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Dr_Manhattan comments on AALWA: Ask any LessWronger anything - Less Wrong
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Comments (611)
I like the idea.
Here we go, things that might be interesting to people to ask about:
born in Kharkov, Ukraine, 1975, Jewish mother, Russian father
went to a great physics/math school there (for one year before moving to US), was rather average for that school but loved it. Scored 9th in the city's math contest for my age group largely due to getting lucky with geometry problems - I used to have a knack for them
moved to US
ended up in a religious high school in Seattle because I was used to having lots of Jewish friends from the math school
Became an orthodox Jew in high school
Went to a rabbinical seminary in New York
After 19 years, accumulation of doubts regarding some theological issues, Haitian disaster and a lot of help from LW quit religion
Mostly worked as a programmer for startups with the exception of Bloomberg, which was a big company; going back to startups (1st day at Palantir tomorrow)
self-taught enough machine learning/NLP to be useful as a specialist in this area
Married with 3 boys, the older one is a high-functioning autistic
Am pretty sure AI issues are important to worry about. MIRI and CFAR supporter
Speaking as a nonexpert, I'm curious what similarities, parallels, and overlap you see between these two fields.
Modern NLP (Natural Language Processing) uses statistical methods quite a bit - http://nlp.stanford.edu/fsnlp/
How did your family handle your deconversion? Do you continue with the religious Jewish style of everyday life?
Do your kids speak Russian at all/fluently? If not, are you at all unhappy about that? What about Hebrew?
If you're comfortable discussing the HFA kid: at what age was he diagnosed? What kind of therapy did you consider/reject/apply? What are the most visible differences from neurotypical norm now?
Hi Anatoly,
Initially it was a shock to my wife, but I took things very slowly as far as dropping practices. This helped a lot and basically I do whatever I want now (3.5 years later). Also transferred my kids to a good public school out of yeshiva. My wife remains nominally religious, it might take another 10 years :)
My kids don's speak Russian - my wife is American-born. I prefer English myself, so I'm not "unhappy" about them not speaking Russian in particular although I'd prefer them to be bilingual in general. They read a bit of Hebrew.
I'm happy to discuss my HFA kid via PM.
Is your wife still teaching your kids religion? How do you work out conflicts with your wife over religious issues (I assume she insists on a kosher kitchen, wants the kids to learn Jewish values etc)
So glad to hear you got your kids out of yeshiva. Way to go!
Did you meet your wife via shidduch or more traditionally? If you ever did shidduch: I'm curious if in the orthodox circles in the US a Baal Teshuva faces a tougher challenge in shidduch than someone who grew up in a frum family. This is very much the case in Israel. Here I've heard tales of severe discrimination and essentially second-class status.
What's the attitude in orthodox circles towards Conservative/Reform Jews? (not the official one, but the "on the street" sort of thing, if it exists...). Is there any dialogue between the branches at all? (As you probably know, Conservative/Reform barely exist in Israel).
Met my wife through a Shidduch, though the Shadchan was my friend and both of us were BTs, so it wasn't quite Fiddler on the Roof. The BT thing made my transition out easier, now my in-laws love me even more :).
I attended a modern and strangely rationalist Yeshiva - they really attempted to reconcile Torah with modern science ala Maimonides. I just concluded you can't pull that off in the end. The attitude to conservatives there was "well, they're wrong, but let's not make this personal", mostly treating them as "tinock shenishbh". The guy who started it was mostly a nice guy, and he used most of the allowed vitriol to attack the stupidity and superstition of the right. I can't speak for other yeshivot or sects from personal experience, but I imagine this was somewhat unusual.
Funny - my biological father's last name was Vorobyev. I guess that makes us cousins :-p