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rayalez comments on What is your rationalist backstory? - Less Wrong
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I disagree. My drive to "be clever" has nothing to do with my intelligence compared to other people, it's just about my desire to push my understanding of the universe, mastery of my skills, and creativity as far as I can. I love knowing things, understanding things, and being able to create things. And being good at it is what matters to me the most. At least this is what 'being clever' means to me.
Other people are just examples of what's possible, or of what I should avoid. I really don't care whether I appear smarter than them, it is just about pushing my potential as far as possible.
As to whether it is a worthwhile aim in life - it seems pretty worthwhile to me. So far I have not found anything more interesting or worthy of pursuing.
Maslow would probably call that "self-actualization".
The desire to understand is quite different from the desire to be clever, at least as I understand these words.
What kind of things do you want to create?
I think that ability to understand is a part of being clever. So is knowing a lot of things, and being able to come up with unusual ideas, and being able to focus on a task for a long time, and ability to achieve goals, and many other things.
I want to create a startup.
And I also want to write awesome fiction(Rationalist sci-fi comedy. Something like Rick and Morty meets HPMOR).