Hey everyone, nice to finally join the party.

My name's Pat, I'm a 22 year old man studying biochemistry at the undergraduate level, and I've been an on-and-off lurker for at least the last five years. My two favorite animals are the platypus and the water bear, my favorite food is calamari and I love cheesy action movies un-ironically.

If I had to put together a narrative of how I became a rationalist and made it to this site, it would look something like this (1);

My parents were quite a bit smarter than they were emotionally stable or perceptive, so they raised me as an atheist while forgetting the somewhat-important step of not making non-existence sound utterly horrifying (2). From a fairly young age I had a nearly paralyzing fear of death, and being a smart arrogant kid I figured that if anyone ought to live forever it should be me. I remember on my twelfth birthday talking to a few of my friends and deciding that genetic modification would probably allow for practical immortality before brain uploading was developed. That thought led immediately to the next; that I would be the person to solve mortality forever. (Yeah, I was pretty childish back then.)

I had already been interested in science beforehand, and with a powerful drive like that spent an inordinate amount of time studying so that I could hit 'escape velocity' in my lifetime. Even as the fear evaporated later on and I became indifferent as to whether I lived or died the interest in biology remained and intensified, and overall it has served me well. The scientific method helped me nail down my more intuitive-associative style of thinking into a logical framework while my passion helped me set clear goals for the future.

But I wouldn't say I was really a rationalist until about a year or so ago, when three key events combined to shape me into the person I am now. The first was reading this site and hearing about Bayes Theorem for the first time in about 2008-2009, which helped me structure my understanding of science in a clearer way and for which I owe Mr Yudkowski a huge debt. The second was recovering from a severe depression caused by my anxiety disorder about a year later; unsurprisingly it's a lot easier to be rational when you are actually sane, not to mention that cognitive-behavioral therapy taught me more about biases and neurology than I had learned in years of logic or neuroscience courses. The third is that I started reading a lot of Nietzsche, which helped me clear up a lot of the distracting moral detritus I had rolling around in my head.

So today I'm a more-or-less stable and happy guy who's just gotten back into my field, trying to improve his life and the world. I'm primarily interested in genetics, nanotechnology (3), and transhumanism / eugenics, but really I'll read about anything which doesn't lean too heavily on pure math or religious evangelism.

Thanks for reading all this, and I look forward to getting to know all of you.

1 Technically, exactly like this. If you haven't noticed, I can be a bit of a pedant. 2 For a long time I thought of the idea of hell as comforting; as bad as eternal torture sounds, at least you're still there. 3 I've heard some fascinating things about the potential of deoxyribozymes as a substitute for proteins in terms of nanotech, which is great for lazy people like me because I'd like to be able to understand the folding of things I work with without having to take a supercomputer's word for it.