My name is Joshua. I am 29 years old. After lurking for a while, I have decided to begin participating.

I have little training in mathematics or computer science. Growing up, mathematics always came easy to me, but it was never interesting (probably because it was easy, in part). Accordingly, I completed a typical high school education in mathematics by my freshman year and promptly stopped. In college, the only course I took was college algebra, which I completed for the sake of university requirements. I now regret ending my mathematical education and have begun going through the Khan Academy materials. As best I can currently estimate, I want to reach a level roughly equivalent to what an undergraduate math major would be required to know at the beginning of his or her upper-division work. At that point, I will be in a better position to know what else to study. Computers, by contrast, were of considerable interest to me in my youth, and I learned some rudimentary programming in junior high. That interest was eventually eclipsed by other interests, and I do not currently have any plans to reanimate it.

Most of my intellectual efforts are devoted to philosophy, and it is from that angle that I discovered Less Wrong. I have a fair amount of formal training in the field. (The sort of discussions that occur on Less Wrong, of course, are quite different from most of the work that is done in philosophy.)

As far as the normal Less Wrong materials are concerned, I have read a few of the sequences and recently read a bit of HPMoR. Most significantly, I have been working through one of the ebook versions of Eliezer's posts arranged in chronological order; I have slowly read somewhat more than half of them (for reference, I recently completed the sequences on quantum physics and meta-ethics).

I look forward to participation.

I also have a request: would someone be willing to set up a chat appointment (IRC or whatever) to work through a few comprehension questions related to the quantum physics sequence? I am confident that my questions are quite basic. If you are interested, please send me a private message.