Hi, LessWrong community!
My pseudonym is Ilzolende Kiefer. I'm a HS student, autistic, and (as is typical for users of this site) an atheist. I've been lurking on this site for a while, and before that I was reading other books about cognitive bias and whatnot.
I think I got into rationality for 2 reasons: having a scientist parent, and dealing with school psychologists of questionable quality. (The autism wasn't a big enough deal to require an autism-specific therapist, but it wasn't equivalent to neurotypicality.) The first reason is straightforward. The second reason takes explaining. Imagine the adults around you treating your personal thought process as flawed. Even if you're a kindergartener, if you're fairly smart, you'll want to self-correct.
I actually did this in kindergarten: my model of appropriate behavior before starting was based on the Junie B. Jones fiction series. This led me to hit a boy on the first day of class, because girls were supposed to hate boys. I got a behavior chart (don't do x for y weeks, and then a reward will occur) for this, and did not have difficulty adhering to it, because I didn't want to hit random boys, I just wanted to behave in accordance with expectations whenever it was easy to do so. That's not to say I was very rational then: I thought that a good way to communicate that a timer was going off was to make beeping sounds: "That's how the timer communicates stuff, so I should repeat the communication!", and that my friends would be really interested in a discussion of binary numbers involving sticks and pinecones representing ones and zeroes.)
Another reason that this led to rationality was that school psychologists have a client, and that client is not the student. I do not consider "becoming indistinguishable from my peers" to be a terminal goal I have or want, nor do I consider it a good instrumental goal. School psychologists are very skilled at influencing behaviors through Dark Arts-type methods. I began to notice that this was occurring (behaviors that did not correspond to my model of how I should be behaving, such as picking up valley-girl speech patterns), and tried to immunize myself against it, mostly by getting into a lot of exhausting arguments.
Side note: teaching empathy via guessing emotions of drawn faces is terrible. I have plenty of distance bias in my moral reasoning already. Looking at bad art won't increase this. There is more to identifying an emotion than the low level of detail a sketch artist can manage (voice, posture, more details in the face, movement, and context.)
Quitting religion was easy for me, mostly because I was only religious because that was what people who attended weekly services were. The biggest shock along the way was finding out that the biology writer I had read 2 books by was actually more famous as an atheist. (Me in museum gift shop: "Hey, it's that Dawkins guy. Wait, this book called The God Delusion has his name on it? Isn't he a biology writer?") If I had to pinpoint anything, it's that I had no social cost for quitting, as well as the chapter on memes in The Selfish Gene.
Finally, I'm a Mock Trial pseudo-trial attorney. This has dramatically improved my argument skills, even if it is motivated reasoning. (At one point, I found myself talking about prior probabilities in the middle of an objection argument, and it worked. Thanks, LW!)
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A list of some posts that are pretty awesome
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!
Once a post gets over 500 comments, the site stops showing them all by default. If this post has 500 comments and you have 20 karma, please do start the next welcome post; a new post is a good perennial way to encourage newcomers and lurkers to introduce themselves. (Step-by-step, foolproof instructions here; takes <180seconds.)
If there's anything I should add or update on this post (especially broken links), please send me a private message—I may not notice a comment on the post.
Finally, a big thank you to everyone that helped write this post via its predecessors!