I'm Shai Horowitz. I'm currently a duel physics and mathematics major at Rutgers university. I first learned of the concept of "Bayesian" or "rationality" through HPMOR and from there i took it upon myself to read the Overcoming Bias post which has been an extremely long endeavor of which I have almost but not yet accomplished. Through conversation with others in my dorm at Rutgers I have realized simply how much this learning has done to my thought process and it allowed me to hone in on my own thoughts that i could see were still biased and go about fixing them. Through this same reasoning it became apparent to me that it would be largely beneficial to become an active part in the lesswrong community to sharpen my own skills as a rationalist while helping others along the way. I embrace rationality for the very specific reason that I wish to be a Physicists and realize that in trying to do so i could (as Eliezer puts hit) "shoot off my own foot" while doing things that conventional science allows. In the process of learning this I did stall out for months at a time and even became depressed for a while as I was stabbing my weakest points with the metaphorical knife. I do look back at laugh at the fact now that a college student was making incredibly bad decisions to get over the pain of fully embracing the second law of thermodynamics and its implications, which to me seems to be a sign of my progress moving forward. I don't think that i will soon have to face a fact as daunting as that one and with the knowledge that I know how to accept even that law I will now be able to accept any truths much more easily. That being said even though hard science is my primary purpose for learning rationality I am a bit of a self proclaimed polymath and have spent recent times learning more of psychology and cognition then simply the cognitive bias's i need to be self weary of. I just finished the book "Influence: Science and Practice" which I've heard Eliezer mention multiple times and very recently as in this week my interest have turned into pushing standard ethical theories to there limits as to truly understand how to make the world a better place and to unravel the black box that is itself the word "better". I conclude with I would love to talk with anyone experienced or new to rationality about pretty much any topic and would very much like if someone would message me. furthermore if anyone reading this goes to Rutgers university or is around the area, a meet up over coffee or something similar would make my day.
Welcome! I am really curious what you mean by
making incredibly bad decisions to get over the pain of fully embracing the second law of thermodynamics and its implications
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