CassandraR

Hrm. I doubt I would be ready for a cross country trip in the next few months. Maybe I can do it later. Yep. :)

I imagine I would need to provide my own transportation, yes?

Speaking as someone that has been going to a therapist off and on for the past three years I have come to be pretty skeptical of the idea. Pretty much all the progress I have made in coping with and solving my problems has been on my own. I currently see one mainly because it is required of me by my college and because of the entertainment value of talking about myself for an hour or so.

Sounds good to me. I would enjoy being present at a meeting in order to discuss topics from this site.

I am going to be hosting a Less Wrong meeting at East Tennessee State University in the near future, likely within the next two weeks. I thought I would post here first to see if anyone at all is interested and if so when a good time for such a meeting might be. The meeting will be highly informal and the purpose is just to gauge how many people might be in the local area.

So I am back in college and I am trying to use my time to my best advantage. Mainly using college as an easy way to get money to fund room and board while I work on my own education. I am doing this because i was told here among other places that there are many important problems that need to be solved and i wanted to develop skills to help solve them because I have been strongly convinced that it is moral to do so. However beyond this I am completely unsure of what to do. So I have the furious need for action but seem to have no purpose guiding that actio... (read more)

To me cryonics causes a stark panic inducing terror that is only alittle less than death itself and I would never in a million years do it if I used my own judgment on the matter but I decided that Eliezer probably knows more than me on this subject and that I should trust his judgement above my own. So i am in the process of signing up now. Seems much less expensive than I imagined also.

This is at least one skill I have tried to cultivate until I grew more educated myself; the ability to export my judgement consciously to another person. Thinking for your... (read more)

I have read pretty much everything more than once. It is pretty difficult to turn reading into action though. Which is why I feel like there is something I am missing. Yep.

This is similar to my experience. Perhaps a better way to express my problem is this. What are the some safe and effective way to construct and dismantle identity? And what sorts of identity are most able to incorporate new information and process them into rational beliefs? One strategy I have used in the past is to simply not claim ownership of any belief so that I might release it more easily but in this I run into a lack of motivation when I try to act on these beliefs. On the other hand if I define my identity based on a set of beliefs then any threat... (read more)

Let me see if I can be more clear. In my experience I have an emotional framework with which I hang beliefs from. Each belief has specific emotional reinforcement or structure that allows me to believe it. If I revoke that reinforcement then very soon after I find that I no longer hold that belief. I guess the question I should ask first is that is this emotional framework real? Did I make it up? And it is real then how can I use it to my advantage?

How did I build this framework and how do I revoke emotional support? I have good reason to think that the framework isn't simply natural to me since it has changed so much over time.

Something has been bothering me ever since I began to try to implement many of the lessons in rationality here. I feel like there needs to be an emotional reinforcement structure or a cognitive foundation that is both pliable and supportive of truth seeking before I can even get into the why, how and what of rationality. My successes in this area have been only partial but it seems like the better well structured the cognitive foundation is the easier it is to adopt, discard and manipulate new ideas.

I understand that is likely a fairly meta topic and woul... (read more)

The reason I feel value outside of an objective value framework is that I taught myself over weeks and months to do so. If a theist had the rug pulled out from under them morally speaking then they might well be completely bewildered by how to act and how to think. I am sure this would cause great confusion and pain. The process of moving from a theist world view to a materialistic world view is not some flipped switch, a person has to teach themselves new emotional and procedural reactions to common every day problems. The manner in which to do this is to... (read more)

When I started taking hormones in order to fix the sorry state my body was in I really didn't think they would change me much in the realm of personal identity. And there really hasn't been any earthshaking alterations, not sure if that is because my brain architecture was already mostly female or because hormones don't cause many changes, but the amount of small subtle changes and a few moderate ones that added up to make me a almost a completely different person. I may have some other flaws that make it difficult for me to form a personal identity but I ... (read more)

Seems like the most simple solution would be to trend people towards being bisexual and reduce the need for monogamous relationships. So instead of having one perfect mate that a person spends all their time with then have many different mates that all fulfill an different essential need or hunger. I know if I was living a very long life I wouldn't want to spend it all with the same person.