Hi LW, I've been a lurker for the quite some time, it ended this week.

The sequences and blog (ebook compilation I found somewhere) have a comfortable text-to-speech place in my commutes and I've incorporated quite a bit of the lingo, bias definitions and concepts into my daily Anki decks. It's not that this community was that daunting but rather that I thought I could play catch up. My reluctance reminds me of a programmer asking if it's worth getting on github if he's only joining the party now. I've studied computer systems engineering (electronics, digital circuit design, programming, math) and I'm spending most of my time teaching and writing, although most of my work focuses on internet technologies, security and automation - I've veered of quite a bit from my assembly beginnings to the Python world I seem to be living in now.

Some things that have already been actionable for me since around the end of 2011, after reading LW material and more specifically Shut up and do the impossible, includes

• cramming around 12.8k German words into my vocabulary in a mere 35-45 minutes daily in 12 months (which Goethe Inst. deemed impossible) - I do swear by SRS now,
• finally finishing my thesis in security (software fingerprinting and vulnerability mapping) after realising my supervisor might just be incentivised to keep me around for articles - whilst teaching full time - I finally realised focusing on student throughput might mean subsidy for the university but penultimately I need to focus on my work first in order for everyone to benefit - after 10 years of teaching graduate level programming,
• I jumped into a couple of technologies that seemed daunting in terms of scope and people that have used them for years, including LaTeX (no idea how I would live without it now), emacs and org-mode (still only 6 months, but it's getting its grip on me firmly) and also R (although my gut feel is that I'll probably rather veer into using pandas later),
• turning into a QS oversubscriber with tools like RescueTime, Beeminder and selfspy keeping track of my goals and my actual CLI time, and
• lastly probably becoming a more critical reader of everything including my own work. However fuzzy this might make me feel and regardless of how it might sound, some of the sequence material left me with a feeling of coming home.

Soon I hope to be emigrate to Germany from the beautiful South Africa that is suffering at the hands of peak-level irrational politicians (discussions on this in later posts).

I hope to become more involved in discussions to ensure I get a deeper understanding of the concepts. As someone that have spent large amounts of time with curriculum development I'm also very interested in how rationality could be taught, not only to more adults but starting much younger (having grown up under Christian parents myself).

Thanks to @army1987 for the prod to post here, and sorry for all the specific technology mentions - I just find specifics give me more information than saying 'learning' or SRS and such. Also, English is my second language, German third, so excuse the odd pillaging of your tongue. This feels longer than anything I've written about myself.

I'm happy to answer any questions, and I hope I can keep throwing my ignorant rock of understanding against this anvil for a hopefully more interesting shape. There is so much to learn if one approaches this with a growth mindset.