

I rather like Eliezer's description of ethical writing given in rule six here. I'm honestly not sure why he doesn't seem to link it anymore.

Ethical writing is not "persuading the audience". Ethical writing is not "persuading the audience of things I myself believe to be true". Ethical writing is not even "persuading the audience of things I believe to be true through arguments I believe to be true". Ethical writing is persuading the audience of things you believe to be true, through arguments that you yourself take into account as evidence. It's not good enough for the audience unless it's good enough for you.

Comment author: Bongo 17 April 2009 11:55:05AM 1 point [-]

That's what I was going to reply with. To begin with, a rationalist style of rethoric should force you to write/speak like that, or make it easy for the audience to tell whether or not you do.

(Rationalist rethoric can mean at least three things: ways of communication you adopt in order to be able to deliver your message as rationally and honestly as possible, not in order to persuade; techniques that persuade rationalists particularly well; or new forms of dark arts discovered by rationalists)

(We should distinguish between forms of rhetoric that optimize for persuasion and those that optimize for truth. Eliezer's proposed "ethical writing" seems to optimize for truth. That is, if everyone wrote like that, we would find out more truths and lying would be harder, or even persuading people of untruths. Though it's also awfully persuasive... On the other hand, political rhetoric probably optimizes for persuasion, in so far as it involves knowingly persuading people of lies and bad policies.)

Comment author: curious 16 April 2009 06:01:03PM 2 points [-]
  • handle: curious
  • location: NY
  • age: 27
  • education: BA, biology
  • occupation: journalist

OB reader/lurker. not much of a commenter -- i often don't get around to reading posts thoroughly until they're a bit old (at least in 'blog time') and the discussion has moved on...

am i an "aspiring rationalist"? maybe. i want to be alert to irrational behavior/decisions in my life. i'm not yet ready to commit that i will consistently abandon those behaviors and decisions, but i at least want to acknowledge when they're not rationally defensible.

Comment author: ciphergoth 16 April 2009 08:14:25PM 1 point [-]

Enough of us read the comments feed that you can often see new discussions spark in old posts; give it a go.

Comment author: jimrandomh 16 April 2009 06:04:12PM 3 points [-]
  • Handle: jimrandomh
  • Location: Bedford, MA
  • Age: 22
  • Education: Master's in CS
  • Occupation: Programmer

I read Less Wrong for the insight of the authors, which on other blogs would be buried in drivel. Unlike most blogs, Less Wrong has both norms against sloppy thinking and a population of users who know enough to enforce it. Many other blogs have posts that are three-fourths repetition of news stories that I've already seen, and comments that are three-fourths canned responses and confabulation.

Comment author: lavalamp 16 April 2009 06:05:12PM 4 points [-]

Hi, I've been lurking for a few weeks and am likely to stay in lurker mode indefinitely. But I thought I should comment on the welcome thread.

I would prefer to stay anonymous at the moment, but I'm male, 20's, BS in computer programming & work as a software engineer.

As an outsider, some feedback for you all:

Interesting topics -- keep me reading Jargon -- a little is fine, but the more there is, the harder it is to follow. The fact that people make go (my favorite game) references is a nice plus.

I would classify myself as a theist at the moment. As such (and having been raised in a very christian environment), I have some opinions on how you guys could more effectively proselytize--but I'm not sure it's worth my time to speak up.

Comment author: ChrisHibbert 16 April 2009 06:23:25PM 3 points [-]

I have some opinions on how you guys could more effectively proselytize--but I'm not sure it's worth my time to speak up.

If you post about things that are interesting to you, we'll talk about them more.

If you act like you have something valuable to say, we'll read it and respond. We would all be likely to learn something in the process.

Comment author: ciphergoth 16 April 2009 08:13:03PM *  4 points [-]

Thanks for commenting, if this thread gives cause to you and more like you to stick their heads above the parapet and say hello it will have been a good thing.

People here have mixed feelings about the desirability of proselytization, since the ideas that are most vigorously proselytized are so often the worst. I think that we will want to do so, but we will want to work out a way of doing it that at least gives some sort of advantage to better ideas over worse but more appealing ones. I think we'll definitely want to hear from people like you who probably have more real experience in this field than many of us put together.

And since you're a theist, I'm afraid you'll be one of the people we're proelytizing to, so if you can teach us how to do it without pissing people off that would help too :-)

Comment author: lavalamp 17 April 2009 06:36:33PM 0 points [-]

Thanks for the welcome, everyone.

Personally, I pretty much have no desire to proselytize anyone for anything. Waste of time, in my experience. Maybe you all are different, but no one I've ever met will actually change their mind in response to hearing a new line of reasoning, anyway.

What I do have an interest in is people actually taking the time to understand each other and present points in ways that the other party will understand. Atheists and Christians are particularly bad at this. Unfortunately, the worst offenders on the christian side are the least likely to change, or even see the problem. Perhaps there's more hope for those on the other side.

Anyway, I have no desire to debate theism here.

Comment author: mattnewport 17 April 2009 06:45:46PM 0 points [-]

I have changed my mind in response to hearing a new line of reasoning. One particular poster on a forum I used to frequent changed my mind about politics by patiently giving sound arguments that I had not been presented with before. My political beliefs have been undergoing a continual evolution since then but I can pretty much point to that one individual as instrumental in shifting my political opinions in a new direction.

Comment author: pnkflyd831 16 April 2009 08:51:03PM 2 points [-]

lava, You aren't the only one on LW that feels the same way. I have similar background and concerns. We are not outsiders. LW's dedication to attacking the reasoning of a post/comment, but not the person has been proved over and over.

Comment author: ciphergoth 16 April 2009 10:43:36PM 1 point [-]

LW's dedication to attacking the reasoning of a post/comment, but not the person has been proved over and over.

This is very good to hear; I wouldn't put it quite that strongly, but I had the impression it was an axis we did well on and it's nice to know someone else sees it that way too.

Comment author: John_Maxwell_IV 16 April 2009 06:11:02PM 0 points [-]

Many of the people sharing their info in this thread seem to have been around for a while (like me.) It's not that I mind reading about y'all, but MBlume was asking for people who've recently joined, right?

Comment author: ciphergoth 16 April 2009 06:15:09PM 1 point [-]
Comment author: David_Rotor 16 April 2009 06:42:31PM 2 points [-]
* Handle: David_Rotor
* Name: David
* Location: Ottawa, Canada
* Age: 44
* Gender: Male
* Education: MSc
* Occupation: Procurement, Business Development

I started following this site when it was introduced on Overcoming Bias. I came across OB while doing some refresher work on statistical analysis, more particularly how I could help some clients who were struggling with how to use statistical analysis to make better decisions - or in other words they were ignoring data and going with a gut feel bias. I stuck around because I found the conversations interesting, though I find it more difficult to make them useful.

On the religious front ... atheist from about the same time I figured out Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny.

Comment author: MBlume 17 April 2009 03:18:15AM 0 points [-]

atheist from about the same time I figured out Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny

Oddly enough, I figured out all three at different times. The Easter Bunny was an obvious absurdity from the start, but I told myself stories about how SC might exist for years.

Comment author: mattnewport 16 April 2009 06:47:36PM *  4 points [-]
  • Handle: mattnewport
  • Name: Matt Newport
  • Location: Vancouver, Canada
  • Age: 30
  • Occupation: Programmer (3D graphics for games)
  • Education: BA, Natural Sciences (experimental psychology by way of maths, physics, history and philosophy of science and computer science)

I'm here by way of Overcoming Bias which attracted me with its mix of topics I'm interested in (psychology, economics, AI, atheism, rationality). With a lapsed catholic mother and agnostic father I had a half-heartedly religious upbringing but have been an atheist for as long as I can remember thinking about it. Politically my parents were left-liberal/socialist and I would have described myself that way until my early 20s. I've been trending increasingly libertarian ever since.

I'm particularly interested in applying rationality to actually 'winning' in everyday life. I'm interested in the broad 'life-hacking' movement but think it could benefit from a more rigorously rational/scientific approach. I hope to see more discussion of this kind of thing on less wrong.

Comment author: mitechka 16 April 2009 06:58:31PM 2 points [-]
  • Handle: mitechka
  • Name: Dmitriy Kropivnitskiy
  • Location: Brooklyn, NY
  • Age: 35
  • Education: 2 years of college (major chemistry)
  • Occupation: Systems Administrator

About a year ago, I have found Eliezer''s article about cognitive biases and from there googled my way to OB. My interest in rationality lies primarily in learning to make better decisions and better understanding of "how the world works". So far I am mostly reading OB and LW trying to see if topics I would like to write about have already been covered or actually are worth writing about.

Comment author: MBlume 16 April 2009 07:01:56PM 1 point [-]

So far I am mostly reading OB and LW trying to see if topics I would like to write about have already been covered or actually are worth writing about.

If you'd like to tell us about them, we might be able to give you an idea of what's already been said.

Comment author: mitechka 17 April 2009 10:38:19PM *  0 points [-]

I guess, this is what comes out of writing in a hurry. The way it came out, I am an arrogant ass, who only reads what others have to say to see if it relates to something he, himself wants to say. I found most articles on both OB and LW to be enlightening and some to be a major revelation. The way I view the world changed in a significant way in the past 6 months and in a large part this was due to reading OB/LW and trying to read up on philosophy, math, physics etc. to better understand what people on OB and LW are saying. The topics I am contemplating writing about are concept of "deserving" in relation to utilitarianism and everyday Prisoner's Dilemma type situations and how they differentiate from classical definition of PD.

Edited: and I can definitely manage better grammar

Comment author: steven0461 17 April 2009 10:45:42PM *  0 points [-]

See True PD, though you may have other differences in mind. Desert in utilitarianism hasn't been discussed as far as I remember. And FWIW, great-grandparent did not come off as arrogant to me.

Comment author: ciphergoth 18 April 2009 10:34:30AM 0 points [-]

I am keen to see a discussion of desert in utilitarianism/consequentialism.

Comment author: MBlume 17 April 2009 11:09:12PM 0 points [-]

The way it came out, I am an arrogant ass, who only reads what others have to say to see if it relates to something he, himself wants to say.

I actually didn't get this impression at all -- no worries =)

Comment author: badger 16 April 2009 07:08:22PM 2 points [-]
  • Handle: badger
  • Age: 22
  • Location: Tempe, AZ, but soon to be Champaign, IL
  • Education: BS in math, soon to be an economics grad student
  • Occupation: Fiscal analyst for the state legislature

I'm interested in rationality on a personal level and it's relevance in economics. I lurked at OB since its beginning, and am rather surprised I've been active on this site. I have a tendency to over analyse social situations, even over the internet, which resulting in lurking. I've been very impressed by the cooperative nature of this community, its openness to beginners, and the prominent lack of a bystander effect here.

Other interests include: programming (some experience in Java, Scala, and Scheme), political philosophy (left-libertarian, somewhere between Kevin Carson and Will Wilkinson), ethics, science fiction, math, linguistics, conlangs (experience with Quenya, Esperanto, and lojban), and more of the typical nerd interests.

My origin story has more detail on how I ended up here.

Comment author: hamflask 16 April 2009 08:15:29PM 2 points [-]
  • Handle: hamflask
  • Name: Eric Hofreiter
  • Location: Champaign/Urbana, IL
  • Age: 19
  • Education: 2nd year in electrical engineering

I started with OB after being linked to Eliezer's series on quantum physics, and I've been absorbed with OB and now LW ever since. I'm more of a lurker, and I've never really commented at OB for fear that my input would be deemed useless. Perhaps I'll begin commenting here on LW now that we have a voting system.

Comment author: swestrup 16 April 2009 08:33:12PM 3 points [-]

I never knew I had an inbox. Thanks for telling us about that, but I wonder if we might not want to redesign the home page to make some things like that a bit more obvious.

Comment author: arundelo 16 April 2009 10:23:09PM 1 point [-]

Yeah, I've been looking at my user page not realizing that it didn't show replies to comments. Now I see I have four replies I didn't know about.

Comment author: PhilGoetz 16 April 2009 10:25:30PM 0 points [-]

You can also give an email address. Hopefully, LW will forward private messages to your email. I haven't tested it yet.

Comment author: MBlume 16 April 2009 10:27:40PM 1 point [-]

I just sent you a PM -- did you get an e-mail?

Comment author: PhilGoetz 16 April 2009 10:30:38PM 0 points [-]

Nope.

Comment author: ChrisHibbert 17 April 2009 06:57:02AM 0 points [-]

Yes, this was valuable. I've been using my user page and re-displaying each of the comments to find new comments. Now I've added my inbox to my bookmark list of places to check every morning (right after the cartoons.)

Comment author: Zvi 16 April 2009 08:37:53PM *  8 points [-]
  • Handle: Zvi
  • Name: Zvi Mowshowitz
  • Location: New York City
  • Age: 30
  • Education: BA, Mathematics

I found OB through Marginal Revolution, which then led to LW. A few here know me from my previous job as a professional Magic: The Gathering player and writer and full member of the Competitive Conspiracy. That job highly rewarded the rationality I already had and encouraged its development, as does my current one which unfortunately I can't say much about here but which gives me more than enough practical reward to keep me coming back even if I wasn't fascinated anyway. I'm still trying to figure out what my top level posts are going to be about when I get that far.

While I have told my Magic origin story I don't have one for rationality or atheism; I can't remember ever being any other way and I don't think anyone needs my libertarian one. If anything it took me time to realize that most people didn't work that way, and how to handle that, which is something I'm still working on and the part of OB/LW I think I've gained the most from.

Comment author: byrnema 16 April 2009 08:55:17PM *  2 points [-]
  • Handle: byrnema

My Rationalist Origin Story

In this context, I think of "rational" as being open to questioning your assumptions. (I adore Simulacra's first step described as "separation of ideas from the self".) I agree with the general view here that being rational is a result of cognitive dissonance -- if your map doesn't fit the landscape then you're motivated to find a new map. The amount of cognitive dissonance throughout my life has been really extraordinary. I suspect that this is true for most people here.

I think I am rational enough, in the sense of being open to new ideas, as I have somewhat fewer assumptions than I need to get by comfortably already. As a small kid scaring myself with extreme philosophical views, I happily observed that afterwards I could just go downstairs and have a turkey sandwich.

I don't feel very well adapted to the real world. I often feel like everyone got a rule book and I didn't. (I recall once in elementary school that some kids said that when God was passing out brains I was hold holding the door open. I had a reputation for asking stupid (obvious) questions and, bewilderingly, I was holding the door open.) So from my point of view, LW is an amazing social micro-niche where it is OK to ask about the rulebook. In fact, you guys are analyzing the rulebook.

That’s the over-arching (hopeful) goal for being here. On a local level, I really enjoy debating and learning about stuff. Regarding learning, I don’t think we are pooling our resources in the most efficient way to get to the bottom of things. I think it would be cool to develop some kind of group strategy to effectively answer questions that should have answers:

“Given a controversial question in which there are good and bad arguments on both sides, how do you determine the answer when you’re not yourself an expert in the subject?”

Comment author: ciphergoth 16 April 2009 10:57:45PM 1 point [-]

Your last question is of towering importance.

I'd slightly rephrase that as "...in which both sides have arguments that a non-expert might be convinced by..." - there's no barrier to such a problem arising even where there are no inherently good arguments at all on one side, such as the MMR-autism scare.

Comment author: byrnema 17 April 2009 03:11:21AM 0 points [-]

such as the MMR-autism scare

This was exactly the issue that originally motivated this question for me.

Comment author: PhilGoetz 16 April 2009 11:23:35PM 2 points [-]

(I recall once in elementary school that some kids said that when God was passing out brains I was hold holding the door open. I had a reputation for asking stupid (obvious) questions and, bewilderingly, I was holding the door open.)

I've notice time and time again that, if you ask a teacher a lot of questions, most people will assume you're incompetent.

Comment author: pjeby 16 April 2009 11:31:01PM 6 points [-]

I've notice time and time again that, if you ask a teacher a lot of questions, most people will assume you're incompetent.

Interesting -- my experience was that they (the class, but sometimes also the teacher) found me annoying, instead.

During my (brief) venture in college, taking a beginning calculus class, I tended to run way behind the teacher, trying to figure out why he'd done some particular step, and would finally give in and ask about it.

Invariably, he would glance at that step, and go, "Oh, you're right. That's wrong, I should have done..." And trailing off, he would erase nearly half the blackboard, back to the place where I was, and start over from there. About half the class would then glare at me, for having made them have to get rid of all the notes they just took.

Apparently, they were copying everything down whether they understood it or not, whereas I was only writing down what I could actually do. Craziest damn thing I ever saw. (But then, I didn't spend very many years in school, either before or after that point.)

Comment author: Douglas_Knight 17 April 2009 03:10:23AM 1 point [-]

Really? I'd expect that (1) most teachers would like lots of questions; (2) the teacher's opinion would be visible to the class; and (3) the class would trust the opinion of the teacher.

Where am I going wrong?

Comment author: Vladimir_Nesov 16 April 2009 09:24:33PM *  5 points [-]
  • Vladimir Nesov
  • Age: 24
  • Location: Moscow
  • MS in Computer Science, minor in applied math and physics, currently a grad student in CS (compiler technologies, static analysis of programs).

Having never been interested in AI before, I became obsessed with it about 2 years ago, after getting impressed with its potential. Got a mild case of AI-induced raving insanity, have been recuperating for a last year or so, treating it with regular dosage of rationality and solid math. The obsession doesn't seem to pass though, which I deem a good thing.

Comment author: outlawpoet 16 April 2009 09:26:27PM *  4 points [-]
  • Handle: outlawpoet
  • Name: Justin Corwin
  • Location: Playa del Rey California
  • Age: 27
  • Gender: Male
  • Education: autodidact
  • Job: researcher/developer for Adaptive AI, internal title: AI Psychologist
  • aggregator for web stuff

Working in AI, cognitive science and decision theory are of professional interest to me. This community is interesting to me mostly out of bafflement. It's not clear to me exactly what the Point of it is.

I can understand the desire for a place to talk about such things, and a gathering point for folks with similar opinions about them, but the directionality implied in the effort taken to make Less Wrong what it is escapes me. Social mechanisms like karma help weed out socially miscued or incompatible communications, they aren't well suited for settling questions of fact. The culture may be fact-based, but this certainly isn't an academic or scientific community, it's mechanisms have nothing to do with data management, experiment, or documentation.

The community isn't going to make any money(unless it changes) and is unlikely to do more than give budding rationalists social feedback(mostly from other budding rationalists). It potentially is a distribution mechanism for rationalist essays from pre-existing experts, but Overcoming Bias is already that.

It's interesting content, no doubt. But that just makes me more curious about goals. The founders and participants in LessWrong don't strike me as likely to have invested so much time and effort, so much specific time and effort getting it to be the way it is, unless there were some long-term payoff. I suppose I'm following along at this point, hoping to figure that out.

Comment author: ciphergoth 16 April 2009 10:53:02PM *  4 points [-]

I suspect we're going to hear more about the goal in May. We're not allowed to talk about it, but it might just have to do with exi*****ial r*sk...

Comment author: [deleted] 17 April 2009 09:07:18AM *  0 points [-]

deleted

Comment author: cousin_it 16 April 2009 10:06:53PM *  2 points [-]
  • Handle: cousin_it
  • Name: Vladimir Slepnev
  • Location: Moscow, Russia
  • Age: 26
  • Education: Masters in Math
  • Occupation: Programmer
  • Work, open source, music.

I have no strong desire to be a rationalist, just interested in the talk here.

Comment author: PhilGoetz 16 April 2009 11:20:24PM 6 points [-]

This is the first group I've been in where Vladimir is the most common name.

Comment author: MBlume 16 April 2009 11:15:03PM *  1 point [-]

Added the note for theists. At the moment, the set of links is extremely subjective and mostly reflects what, historically, got the job done for me. Please feel free to make edits to the Wiki page.

Comment author: ciphergoth 16 April 2009 11:49:14PM 1 point [-]

don't forget to do your own introduction too...

Comment author: MBlume 17 April 2009 03:40:41AM 0 points [-]

lol, thanks -- done =)

Comment author: PhilGoetz 17 April 2009 12:01:54AM *  4 points [-]
  • Location: Washington DC, USA
  • Education: BS math (writing minor), PhD comp sci/artificial intelligence (cog sci/linguistics minors), MS bioinformatics
  • Jobs held (chronological): robot programmer in a failed startup, cryptologist, AI TA, lecturer, virtual robot programmer in a failed startup, distributed simulation project manager, AI research project manager, computer network security research, patent examiner, founder of failed AIish startup, computational linguist, bioinformatics engineer
  • Blog

I was a serious fundamentalist evangelical until about age 20. Factors that led me to deconvert included Bible study, successful simulations of evolution, and observation of radical cognitive biases in other Christians.

I was active on the Extropian mailing list, and published a couple of things in Extropy, about 1991-1995.

Like EY, I think AI is inevitable, and is the most important problem facing us. I have a lot of reservations about his plans, to the point of seeing his FAI as UFAI (don't ask in this thread). I think the most difficult problem isn't developing AI, or even making it friendly, but figuring out what kind of possible universes we should aim for; and we have a limited time in which we have large leverage over the future.

I prioritize slowing aging over work on AI. I expect that partial cures for aging will be developed 10-20 years before they are approved in the US, and so I want to be in a position to take published research and apply it to myself when the time comes.

I believe that rationality is instrumental, and repeatedly dissent when people on LW make what I see as ideological claims about rationality, such as that it is defined as that which wins; and at presenting rationality as a value-system or a lifestyle. There's room for that too; I mainly want people to recognize that being rational doesn't require all that.

Comment author: jasonmcdowell 17 April 2009 01:53:31AM *  2 points [-]
  • Handle: jasonmcdowell
  • Name: Jason McDowell
  • Location: Santa Cruz, CA
  • Age: 27
  • Gender: Male
  • Education: Currently 1st year Ph.D student in Applied Optics

I found Less Wrong through http://transhumangoodness.blogspot.com/ I don't remember what link brought me there though. I read the Extropians list (quietly) for a few years staring in maybe 2002. I've been reading assorted transhumanist sites ever since.

I'm always happy when I find new sources of dense, high quality thinking on the internet. The TED talks have been one such treasure trove for instance. I really like Eliezer's writing and think Less Wrong will be a great source.

For the last few years I've been paying the most attention to politics. I think now is a good time for me to reengage with transhumanism. I have very rarely posted or commented in the past, preferring to just read and learn instead. Maybe with Less Wrong I'll have a reason to write. Hi!

Comment author: MBlume 17 April 2009 02:28:35AM *  2 points [-]
  • Handle: MBlume
  • Name: Michael Blume
  • Location: Santa Barbara, California
  • Age: 23
  • Gender: Male
  • Education: Physics BS, pursuing PhD
  • External: UCSB Physics, Livejournal, Twitter, OKCupid (any advice here would be appreciated, incidentally), Facebook

I'm Mike, I'm a grad student, research assistant, and teacher's aide at UC Santa Barbara.

I got here by way of OB (as many of us did), got there by way of a Reddit link to, if memory serves, Explainers Shoot High. Aim Low!, though my memory is pretty hazy, since I wound up reading a lot of posts very quickly. I got to Reddit by way of XKCD, and got to XKCD by way of my roommate sending me an amusing comic about string theory.

Let's see. I'm car-free, and a lifestyle biker. I love to ride, and enjoy the self-sufficiency of getting everywhere by my own muscle.

I'm currently a pescatarian, and haven't eaten any land-critters since I was 11. I continue to do this because I remain uncertain about the nature of consciousness, and thus am not certain to what extent animals suffer or experience morally significant pain. I suspect that morally significant consciousness is limited to the primates, but having not yet been fully convinced, I accept the (relatively minor) inconvenience of avoiding meat. If anyone would like to help me resolve this uncertainty, I'd certainly enjoy the conversation.

I've been an atheist for about a year now -- Eliezer's OB writing, along with some other writings I found through Reddit, pushed me in that direction throughout the end of 2007, but I did not accept the matter as fully determined until February 2008. This was not without personal consequences.

I have been rather addicted lately to the music of Tim Minchin -- I'd recommend him to anyone here.

I'm currently working in high-energy particle physics under the direction of professor Jeff Richman and in collaboration with the good folks at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN I'm hoping to, in this way, gain some first-hand experience with how science progresses, and then spend the bulk of my life trying to explain this to the world -- trying to convey a gut-level understanding of what it is scientists do, and why they can be trusted when they tell you how old a rock is, or what's likely to happen if you keep putting the same amount of carbon in the atmosphere every day for the next 50 years.

That's the plan, anyway.

Comment author: Alicorn 18 April 2009 01:27:58AM 0 points [-]

I'm a pescetarian too, and have been since I was seventeen. I have recently stopped eating octopus and squid as well as things I share air with. There are a lot of reasons to reduce or eliminate meat consumption, not just ethical concerns about animal consciousness - as long as you can enjoy a good quality of life and level of health without eating animals, it's easy to find adequate reason not to. (It's more efficient, more environmentally sound, less expensive, healthier, and, yes, provides a nice ethical nervousness buffer zone to make sure you're in the clear as far as the moral significance of animals is concerned.)

Comment author: MichaelBishop 19 April 2009 05:58:43PM 0 points [-]

i'm also mostly vegetarian. i eat some fish.

Comment author: JGWeissman 17 April 2009 03:10:09AM 4 points [-]
  • Handle: JGWeissman
  • Name: Jonathan Weissman
  • Location: Orange County, California
  • Age: 27
  • Education: Majored in Math and Physics, minored in Computer Science
  • Occupation: Programmer
  • Hobby: Sailboat racing

I found OB through StumbleUpon.

Comment author: Nanani 17 April 2009 04:29:31AM *  2 points [-]
  • Handle: Nanani

  • Location: Japan

  • Age: 25

  • Gender: Female (not that it matters)

  • Education: BSc Astrophysics

  • Occupation: Interpretation/Translation (Mostly English and Japanese, in both directions)

  • Goal : To Win.

I found this site through Overcoming Bias, and had already been lurking at the latter for years beforehand. When I first came across Overcoming Bias, it was for too difficult for me. I have since become stronger, enough to read most of its archives and become even stronger. I intend to keep this positive cycle active.

I must say that I hardly feel like a newcomer due to those years of lurking in the shadows. Let's see how the light feels.

Comment author: MBlume 17 April 2009 04:51:16AM 1 point [-]

Goal : To Win.

But what does a win look like to you?

Comment author: Nanani 17 April 2009 05:06:09AM 4 points [-]

Not "A" win, but winning in general, Winning at Life if you will.

To me, this means :

  • Staying true to myself, becoming only what I decide I want to be (which is in turn based on achieving sub-goals)

  • Achieving my lesser and short-term goals.

  • Being able to constantly improve myself

  • Not Dying (I'm only not signed up for cryo because I live in Japan and have trouble with the creation of a suitable policy. Ideally, I'd like to go transhuman.)

Explicit failure scenarios involve becoming a future self that stays still instead of moving forward. If I became a person who was satisfied with the status quo without any desire to expand her horizons, that would be a dramatic failure. Another possibility to avoid is giving in to biology, blindly following urges and, yes, succumbing to biases.

In other words, Winning is Future-Bending to get to be the Me I want to be.

Comment author: HughRistik 17 April 2009 06:42:32AM *  6 points [-]
  • Handle: HughRistik (if you don't get the joke immediately, then say "heuristic" out loud)
  • Age: 23
  • Education: BA Psychology, thinking of grad school
  • Occupation: Web programmer
  • Hobbies: Art, clubbing, fashion, dancing, computer games, too many others to mention
  • Research interests: Mate preferences, sex differences, sex differences in mate preferences, biological and social factors in homosexuality, and the psychology of introversion, social anxiety, high sensitivity, and behavioral inhibition

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?

Comment author: HughRistik 17 April 2009 06:45:39AM 1 point [-]

I am also interested in gender politics. I started off with reflexively feminist views, yet I soon realized flaws in certain types of feminism. Like with religions, I think that there some really positive goals and ideas in feminism, and some really negative ones, all mixed together with really bad epistemic hygiene.

There are more rational formulations of some feminist ideas, yet more rational feminists often fail to criticize less rational feminists (instead calling them "brilliant" and "provocative"), causing a quality control problem leading to dogmatism and groupthink. I am one of the co-bloggers on FeministCritics.org, where we try to take a critical but fair look at feminism and start dialogues with feminists. I'm not very active there anymore, but here's an example of the kind of epistemic objections that I make towards feminism.

My eventual goal is to formulate a gender politics that subsumes the good things about feminism.

Comment author: jasonmcdowell 17 April 2009 10:09:48AM 1 point [-]

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 finding them to have become natural and enjoyable.

For the past few years, I've just been coasting - I haven't changed much and I don't know how to summon up the drive I had before.

Comment author: HughRistik 19 April 2009 01:38:39AM 2 points [-]

Do you still remember how you were?

Yes, though the painfulness of the memory is fading.

I've also experienced "calculating" social situations, emulating alien behaviors - and then later finding them to have become natural and enjoyable.

Do you have a particular example? For me, one of them is smalltalk. I don't necessarily enjoy all smalltalk all the time, but I enjoy it a lot more than I ever thought that I would, back when I viewed it as "pointless" and "meaningless" (because I didn't understand that the purpose of most social communication is to share emotions, not to share interesting factual information and theories). Similar story with flirting.

With such social behaviors, everyone "learned" them at some point. Most people just learned them during their formative experiences. Some people, due to a combination of biological and social factors, learn this stuff later, or not at all. The cruel thing is that once you fall off the train, it's harder and harder to get back on. See the diagram here for a graphic illustration.

For the past few years, I've just been coasting - I haven't changed much and I don't know how to summon up the drive I had before.

I've gone through periods of growth, and periods of plateaus. Once I got to a certain level of slightly above average social skills, it became easy to get complacent with mediocrity. I start making progress again when I keep trying new things, going new places, and focusing on what on what I want.

Comment author: CronoDAS 17 April 2009 07:06:54AM 2 points [-]
  • Handles: CronoDAS, Ronfar, Doug S.
  • Facebook profile
  • Education: BS in Computer Engineering, minor in Mathematics. Oh, and lots of web-surfing.
  • Currently job-free, by choice
  • Politics: Liberal, with some libertarian sympathies
  • Meta-ethics: Desire Utilitarianism
  • Former tournament Magic player. Gave it up because he wanted to save money.
  • Takes antidepressant medication. Wishes that he never came into existence, but is not an immediate danger to himself.
  • Has read basically the entire Overcoming Bias blog
  • Is a big fan of the TV Tropes Wiki.
Comment author: prase 17 April 2009 09:37:47AM 2 points [-]
  • handle: prase
  • name: Hynek Bíla
  • gender/sex: male
  • age: 27
  • location: Prague
  • occupation: theoretical physicist

I am not sure whether I am a newcomer, since I read OB regularly more than a year and comment occasionaly. I have found OB almost randomly, via link from other website.

Comment author: blogospheroid 17 April 2009 09:54:51AM *  2 points [-]
  • Handle: blogospheroid - (I'm fat)
  • Name: Prakash Chandrashekar
  • Location: Bangalore, India
  • Age: 29
  • Education: Btech (BS) in civil engineering, Post Grad diploma in Management
  • Occupation: Functional consultant for Enterprise software implementation
  • Hobby: Browsing the net. I lurk a lot, comment very little.
  • Political beliefs - georgist libertarian, enthusiastic about dynamic geography
  • Religious, ethical beliefs - Atheist about omnipotent god, Agnostic about simulation controllers/watchers, believer in karma and reincarnation, searching for a true dharma in this weird age, greater intelligence is one of the few true ways of finding win-win situations
  • philosophical influences - vivekananda, ayn rand, nietszche, pirsig, eliyahu goldratt, the economist/technophile cluster, yudkowsky

  • Short term goal - Lose fat, keep job

  • Medium Term goal - conquer fear (of failure, mostly), achieve financial independence
  • Long term goal - expand mental capacity and live a full life
Comment author: MorgannaLeFey 17 April 2009 02:39:38PM *  2 points [-]
  • Handle: MorgannaLeFey
  • Name: Siobhan
  • Location: Central Vermont (via Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, Iowa, Minnesota, and Alaska)
  • Age: At this point, I'm 43. I expect that to change.
  • Occupation: database and web applications developer
  • Education: I studied theatre arts and communications (no degree). Eleven years later I studied psychology, women's studies, and community development (primarily online and non-academic). Again, no degree.

When I registered I didn't consider that my handle might not be the most apt for this community, it is simply who I have been online for over fifteen years (though I have been participating in online communities since 1983). The original reasons for my handle have faded, but my attachment to the name has remained. So please, don't read more into my handle than my having a preference for the way it sounds.

I was pushed away from mathematics and the sciences from an early age by the limitations of our public school system, though I had the ability to excel in both. I was not encouraged to develop the habits of intellectual discipline that would have carried me beyond those limitations. I was content to glide through my classes, doing only the minimum necessary to maintain my A average without bothering to push much beyond that. My social life, outside activities, and connections were more important to me. This isn't something I have any regrets over, I bring it up to somewhat explain my intellectual inertia and lack of familiarity with certain standard concepts found here.

The immediate circumstance that led me to LW is that a close friend found this site and forwarded the link to my husband. My husband forwarded the link to me. However, the path that led me here started much earlier. I was of a skeptical nature from an early age, though I have only come to realize this in the course of years of self-examination. I go through periods of studying things, then leaving them behind in favor of other, less stringent pursuits. Yet, as I age my brain gets mushy more easily, so I've been looking for ways to stave that off. In researching the issue, I found that the effects of aging on the brain can be mitigated through intellectual exercise. Not much of a surprise, really. So that has me poking around for ways to exercise my brain.

There is, of course, so much more to the story of how I got here. I could fill pages that I suspect most would find uninteresting. So I'll stop here.

Comment author: CronoDAS 17 April 2009 05:37:57PM 0 points [-]

I found that the effects of aging on the brain can be mitigated through intellectual exercise. Not much of a surprise, really. So that has me poking around for ways to exercise my brain.

I recommend video games, or Magic: the Gathering.

Comment author: SoullessAutomaton 17 April 2009 06:01:10PM *  0 points [-]

Good old-fashioned learning also works, and I believe there is some documented evidence for things like crossword puzzles helping as well.

The main thing is activities that are neither passive nor physical. Likely, mind puzzles are better than non-reflex-based videogames are better than most fiction are better than watching television or some rot like that.

Comment author: Pierre-Andre 17 April 2009 05:59:27PM *  3 points [-]
  • Handle: Pierre-Andre
  • Name: Pierre-André Noël
  • Age: 26
  • Gender: Male.
  • Location: Québec City, Québec, Canada
  • Education: B.Sc. Physics, M.Sc. Physics and currently midway through Ph.D. Physics.
  • Research interests: Dynamics, networks, dynamics over networks, statistical mechanics.
  • Newcomb: Commited to one-box if facing a decent Omega.
  • Prisoner: Cooperate if I judges that the other will.

I discovered OB some months ago (don't remember how) and reads both OB and LW. For now, I am mostly a lurker.

I have been raised as a Catholic Christian and became atheist midway through high school. I think that Science should take a clear position on the topic of religions, for the good of mankind.

I plan to write top-level posts on some of the following topics when I will have the time (and the karma) to do so.

  • Beyond the fad: the word "emergence" carries > 0 information.
  • Telling the truth.
  • Universal priors.
  • Many Bayesian-related topics.

By the way, does the "be half accessible" request holds for LW too?

Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 17 April 2009 06:15:21PM 2 points [-]

Re: be half accessible - I'd say no. There are accessible posts aplenty here. But "don't be gratuitously inaccessible" is still good advice.

Comment author: ciphergoth 18 April 2009 10:20:29AM 2 points [-]

For those wondering what this conversation is about:

Contributors: Be Half Accessible, Overcoming Bias, December 21, 2006

Comment author: dreeves 17 April 2009 10:24:45PM *  2 points [-]

I'm Daniel Reeves (not that other Daniel Reeves who I've seen comment on OvercomingBias, although conveniently I think every post by him I've seen I've agreed with!), a research scientist at Yahoo in New York City. I work on game theory and mechanism design though I'm a computer scientist by training. At the moment I'm particularly interested in anti-akrasia tools and techniques.

PS: You pointed out a handy inbox link -- lesswrong.com/message/inbox -- but I can't seem to find that anywhere else on the site.

Comment author: orthonormal 17 April 2009 11:28:29PM 3 points [-]
  • Handle: orthonormal
  • Name: Patrick
  • Location: Berkeley, CA
  • Age: 25
  • Occupation: Math PhD Student
  • Interest in rationality: Purely epistemic, negligibly instrumental.
  • Atheist (see origin story), tentative one-boxer, MWI evangelist, cryocrastinator.

I'm driven towards rationality by three psychological factors— first, that I love to argue on philosophical and related matters, secondly that I'm curious about most fields of intellectual endeavor, and thirdly that it pains me to realize I'm being less than fully honest with myself.

Ye gods, that sounds like a personals ad. Should compensate by adding that I'm rather selfish compared to the standards of altruism espoused here; my typical desire is to observe and comprehend, not necessarily to help.

Comment author: Chase_Johnson 18 April 2009 12:52:01AM *  2 points [-]
  • Handle: Chase_Johnson
  • Name: same
  • Location: Richardson, TX (near Dallas)
  • Age: 22
  • Occupation: Software Developer
  • Education: BS Electrical Engineering '09
  • Things I Fiddle With: Electronics, Software, Cars, Motorcycles
  • Things I Read: SF, math, physics, lifehacking, technical manuals

I read LW and OB in part as procrastination. It's interesting stuff. I don't spend a lot of time implementing the LW/OB rationality techniques right now, and I am not sure I ever will. What drew me in in the first place was the discussion of AIs. However, I am more interested in the implementation of AGI than in the development of rationality that seems to be dominating at LW. Introspection can be interesting and useful, but I have a lot more fun building and tinkering.

Within my domains of specific knowledge, software and electrical engineering, I am interested in creating systems with novel uses that were impossible five or ten years ago, e.g., I am trying to get involved with the nascent GandhiCam project. Ambient intelligence, autonomous systems, things of that nature. I see a world of data all around us almost entirely unprobed and unanalyzed, and I want to collect that data. I am an inveterate generalist and interested in almost everything.

I suppose within the jargon of OB/LW, I would be considered an instrumental rationalist. I have little interesting in anything of a purely theoretical nature; I want to see something happen in reality. As a result, I pursue rationality with the intent of understanding the world and making things to expand our human abilities.

Currently, LW is losing interest for me. This is probably not a problem with LW, just a mismatch of interests. I probably won't participate much, but I do hope to see the cause succeed. However, I think I'd be more happy with the entire world being somewhat less irrational, rather than a few of us being extremely more rational.

EDIT: i suck at formatting

Comment author: MichaelBone 18 April 2009 01:50:56AM *  2 points [-]
  • Handle: MichaelBone
  • Name: Michael Bone
  • Location: Toronto, ON
  • Age: 25
  • Education: Bachelor of Design, currently studying cognitive science and AI.

I find minds to be the most beautiful objects in the known universe; at once, natural and artifact, localized and distributed, intuitively clear and epistemically ephemeral the mind continually beguiles, delights and terrifies me. Of particular personal interest is a mind's propensity and capability for creativity and, separately, wisdom.

Like the majority of artists, I dream of creating beautiful and profound reflections of reality through a human lens. I believe the creation of a mind would be the ultimate expression of this desire.

Like the majority of parents, I dream of my creation surpassing me in all aspects. I believe the design of a mind could be the ultimate expression of this desire.

But a mind is no passive statue or oil painting. The very dynamic nature of the mind that makes it so beautiful also implies grave ethical concerns both for humanity and for the artificial intelligence itself (a subject I am sure you're all familiar with).

It is in ethical decisions that rationality is most needed, and yet least practiced: where one is continually admonished to follow one's “gut” and not one's “brain”. As such, rationality as it pertains to ethics is my primary concern.

As far as contributing goes, I don't imagine that I'm yet expert enough on any particular topic to be of much use, but I have been reading up on the wisdom literature with the intention of tying cognitive mechanisms associated with wisdom to concepts in machine learning, so there is some hope...

Comment author: randallsquared 18 April 2009 03:21:35PM 1 point [-]
  • Handle: randallsquared (why are we putting this, anyway?)
  • Name: Randall Randall
  • Location: Washington, DC metro area
  • Age: 35
  • Education: some college; mostly autodidact.

I found LW through OB, which was mentioned on the SL4 list at least a year ago. I haven't contributed much in either place (nor did I post much on SL4), and mostly read OB and LW when I've used up the recent interesting commentary on reddit and Hacker News.

That said, I'm interested in rationality and thinking, but not to the extent that many here seem to be. I tend to assume my intuition is correct about things (biases and all) until it's obvious that it isn't, and due in part to this, I'm pretty conservative, morally, though libertarian/anarchist politically.

Comment deleted 18 April 2009 06:06:05PM [-]
Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 18 April 2009 06:48:42PM 1 point [-]

If you're literate in Python, we've got some free software programming tasks going here on Less Wrong...

Comment author: John_Maxwell_IV 20 April 2009 05:27:58PM 2 points [-]

I am very good at my profession, programming, and make about as much per hour as expensive lawyers.

Any advice on how to become this good?

Comment author: XFrequentist 18 April 2009 08:31:20PM *  5 points [-]
  • Name: Alex Demarsh
  • Age: 26
  • Education: MSc Epidemiology/Biostatistics
  • Occupation: Epidemiologist
  • Location: Ottawa, Canada
  • Hobbies: Reading, travel, learning, sport.

I found OB/LW through Eliezer's Bayes tutorial, and was immediately taken in. It's the perfect mix of several themes that are always running through my head (rationality, atheism, Bayes, etc.) and a great primer on lots of other interesting stuff (QM, AI, ev. psych., etc). The emphasis on improving decision making and clear thinking plus the steady influx of interesting new areas to investigate makes for an intoxicating ambrosia. Very nice change from many other rationality blogs, which seem to mostly devote themselves to the fun-but-eventually-tiresome game of bashing X for being stupid/illogical/evil (clearly, X is all of these things and more, but that's not the point). Generally very nice writing, too.

As for real-life impact, LW has:

  • grown my reading list exponentially,
  • made me want to become a better writer,
  • forced me to admit that my math is nowhere near where it needs to be,
  • made my unstated ultimate goal of understanding the world as a coherent whole seem less silly, and
  • altered my list of possible/probable PhD topics.

I'll put some thought into my rationalist origins story, but it may have been that while passing several (mostly enjoyable) summers as a door-to-door salesman, I encountered the absolutely horrible decision making mechanisms of lots and lots of people. It kind of made me despair for the world, and probably made me aspire to do better. But that could be a false narrative.

Comment author: [deleted] 19 April 2009 06:37:29PM *  1 point [-]

del

Comment author: Kaj_Sotala 19 April 2009 07:20:37PM *  2 points [-]
  • Name: Kaj Sotala
  • Nick: Xuenay
  • Location: Helsinki, Finland
  • Sex: Male
  • Age: 22
  • Education: Working on a Bachelor's degree in Cognitive Science (University of Helsinki)
  • Blog, website (hasn't been updated in a while)
  • Positions of note: Board member and spokesman, the Pirate Party of Finland (a political party seeking to strengthen privacy and freedom of speech laws, legalize non-commercial filesharing and drastically cut the duration of commercial copyright - 5-10 years is the official suggestion)
  • Interests: Far too many, ranging from role-playing and gender politics to economics and AI. I have written one book about RPGs, currently finishing one on emerging technologies, and should start on a third one (not sure if I can disclose the topic yet) soon. Unfortunately for the readership of this site, they're all in Finnish.
Comment author: Nick_Tarleton 19 April 2009 08:02:13PM *  2 points [-]
  • Name: Nick Tarleton (!)
  • Age: 18
  • Location: Pittsburgh, PA / Cary, NC
  • Education: freshman, Carnegie Mellon University, undecided field

I discovered OB in early 2007, after my interest in transhumanism led me to Eliezer Yudkowsky's other works. I care about preventing the future from being lost, and think that Eliezer is right about how to do this. I also care plenty about being less wrong for its own sake.

I don't feel like I have much to share in this thread; my beliefs and values are probably pretty typical for Singularitarian Bayesian-wannabes (atheist, consequentialist, MWI, ...), and there's not much more to my origin story (not raised religious or anything like that, although I did have a difficult time figuring out a sane metaethic after being forced to seriously consider the issue for the first time). I do have quite a few ideas stored up to post on when I have the time this summer, though.

I would appreciate contact with any other undergraduates interested in existential risk and/or Friendly AI.

Comment author: james_edwards 19 April 2009 11:29:37PM 2 points [-]
  • Name: James Edwards
  • Handle: james_edwards
  • Location: Auckland, New Zealand
  • Education: BA (Philosophy, plus some Statistics and Chinese); will finish my law degree within a few months.
  • Occupation: Tutor for a stage one (freshman) Critical Thinking course - teaching old-school rationalism, focused on diagnosing and preventing fallacious arguments.

Came upon Eliezer's simple truth years ago, then happened upon a link to OB during a phase of reading econblogs. As a teenager I was appalled that many people believed the unsupported claims of homeopathy and other less-than-evidence based medical treatments.

I worry that my limited mathematical education is a barrier to becoming a better rationalist, and intend to learn more. A bigger barrier still is akrasia - I struggle to follow through on my well-intentioned plans.

Rationalist lawyers seem to be rare. There may be good reasons for this which I have failed to consider. For the time being, I'm planning to write my dissertation on whether the current law makes cryogenics viable for New Zealanders.

Comment author: Cyan 21 April 2009 12:59:48AM 3 points [-]
  • Handle: Cyan
  • Age: 31
  • Species: Pan sapiens (male)
  • Location: Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
  • Education: B.Sc. biochemistry, B.A.Sc. chemical engineering, within pages of finishing my Ph.D. thesis in biomedical engineering
  • Occupation: statistical programmer (would be a postdoc if I were actually post the doc) at the Ottawa Institute of Systems Biology

    I'm principally interested in Bayesian probability theory (as applied in academic contexts as opposed to rationalist ones). I don't currently attempt to apply rationalist principles in my own life, but I find the discussion interesting.

Comment author: evtujo 21 April 2009 05:02:31AM 0 points [-]
* Handle: evtujo
* Location: Montana
* Age: 40
* Gender: Male
* Education: Physics BS, CompSci Masters
* Occupation: Programmer

I've been following OB pretty much since the first couple of months. I was trying to think when I would have started calling myself a rationalist. I can't think of any time in my life when I wouldn't have thought of myself that way. Even 20+ years ago when I thought the world was 6000 years old. I just wasn't a relentless rationalist. I even tried using all the rationalism I could muster to try to develop evangelistic witnessing "scripts". It was during that process that I talked myself out of religion.

Reading OB/LW has made me aware that my rationality skills aren't as sophisticated as I once thought. But one of my current strongest interests in the rationality game is to learn ways to help my children develop their rationality muscles. Also wouldn't hate helping my friends/family/co-workers on this path. I guess I'm just an evangelist at heart.

Comment author: JamesCole 21 April 2009 07:27:36AM *  2 points [-]

James Cole

31, Brisbane Australia

Bachelor of info tech. Worked for a few years in IT research, now undertaking PhD on what information is.

I've always been interested in 'flawed thinking' and how to avoid it, and I've always thought flawed thinking was a great contributer to so many of the world's ills. Most of my life I hadn't come across many others with similar views, so it has been great to come across this community.

I came across this through Overcoming Bias, which I think I originally found via a link on reddit.

Comment author: derekz 21 April 2009 03:01:24PM 2 points [-]

Hello all. I don't think I identify myself as a "rationalist" exactly -- I think of rationality more as a mode of thought (for example, when singing or playing a musical instrument, that is a different mode of thought, and there are many different modes of thought that are natural and appropriate for us human animals). It is a very useful mode of thought, though, and worth cultivating. It does strike me that the goals targeted by "Instrumental Rationality" are only weakly related to what I would consider "rationality" and for most people things like focus, confidence, and other similar skills far surpass things like Bayesian update for the practical achievement of goals. I also fear that our poor ability to gauge priors very often makes human-Bayesianism provide more of the appearance of rationality than actual improvement in tangible success in day-to-day reasoning.

Still, there's no denying that epistemic and instrumental rationality drive much of what we call "progress" for humanity and the more skilled we are in their use, the better. I would like to improve my own world-modeling skills.

I am also very interested in a particular research program that is not presently an acceptable topic of conversation. Since that program has no active discussion forum anywhere else (odd given how important many people here think it to be), I am hopeful that in time it will become an active topic -- as "rationality incarnate" if nothing else.

I thank all of the authors here for providing interesting material and hope to contribute myself, at least a little.

Oh, I'm a 45-year-old male software designer and researcher working for a large computer security company.

Comment author: Iguanodontist 21 April 2009 06:16:50PM 2 points [-]

Howdy.

My name's Schuyler. I'm a 22 year old 1st year law student in NYC, with my undergraduate degree in Economics and Philosophy. I spend my free time as a volunteer fireman/EMT out on Long Island.

Stumbled over to OB in the beginning of September, as I fleshed out my Google Reader in preparation for the upcoming year of law school (gotta kill time in class somehow). The Babyeaters got me hooked, and when LessWrong opened up I started lurking here, as well. Never posted or commented on either site, except to express my appreciation for the Babyeaters series. Always been kind of intimidated, to be honest.

I suppose I became interested in rationality when I started taking my Econ theory courses. The first assumption of economics is that people are rational - and in my class, as well as all the others I've TA'ed for, the students invariably respond 'No, they aren't.' Immediately. So when I branched out into my second major, and reading Friedman and Nozick, I tried to both understand why people aren't rational, and try to bring myself closer to that ideal.

I don't think I've done such a good job, all told. But I am grateful to the contributors on this website and over at OB for helping so frequently.

Comment author: Velochy 22 April 2009 07:12:44PM 1 point [-]

Hello,

My name is Margus Niitsoo and Im a 22 year old Computer Science doctorial student in Tartu, Estonia. I have wide interests that span religion and psychology as well (I am a pantheist by the way.. so somewhat religious but unaffected by most of the classical theism bashing). I got here through OB which I got to when reading about AI and the thing that shall not be named.

I do not identify myself as a rationalist for I only recently understood how emotional a person I really am and id like to enjoy it before trying to get it under control again. However, I am interested in understanding human behaviour as best I can and this blog has given me many new insights I doubt I could have gotten somewhere else.

Comment author: thomblake 22 April 2009 07:19:30PM *  1 point [-]

Note that rationality and emotion are not mutually exclusive, and thinking that they are can get you into trouble. Good reference, anyone? I'd recommend Aristotle.

ETA: Yes, Vladimir_Nesov's link, below, is what I was looking for.

Comment author: Vladimir_Nesov 22 April 2009 07:24:24PM 2 points [-]

The reference from OB is Feeling Rational.

Comment author: MBlume 22 April 2009 07:31:22PM *  3 points [-]

I do not identify myself as a rationalist for I only recently understood how emotional a person I really am and id like to enjoy it before trying to get it under control again.

Note that rationality does not necessarily oppose emotion.

Becoming more rational - arriving at better estimates of how-the-world-is - can diminish feelings or intensify them. Sometimes we run away from strong feelings by denying the facts, by flinching away from the view of the world that gave rise to the powerful emotion. If so, then as you study the skills of rationality and train yourself not to deny facts, your feelings will become stronger.

Feeling Rational

If the iron approaches your face, and you believe it is hot, and it is cool, the Way opposes your fear. If the iron approaches your face, and you believe it is cool, and it is hot, the Way opposes your calm.

The Twelve Virtues

Comment author: pjeby 22 April 2009 08:49:32PM 0 points [-]

If the iron approaches your face, and you believe it is hot, and it is cool, the Way opposes your fear. If the iron approaches your face, and you believe it is cool, and it is hot, the Way opposes your calm.

What if the iron is hot, but if you flinch, you'll be shot? Fear of the iron won't help you stay steady, and neither will fear of the bullet.

(Note: IAWYC, I'm just taking this opportunity to nitpick the silly notion that "truth" determines or even should determine your emotions. Emotions should be chosen to support your desired actions and results.)

Comment author: thomblake 22 April 2009 08:53:56PM 1 point [-]

Emotions should be chosen to support your desired actions and results.

Another shot in the battle over priority of epistemic or instrumental rationality?

Comment author: MBlume 22 April 2009 09:17:40PM 3 points [-]

My fear of the bullet would cause me to want to avoid it, which would mean I must ensure that I do not flinch. The decision to flinch or not to flinch is in the hands of low-level circuitry in my brain, and the current inputs to that circuitry will tend to produce a flinch. So I would be well advised to change those inputs if I can, by visualizing myself on a beach, curled up in bed, sitting at my computer writing comments on Less Wrong, or some other calming, comforting environment. If this is a form of self-deception, it is one I am comfortable with. It is of the same kind that I practiced as a member of the bardic conspiracy, and I don't think that hurt my epistemic rationality any.

Comment author: Alexandros 24 April 2009 09:21:15PM *  2 points [-]
  • Handle: Alexandros
  • Name: Alexandros Marinos
  • Location: Guildford, UK
  • Age: 27
  • Gender: Male
  • Education/Occupation: Currently in 3rd year of PhD in Computing
  • Links: Blog, FriendFeed

Hi all,

I spent the first 25 years of my life in a christian quasi-fundamentalist environment. As time went by I was increasingly struggling to reach a consistent mindset within the christian belief-constraints. Over time, I kept removing elements of the belief system while nominally retaining the fundamentals even if simply as shells. At some point, I lost someone deeply important to me due to not providing her definition of a spiritual relationship, a situation similar to MBlume's even if predating my explicit conversion to atheism. This led me to distance myself from the christian circles, as I considered being truly accepted without effectively leading a double life an impossibility. About a year later, discovering Eliezer's writings provided me with the mature articulation of many thoughts that had existed in embryonic unexpressed form in my mind and added many others. In this sense it provided the coup de grâce to my theistic beliefs.

Simultaneously to the above, I am a programmer who has not seriously written code in the last three years. This is because I have hit on a problem the solution to which I need to thoroughly formulate before resuming my efforts. The essence of the problem is that whenever I code, my intuition is to take soft-coding to the extreme. That is, I see each (algorithm/process/program) as a compilation of items of source knowledge and try to factor each item out. Taken to its logical conclusion, this leads to something that could be called knowledge-oriented programming or some such. I did not consider this related to artificial intelligence but I am now not entirely certain.

Additionally, I am involved in Digital Ecosystem research, what I consider the effort to make control the property of networks rather than individual agents in the network. As an extension of this field, is my interest in social computing and the goal to make an unmoderated online community that allows freedom from coercion to its members while at the same time is able to collectively control itself. However, among the three, if I had to state only one goal, it would certainly be the effort to achieve 'extreme soft coding'

I recently have grown increasingly unsatisfied by the contents of my feed reader, I find in this community a higher a satisfaction-to-noise ratio than even Hacker News, and intend to try and participate as much as I can, although I don't expect to have any major contributions any time soon.

Comment author: AnnaSalamon 04 May 2009 07:52:43AM *  4 points [-]

(This is in response to a comment of brynema’s elsewhere; if we want LW discussions to thrive even in cases where the discussions require non-trivial prerequisites, my guess is that we should get in the habit of taking “already discussed exhaustively” questions to the welcome thread. Or if not here, to some beginner-friendly area for discussing or debating background material.)

brynema wrote:

So the idea is that a unique, complex thing may not necessarily have an appreciation for another unique complexity? Unless appreciating unique complexity has a mathematical basis.

Kind of. The idea is that:

  • Both human minds, and whatever AIs can be built, are mechanistic systems. We’re complex, but we still do what we do for mechanistic reasons, and not because the platonic spirit of “right thing to do”ness seeps into our intelligence.
  • Goals, and “optimization power / intelligence” with which to figure out how to reach those goals, are separable to a considerable extent. You can build many different systems, each of which is powerfully smart at figuring out how to hit its goals, but each of which has a very different goal from the others.
  • Humans, for example, have some very specific goals. We value, say, blueberry tea (such a beautiful molecule...), or particular shapes and kinds of meaty creatures to mate with, or particular kinds of neurologically/psychologically complex experiences that we call “enjoyment”, “love”, or “humor”. Each of these valued items has tons of arbitrary-looking details; just as you wouldn’t expect to find space aliens who speak English as their native language, you also shouldn’t expect an arbitrary intelligence to have human (as opposed to parrot, octopus, or such-and-such variety of space aliens) aesthetics or values.
  • If you’re dealing with a sufficiently powerful optimizing system, the question isn’t whether it would assign some value to you. The question is whether you are the thing that it would value most of all, compared to all the other possible things it could do with your atoms/energy/etc. Humans re-arranged the world far more than most species, because we were smart enough to see possibilities that weren’t in front of us, and to figure out ways of re-arranging the materials around us to better suit our goals. A more powerful optimizing system can be expected to change things around considerably more than we did.

That was terribly condensed, and may well not make total sense at this point. Eliezer’s OB posts fill in some of this in considerably better detail; also feel free, here in the welcome thread, to ask questions or to share counter-evidence.

Comment author: hrishimittal 17 May 2009 01:35:51PM 7 points [-]

Hi, I'm Hrishi, 26, male. I work in air pollution modelling in London. I'm also doing a part-time PhD.

I am an atheist but come from a very religious family background.

When I was 15, I once cried uncontrollably and asked to see God. If there is indeed such a beautiful supreme being then why didn't my family want to meet Him? I was told that their faith was weak and only the greatest sages can see God after a lot of self-afflicted misery. So, I thought nevermind.

I've signed up for cryonics. You should too, or it'll just be 3 of us from LW when we wake up on the other side. I don't mind hogging all the press, but inside me lives a shiny ball of compassion which wants me to share the glory with you.

I wish to live a happy and healthy life.

Comment author: LukeParrish 29 May 2009 01:02:57AM *  1 point [-]
  • Name: Luke Parrish
  • Age: 26 next month
  • Sex: Male
  • Personality: INTP (Socionics INTJ)
  • Location: Idaho, USA
  • Ideas I like: Cryonics, Forth, Esperanto, Socionics.

I became skeptical of God when I realized that as a philosophical construct his existence would present some unanswerable questions. Also it helped when I decided I was not going to hell over asking a few logical questions. I don't typically position myself as an atheist -- why should I be defined by what I don't accept? Instead I attempt to be someone who is willing to evaluate any logical question and expect consistent answers.

I believe advancing the cause of cryonics and/or life extension is important from a moral perspective, since if they take longer to develop or be accepted, that translates to more people dying. I haven't yet signed up for cryonics but definitely intend to.

Comment author: Ttochpej 29 May 2009 01:15:01PM 2 points [-]

Hi, I'm James, 24, male, and a Information Technology student in my last year of my degree, and live in Australia, Central Queensland. I have been trying to answer big questions like "What is the meaning of life?", "What is Intelligence?", and trying to come up with a Grand Theory Of Everything, for as long as I can remember. I have written a lot on my theory's and hypotheses but everything I have ever written is saved on my computer and I have never shared any of my ideas with anyone, it has just been a private hobby of mine. I'm hoping I'll be able to learn so more by reading the posts on Less Wrong and maybe eventually post some of my own ideas.

I have read on here that a few people are signed up for cryonics, I think cryonics sounds interesting and I might sign up for it as well one day, but I think more of my self living on through knowledge. By that I mean If you say a person is made up by there knowledge and experience and not by there body, then if I can write my knowledge and experiences down, and then once I die people read and learn that knowledge and about my experiences, then I see it as a ship of theseus paradox, my knowledge and experience still exists just in a different body.

Comment author: rhollerith_dot_com 03 July 2009 08:20:35PM *  0 points [-]

Handle: rhollerith_dot_com

Name: Richard Hollerith.

Location: just north of San Francisco, California.

Contact information.

More information.

Suppose you are reading this because you are reading every comment under the user name rhollerith_dot_com from newest to oldest. Well, you have almost finished with that: there are only 4 comments older than the comment you are reading. But there are more comments written by me under a different user name, namely, rhollerith.

Comment author: RobinZ 08 July 2009 09:33:25PM *  10 points [-]

Ignoring the more obvious jokes people make in introduction posts: Hi. My name is Robin. I grew up in the Eastern Time Zone of the United States, and have lived in the same place essentially all my life. I was homeschooled by secular parents - one didn't discuss religion and the other was agnostic - with my primary hobby being the reading of (mostly) speculative fiction of (mostly) quite high quality. (Again, my parent's fault - when I began searching out on my own, I was rather less selective.) The other major activity of my childhood was participation in the Boy Scouts of America.

I entered community college at the age of fifteen with an excellent grounding in mathematics, a decent grounding in physics, superb fluency with the English language (both written and spoken), and superficial knowledge of most everything else. After earning straight As for three years, I applied to four-year universities, and my home state university offered me a full ride. At present, I am a graduate student in mechanical engineering at the same institution.

In the meantime, I have developed an affection for weblogs, web comics, and online chess, much to the detriment of my sleep schedule and work ethic. I suspect I discovered Overcoming Bias through "My Favorite Liar" like everyone else, but Eliezer Yudkowsky's sequences (and, to a lesser extent, Robin Hanson's essays) were what drew me in. I lost interest around when EY jumped to lesswrong.com, but was drawn back in when I opened up the bookmark again in the past day or so, particularly thanks to a few of Yvain's contributions.

Being all of twenty-four and with less worldly experience than the average haddock, I imagine I shan't contribute much to the conversation, but I'll give it my best shot.

(P.S. I am not registered for cryonics and I'm skeptical about the ultimate potential of AI. I'm an modern-American-style liberal registered as a Republican for reasons which seemed good at the time. Also, I am - as is obvious in person but not online - both male and black.)

Comment author: Alicorn 08 July 2009 09:45:27PM 4 points [-]

Being all of twenty-four and with less worldly experience than the average haddock

What gave you the idea that anyone cares about age and experience around here? ;)

Comment author: RobinZ 09 July 2009 02:11:31AM 2 points [-]

Oh, I'm sure someone does, but the real reason I mentioned it is because I usually don't have a lot more to say about a subject than "that sounds reasonable to me". (:

Comment author: Vladimir_Nesov 09 July 2009 10:11:10AM -1 points [-]

So, that was a rationalization above the bottom line of observation that you choose to not say much?

Comment author: RobinZ 09 July 2009 11:29:20AM 1 point [-]

No - I choose to talk a lot, in fact. That's just the reason I expect most of it to be inane. :D

Comment author: thomblake 08 July 2009 10:23:32PM 1 point [-]

Welcome! As Alicorn pointed out, age and experience don't count for much here, as compared to rationality and good ol'fashioned book-learnin'. If it helps any, you even have more education than a lot of the folks about (though we have a minor infestation of doctors)

Comment author: RobinZ 09 July 2009 02:14:04AM 2 points [-]

Well, like I said, I'll give it my best!

(Doctors, eh? Y'know, I have this rash on my lower back... ^_^)

Comment author: spriteless 20 July 2009 02:15:21AM 0 points [-]

I have not joined too recently, but I have started actually participating recently. My handle is no typo. Google tells me I'm the only one to use it, and my gender. Since I just drew attention to my gender, you can guess what it is without asking Google.

In real life I am a student and have to draw attention away from my gender instead.

Comment author: thomblake 20 July 2009 02:21:47AM *  0 points [-]

I can hardly parse what you've written here. Are you trying to be mysterious, or is this my fault?

ETA: Thanks! That clears it up.

Comment author: spriteless 20 July 2009 03:37:22AM 0 points [-]

Completely my fault. I don't think verbally. I converted my thoughts into the first grammatically correct words to come to mind; it seems I did not actually convert them into usable language.

I joined awhile ago, however, I only started commenting recently. My handle is not a typo, although on many boards it is assumed a misspelling of 'spiritless.' When I run a Google search for my handle, I find mostly profiles I have created on social sites and wikis, some of which state my gender. Since I just drew attention to my gender, you can guess what it is without bothering to search.

In real life I am a student who is retaking English Composition 101.

Comment author: CronoDAS 20 July 2009 06:30:05AM 2 points [-]

In real life I am a student who is retaking English Composition 101.

You know, I consider myself to be a good writer, but I never managed to pass the first year Expository Writing course at Rutgers University. I just couldn't get my head around the subject matter I had to write about, and I was left with nothing to say. Eventually, that damn English course was the only thing standing between me and graduation. I eventually got special permission from the Dean to take a course titled "Scientific and Technical Writing" instead of that damn Expos class, and I ended up with an A in the course.

Anyway, welcome to LessWrong!

Comment author: Jonii 20 July 2009 09:58:24AM *  2 points [-]

Hello.

My name is Joni, I'm 21 years old, I study mathematics at Helsinki University, Finland, I'm male...

So, yeah. Reason behind my interest in rationality would probably be something that is likely to earn me ADHD-diagnosis in near future. Since I've been mentally impaired to some weird degree, I've tried to find a Way to overcome that. My earlier efforts weren't all that effective, but now that I found a site that gathers results of systematic study around this field, I expect a lot.

My school grades were about medium throughout my life. I enjoy a board game called "go" a lot, and I used it to find and eliminate some biases and cognitive mistakes(I'm Finnish shodan). Other than math, I like psychology, I also find transhumanism very interesting topic, and I have many times thought that I could make my own super-AI. I like computers, I know superfically some programming languages, but I haven't had any larger projects on any real languages(Some 500 line scripts occasionally).

I found this site through irc-channel for Finnish transhumanist movement. Whole notion of "refining the art of human rationality" was like a dream come true. I try to avoid commenting to avoid quality of discussion dropping, so for the months to come, I'll be mostly doing my homework to gather some basic knowledge.

Comment author: cousin_it 20 July 2009 10:02:08AM *  0 points [-]

Welcome, Joni! People who can do math are always welcome here.

Comment author: avalot 20 July 2009 04:32:21PM 2 points [-]

Hello.

I'm Antoine Valot, 35 years old, Information Architect and Business Analyst, a frenchman living in Colorado, USA. I've been lurking on LW for about a month, and I like what I see, with some reservations.

I'm definitely an atheist, currently undecided as to how anti-theist I should be (seems the logical choice, but the antisocial aspects suggest that some level of hypocrisy might make me a more effective rational agent?)

I am nonetheless very interested in some of the philosophical findings of Buddhism (non-duality being my pet idea). I think there's some very actionable and useful tools in Buddhism at the juncture of rationality and humanity: How to not believe in santa, but still fulfill non-rational human needs and aspirations. Someone's going to have to really work on convincing me that "utility" can suffice, when Buddhist concepts of "happiness" seem to fit the bill better for humans. "Utility" seems too much like pleasure (unreliable, external, variable), as opposed to happiness (maintainable, internal, constant).

Anyway, I'm excited to be here, and looking forward to learning a lot and possibly contributing something of value.

A special shout-out to Alicorn: I read you post on male bias, and I dig, sister. I'll try to not make matters worse, and look for ways to make them better.

Comment author: Whisper 22 July 2009 06:56:31AM 3 points [-]

Greetings. To this community, I will only be known as "Whisper". I'm a believer in science and rationality, but also a polythiest and a firm believer that there are some things that science cannot explain. I was given the site's address by one Alicorn, who I've been trying to practice Far-Seeing with...with much failure.

I'm 21 years old right now, living in NY, and am trying to write my novels. As for who I am, well, I believe you'll all just have to judge me for yourself by my actions (posts) rather than any self-description. Thankee to any of you who bothered to read.

Comment author: thomblake 22 July 2009 02:19:42PM 3 points [-]

a firm believer that there are some things that science cannot explain

I think this is a common enough epistemic position to be in, though some of us might define our terms a bit differently.

For any decent definitions of 'explain' and 'science', though, whatever "science can't explain" is not going to be explained by anything else any better.

Comment author: ajayjetti 23 July 2009 01:24:38AM *  3 points [-]

Hi

I am Ajay from India. I am 23. I was a highly rebellious person(still am i think), flunked out college, but completed it to become a programmer. But as soon as i finished college, i had severe depression because of a woman. I than thought of doing Masters degree in US, and applied, but then dropped the idea.Then i recaptured a long gone passion to make music, so i started drumming. I got accepted to berklee college of music, but then i lost interest to make a career out of it, i have some reasons for it. Then i started reading a lot(parallel to some programming). I face all the problems that an average guy faces(from social to economic problems). I graduated from one of the top colleges in india and now don't do my degree any justice. sometimes i think about the fact that all my colleagues are happy working with companies like google, oracle, etc. In a spur to make a balance, i gave gmat and applied and got admit to some supposedly TOP MBA schools. But i again lost interest for pursuing that thing. Now i write a bit, and read and i teach primary school mathematics in a local school. I love music ranging from art tatum to balamurlikrishna to illayraja to blues. I have been to US once when i was working with Perot systems bangalore(i was campus placed there). I would like to travel more, but i dont see that happening in near future because of financial contraints and constraints by governments of this world.

So, i always keep searching for some interesting "cures" on internet. One fine day i found paul grahams website through some Ajax site. Then i was reading something on hacker news, something related to cult following and stuff. There was a name mentioned there--Eliezer yudkowsky(hope i spelled it right). So i wikied that name. i found his site and then from there to less wrong and overcoming bias. Since 2 months, i am really obsessed by this blog. I dont know how will this help me "practically", but i am quite happy reading and demystifying my brain on certain things.

One thing: I have noticed that this forum has people who are relatively intellectual. Lot of them seem to be from developed countries, who have got very less idea about how things work in a country like India. Sitting here, all these things that are happening in "developed" world seem incredulous to me. I get biased like lot of indians who think US or Europe is a better place. I dont need to say that there are millions of indians in these regions. Then i think some more. So far, i dont think anybody is doing things any differently when it comes to living a life. Even in this community i dont see we are living differently, i dont know whether we even need to!!

We are born, we live and we die, that is the only truth that appeals me so far. One might think that a different state of my mind would give different opinion about what my brain thinks is "truth", but i doubt that. But i love this site, if anybody doubts that whether this site has practical benefits or not---I say that it is very useful. Onething stands out, people here are open to criticism. Even if we don't get truth from this site, we have so many better routes to choose from!! This site seems to be a map. For a timeless travel. Dont give a shit about what others have to say. People can come with theories about everything it seems. And i dont like when people have -ve stuff to say about this forum. I am and would like to loyal to the forum which serves me good.

I hope something happens that we are able to live for atleast 500 years. I think that would be a good time to know few things( my fantasy)

i have recently started writing at http://ajayjetti.com/

thanks for reading if u have reached here!!

Comment author: RobinZ 23 July 2009 01:32:21AM 0 points [-]

Welcome! I'll be interested to hear what you have to say.

Comment author: alexflint 23 July 2009 09:48:04AM *  4 points [-]

Hi,

I'm Alex and I'm studying computer vision at Oxford. Essentially we're trying to build AI that understands the visual world. We use lots of machine learning, probabilistic inference, and even a bit of signal processing. I arrived here through the Future of Humanity Institute website, which I found after listening to Nick Bostrom's TED talk. I've been lurking for a few weeks now but I thought I should finally introduce myself.

I find the rationalist discussion on LW interesting both on a personal interest level, and in relation to my work. I would like to get some discussion going on the relationship between some of the concrete tools and techniques we use in AI and the more abstract models of rationality being discussed here. Out of interest, how many people here have some kind of computer science background?

Comment author: Kaj_Sotala 23 July 2009 10:00:24AM 0 points [-]

Out of interest, how many people here have some kind of computer science background?

Quite a few if not most, it seems. See http://lesswrong.com/lw/fk/survey_results/ - the summary there doesn't mention the educational background, but looking through the actual spreadsheet, lots of people have listed a "computing" background.

Comment author: Vladimir_Nesov 23 July 2009 10:58:00AM 1 point [-]

Hi Alex, welcome to LessWrong. You can find some info about the people here in the survey results post. Quite a lot are with CS background, and some grok machine learning.

Comment author: mni 24 July 2009 09:41:16PM *  16 points [-]

Hello.

I've been reading Less Wrong from its beginning. I stumbled upon Overcoming Bias just as LW was being launched. I'm a young mathematician (an analyst, to be more specific) currently working towards a PhD and I'm very interested in epistemic rationality and the theory of altruist instrumental rationality. I've been very impressed with the general quality of discussion about the theory and general practice of truth-seeking here, even though I can think of places where I disagree with the ideas that I gather are widely accepted here. The most interesting discussions seem to be quite old, though, so reviving those discussions out of the blue hasn't felt like - for lack of a better word - a proper thing to do.

There are many discussions here of which I don't care about. A large proportion of people here are programmers or otherwise from a CS background, and that colors the discussions a lot. Or maybe it's just that the prospect of an AGI in recent future doesn't seem at all likely to me. Anyway, the AI/singularity stuff, the tangentially related topics that I bunch together with them, and approaching rationality topics from a programmer's point of view I just don't care about. Not very much, at least.

The self-help stuff, "winning is everything" and related stuff I'd rather not read. Well, I do my best not to. The apparent lack of concern for altruism in those discussions makes me even wish they wouldn't take place here in the first place.

And then there are the true failings of this community. I had been thinking of registering and posting in some threads about the more abstract sides of rationality, but I must admit I eventually got around to registering and posting because of the gender threads. But there's just so much bullshit going on! Evolutionary psychology is grossly misapplied (1). The obvious existence of oppressive cultural constructs (2) is flatly denied. The validity of anecdotes and speculation as evidence is hardly even questioned. The topics that started the flaming have no reason of even being here in the first place. This post pretty well sums up the failures of rationality here at Less Wrong; and that post has been upvoted to 25! Now, the failings and attitudes that surfaced in the gender debate have, of course, been visible for quite some time. But that the failures of thought seem so common has made me wonder if this community as a whole is actually worth wasting my time for.

So, in case you're still wondering, what has generously been termed "exclusionary speech" really drives people away (3). I'm still hoping that the professed rationality is enough to overcome the failure modes that are currently so common here (4). But unfortunately I think my possible contributions won't be missed if I rid myself of wishful thinking and see it's not going to happen.

It's quite a shame that a community with such good original intentions is failing after a good start. Maybe humans simply won't overcome their biases (5) yet in this day and age.

So. I'd really like to participate in thoughtful discussions with rationalists I can respect. For quite a long time, Less Wrong seemed like the place, but I just couldn't find a proper place to start (I dislike introductions). But now as I'm losing my respect for this community and thus the will to participate here, I started posting. I hope I can regain the confidence in a high level of sanity waterline here.

(Now a proper rationalist would, in my position, naturally reconsider his own attitudes and beliefs. It might not be surprising that I didn't find all too much to correct. So I might just as well assume that I haven't been mind-killed quite yet, and just make the post I wanted to.)

EDIT: In case you felt I was generalizing with too much confidence - and as I wrote here, I agree I was - see my reply to Vladimir Nesov's reply.

(1) I think failing to control for cultural influences in evolutionary psychology should be considered at least as much of a fail as postulating group selection. Probably more so.

(2) Somehow I think phrases like "cultural construct", especially when combined with qualifiers like "oppressive", trigger immediate bullshit alarms for some. To a certain extent, it's forgivable, as they certainly have been used in conjunction with some of the most well-known anti-epistemologies of our age. But remember: reversing stupidity doesn't make you any better off.

(3) This might be a good place to remind the reader that (our kind can't cooperate)[http://lesswrong.com/lw/3h/why_our_kind_cant_cooperate/]. (This is actually referring to many aspects of the recent debate, not just one.)

(4) Yes, I know, I can't cooperate either.

(5) Overcoming Bias is quite an ironic name for that blog. EDIT: This refers exclusively to many of Robin Hanson's posts about gender differences I have read. I think I saw a post linking to some of these recently, but I couldn't find a link to that just now. Anyway, this footnote probably went a bit too far.