JoshuaFox comments on AALWA: Ask any LessWronger anything - Less Wrong

28 Post author: Will_Newsome 12 January 2014 02:18AM

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Comment author: JoshuaFox 12 January 2014 07:12:43PM *  1 point [-]

  1. Why do you say "may have at one point been good at math and programming." Aren't you still good at that? Are opportunities for people like yourself -- blind, but with those aptitudes --, available in today's world, where so much is done in front of a computer screen, and adaptive technologies exist? Or do you think that in a competitive world, blindness puts you hopelessly behind sighted people?

  2. Do you think that your level of ambition and drive are lessened by your disability, increased, or does it make no difference?

  3. Does the CfAR-style philosophy of instrumental rationalism help you overcome your disability?

Comment author: CAE_Jones 12 January 2014 08:22:59PM 4 points [-]
  1. Issues in my first two years of college interfered in my Math/Physics/Computer Science courses, and I never got back into those. So my skills in each has remained only that which I've used most (for example, I've made some games, but the required qualifications for most programming jobs I've come across exceed what I can do without additional training. I think that, even had I not dropped the ball on those, competing with sighted programmers/scientists/mathematicians would require a decent amount of exceptionalism and/or luck. Mathematic notation is also tricky in terms of accessibility; there exist codes such as Nemeth that make math in braille relatively powerful, but on the computer side of things, graphs and LeTX take some doing to use, which also makes trying to study anything with math online difficult (I once downloaded a web page and edited its source so I could read the equations).
  2. It's hard to say. For roughly four years after my vision went from poor to useless, I think I was still fairly driven and ambitious (I did a lot of writing, half taught myself Japanese and Javascript, self-published a terrible science fiction novel, learned to use a music composition program whose accessibility was poor, improvised some crude techniques for making simple images, got into and graduated from the state Math and Science school, and was taking plenty of notes on numerous other things I was hoping to do sooner than later). It all went to hell when I got to college, and has gone back and fourth since, but I'm not sure if any of this compares favorable/unfavorably to the average person. There may be some contributing factors to the negative aspects that go back to my vision (I can't safely get up and go running, or do the all-important eye-contact thing, as examples), but I don't think the affect in the ambition/motivation area has been majorly significant.
  3. I'm not sure what you mean, specifically? My exposure to CFAR consists primarily of LesssWrong; I've been attempting to apply LW-style rationality to the situation, but the timing has made this difficult (I found LW a few months after returning home from college, at which point my options in general were reduced to "things I can do over the internet" and "things for which I would need to go through my parents", and have mostly stayed there until half a week ago. I've not been able to avoid antisocial death spirals; I find myself wanting to deal with the family members I live with less, which makes dealing with them more annoying, repeat ad hermitdom.) If the results of last week's meeting go as planned, I should have a better answer by the end of February.
Comment author: Eugine_Nier 12 January 2014 09:17:56PM 1 point [-]

competing with sighted programmers/scientists/mathematicians would require a decent amount of exceptionalism and/or luck.

Standard economics question: have you considered accepting lower pay?

Comment author: CAE_Jones 13 January 2014 01:51:40AM 4 points [-]

Standard economics question: have you considered accepting lower pay?

Yes.

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