Hello!
I actually started an account two years ago, but after a few comments I decided I wasn't emotionally or intellectually ready for active membership. I was confused and hurt for various reasons that weren't Less Wrong's fault, and I backed away to avoid saying something I might regret. I didn't want to put undue pressure on myself to respond to topics I didn't fully understand. Now, after many thousands of hours reading and thinking about neurology, evolutionary psychology, and math, I'm more confident that I won't just be swept up in the half-understood arguments of people much smarter than I am. :)
Like almost everyone here, I started with atheism. I was raised Hindu, and my home has the sort of vague religiosity that is arguably the most common form in the modern world. For the most part, I figured out atheism on my own, when I was around 11 or 12. It was emotionally painful and socially costly, but I'm stronger for the experience. I started reading various mediocre atheist blogs, but I got bored after a couple of years and wanted to do something more than shoot blind fish in tiny barrels. I wanted to build something...
Welcome to Less Wrong, and I for one am glad to have you here (again)! You sound like someone who thinks very interesting thoughts.
I had to face the fact that mere biology may have systematically biased my half of the population against greatness. And it hurt. I had to fight the urge to redefine intelligence and/or greatness to assuage the pain.
I can't say that this is something that has ever really bothered me. Your IQ is what it is. Whether or not there's an overall gender-based trend in one direction or another isn't going to change anything for you, although it might change how people see you. (If anything, I found that I got more attention as a "girl who was good at/interested in science"...which, if anything, was irritating and made me want to rebel and go into a "traditionally female" field just because I could.
Basically, if you want to accomplish greatness, it's about you as an individual. Unless you care about the greatness of others, and feel more pride or solidarity with females than with males who accomplish greatness (which I don't), the statistical tendency doesn't matter.
...I don't want to lose the hope/idealism/inner happiness that makes me
I know that it's not particularly rational to feel more affiliation with women than men, but I do. It's one of the things my monkey brain does that I decided to just acknowledge rather than constantly fight. It's helped me have a certain kind of peace about average IQ differentials. The pain I described in the parent has mellowed. Still, I have to face the fact that if I want to major in, say, applied math, chances are I might be lonely or below-average or both. I wish I had the inner confidence to care about self-improvement more than competition, but as yet I don't.
ETA: I characterize "idealism" as a hope for the future more than a belief about the present.
Still, I have to face the fact that if I want to major in, say, applied math, chances are I might be lonely or below-average or both.
As long as you know your own skills, there is no need to use your gender as a predictor. We use the worse information only in the absence of better information; because the worse information can be still better than nothing. We don't need to predict the information we already have.
When we already know that e.g. "this woman has IQ 150", or "this woman has won a mathematical olympiad" there is no need to mix general male and female IQ or math curves into the equation. (That's only what you do when you see a random woman and you have no other information.)
If there are hundred green balls in the basket and one red ball, it makes sense to predict that a randomly picked ball will be almost surely green. But once you have randomly picked a ball and it happened to be red... then it no longer makes sense to worry that this specific ball might still be green somehow. It's not; end of story.
If you had no experience with math yet, then I'd say that based on your gender, your chances to be a math genius are small. But that's not the situation; you already had some math experience. So make your guesses based on that experience. Your gender is already included in the probability of you having that specific experience. Don't count it twice!
And it's exasperating to see highly intelligent men make the rookie mistake of saying "women are stupid" or "most women are stupid" because they happen to be high-IQ. There's an obvious selection bias - intelligent men probably have intelligent male friends but only average female acquaintances - because they seek out the women for sex, not conversation.
Another possible explanation comes to mind: people with high IQs consider the "stupid" borderline to be significantly above 100 IQ. Then if they associate equally with men and women, the women will more often be stupid; and if they associate preferentially with clever people, there will be fewer women.
(This doesn't contradict selection bias. Both effects could be at play.)
I had to face the fact that mere biology may have systematically biased my half of the population against greatness. And it hurt. I had to fight the urge to redefine intelligence and/or greatness to assuage the pain.
Consciously keeping your identity small and thus not identifying with everyone who happens to have the same internal plumbing might be helpful there.
Personally, for their first female protagonist, I felt like Pixar could have done a lot better than a Rebellious Princess. It's cliche, and I would have liked to see them exercise more creativity, but besides that, I think the instructive value is dubious. Yes, it's awfully burdensome to have one's life direction dictated to an excessive degree by external circumstances and expectations. But on the other hand, Rebellious Princesses, including Merida, tend to rail against the unfairness of their circumstances without stopping to consider that they live in societies where practically everyone has their lives dictated by external circumstances, and there's no easy transition to a social model that allows differently.
Merida wants to live a life where she's free to pursue her love of archery and riding, and get married when and to whom she wants? Well she'd be screwed if she were a peasant, since all the necessary house and field work wouldn't leave her with the time, her family wouldn't own a horse, unless it was a ploughhorse she wouldn't be able to take out for pleasure riding, and she'd be married off at an early age out of economic rather than political necessity. And she'd be sim...
I'm Aaron Swartz. I used to work in software (including as a cofounder of Reddit, whose software that powers this site) and now I work in politics. I'm interested in maximizing positive impact, so I follow GiveWell carefully. I've always enjoyed the rationality improvement stuff here, but I tend to find the lukeprog-style self-improvement stuff much more valuable. I've been following Eliezer's writing since before even the OvercomingBias days, I believe, but have recently started following LW much more carefully after a couple friends mentioned it to me in close succession.
I found myself wanting to post but don't have any karma, so I thought I'd start by introducing myself.
I've been thinking on-and-off about starting a LessWrong spinoff around the self-improvement stuff (current name proposal: LessWeak). Is anyone else interested in that sort of thing? It'd be a bit like the Akrasia Tactics Review, but applied to more topics.
'Twas about time that I decided to officially join. I discovered LessWrong in the autumn of 2010, and so far I felt reluctant to actually contribute -- most people here have far more illustrious backgrounds. But I figured that there are sufficiently few ways in which I could show myself as a total ignoramus in an intro post, right?
I don't consider my gender, age and nationality to be a relevant part of my identity, so instead I'd start by saying I'm INTP. Extreme I (to the point of schizoid personality disorder), extreme T. Usually I have this big internal conflict going on between the part of me that wishes to appear as a wholly rational genius and the other part, who has read enough psychology and LW (you guys definitely deserve credit for this) to know I'm bullshitting myself big time.
My educational background so far is modest, a fact for which procrastination is the main culprit. I'm currently working on catching up with high school level math... so far I've only reviewed trigonometry, so I'm afraid I won't be able to participate in more technical discussions around here. Aside from a few Khan Academy videos, I'm still ignorant about probability; I did try to solve that cancer ...
I've seen this happen where one person enjoys debate/arguing and another does not. To one person it's an interesting discussion, and to the other it feels like a personal attack. Or, more commonly, I've seen onlookers get upset watching such a discussion, even if they don't personally feel targeted. Specifically, I'm remembering three men loudly debating about physics while several of their wives left the room in protest because it felt too argumentative to them.
Body language and voice dynamics can affect this a lot, I think - some people get loud and frowny when they're excited/thinking hard, and others may misread that as angry.
We used to say of two friends of mine that "They don't so much toss ideas back and forth as hurl sharp jagged ideas directly at one another's heads."
I've commented infrequently, but never did one of these "Welcome!" posts.
Way back in the Overcoming Bias days, my roomate raved constantly about the blog and Eliezer Yudkowsky in particular. I pattern matched his behaviour to being in a cult, and moved on with my life. About two years later (?), a common friend of ours recommended Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, which I then read, which brought me to Lesswrong, reading the Sequences, etc. About a year later, I signed up for cryonics with Alcor, and I now give more than my former roomate to the Singularity Institute. (He is very amused by this.)
I spend quite a bit of time working on my semi-rationalist fanfic, My Little Pony: Friendship is Optimal, which I'll hopefully release on a timeframe of a few months. (I previously targeted releasing this damn thing for April, but...planning fallacy. I've whittled my issue list down to three action items, though, and it's been through it's first bout of prereading.)
Hi! I got here from reading Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, which I think I found on TV Tropes. Once I ran out of story to catch up on, I figured I'd start investigating the source material.
I've read a couple of sequences, but I'll hold off on commenting much until I've gotten through more material. (Especially since the quality of discussions in the comment sections is so high.) Thanks for an awesome site!
Hi All,
I'm Will Crouch. Other than one other, this is my first comment on LW. However, I know and respect many people within the LW community.
I'm a DPhil student in moral philosophy at Oxford, though I'm currently visiting Princeton. I work on moral uncertainty: on whether one can apply expected utility theory in cases where one is uncertain about what is of value, or what one one ought to do. It's difficult to do so, but I argue that you can.
I got to know people in the LW community because I co-founded two organisations, Giving What We Can and 80,000 Hours, dedicated to the idea of effective altruism: that is, using one's marginal resources in whatever way the evidence supports as doing the most good. A lot of LW members support the aims of these organisations.
I woudn't call myself a 'rationalist' without knowing a lot more about what that means. I do think that Bayesian epistemology is the best we've got, and that rational preferences should conform to the von Neumann-Morgenstern axioms (though I'm uncertain - there are quite a lot of difficulties for that view). I think that total hedonistic utilitarianism is the most plausible moral theory, but I'm extremely uncertain in that conclusion, partly on the basis that most moral philosophers and other people in the world disagree with me. I think that the more important question is what credence distribution one ought to have across moral theories, and how one ought to act given that credence distribution, rather than what moral theory one 'adheres' to (whatever that means).
Hello, everyone!
I'd been religious (Christian) my whole life, but was always plagued with the question, "How would I know this is the correct religion, if I'd grown up with a different cultural norm?" I concluded, after many years of passive reflection, that, no, I probably wouldn't have become Christian at all, given that there are so many good people who do not. From there, I discovered that I was severely biased toward Christianity, and in an attempt to overcome that bias, I became atheist before I realized it.
I know that last part is a common idiom that's usually hyperpole, but I really did become atheist well before I consciously knew I was. I remember reading HPMOR, looking up lesswrong.com, reading the post on "Belief in Belief", and realizing that I was doing exactly that: explaining an unsupported theory by patching the holes, instead of reevaluating and updating, given the evidence.
It's been more than religion, too, but that's the area where I really felt it first. Next projects are to apply the principles to my social and professional life.
The problem that I find is that all ways to spontaneously generate joy have some degree of mysticism.
What? What about all the usual happiness inducing things? Listening to music that you like; playing games; watching your favourite TV show; being with friends? Maybe you've ruled these out as not being spontaneous? But going to church isn't less effort than a lot of things on that list.
I suspect that a tendency towards mysticism just sort of spontaneously accretes onto anything sufficiently esoteric; you can see this happening over the last few decades with quantum mechanics, and to a lesser degree with results like Gödel's incompleteness theorems. Martial arts is another good place to see this in action: most of those legendary death touch techniques you hear about, for example, originated in strikes that damaged vulnerable nerve clusters or lymph nodes, leading to abscesses and eventually a good chance of death without antibiotics. All very explicable. But layer the field's native traditional-Chinese-medicine metaphor over that and run it through several generations of easily impressed students, partial information, and novelists without any particular incentive to be realistic, and suddenly you've got the Five-Point Palm Exploding Heart Technique.
So I don't think the mumbo-jumbo is likely to be strictly necessary to most eudaemonic approaches, Eastern or Western. I expect it'd be difficult to extract from a lot of them, though.
Hello everyone,
Thought it was about time to do one of these since I've made a couple of comments!
My name's Carl. I've been interested in science and why people believe the strange things they believe for many years. I was raised Catholic but came to the conclusion around the age of ten that it was all a bit silly really, and as yet I have found no evidence that would cause me to update away from that.
I studied physics as an undergrad and switched to experimental psychology for my PhD, being more interested at that point in how people work than how the universe does. I started to study motor control and after my PhD and a couple of postdocs I know way more about how humans move their arms than any sane person probably should. I've worked in behavioural, clinical and computational realms, giving me a wide array of tools to use when analysing problems.
My current postdoc is coming to an end and a couple of months ago I was undergoing somewhat of a crisis. What was I doing, almost 31 and with no plan for my life? I realised that motor control had started to bore me but I had no real idea what to do about it. Stay in science, or abandon it and get a real job? That hurts after almost a de...
Greetings LWers,
I'm an aspiring Friendliness theorist, currently based at the Australian National University -- home to Marcus Hutter, Rachael Briggs and David Chalmers, amongst others -- where I study formal epistemology through the Ph.B. (Hons) program.
I wasn't always in such a stimulating environment -- indeed I grew up in what can only be deemed intellectual deprivation, from which I narrowly escaped -- and, as a result of my disregard for authority and despise for traditional classroom learning, I am largely self-taught. Unlike most autodidacts, though, I never was a voracious reader, on the contrary I barely opened books at all, instead preferring to think things over in my head; this has left me an ignorant person -- something I'm constantly striving to improve on -- but has also protected me from many diseased ideas and even allowed me to better appreciate certain notions by having to rediscover them myself. (case in fact, throughout my adolescence I took great satisfaction in analysing my mental mechanisms and correcting for what I now know to be biases, yet I never came across the relevant literature, essentially missing out on a wealth of knowledge)
For a long time I've a...
Hello everyone! I've been a lurker on here for awhile, but this is my first post. I've held out on posting anything because I've never felt like I knew enough to actually contribute to the conversation. Some things about me:
I'm currently 22, female, and a recent graduate of college with a degree in computer science. I'm currently employed as a software engineer at a health insurance company, though I am looking into getting into research some day. I mainly enjoy science, playing video games, and drawing.
I found this site through a link on the Skeptics Stack Exchange page. The post was about cryonics, which is how I got over here. I've been reading the site for about six months now and I have found it extremely helpful. It has also been depressing, though, because I've since realized many of the "problems" in the world were caused by the ineptitude of the species and aren't easily fixed. I've had some problems with existential nihilism since then and if anyone has any advice on the matter, I'd love to hear it.
My journey to rationality probably started with atheism and a real understanding of the scientific method and human psychology. I grew up Mormon, which has since give...
Hi! Long-time lurker, first-time... joiner?
I was inspired to finally register by this post being at the top of Main. Not sure yet how much I'll actually post, but the removal of the passive barrier of, you know, not actually being registered is gone, so we'll see.
Anyway. I'm a dude, live in the Bay Area, work in finance though I secretly think I'm actually a writer. I studied cog sci in college, and that angle is what I tend to find most interesting on Less Wrong.
I originally came across LW via HPMoR back in 2010. Since then, I've read the Sequences, been to a few meetups, and attended the June minicamp (which, P.S., was awesome).
I'm still struggling a bit with actually applying rationality tools in my life, but it's great to have that toolbox ready and waiting. Sometimes... I hear it calling out to me. "Sean! This is an obvious place to apply Bayes! Seaaaaaaan!"
Hi all,
Not quire recently joined, but when I first joined, I read some, then got busy and didn't participate after that.
Age: Not yet 30. Former Occupation: Catastrophe Risk Modeling New Occupation: Graduate Student, Public Policy, RAND Corporation.
Theist Status: Orthodox Jew, happy with the fact that there are those who correctly claim that I cannot prove that god exists, and very aware of the confirmation bias and lack of skepticism in most religious circles. It's one reason I'm here, actually. And I'll be glad to discuss it in the future, elsewhere.
I was initially guided here, about a year ago, by a link to The Best Textbooks on Every Subject . I was a bit busy working at the time, building biased mathematical models of reality. (Don't worry, they weren't MY biases, they were those of the senior people and those of the insurance industry. And they were normalized to historical experience, so as long as history is a good predictor of the future...) So I decided that I wanted to do something different, possibly something with more positive externalities, less short term thinking about how the world could be more profitable for my employer, and more long-term thinking about how it ...
Hello and goodbye.
I'm a 30 year old software engineer with a "traditional rationalist" science background, a lot of prior exposure to Singularitarian ideas like Kurzweil's, with a big network of other scientist friends since I'm a Caltech alum. It would be fair to describe me as a cryocrastinator. I was already an atheist and utilitarian. I found the Sequences through Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality.
I thought it would be polite, and perhaps helpful to Less Wrong, to explain why I, despite being pretty squarely in the target demographic, have decided to avoid joining the community and would recommend the same to any other of my friends or when I hear it discussed elsewhere on the net.
I read through the entire Sequences and was informed and entertained; I think there are definitely things I took from it that will be valuable ("taboo" this word; the concept of trying to update your probability estimates instead of waiting for absolute proof; etc.)
However, there were serious sexist attitudes that hit me like a bucket of cold water to the face - assertions that understanding anyone of the other gender is like trying to understand an alien, for example.
Com...
Thanks for writing this. It's true that LW has a record of being bad at talking about gender issues; this is a problem that has been recognized and commented on in the past. The standard response seems to have been to avoid gender issues whenever possible, which is unfortunate but maybe better than the alternative. But I would still like to comment on some of the specific things you brought up:
assertions that understanding anyone of the other gender is like trying to understand an alien, for example.
I think I know the post you're referring to, I didn't read this as sexist, and I don't think that indicates a male-techy failure mode on my part about sexism. Some men are just really, really bad at understanding women (and maybe commit the typical mind fallacy when they try to understand men, and maybe just don't know anyone who doesn't fall into one of those categories), and I don't think they should be penalized for being honest about this.
gender essentialist
I haven't seen too much of this. Edit: Found some more.
women-are-objects-not-people-like-us crap
Where? Edit: Found some of this too.
...I think it has fallen very squarely into the "nothing more than sexism, th
Whenever I see a high quality comment made by a deleted account (see for example this thread where the two main participants are both deleted accounts), I'd want to look over their comment history to see if I can figure out what sequence of events alienated them and drove them away from LW, but unfortunately the site doesn't allow that. Here SamLL provided one data point, for which I think we should be thankful, but keep in mind that many more people have left and not left visible evidence of the reason.
Also, aside from the specific reasons for each person leaving, I think there is a more general problem: why do perfectly reasonable people see a need to not just leave LW, but to actively disidentify or disaffiliate with LW, either through an explicit statement (SamLL's "still less am I enthused about identifying myself as part of a community where that's so widespread"), or by deleting their account? Why are we causing them to think of LW in terms of identity in the first place, instead of, say, a place to learn about and discuss some interesting ideas?
Why are we causing them to think of LW in terms of identity in the first place, instead of, say, a place to learn about and discuss some interesting ideas?
Some possibilities:
There have been deliberate efforts at community-building, as evidenced by all the meetup-threads and one whole sequence, which may suggest that one is supposed to identify with the locals. Even relatively innocuous things like introduction and census threads can contribute to this if one chooses to take a less than charitable view of them, since they focus on LW itself instead of any "interesting idea" external to LW.
Labeling and occasionally hostile rhetoric: Google gives dozens of hits for terms like "lesswrongian" and "LWian", and there have been recurring dismissive attitudes regarding The Others and their intelligence and general ability. This includes all snide digs at "Frequentists", casual remarks to the effect of how people who don't follow certain precepts are "insane", etc.
The demographic homogeneity probably doesn't help.
Ordinarily I'd leave this for SamLL to respond to, but I'd say the chances of getting a response in this context are fairly low, so hopefully it won't be too presumptuous for me to speculate.
First of all, we as a community suck at handling gender issues without bias. The reasons for this could span several top-level posts and in any case I'm not sure of all the details; but I think a big one is the unusually blurry lines between research and activism in that field and consequent lack of a good outside view to fall back on. I don't think we're methodologically incapable of overcoming that, but I do think that any serious attempt at doing so would essentially convert this site into a gender blog.
To make matters worse, for one inclined to view issues through the lens of gender politics, Failed Utopia 4-2 is close to the worst starting point this site has to offer. Never mind the explicitly negative framing, or its place within the fun theory sequence: we have here a story that literally places men on Mars on gender-essentialist grounds, and doesn't even mention nonstandard genders or sexual preferences. No, that's not meant to be taken all that seriously or to inform people's real...
Hello! I'm David.
I'm 26 (at the time of writing), male, and an IT professional. I have three (soon to be four) children, three (but not four) of which have a different dad.
My immediate links here were through the Singularity Institute and Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, which drove me here when I realized the connection (I came to those things entirely separately!). When I came across this site, I had read through the Wikipedia list of biases several times over the course of years, come to many conscious conclusions about the fragility of my own cognition, and had innumerable arguments with friends and family that changed minds, but I never really considered that there would be a large community of people that got together on those grounds.
I'm going to do the short version of my origin story here, since writing it all out seems both daunting and pretentious. I was raised rich and lucky by an entrepreneur/university professor/doctor father and a mother who always had to be learning something or go crazy (she did some of both). I dropped out of a physics major in college and got my degree in gunsmithing instead, but only after I worked a few years. Along the way, I've p...
Hi LWers,
I am Robert and I am going to change the world. Maybe just a little bit, but that’s ok, since it’s fun to do and there’s nothing else I need to do right now. (Yay for mini-retirements!)
I find some of the articles here on LW very useful, especially those on heuristics and biases, as well as material on self-improvement although I find it quite scattered among loads of way to theoretic stuff. Does it seem odd that I have learned much more useful tricks and gained more insight from reading HPMOR than from reading 30 to 50 high-rated and “foundational” articles on this site? I am sincerely sad that even the leading rationalists on LW seem to struggle getting actual benefits out of their special skills and special knowledge (Yvain: Rationality is not that great; Eliezer: Why aren't "rationalists" surrounded by a visible aura of formidability?) and I would like to help them change that.
My interest is mainly in contributing more structured, useful content and also to band together with fellow LWers to practice and apply our rationalist skills. As a stretch goal I think that we could pick someone really evil as our enemy and take them down, just to show our superiority....
Greetings. I am Error.
I think I originally found the place through a comment link on ESR's blog. I'm a geek, a gamer, a sysadmin, and a hobbyist programmer. I hesitate to identify with the label "rationalist"; much like the traditional meaning of "hacker", it feels like something someone else should say of me, rather than something I should prematurely claim for myself.
I've been working through the Sequences for about a year, off and on. I'm now most of the way through Metaethics. It's been a slow but rewarding journey, and I think the best thing I've taken out of it is the ability to identify bogus thoughts as they happen. (Identifying is not always the same as correcting them, unfortunately) Another benefit, not specifically from the sequences but from link-chasing, is the realization that successful mental self-engineering is possible; I think the tipping point for me there was Alicorn's post about polyhacking. The realization inspired me to try and beat the tar out of my akrasia, and I've done fairly well so far.
My current interests center around "updating efficiently." I just turned 30; I burnt my 20s establishing a living instead of learning all...
Hey everyone,
As I continue to work through the sequences, I've decided to go ahead and join the forums here. A lot of the rationality material isn't conceptually new to me, although much of the language is very much so, and thus far I've found it to be exceptionally helpful to my thinking.
I'm a 24 year old video game developer, having worked on graphics on a particular big-name franchise for a couple years now. It's quite the interesting job, and is definitely one of the realms I find the heady, abstract rationality tools to be extremely helpful. Rationality is what it is, and that seems to be acknowledged here, a fact I'm quite grateful for.
When I'm not discussing the down-to-earth topics here, people may find I have a sometimes anxiety-ridden attachment to certain religious ideas. Religious discussion has been extremely normal for me throughout my life, so while the discussion doesn't make me uncomfortable, my inability to come to answers that I'm happy with does, and has caused me a bit of turmoil outside of discussion. Obviously there is much to say about this, and much people may like to say to me, but I'd like to first get through all the sequences, get all of my quest...
I've been commenting for a few months now, but never introduced myself in the prior Welcome threads. Here goes: Student, electrical engineering / physics (might switch to math this fall), female, DC area.
I encountered LW when I was first linked to Methods a couple years ago, but found the Sequences annoying and unilluminating (after having taken basic psych and stats courses). After meeting a couple of LWers in real life, including my now-boyfriend Roger (LessWrong is almost certainly a significant part of the reason we are dating, incidentally), I was motivated to go back and take a look, and found some things I'd missed: mostly, reductionism and the implications of having an Occam prior. This was surprising to me; after being brought up as an anti-religious nut, then becoming a meta-contrarian in order to rebel against my parents, I thought I had it all figured out, and was surprised to discover that I still had attachments to mysticism and agnosticism that didn't really make any sense.
My biggest instrumental rationality challenge these days seems to be figuring out what I really want out of life. Also, dealing with an out-of-control status obsession.
To cover some typical LW clus...
Hi, I'm Edward and have been reading the occasional article on here for a while. I've finally decided to officially join as this year I'm starting to do more work on my knowledge and education (especially maths & science) and I like the thoughtful community I see here. I'm a programmer, but also have a passion for history. Just as I was finishing university, my thinking led me to abandon the family religion (many of my friends are still theists). I was going to keep thinking and exploring ideas but I ended up just living - now I want to begin thinking again.
Regards, Edward
I'm Abd ul-Rahman Lomax, introducing myself. I have six grandchildren, from five biological children, and I have two adopted girls, age 11 from China, and age 9 from Ethiopia.
Born in 1944, Abd ul-Rahman is not my birth name, I accepted Islam in 1970. Not being willing to accept pale substitutes, I learned to read the Qur'an in Arabic by reading the Qur'an in Arabic.
Back to my teenage years, I was at Cal Tech for a couple of years, being in Richard P. Feynman's two years of undergraduate physics classes, the ones made into the textbook. I had Linus Pauling for freshman chemistry, as well. Both of them helped create how I think.
I left Cal Tech to pursue a realm other than "science," but was always interested in direct experience rather than becoming stuffed with tradition, though I later came to respect tradition (and memorization) far more than at the outset. I became a leader of a "spiritual community," and a successor to a well-known teacher, Samuel L. Lewis, but was led to pursue many other interests.
I delivered babies (starting with my own) and founded a school of midwifery that trained midwives for licensing in Arizona.
Self-taught, I started an electronics d...
Hello. I was brought here by HPMOR, which I finished reading today. Back in 1999 or something I found the site called sysopmind.com which had interesting reads on AI, Bayes theorem (that I didn't understand) and 12 virtues of rationality. I loved it for the beauty that reminded me of Asimov. I kept it in my bookmarks forever. (I knew him before he was famous? ;-))
I like SF (I have read many SF books but most were from before 1990 for some reason) and I'm a computer nerd, among other things. I want to learn everything, but I have a hard time putting in the work. I study to become a psychologist, scheduled to finish in 2013. My favorite area of psychology is social psychology, especially how humans make decisions, how humans are influenced by biases or norms or high status people. I'm married and have a daughter born in 2011.
I like to watch tv-shows, but I have high standards. It is SF if it is based in science and rationality, otherwise it's just space drama/space action and I have no patience for it. I also like psychological drama, but it has to be realistic and believable. Please give recommendations if you like. (edited:) Also, someone could explain in what way Star Trek, Babylon 5 or Battlestar Galactica is really SF or Buffy is feminist, so I know if they are worth my while.
I highly doubt that I'll be posting articles or even joining discussions anytime soon, since right now, I'm just getting started on reading the sequences and exploring other parts of the site, and don't feel prepared yet to get involved in discussions. However, I'll probably comment on things now and then, so because of that (and, honestly, just because I'm a very social person), I figured I might as well post an introduction here.
I appreciate the way that discussions are described as ending on here, because I've noticed in other debates that "tapping out" is seen as running away, and the main trait that gives me problems in my quest for rationality is that I'm inherently a competitive person, and get more caught up in the idea of "winning" than of improving my thinking. I'm working on this, but if I do get involved in discussions, the fact that they aren't seen as much as competitions here compared to other places should be helpful to me.
Anyway, I guess I'll introduce myself. I'm Alexandra, and I'm a seventeen year old high-school student in the United States (I applied to the camp in August, but I never received any news about it, so I assume that I wasn't acc...
Hellow Lesswrong! (I posted this in the other July2012 welcome thread aswell. :P Though apparently it has too many comments at this point or something to that effect.)
My name is Ryan and I am a 22 year old technical artist in the Video Game industry. I recently graduated with honors from the Visual Effects program at Savannah College of Art and Design. For those who don't know much about the industry I am in, my skill set is somewhere between a software programmer, a 3D artist, and a video editor. I write code to create tools to speed up workflows for the 3D things I or others need to do to make a game, or cinematic.
Now I found lesswrong.com through the Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality podcast. Up unto that point I had never heard of Rationalism as a current state of being... so far I greatly resonate with the goals and lessons that have come up in the podcast, and what I have seen about rationalism. I am excited to learn more.
I wouldn't go so far to claim the label for myself as of yet, as I don't know enough and I don't particularly like labels for the most part. I also know that I have several biases, I feel like I know the reasons and causes for most, but I have not ...
Hello,
My name is Trent Fowler. I started leaning toward scientific and rational thinking while still a child, thanks in part to a variety of aphorisms my father was fond of saying. Things like "think for yourself" and "question your own beliefs" are too general to be very useful in particular circumstances, but were instrumental in fostering in me a skepticism and respect for good argument that has persisted all my life (I'm 23 as of this writing). These tools are what allowed me to abandon the religion I was brought up in as a child, and to eventually begin salvaging the bits of it that are worth salvaging. Like many atheists, when I first dropped religion I dropped every last thing associated with it. I've since grown to appreciate practices like meditation, ritual, and even outright mysticism as techniques which are valuable and pursuable in a secular context.
What I've just described is basically the rationality equivalent of lifting weights twice a week and going for a brisk walk in the mornings. It's great for a beginner, but anyone who sticks with it long enough will start to get a glimpse of what's achievable by systematizing training and ramping ...
I am Yan Zhang, a mathematics grad student specializing in combinatorics at MIT (and soon to work at UC Berkeley after graduation) and co-founder of Vivana.com. I was involved with building the first year of SPARC. There, I met many cool people at CFAR, for which I'm now a curicculum consultant.
I don't know much about LW but have liked some of the things I have read here; AnnaSalamon described me as a "street rationalist" because my own rationality principles are home-grown from a mix of other communities and hobbies. In that sense, I'm happy to step foot into this "mainstream dojo" and learn your language.
Recently Anna suggested I may want to cross-post something I wrote to LW and I've always wanted to get to know the community better, so this is the first step, I suppose. I look forward to learning from all of you.
Hi,
My name is Hannah. I'm an American living in Oslo, Norway (my husband is Norwegian). I am 24 (soon to be 25) years old. I am currently unemployed, but I have a bachelor's degree in Psychology from Truman State University. My intention is to find a job working at a day care, at least until I have children of my own. When that happens, I intend to be a stay-at-home mother and homeschool my children. Anything beyond that is too far into the future to be worth trying to figure out at this point in my life.
I was referred to LessWrong by some German guy on OkCupid. I don't know his name or who he is or anything about him, really, and I don't know why he messaged me randomly. I suppose something in my profile seemed to indicate that I might like it here or might already be familiar with it, and that sparked his interest. I really can't say. I just got a message asking if I was familiar with LessWrong or Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality (which I was not), and if so, what I thought of them. So I decided to check them out. I thought the HP fanfiction was excellent, and I've been reading through some of the major series here for the past week or so. At one point I had a comment ...
Hello LW,
Last Thursday, I was asked by User:rocurley if, in his absence, I wanted to organize a hiking event (originally my idea) for this week's DC metro area meetup, during which I discovered I could not make posts, etc. here because I had zero karma. I chose to cancel the meetup on account of weather. I had registered my account previously, but realizing that I might have need to post here in the future, and that I had next to nothing to lose, I have decided to introduce myself finally.
I discovered LW through HPMOR, through Tvtropes, I believe. I've read some LW articles, but not others. Areas of interest include sciences (I have a BS in physics), psychology, personality disorders, some areas of philosophy, reading, and generally learning new things. One of my favorite books (if not /the/ favorite) is Godel, Escher, Bach, which I read for the first (and certainly not last) time while I was in college, 5+ years ago.
I'm extremely introverted, and I am aware that I have certain anxiety issues; while rationality has not helped with the actual feeling of anxiety, it has allowed me to push through it, in some cases.
I got into a community of intelligent, creative free-thinkers by reading fan fiction of all things.
You know the one.
Anyway, my knowledge of what is collectively referred to as Rationality is slim. I read the first 6 pages of The Sequences, felt like I was cheating on a test, and stopped. I'll try to make up for it with some of the most unnecessarily theatrical and hammy writing I can get away with.
I love word play, and over the course of a year I offered (as a way of apology) to owe my friend a quarter for every time I improvised a pun or awful joke mid-conversation, by the end of which I could have bought a dinner for him at Pizza Delight- I didn't. It's on my to-do list to compile all the wises that Carlos Ramon ever cracked on The Magic School Bus and put it on you tube, because no one else has and it needs to be done, damn it. As you can tell, I sometimes write for it's own sake, sort of a literary hedonist if you will. But all good things must come to an end...
My greatest principle is that a person's course in life is governed by their reaction to their circumstance, and that nothing at all is of certainty. The nature of the human mind is a process which our current metaphors...
Hello. I am from Istanbul, Turkey (A Turkish Citizen born and raised). I came across LessWrong on a popular Turkish website called EkşiSözlük. Since then, this is the place I checked to see what's new when there's nothing worth reading on Google Reader and I have time. (So long posts you have!)
I am 31 years old and I have a BSc in Computer Science and MSc in Computational Sciences (Research on Bioinformatics). But then, like most of the people in my country does, I've landed upon a job where I can't utilize any of these information. Information Security :)
Why did I complain about my job? Here is why:
I've been long since looking for "the best way to have lived a life". What I mean by this is, I have to say, at the moment of death "I lived my life the best way I could, and I can die blissfully". This may come off a bit cliché but bear in mind that I'm relatively new to this rationality thing.
While I was learning Computer Science for the first time, I saw there was great opportunity in relating computational sciences to social sciences so as to understand inner workings of human beings. This I realised when the Law&Ethics instructor asked us to write an essay o...
Hello. I've read sequence articles and discussion off this website for a while now. Been hesitant to join before because I like to keep my identity small but recently realized that being able to talk to others about topics on this site will make me more effective at reaching my goals.
Armchairs are very comfortable and I'm having some mental difficulty putting the effort into the practice of achieving set goals. It's very hard to actually do stuff and easy to just read about interesting topics without engaging.
I'm interested more in meta-ethics than in physics, more in decision theory than practical AI. My first comments will likely be in the sequences or in discussion comments of a few specific natures.
This should be fun, I look forward to talking with you. Ask me any questions that arouse your curiosity.
The browsing experience with Kibitzing off is strange but not unpleasant. How long did it take for you to get accustomed to it?
Hi, I'm Liz.
I'm a senior at a college in the US, soon to graduate with a double major in physics and economics, and then (hopefully) pursue a PhD in economics. I like computer science and math too. I'm hoping to do research in economic development, but more relevantly to LW, I'm pretty interested in behavioral economics and in econometrics (statistics). Out of the uncommon beliefs I hold, the one that most affects my life is that since I can greatly help others at a small cost to myself, I should; I donate whatever extra money I have to charity, although it's not much. (see givingwhatwecan.org)
I think I started behaving as a rationalist (without that word) when I became an atheist near the end of high school. But to rewind...
I was raised Christian, but Christianity was always more of a miserable duty than a comfort to me. I disliked the music and the long services and the awkward social interactions. I became an atheist for no good reason in the beginning of high school, but being an atheist was terrible. There was no one to forgive me when I screwed up, or pray to when the world was unbearably awful. My lack of faith made my father sad. Then, lying in bed and angsting about free ...
I'm Mike Johnson. I'd estimate I come across a reference to LW from trustworthy sources every couple of weeks, and after working my way through the sequences it feels like the good outweighs the bad and it's worth investing time into.
My background is in philosophy, evolution, and neural nets for market prediction; I presently write, consult, and am in an early-stage tech startup. Perhaps my highwater mark in community exposure has been a critique of the word Transhumanist at Accelerating Future. In the following years, my experience has been more mixed, but I appreciate the topics and tools being developed even if the community seems a tad insular. If I had to wear some established thinkers on my sleeve I'd choose Paul Graham, Lawrence Lessig, Steve Sailer, Gregory Cochran, Roy Baumeister, and Peter Thiel. (I originally had a comment here about having an irrational attraction toward humility, but on second thought, that might rule out Gregory "If I have seen farther than others, it's because I'm knee-deep in dwarves" Cochran… Hmm.)
Cards-on-the-table, it's my impression that
(1) Lesswrong and SIAI are doing cool things that aren't being done anywhere else (this is not faint...
Hello everyone, Like many people, I come to this site via an interest in transhumanism, although it seems unlikely to me that FAI implementing CEV can actually be designed before the singularity (I can explain why, and possibly even what could be done instead, but it suddenly occurred to me that it seems presumptuous of me to criticize a theory put forward by very smart people when I only have 1 karma...).
Oddly enough, I am not interested in improving epistemic rationality right now, partially because I am already quite good at it. But more than that, I am trying to switch it off when talking to other people, for the simple reason (and I'm sure this has already been pointed out before) that if you compare three people, one who estimates the probability of an event at 110%, one who estimates it at 90%, and one who compensates for overconfidence bias and estimates it at 65%, the first two will win friends and influence people, while the third will seem indecisive (unless they are talking to other rationalists). I think I am borderline asperger's (again, like many people here) and optimizing social skills probably takes precedence over most other things.
I am currently doing a PhD in ...
I am not interested in improving epistemic rationality right now, partially because I am already quite good at it.
But remember that it's not just your own rationality that benefits you.
it seems presumptuous of me to criticize a theory put forward by very smart people when I only have 1 karma
Presume away. Karma doesn't win arguments, arguments win karma.
Hi! Given how much time I've spent reading this site and its relatives, this post is overdue.
I'm 35, male, British and London-based, with a professional background in IT. I was raised Catholic, but when I was about 12, I had a de-conversion experience while in church. I remember leaving the pew during mass to go to the toilet, then walking back down the aisle during the eucharist, watching the priest moving stuff around the altar. It suddenly struck me as weird that so many people had gathered to watch a man in a funny dress pour stuff from one cup to another. So I identified as atheist or humanist for a long time. I can't remember any incident that made me start to identify as a rationalist, but I've been increasingly interested in evidence, biases and knowledge for over ten years now.
I've been lucky, I think, to have some breadth in my education: I studied Physics & Philosophy as an undergrad, Computer Science as a postgrad, and more recently rounded that off with an MBA. This gives me a handy toolset for approaching new problems, I think. I definitely want to learn more statistics though - it feels like there's a big gap in the arsenal.
There are a few stand-out things I have...
Background:
21-year old transgender-neither. I spent 13 years enveloped by Mormon culture and ideology, growing up in a sheltered environment. Then, everything changed when the Fire nation attacked.
Woops. Off-track.
I want my actions to matter, not from others remembering them but from me being alive to remember them . In simpler terms, I want to live for a long time - maybe forever. Death should be a choice, not an unchanging eventuality.
But I don't know where to start; I feel overwhelmed by all the things I need to learn.
So I've come here. I'm reading the sequences and trying to get a better grasp on thinking rationally, etc., but was hoping to get pointers from the more experienced.
What is needed right now? I want to do what I can to help not only myself, but those whose paths I cross.
~Jenna
I'll quickly point you at Drexler's Nanosystems and Freitas's Nanomedicine though they're rather long and technical reads. But we are visualizing molecularly specified machines, and 'hell no' to thawing first or pulping the cell. Seriously, this kind of background assumption is why I have to ask a lot of questions instead of just taking this sort of skeptical intuition at face value.
But rather than having to read through either of those sources, I would ask you to just take on assumption that two molecularly distinct (up to thermal noise) configurations will somehow be distinguishable by sufficiently advanced technology, and describe what your intuitions (and reasons) would be taking that premise at face value. It's not your job to be a physicist or to try to describe the theoretical limits of future technology, except of course that two systems physically identical up to thermal noise can be assumed to be technologically indistinguishable, and since thermal noise is much larger than exact quark positions it will not be possible to read off any subtle neural info by looking at exact quark positions (now that might be permanently impossible), etc. Aside from that I would encoura...
Would strongly predict that such changes erase only information about short term activity, not long term memory. Protein conformation in response to electrochemical/osmotic gradients operates on the timescale of individual firings, it's probably too flimsy to encode stable memories. These should be easy for Skynet to recover.
Higher level pattens of firings might conceivably store information, but experience with anaesthesia, hypothermia etc. says they do not. Or we've been killing people and replacing them all this time... a possibility which thanks to this site I'm prepared to consider..
Oh, and
Do you have a page number in Nanosystems for a references to a sensing probe?
Bam.
http://www.nature.com/news/diamond-defects-shrink-mri-to-the-nanoscale-1.12343
Anders Sandberg who does get the concept of sufficiently advanced technology posts saying, "Shit, turns out LTM seems to depend really heavily on whether protein blah has conformation A and B and the vitrification solution denatures it to C and it's spatially isolated so there's no way we're getting the info back, it's possible something unknown embodies redundant information but this seems really ubiquitous and basic so the default assumption is that everyone vitrified is dead". Although, hm, in this case I'd just be like, "Okay, back to chopping off the head and dropping it in a bucket of liquid nitrogen, don't use that particular vitrification solution". I can't think offhand of a simple discovery which would imply literally giving up on cryonics in the sense of "Just give up you can't figure out how to freeze people ever." I can certainly think of bad news for particular techniques, though.
Personally, I would be very impressed if anyone could demonstrate memory loss in a cryopreserved and then revived organism, like a bunch of C. elegans losing their maze-running memories. They're very simple, robust organisms, it's a large crude memory, the vitrification process ought to work far better on them than a human brain, and if their memories can't survive, that'd be huge evidence against anything sensible coming out of vitrified human brains no matter how much nanotech scanning is done (and needless to say, such scanning or emulation methods can and will be tested on a tiny worm with a small fixed set of neurons long before they can be used on anything approaching a human brain). It says a lot about how poorly funded cryonics research is that no one has done this or something similar as far as I know.
My name is Itai Bar-Natan. I have been lurking here for a long time, more recently I start posting some things, but only now do I formally introduce myself.
I am in grade 11, and I began reading less wrong at grade 8 (introduced by Scott Aaronson's blog). I am a former math prodigy, and am currently taking one graduate-level course in it. This is the first time I am learning math under the school system (although I not the first time I attended math classes under the school system). Before that, I would learn from my parents, who are both mathematicians, or (later on) from books and internet articles.
Heedless of Feynman, I believe I understand quantum mechanics.
One weakness I am working to improve on is the inability to write in large quantities.
I have a blog here: http://itaibn.wordpress.com/
I consider less wrong as a fun time-waster and a community which is relatively sane.
I'm Robby Oliphant. I started a few months ago reading HP:MoR, which led me to the Sequences, which led me here about two weeks ago. So far I have read comments and discussions solely as a spectator. But finally, after developing my understanding and beginning on the path set forth by the sequences, I remain silent no more.
I am fresh out of high school, excited about life and plan to become a teacher, eventually. My short-term plans involve going out and doing missionary work for my church for the next two years. When I came head on against the problem of being a rationalist and a missionary for a theology, I took a step back and had a crisis of belief, not the first time, but this time I followed the prescribed method and came to a modified conclusion, though I still find it rational and advantageous to serve my 2 year mission.
I find some of this difficult, some of this intuitive and some of this neither difficult or intuitive, which is extremely frustrating, how something can appears simple but defy my efforts to intuitively work it. I will continue to work at it because rationality seems to be praiseworthy and useful. I hope to find the best evidence about theology here. I don't mean evidence for or against, just the evidence about the subject.
Some businessman wrote a book of advice called "Never Eat Alone", the title of which means that every meal is an opportunity to have a meal with someone to network with. That is what the saying "he who would be Pope must think of nothing else" looks like in practice. Not wearing oneself out like Superman in the SMBC cartoon, driven into self-imposed slavery by memetic immune disorder.
Actually, I think that the world described in that SMBC cartoon is far preferable to the standard DC comics world with Superman. I do not think that doing what Superman did there is a memetic immune disorder, but rather a (successful) attempt to make the world a better place.
I definitely wouldn't. A single tormented child seems to me like an incredibly good tradeoff for the number of very high quality lives that Omelas supports, much better than we get with real cities.
It sucks to actually be the person whose well-being is being sacrificed for everyone else, but if you're deciding from behind a veil of ignorance which society to be a part of, your expected well being is going to be higher in Omelas.
Back when I was eleven or so, I contemplated this, and made a precommitment that if I were ever in a situation where I'm offered a chance to improve total wellfare for everyone at the cost of personal torment, I should take it immediately without giving myself any time to contemplate what I'd be getting myself into, so in that sense I've effectively volunteered myself to be the tormented child.
I don't disagree with maximally efficient altruism, just with the idea that it's sensible to judge entertainment only as an instrumental value in service of productivity.
My interpretation is "evidence that was not obtained in the service of a particular bottom line."
I'm here to make one public prediction that I want to be as widely-read as possible. I'm here to predict publicly that the apparent increase in autism prevalence is over. It's important to predict it because it distinguishes between the position that autism is increasing unstoppably for no known reason (or because of vaccines) and the position that autism has not increased in prevalence, but diagnosis has increased in accuracy and a greater percentage of people with autism spectrum disorders are being diagnosed. It's important that this be as widely-read as possible as soon as possible because the next time prevalence estimates come out, I will be shown right or wrong. I want my theory and prediction out there now so that I can show that I predicted a surprising result before it happened. While many people are too irrational to be surprised when they see this result even though they have predicted the opposite, I hope that rationalists will come to believe my position when it is proven right. I hope that everyone disinterested will come to believe this. The reason why I hope this is because I want them to be more likely to listen to me when I make statements about human rights as they apply to people with autism spectrum disorders. It is important that society change its attitudes toward such individuals.
Please help me by upvoting me to two karma so I can post in the discussion section.
I saw this site on evand's computer one day, so of course then had to look it up for myself. In my free time, I pester him with LW-y questions.
By way of background, I graduated from a trying-to-be-progressive-but-sort-of-hung-up-on-orthodoxy quasi-Protestant seminary in spring 2010. Primary discernible effects of this schooling (i.e., I would assign these a high probability of relevance on LW) include:
deeply suspicious of pretty much everything
a predisposition to enter a Hulk-smash rage at the faintest whiff of systematic injustice or oppression
high value on beauty, imagination*, and inclusivity
* Part of my motivation to involve myself in rationalism is a hope that I can learn ways to imagine better (more usefully, maybe.)
I like learning more about how brains work (/don't work). Also about communities. Also about things like why people say and do what they say and do, both in terms of conditioning/unconscious motivation and conscious decision. And and and. I will start keeping track on a wiki page perhaps.
I cherish ambitions of being able to contribute to a discussion one day! (If anyone has any ideas/relevant information about getting over not wanting to look stupid, please do share ...)
Hi!
Hello.
I was raised by a rationalist economist. At some point I got the idea that I wanted to be a statistical outlier, and also that irrationality was the outlier. After starting to pay attention to current events and polls, I'm now pretty sure that the second premise is incorrect.
I still have many thought patterns from that period that I find difficult to overcome. I try to counter them in the more important decisions by assigning WAG numerical values and working through equations to find a weighted output. I read more non-fiction than fiction now, and I am working with a mental health professional to overcome some of those patterns. I suppose I consider myself to have a good rationalist grounding while being used to completely ignoring it in my everyday life.
I found Less Wrong through FreethoughtBlogs and "Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationalism." I added it to my feed reader and have been forcing my economist to help me work though some of the more science-of-choice oriented posts.
Hi. 18 years old. Typical demographics. 26.5-month lurker and well-read of the Sequences. Highly motivated/ambitious procrastinator/perfectionist with task-completion problems and analysis paralysis that has caused me to put off this comment for a long time. Quite non-optimal to do so, but... must fight that nasty sunk cost of time and stop being intimidated and fearing criticism. Brevity to assure it is completed - small steps on a longer journey. Hopefully writing this is enough of an anchor. Will write more in future time of course.
Finally. It is written. So many choices... so many thoughts, ideas, plans to express... No! It is done! Another time you silly brain! We must choose futures! We will improve, brain, I promise.
I look forward to at last becoming an active member of this community, and LEVELING UP! Tsuyoku naritai!
I’m Taylor Smith. I’ve been lurking since early 2011. I recently finished a bachelor’s in philosophy but got sort of fed up with it near the end. Discovering the article on belief in belief is what first hooked me on LessWrong, as I’d already had to independently invent this idea to explain a lot of the silly things people around me seemed to be espousing without it actually affecting their behavior. I then devoured the Sequences. Finding LessWrong was like finding all the students and teachers I had hoped to have in the course of a philosophy degree, all in one place. It was like a light switching on. And it made me realize how little I’d actually learned thus far. I’m so grateful for this place.
Now I’m an artist – a writer and a musician.
A frequently-confirmed observation of mine is that art – be it a great sci-fi novel, a protest song, an anti-war film – works as a hack to help to change people’s minds who are resistant or unaccustomed to pure rational argument. This is true especially of ethical issues; works which go for the emotional gut-punch somehow make people change their minds. (I think there are a lot of overlapping reasons for this phenomenon, but one certainly is that...
Hello all, My name is Benjamin Martens, a 19-year-old student from Newcastle, Australia. Michael Anissimov, director of Humanity+, added me to the Less Wrong Facebook group. I don’t know his reasons for adding me, but regardless I am glad that he did.
My interest in rational thinking, and in conscious thinking in general, stems, first, from the consequences of my apostasy from Christianity, which is my family’s faith; second, from my combative approach to my major depression, which I have (mostly) successfully beaten into submission through an analysis of some of the possible states of the mind and of the world— Less Wrong and the study of cognitive biases will, I hope, further aid me in revealing my depressive worldview as groundless; or, if not as groundless, then at least as something which is not by nature aberrant and which is, to some degree, justified; third, and in connection to my vegan lifestyle, I aim to understand the psychology which might lead a person to cause another being to suffer; and last, and in connection to all aforementioned, it is my hope that an understanding of cognitive biases will allow not merely myself to edge nearer to the true state of things, but al...
I'm Nancy Hua. I was MIT 2007 and worked in NYC and Chicago in automated trading for 5 years after graduating with BS's in Math with CS (18C) and in Writing (21W).
Currently I am working on a startup in the technology space. We have funding and I am considering hiring someone.
I started reading Eliezer's posts on Overcoming Bias. In 2011, I met Eliezer, Robin Hanson, and a bunch of the NYC Lesswrongers. After years of passive consumption, very recently I started posting on lesswrong after meeting some lesswrongers at the 2012 Singularity Summit and events leading up to it, and after reading HPMOR and wanting to talk about it. I tried getting my normal friends to read it but found that making new friends who have already read it is more efficient.
Many of the writings regarding overcoming our biases and asking more questions appeal to me because I see many places where we could make better decisions. It's amazing how far we've come without being all that intelligent or deliberate, but I wonder how much more slack we have before our bad decisions prevent us from reaching the stars. I want to make more optimal decisions in my own life because I need every edge I can get to achieve some of my goals! Plus I believe understanding and accepting reality is important to our success, as individuals and as a species.
Poll: how old are you?
Newcomers only, please.
How polls work: the comments to this post are the possible answers. Upvote the one that describes your age. Then downvote the "Karma sink" comment (if you don't see it, it is the collapsed one), so that I don't get undeserved karma. Do not make comments to this post, as it would make the poll options hard to find; use the "Discussion" comment instead.
Hi. I discovered LessWrong recently, but not that recently. I enjoy Yudkowsky's writings and the discussions here. I hope to contribute something useful to LessWrong, someday, but as of right now my insights are a few levels below those of others in this community. I plan on regularly visiting the LessWrong Study Hall.
Also, is it "LessWrong" or "Less Wrong"?
I am Pinyaka. I've been lurking a bit around this site for several months. I don't remember how I found it (probably a linked comment from Reddit), but stuck around for the main sequences. I've worked my way through two of them thanks to the epub compilations and am currently struggling to figure out how to prioritize and better put into practice the things that I learn from the site and related readings.
I hope to have some positive social interactions with the people here. I find that I become fairly unhappy without some kind of regular socialization in a largish group, but it's difficult to find groups whose core values are similar to mine. In fact, after leaving a quasi-religious group last year it occurred to me that I've always just fallen in with whatever group was most convenient and not too immediately repellant. This marks the first time I've tried to think about what I value and then seek out a group of like minded individuals.
I also hope to find a consistent stream of ideas for improving myself that are backed by reason and science. I recognize that removing (or at least learning to account for) my own biases will help me build a more accurate picture of the universe that I live in and how I function within that framework. Along with that, I hope to develop the ability to formulate and pursue goals to maximize my enjoyment of life (I've been reading a bunch of lukeprogs anti-akrasia posts recently, so following through on goals is on my mind currently).
I am excited to be here.
I'm Shai Horowitz. I'm currently a duel physics and mathematics major at Rutgers university. I first learned of the concept of "Bayesian" or "rationality" through HPMOR and from there i took it upon myself to read the Overcoming Bias post which has been an extremely long endeavor of which I have almost but not yet accomplished. Through conversation with others in my dorm at Rutgers I have realized simply how much this learning has done to my thought process and it allowed me to hone in on my own thoughts that i could see were still biased and go about fixing them. Through this same reasoning it became apparent to me that it would be largely beneficial to become an active part in the lesswrong community to sharpen my own skills as a rationalist while helping others along the way. I embrace rationality for the very specific reason that I wish to be a Physicists and realize that in trying to do so i could (as Eliezer puts hit) "shoot off my own foot" while doing things that conventional science allows. In the process of learning this I did stall out for months at a time and even became depressed for a while as I was stabbing my weakest points with the met...
Hi! I was wondering where to start on this website. I started reading the sequence "How to actually change your mind", but there's a lot of lingo and stuff I still don't understand. Is there a sequence here that's like, Rationality for Beginners, or something? Thanks.
Hi, my name is Briony Keir, I'm from the UK. I stumbled on this site after getting into an argument with someone on the internet and wondering why they ended up failing to refute my arguments and instead resorted to insults. I've had a read-around before posting and it's great to see an environment where rational thought is promoted and valued; I have a form of autism called Asperger Syndrome which, among many things, allows me to rely on rationality and logic more than other people seem to be able to - I too often get told I'm 'too analytical' and I 'shouldn't poke holes in other peoples' beliefs' when, the way I see it, any belief is there to be challenged and, indeed, having one's beliefs challenged can only make them stronger (or serve as an indicator that one should find a more sensible viewpoint). I'm really looking forward to reading what people have to say; my environment (both educational and domestic) has so far served more to enforce a 'we know better than you do so stop talking back' rule rather than one which allows for disagreement and resolution on a logical basis, and so this has led to me feeling both frustrated and unchallenged intellectually for quite some time. I hope I prove worthy of debate over the coming weeks and months :)
Hello everyone,
I found Less Wrong through "Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality" like many others. I started reading more of Eliezer Yudkowsky's work a few months ago and was completely floored. I now recommend his writing to other people at the slightest provocation, which is new for me. Like others, I'm a bit scared by how thoroughly I agree with almost everything he says, and I make a conscious effort not to agree with things just because he's said them. I decided to go ahead and join in hopes that it would motivate me to start doing more active thinking of my own.
Hello rationalists-in-training of the internet. My name is Joseph Gnehm, I am 15 and I live in Montreal. Discovering LessWrong had a profound effect on me, shedding light on the way I study thought processes and helping me with a more rational approach.
I'm a 20-year-old physics student from Finland whose hobbies include tabletop roleplaying games and Natalie Reed-Zinnia Jones-style intersection of rationality and social justice.
I've been sporadically lurking on LessWrong for the last 2-3 years and have read most of the sequences. My primary goal is to contribute useful research to either SI or FHI or failing that, a significant part of my income. I've contacted the X-risks Reduction Career Network as well.
I consider this an achievable goal as my general intelligence is extremely high and I have won a national level mathematics competition 7 years ago despite receiving effectively no training in a small backwards town. With dedication and training I believe I could reach the level of the greats.
However, my biggest challenge currently is Getting Things Done; apart from fun distractions, committing any significant effort to something is nigh impossible. This could probably be caused by clinical depression (without the mood effects) and I'm currently on venlafaxine as an attempt to improve my capability to actually do something useful but so far (about 3 months) it hasn't had the desired effect. Assistance/advice would be appreciated.
Hi everyone! Another longtime lurker here. I found LW through Yvain's blog (Emily and Control FTW!). I'm not really into cryonics or FAI, but the sequences are awesome, and I enjoy the occasional instrumental rationality post. I decided to become slightly more active here, and this thread seemed like a good place to start, even if a bit old.
Hi.
My name is Roberto and I'm a Brazilian physicist working in the UK. Even working in an academic environment, that obviously do not guarantee an environment where rational/unbiased/critical discussions can happen. Science production in universities not always are carried out by thinking critically about a subject as many papers can be purely technical in their nature. Also, free thinking is as regulated in academia as it is everywhere else in many aspects.
That said, I have been reading and browsing Less Wrong for some time and think that this can indeed be done here. In addition, given later developments all around the world in many aspects and how people react to them, I felt the urge to discuss them in a way which is not censored, specially by the other persons in the discussion. It promises to be relaxing anyway.
I'm sure I'm gonna have a nice time.
Please add a few words about "Open Thread". Something like -- If you want to write just a simple question or one paragraph or text, don't create a new article, just add it as a comment to the latest discussion article called "Open Thread".
Hello everyone. My name is Vadim Kosoy, and you can find some LW-relevant stuff about me in my Google+ stream: http://plus.google.com/107405523347298524518/about
I am an all time geek, with knowledge / interest in math, physics, chemistry, molecular biology, computer science, software engineering, algorithm engineering and history. Some areas in which I'm comparatively more knowledgeable: quantum field theory, differential geometry, algebraic geometry, algorithm engineering (especially computer vision)
In my day job I'm a technical + product manager of a small software group in Mantis Vision (http://www.mantis-vision.com/) a company developing 3D video cameras. My previous job was in VisionMap (http://www.visionmap.com/) which develops airborne photography / mapping systems, where I led a team of software and algorithm engineers.
I knew about Eliezer Yudkowsky and his friendly AI thesis (which I don't fully accept) for some time, but discovered this community only relatively recently. For me this community is interesting because of several reasons. One reason is that many discussions are related to the topics of transhumanism / technological singularity / artificial intelligence which...
Welcome! We're all 29.9 years old, here.
Speak for yourself, youngster ! Why, back in my day, we didn't have these "internets" you whippersnappers are always going on about, what with the cats and the memes and the facetubes and the whatnot. We had to make our own networks, by hand, out of floppies and acoustic modems, and we liked it . Why, there's nothing like an invigorating morning hike with a box of 640K floppies (formatted to 800K) in your backpack, uphill in the snow both ways. Builds character, it does. Mumble mumble mumble get off my lawn !
Hello,
I'm Ben. I'm here mainly because I'm interested in effective altruism. I think that tracing through the consequences of one's actions is a complex task and I'm interested in setting out some ideas here in the hope that people can improve my reasoning. For example, I've a post on whether ethical investment is effective, which I'd like to put up once I've got a couple of points of karma.
I studied philosophy and theology, and worked for a while in finance. Now, I'm trying to work out how to increase the positive impact I have, which obviously demands answers about both what 'positive impact' means, and what the consequences are of the choices I make. I think these are far from simple to work out; I hope just to establish a few points with which I'm satisfied enough. I think that exposing ideas and arguments to thoughtful people who might want to criticise or expand them could help me a lot. And this seems a good place for doing that!
Hi, I'm Alex.
Every once in a while I come to LessWrong because I want to read more interesting things and have more interesting discussions on the Internet. I've found it a lot easier to spend time on Reddit (having removed all the drivel) and dredging through Quora to find actually insightful content (seriously, do they have any sort of actual organization system for me to find reading material?) in the past. LessWrong's discussions have seemed slightly inaccessible, so maybe posting an introduction like I'm supposed to will set in motion my figuring out how this community works.
I'm interested in a lot of things here, but especially physics and mathematics. I would use the word "metaphysics" but it's been appropriated for a lot of things that aren't actually meta-physics like I mean. Maybe I want "meta-mathematics"? Anyway, I'm really keen on the theory behind physical laws and on attempts at reformulating math and physics into more lucid and intuitive systems. Some of my reading material (I won't say research, but ... maybe I should say research) recently has been on geometric algebra, re-axiomizing set theory, foundations and interpretations of quantum mechan...
Hello, newbie here. I'm intrigued by the premise of this forum.
About me: I think a lot- mostly by myself. That's trained me in some really lazy habits that I am looking to change now.
In the last few weeks, I noticed what I think are some elemental breakdowns in human politics. When things go bad between people, I think it can be attributed to one of three causes: immaturity, addiction, or insanity. I would love to discuss this further, hoping someone's interested.
I wasn't going to mention theism, but it's here in the main post, and suddenly I'm interested: I trend toward the athiestic- I'm really unimpressed with my grandmother's deity, and "supernatural" doesn't seem a useful or interesting category of phenomena. But I like being agnostic more than atheist, just on a few tiny little wiggle-words that seem powerfully interesting to me, and I notice that other people seem to find survival value in it. So that's probably something I will want to talk about.
Many of my more intellectual friends and neighbors can seem like bullies a lot of the time. So I like the word "rationality" in the title of this place, much more than I like "science" or "logic&...
Hello, I'm Ben Kidwell. I'm a middle-aged classical pianist and lifelong student of science, philosophy, and rational thought. I've been reading posts here for years and I'm excited to join the discussion. I'm somewhat skeptical of some things that are part of the conventional wisdom around here, but even when I think the proposed answers are wrong - the questions are right. The topics that are discussed here are the topics that I find interesting and significant.
I am only formally and professionally trained in music, but I have tried to self-study physics, math, computer science, and philosophy in a focused way. I confess that I do have one serious weakness as a rationalist, which is that I can read and understand a lot of math symbology, but I can't actually DO math past the level of simple calculus with a few exceptions. (Some computer programming work with algorithms has helped with a few things.) It's frustrating because higher math is The Key that unlocks a lot of deep understanding of the universe.
I have a particular interest in entropy, information theory, cosmology, and their relation to the human experience of temporality. I think the discovery that information-theoretic...
I'm Rev. PhD in mathematics, disabled shut-in crank. I spend a lot of time arguing with LW people on Twitter.
I am a 43 year old man who loves to read, and stumbling across HPMOR was an eye opener for me, and it resonated profoundly within. My wife is not only the Queen of Critical Thinking and logic, she is also the breadwinner. Me? I raise the children( three girls), take care of the house, and function as a housewife/gourmet chef/personal trainer/massage therapist for my wife on top of being my daughters personal servant. This is largely due to my wife's towering intellect, overwhelming competence, my struggles with ADHD, and the fact that she makes huge amounts of money. Me, I just age almost supernaturally slowly(at 43, I still pass for thirty, possibly due to an obsession with fitness ), am above average handsome, passingly charming, good singing voice, and incapable of winning a logical argument, as the more stress I grow, the faster my IQ shrinks. I am taken as seriously by my wife, as Harry probably was by his father as a four year old. I am looking to change that. I am hoping that if I learn enough about less wrong, I just might learn how to put all the books I compulsively read to good use, and maybe learn how to...change.
I am Alexander Baruta, High-school student currently in the 11th grade (grade 12 math and biology). I originally found the site through Eliezer's blog, I am (technically) part of the school's robotics team (someone has to stop them from creating unworkable plans), undergoing Microsoft It certification, and going through all of the psychology courses in as little time as possible (Currently enrolled in a self-directed learning school) so I can get to the stuff I don't already know. My mind is fact oriented, (I can remember the weirdest things with perfect clarity after only hearing them once) but I have trouble combining that recall with my English classes, and I have trouble remembering names. I am informally studying formal logic, programming, game theory, and probability theory (don't you hate it when the curriculum changes. (I also have a unusual fondness for brackets, if you couldn't tell by now)
I also feel that any discussion about me that fails to mention my love of Sf/Fantasy should be shot dead, I caught onto reading at a very, very early age and by the time I was in 5th grade I was reading at a 12th grade comprehension level, and I was tackling Asimov, Niven, Pohl, Piers Anthony, Stephen R. Donaldson, Roger Zelazny and most good authors.
Hi,
I was introduced to LW by a friend of mine but I will admit I dismissed it fairly quickly as internet philosophy. I came out to a meetup on a recent trip to visit him and I really enjoyed the caliber of people I met there. It has given me reason to come back and be impressed by this community.
I studied Math and a little bit of Philosophy in undergrad. I'm here mostly to learn, and hopefully to meet some interesting people. I enjoy a good discussion and I especially enjoy having someone change my mind but I lose interest quickly when I realize that the other party has too much ego involved to even consider changing his or her mind.
I look forward to learning from you all!
Matt
Hello LW community. I'm a HS math teacher most interested in Geometry and Number Theory. I have long been attracted to mathematics and philosophy because they both embody the search for truth that has driven me all my life. I believe reason and logic are profoundly important both as useful tools in this search, and for their apparently unique development within our species.
Humans aren't particularly fast, or strong, or resistant to damage as compared with many other creatures on the planet, but we seem to be the only ones with a reasonably well develo...
Aaron's blog brought me here. Sad that he's no longer with us.
I have been thinking for a long time about overcoming biases, and to put them into action in life. I work as an orthopaedic surgeon in the daytime and all I see around me is an infinite amount of bias. I can't take it on unless I can understand them and apply them to my life processes!
Hey everyone, I'm sean nolan. I found less wrong from tvtropes.org, but I made sure to lurk sufficiently long before joining. I've been finding a lot of interesting stuff on lesswrong (most of which was posted by eliezer), some of which I've applied to real life (such as how procrastination vs doing something is the equivalent of defect vs cooperate in a prisoners' dilemma against your future self). I'm 99.5% certain I'm a rationalist, the other 0.5% being doubt cast upon me by noticing I've somehow attained negative karma.
Hello, I'm a physics student from Croatia, though I've attended a combined physics and computer science program (study programs here are very specific) for couple of years at a previous university that I left, though my high school specialization is in economy. I am currently working towards my bachelor's degree in physics.
I have no idea how I learned of this site, though it was probably trough some transhumanist channels (there's a lot of half-forgotten bits and pieces of information floating in my mind, so I can't be sure). Lately I've started reading th...
Hi! I am Robert Pearson: Political professional of the éminence grise variety. Catholic rationalist of the Aquinas variety. Avid chess player, pistol shooter. Admirer of the writings of Ayn Rand and Robert Heinlein. Liberal Arts BA from a small state university campus. I read Overcoming Bias occasionally some years ago, but heard of LessWrong from Leah Libresco.
My real avocation is learning how to be a smarter, better, more efficient, happier human being. Browsing the site for awhile convinced me it was a good means to those ends.
I write a column on Thursdays for Grandmaster Nigel Davies' The Chess Improver
Hey there! I'm a 19-year old Canadian girl with a love for science, science fiction, cartoons, RPGs, Wayne Rowley, learning, reading, music, humour, and a few thousand other things.
Like many I found this site via HPMOR. As a long-time fan of both science and Harry Potter, I was ultimately addicted from chapter one. It's hard to apply scientific analysis to a fictional universe while still keeping a sense of humour, and HPMOR executes this brilliantly. My only complaint ( all apologies to Mr. Yudkowsky, though I doubt he'll ever read this) are that Harry co...
Hi, I'm Jess. I've just graduated from Oxford with a masters degree in Mathematics and Philosophy. I'm trying to decide what to do next with my life, and graduate study in cognitive science is currently top of my list. What I'm really interested in is the application of research in human rationality, decision making and its limitations to wider issues in society, public policy etc.
I'm taking some time to challenge my intuition that I want to go into research, though, as I'm slightly concerned that I'm taking the most obvious option not knowing what else to...
Hi everyone,
I'm currently caught up on HPMOR, and I've read many of the sequences, so I figured it was time to introduce myself here.
I'm a 24 year old Cognitive Psychology graduate student. I was raised as a fairly conservative Christian who attempted to avoid any arguments that would seriously challenge my belief structure. When I was in undergrad, I took an intro to philosophy course which helped me realize that I needed to fully examine all of my beliefs. This helped me to move toward becoming a theistic evolutionist and finally an atheist. Now I strive...
Hi everyone,
I'm Leisha. I originally came across this site quite a while ago when I read the Explain/Worship/Ignore analogy here. I was looking for insight into my own cognitive processes; to skip the unimportant details, I ended up reading a whole lot about the concept of infinity once I realized that contemplating the idea gave me the same feeling of Worship that religion used to. It still does, to some extent, but at least I'm better-informed and can Explain the sheer scale of what I'm thinking of a little better.
I didn't return here until yesterday, wh...
Hello,
I am Jay Swartz, no relation to Aaron. I have arrived here via the Singularity Institute and interactions with Louie Helm and Malo Bourgon. Look me up on Quora to read some of my posts and get some insight to my approach to the world. I live near Boulder, Colorado and have recently started a MeetUp; The Singularity Salon, so look me up if you're ever in the area.
I have an extensive background in high tech, roughly split between Software Development/IT and Marketing. In both disciplines I have spent innumerable hours researching human behavior and tho...
Hi I’m Bojidar (also known as Bobby). I was introduced to LW by Luke Muehlhauser’s blog “Common Sense Atheism” and I've been reading LW ever since he first started writing about it. I am a 25 year old laboratory technician (and soon to be PhD student) at a major cancer research hospital in Buffalo, NY. I've been reading LW for a while and recently I've been really wishing that Buffalo had a LW group (I've been considering starting one, but I’m a bit concerned that I don’t have much experience in running groups nor have I been very active in the online comm...
Hi, I'm Rixie, and I read this fan fic called Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, by lesswrong, so I decided to check out Lesswrong.com. It is totally different from what I thought it would be, but it's interesting and I like it. And right now I'm reading the post below mine, and wow, my comment sounds all shallow now . . .
I'm Rachel Haywire and I love to hate culture. I've been in "the community" for almost 2 years but just registered an account today. I need to read more of the required texts here before saying much but wanted to pop my head out from lurking. I've been having some great conversations on Twitter with a lot of the regulars here.
I organize the annual transhumanist/alt-culture event Extreme Futurist Festival (http://extremefuturistfest.info) and should have my new website up soon. I like to write, argue, and write about arguing. I've also done silly ...
Hi, my name is Wes(ley), and I'm a lurkaholic.
First, I'd like to thank this community. I think it is responsible in a large way for my transformation (perceived transformation of course) from a cynical high schooler who truly was only motivated enough to use his natural (not worked hard for) above average reasoning skills to troll his peers, to a college kid currently making large positive lifestyle changes, and dreaming of making significant positive changes in the world.
I think I have observed significant changes in my thinking patterns since reading th...
I'm new on Less Wrong and I want to solve P vs. NP.
The Millenium Prize would be a nice way to simultaneously fund my cryopreservation and increase my prestige. I clearly need a backup plan, though, and I don't have one. Will someone with a BS in mathematics and computer science be able to find a good job? Where should I look?
Sorry to put it bluntly, but this sounds incredibly naive. One cannot plan on winning the Millenium Prize any more than one can plan on winning a lottery. So, it's not an instrumentally useful approach to funding your cryo. The latter only requires a modest monthly income, something that you will in all likelihood have regardless of your job description.
As for the jobs for CS graduates, there are tons and tons of those in the industry. For example, the computer security job market is very hot and requires the best and the brightest (on both sides of the fence).
Hi everyone!
I'm 19 years old and a rising sophomore at an American university. I first came across Less Wrong five months ago, when one of my friends posted the "Twelve Virtues of Rationality" on facebook. I thought little of it, but soon afterward, when reading Leah Libresco's blog on atheism (she's since converted to catholicism), I saw a reference to Less Wrong, and figured I would check it out. I've been reading the Sequences sporadically for a few months, and just got up to date on HPMOR, so I thought I would join the community and perhaps b...
Hi, LessWrong,
I used to entertain myself by reading psychology, and philosophy articles on Wikipedia and following the subsequent links. When I was really interested in a topic though, I used google to further find websites would provide me more information on said topics. Around late 2010, I found that some of my search results led to this very website. Less Wrong proved to be a little too dense for me to enjoy; I needed to fully utilize my cognitive capabilities to even begin to comprehend some of the articles posted here.
Since I was looking for enterta...
So I recently found LessWrong after seeing a link to the Harry Patter fanfiction, and I have been enthralled with the concept of rationalism since. The concepts are not foreign to me as I am a chemist by training, but the systematization and focus on psychology keep me interested. I am working my way through the sequences now.
As for my biography, I am a 29 year old laboratory manager trained as a chemist. My lab develops and tests antimicrobial materials and drugs based on selenium's oxygen radical producing catalysis. It is rewarding work if you can g...
Greetings!
I'll start with how I made my way here. Unsurprisingly, it was HPMOR. Perhaps even less surprisingly, said fanfic was recommended on Tumblr. After reading that excellent story and a couple of follow up fanfics, I decided that rational fics are the thing for me, and also that, as someone who desperately wants to write a good story, the underlying rationality is something that I needed to get a handle on. (Also, for a large portion of my life I've been obsessed with logic.)
I've acquired Rationality: From AI to Zombies, and am slowly working my way ...
Hi, Charlie here.
I'm a middle-aged high-school dropout, married with several kids. Also a self-taught computer programmer working in industry for many years.
I have been reading Eliezer's posts since before the split from Overcoming Bias, but until recently only lurked the internet -- I'm shy.
I broke cover recently by joining a barbell forum to solve some technical problems with my low-bar back squat, then stayed to argue about random stuff. Few on the barbell forum argue well -- it's unsatisfying. Setting my sights higher, I now join this forum.
I'll probably start by trying some of the self-improvement schemes and reporting results. Any recommendations re: where to start?
Apologies in advance for the novella. And any spelling errors that I don't catch (I'm typing in notepad, among other excuses).
It's always very nice when I come across something that reminds me that there are not only people in the world who can actually think rationally, but that many of them are way better at it than me.
I don't like mentioning this so early in any introduction, but my vision is terrible to the point of uselessness; I mostly just avoid calling myself "blind" because it internally feels like that would be giving up on the tiny pow...
After having read all of the Sequences, I suppose its time I actually registered. I did the most recent (Nov 2012) survey. I'm doing my PhD in the genetics of epilepsy (so a neurogenetics background is implied). I'm really interested in branching out into the field of biases and heuristics, especially from a functional imaging and genetics perspective (my training includes EEG, MRI/fMRI, surgical tissue analysis, and all the usual molecular stuff/microarrays).
Experiences with grant writing makes me lean more toward starting my own biotech or research firm and going from there, but academics is an acceptable backup plan.
Hi, I’m Cinnia, the name I go by on the net these days. I found my way here by way of both HPMOR and Luminosity about 8 months ago, but never registered an account until the survey.
Like Alan, I’m also in my final year of secondary school, though I’m on the other side of the pond. I love science and math and plan to have a career in neuroscience and/or psychiatry after I graduate. This year I finally decided to branch out my interests a bit and joined the local robotics club (a part of FIRST, if anyone’s curious), and it’s possibly the best extracurricular...
Hi, I'm Alan, a student in my final year of secondary school in London, England. For some reason I'm finding it hard to remember how and when I stumbled upon Less Wrong. It was probably in March or April this year, and I think it was because Julia Galef mentioned it at some point, thought I may be misremembering.
Anyway, I've now read large chunks of the Sequences (though I can never remember which bits exactly) and HPMOR, and enjoy reading all the discussion that goes on here. I've never registered as a user before as I've never felt the burning need to c...
Hello everyone, I'm Luc, better known on the web as lucb1e. (I prefer not to advertise my last name for privacy reasons.) I'm currently a 19 year old student, doing application development in Eindhoven, The Netherlands.
Like Aaron Swartz, I meant to post in discussion but don't have enough karma. I've been reading articles from time to time for years now, so I think I have an okay idea what fits on this site.
I think I ended up on LessWrong originally via Eliezer's NPC story. After reading that I looked around on the site, read about the AIBox experiment (wh...
Well, I haven't really figured out what you all need to know about me, but I suppose there must be something relevant. Let's start with why I'm here.
I can remember being introduced to Less Wrong in two ways, though I don't know in what order. One was through HPMoR, and the other through a post about Newcomb's problem. Neither of those really brought me here in a direct way, though. I guess I am here based on the cumulative sum of recommendations and mentions of LW made by people in my social circle, combined with a desire for new reading material that i...
Hi everyone!
I'm a theoretical physicist from Germany. My work is mostly about the foundations of quantum theory, but also information theory and non-commutative geometry. Currently I'm working as head of research in a private company.
As a physicist I have been confronted with all sorts of (semi-) esoteric views about quantum theory and its interpretation, and my own lack of a better understanding got me started to explore the fundamental questions related to understanding quantum theory on a rational basis. I believe that all mainstream interpretations h...
Howdy, I'm a math grad student.
I discovered Less Wrong late last night when a friend linked to a post about enjoying "mere" reality, which is a position I've held for quite some time. That post led me to a couple posts about polyamory and Bayesianism, which were both quite interesting, and I say this as someone familiar with each topic.
Although I've read bits & pieces of Harry Potter & the Methods of Rationality, it wasn't until I browsed through this thread that I realized it was assembled here.
I will freely admit that I tend to be a bit...
My name is Chris Roberts. Professionally, my background is finance, but I have always been fascinated by science and have tried to apply a scientific approach to my thought and discussions. I find far too much thinking dominated by ideology and belief systems without any supporting evidence (let alone testable hypotheses). Most people seem to decide their positions first, then marshal arguments to justify their prejudigments. I have never considered myself a "rationalist", but rather an empiricist. I believe in democracy, the free market and...
Hello, I'm a 21 year old undergraduate student studying Economics and a bit of math on the side. I found LessWrong through HPMOR, and recently started working on the sequences. I've always been torn between an interest in pure rational thinking, and an almost purely emotional / empathetic desire for altruism, and this conflict is becoming more and more significant as I weigh options moving forward out of Undergrad (Peace Corp? Developmental Economics?)... I'm fond of ellipses, Science Fiction novels and board games - I'll keep my interests to a minimum her...
Hello,
I found this site via HPMOR, which was the most awesome book I have read for several years. Besides being awesome as a book there were a lot of moments during reading I thought wow, there is someone who really thinks quite like myself. (Which is unfortunately something I do not experience too often.) Thus I was interested in who the author of HPMOR is, so I googled “less wrong”.
This site really held what HPMOR promised, so I spend quite some time reading through many articles absorbing a lot of new and interesting concepts.
Regarding my own person, ...
Long-time lurker, first-time poster. I'm 21, male, and a college student majoring in economics and minoring in CS. I first heard of Eliezer Yudkowsky when a couple of my friends discovered Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality two years ago. I started reading it and enjoyed it immensely at first, but as the plot eclipsed what I'd call the "cool tricks", I became less interested and dropped it. More recently, a different friend linked me to Intellectual Hipsters. After reading it, I read several sequences and was hooked.
My journey to rationa...
I wandered onto this site, read an article, read some interesting discussion on it, and decided to take the survey. The survey had some interesting discussion and I enjoyed the extra credit, which I did the majority of, with an exception of the IQ test I couldn't get to work right and will do later. I enjoyed the discussion I read, though, and decided this would be an interesting site to read more on. I don't know yet how much discussion I'll contribute, but when I see an interesting discussion I'm sure I'll join in.
I don't have too much to say about myse...
Hi Guys,
I found out about this place from Methods of Rationality and have been reading the sequences for a few months now. I don't have a background in science or mathematics (just finished reading law at university) so I've yet to get to the details of Bayes but I've been very intrigued by all the sequences on cognitive bias, and this site was the trigger for me becoming interested in the mind-blowing realities of evolution and prompted me finally pulling my finger out and shifting from non-thinking agnosticm to atheism.
I'm still adjusting but I feel this site has already helped start to clean up my thinking, so thanks to everyone for making coming here such a life-changing experience.
David
I used to have a different account here, but I wanted a new one with my real name so I made this one.
I study computer and electrical engineering at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, though I'm not finding it very gratifying (rationalists are rare creatures around here for some reason), and I'm trying as hard as I can to find some other way to get paid to code/think so I can drop out. Here's my occasionally-updated reading list, and my favorite programming language is Clojure.
Peter here,
I stumbled onto LW from a link on TvTropes about the AI Box experiment. Followed it to an explanation of Bayes' Theorem on Yudowsky.net 'cause I love statistics (the rage I felt knowing that not one of my three statistics teachers ever mentioned Bayes was an unusual experience).
I worked my way through the sequences and was finally inspired to comment on Epistemic Viciousness and some of the insanity in the martial arts world. If your goal is to protect yourself from violence, martial arts is more likely to get you hurt or thrown in jail.
It seems...
Hellooo! I de-lurked during the survey and gradually started rambling at everyone but I never did one of these welcome posts!
My exposure to rationality started with idea that your brain can have bugs, which I had to confront when I was youngish because (as I randomly mentioned) I have a phobia that started pretty early. By then I had fairly accurate mental models of my parents to know that they wouldn't be very helpful/accommodating, so I just developed a bunch of workarounds and didn't start telling people about it until way later. The experience helped ...
Hello everyone!
My personal and professional development keep leading me back to the LessWrong sequences, so I've gathered up enough humility to join in the discussions. I hope to meet your high standards.
I'm 27 and my background is in business and the life sciences; I see rationality as a critically important tool in these areas, but ultimately a relatively minor tool for life as a successful human animal. As such I see this community as being similar to a bodybuilding/powerlifting community, where the interest is in training the rational faculty instead of physical strength.
Edit: Wow, all my comments downvoted? That's a pretty strongly negative response. Care to explain?
Greetings! I am Viktor Brown (please do not spell Viktor with a c), and I tend to go by deathpigeon (please do not capitalize it or spell pigeon with a d) on the internet. (I cannot actually think of a place I don't go by deathpigeon...) I'm currently 19 years old. I'm unemployed and currently out of school since my parents cut off me off for paying for school. I consider myself to be a rationalist, a mindset that comes from how I was raised rather than any particular moment in my life. When I was still in university, I was studying computer science, a sub...
Hi everyone!
Well, I'm new-ish here, and this site is really big, so I was wondering where I should start, like, which articles or sequences I should read first?
Thanks!
Howdy. My name is Alexander. I've read a lot of LW, but only recently finally registered. I learned about LW from RationalWiki, where I am a mod. I have read most of the sequences, and many of them are insightful, although I am skeptical about the utility of such posts as the Twelve Virtues, which seeks to clothe a bit of good advice in the voluminous trappings of myth. HPMOR is also good. I don't anticipate engaging in much serious criticism of these things, however, because I have little experience in the sciences or mathematics, and often struggle...
First of all, I encourage you to take advantage of the counseling and psychological services available to you on campus, if you have not already done so. They're very familiar with psychological pain.
Second, I encourage you to go to a Less Wrong meetup when you get the chance. There's a good chance you'll find people there who are as smart as you and who care about some of the same things you care about. There are listings for meetups in Toronto, Albany, and New York City. I can personally attest that the NYC meetup is great and exists and has good people.
Finally, I wish I could point you to resources that are especially appropriate for trans people, but I don't know what they are.
I really hope that you will be okay.
It really feels good to be here. The name along sounds comforting..... 'less wrong'. I've always loved to be around people who write and provide of intuitive solutions to everyday challenges. Guess am gonna read a few posts and get acquainted to the customs here then make meaningful contributions too.
Thanks Guys for this great opportunity.
Hi! I'm shard. I have been looking for a community just like this for quite awhile. Someone on the Brain Workshop group recommended this site too me. It looks great, I am very excited to sponge as much knowledge off as I can, and hopefully to add a grain someday.
I love the look of the site. What forum or bb do you use? or is it a custom one? I've never seen one like it, it's very clean, and I'd like to use it for a forum I wanted to start.
Greetings. My name is Albert Perrien. I was initially drawn to this site by my personal search on metacognition; and only really connected after having stumbled across “Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality”, which I found an interesting read. My professional background is in computer engineering, database administration, and data mining, with personal studies of Machine Learning, AI and mathematics. I find the methods given here to promote rational thought and bias reduction fascinating, and the math behind everything enlightening.
Recently I’ve b...
It took me a few hours to find this thread like a kid rummaging through a closet not knowing what he is looking for.
As my handle indicates, I am Lloyd. Not much I think is worth saying about myself but I would like to ask a few questions to see what interests readers here, if anyone reads this, and present a sample of where my thinking may come from.
Considering the psychological model of five senses we are taught since grade school is there a categorical difference in our ability to logically perceive that 2+2=4 vs perceiving the temperature is decreasi...
Hi all! I'm Leonidas and I was also a lurker for quite some time. I forget how I exactly found Less Wrong but most likely is via Nick Bostrom's website, when I was reading about anthropics about a year ago. I'm an astronomer working on observational large-scale structure and I have a big interest in all aspects of cosmology. I also enjoy statistics, analyzing data and making inferences and associated computational techniques.
It was only during the final year of my undergraduate studies in physics that I consciously started to consider myself a rationalist...
I am Erik Erikson. By day I currently write patents and proofs of concept in the field of enterprise software. My chosen studies included neuro and computer sciences in pursuit of the understanding that can produce generally intelligent entities of equal to or greater than human intelligence less our human limitations. I most distinctly began my "rationalist" development around the age of ten when I came to doubt all truth, including my own existence. I am forever in debt to the "I think, therefore I am" idiom as my first piece of k...
Hello everyone. I've been lurking around this site for a while now. I found this site from HPMOR, as I'm sure a lot of people have. The fanfic was suggested to me by one of my friends who read it.
Random cliffnotes about myself. I'm a highschool senior. I'm a programmer, been programming since I was 10, it's one of my favorite things to do and it's what I plan on doing for my career. I love reading, which I would imagine is a given to most people here. I've always been interested in how the universe and people work, and I want to know the why of everything I can.
Hello, I found LessWrong through a couple of Tumblr posts. I don't really identify as a rationalist but it seems like a sane enough idea. I look forward to figuring out how to use this site and maybe make some contributions. I found reading some of the sequences interesting, but I think I might just stick to the promoted articles. As of now I have no plans on figuring out the Bayes thing, although I did give it a try. My name is Andrew.
Hello everyone
I've been lurking here for a while now but I thought it was about time I said "Hi".
I found Less Wrong through HPMOR, which I read even though I never read Rowling's books.
I'm currently working my way through the Sequences at a few a day. I'm about 30% through the 2006-2010 collection, and I can heartily recommend reading them in time order and on something like Kindle on your iPhone. ciphergoth's version suited me quite well. I've been making notes as I go along and sooner or later there'll be a huge set of comments and queries ar...
We are currently undertaking a study on popular perceptions of existensial risk, our goal is to create a publicly accesible index of such risks, which may then be used to inform and catalyze comprehension through discussion generated around them.
If you have a few minutes, please follow the link to complete a brief, anonymous questionnaire - your input will be appreciated !
Survey Link : http://eclipsebureau-survey.questionpro.com/
Join us on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/eclipse.bureau
Hi there community! My name is Dave. Currently hailing from the front range in Colorado, I moved out here after 5 years with a Chicago non-profit - half as executive director - following a diagnosis of Asperger Syndrome (four years after being diagnosed with ADHD-I). That was three years ago. Much has happened in the interim, but long story short, I mercilessly began studying what we call AS & anything related I could find. After a particularly brutal first-time experience with hardcore passive-aggressivism (always two sides to every situation, but it ...
Hello Michael and Amanda Connolly from Phoenix Arizona here! we are looking for like minded people in Arizona too start a meetup group with. We are working on A documentary on rational thinking! its Called Rated R for Rational
http://www.indiegogo.com/RatedR?a=1224097
shoot us off an Email if you live in Arizona!
Just joined. Into: Hume, Nietzsche, J.S. Mill, WIliam James, Aleister Crowley, Wittgenstein, Alfred Korzybski, Robert Anton Wilson, Paul K. Feyerabend, etc.... DeeElf
Hi, my name is Alex. I'm not that smart as ppl posting articles here. My ability to properly challenge the captcha only from 2nd attempt while registering here in LW proves this :) So I was learning math when being student, now working in IT. While typing this comment I've been thinking what is my purpose of spending time here and reading different info... and suddenly realized that i'm 29 already and life is too short to afford thinking wrong and thinking slow. So hope to improve myself to be able learn and understand more and more things. Cheers to everyone :)
Hey. I'd like to submit an article. Please upvote this comment so that I may acquire enogh points to submit it.
I am Alexander Baruta, High-school student currently in the 11th grade (grade 12 math and biology). I originally found the site through Eliezer's blog, I am (technically) part of the school's robotics team (someone has to stop them from creating unworkable plans), undergoing Microsoft It certification, and going through all of the psychology courses in as little time as possible (Currently enrolled in a self-directed learning school) so I can get to the stuff I don't already know. My mind is fact oriented, (I can remember the weirdest things with perfect c...
A few years ago some of my friends and I were interested in futurism and how technology could make the world a better place, which brought us upon the topics of transhumanism and the Singularity. I was aware of LessWrong, but it wasn't until last year when I took a psychology course that I got really interested in reading the blog. Just over a year ago I started reading LessWrong more frequently. I read a lot of stuff about the Singularity, existential risk, optimal philanthropy, epistemology, and cognitive science, both here and lots of other places on th...
Hello...sorry, but I was hoping someone could msg me the location for the NYC meetup real quick, which is in two hours.
I am a new member and have been looking at Blogs for the first time over the past few weeks. I have written a book, finished last month, which deals with many of the issues about reasoning discussed at this site, but I attempt to cut through them somewhat, as there is so much potential in the facts out there to be ordered that I don't spend a lot of time considering the theory relating to my reasoning in providing some order to it in my book. I discuss reasoning, and many of the principles raised in posts here, but my interest is in reasonably framing the ...
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, what you value, how you came to identify as a rationalist or how you found us. You can skip right to that if you like; the rest of this post consists of a few things you might find helpful. More can be found at the FAQ.
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A note for theists: you will find the Less Wrong community to be predominantly atheist, though not completely so, and most of us are genuinely respectful of religious people who keep the usual community norms. It's worth saying that we might think religion is off-topic in some places where you think it's on-topic, so be thoughtful about where and how you start explicitly talking about it; some of us are happy to talk about religion, some of us aren't interested. Bear in mind that many of us really, truly have given full consideration to theistic claims and found them to be false, so starting with the most common arguments is pretty likely just to annoy people. Anyhow, it's absolutely OK to mention that you're religious in your welcome post and to invite a discussion there.
I recommend the major sequences to everybody, but I realize how daunting they look at first. So for purposes of immediate gratification, the following posts are particularly interesting/illuminating/provocative and don't require any previous reading:
More suggestions are welcome! Or just check out the top-rated posts from the history of Less Wrong. Most posts at +50 or more are well worth your time.
Welcome to Less Wrong, and we look forward to hearing from you throughout the site.