I've found myself to be overly drawn to the dark arts in general. Whether it's the idea of becoming a Dark Lord, a sith, or using self-deception to achieve my goals (or just my desires). What feels somewhat related is that I am terrified that I would take the option of "blissing out" if it were available. Realizing I am like this and that I need to compensate is all that kept me away from becoming a drug addict.

On first reading this post, my reaction was extreme eagerness. I thought of dozens of applications before I was done reading. I have done the things described, largely intuitively, before ever starting a journey as a rationalist. But after taking a deep breath and saying, "Whoa now," to myself... I think I need to walk away and not think about this until I've worked on myself a bit more.

What makes me uncomfortable is not the suggestions, it's how perfectly comfortable I am with them.

It was interesting to see how very average I am (as a member of Less Wrong). My feelings of being an outsider (here at least) have diminished.

I've also resolved to do two things this year, thanks in part to this survey: 1) sign the hell up for cryonics already and 2) take a professional IQ test.

For cryonics, the number of yeses compared to the number who want to or are still considering is a bit of a wake-up call for me.

If it's lower than I want...

What do you want your IQ to be?

I answered everything I could. I wish I could have put what my IQ is, but I've never taken an official test. I'm not sure I want to know what my IQ really is. If it's lower than I want, I think I'll feel inferior, envious, and generally frustrated that I can't do much to improve it.

"Contributors would, at the very least, need to be familiar with how to write articles using a skill acquisition process agreed upon by the entire community."

Are you talking about a process for acquiring rationality skills or writing skills? Requiring an entire community to agree on how to write something seems to indicate the whole community would be qualified to do the writing...

Bureaucracies are really bad about actually getting anything done. Beware of that.

The people I interact with are obviously a non-random sample

Don't worry; the people whose responses the tests were built on didn't have access to a random sample either! Still seems to work, though.

All else being equal, creating new lives would be a bad thing, but I don't believe that trying to discourage people from having children on those grounds would be particularly useful (its net effect would probably just be bad PR for negative utilitarianism), nor that it would be good to have a general policy of smart and ethical people having less children than people not belonging to that class. Also, I count Stuart as my friend, and I didn't want him to experience suffering due to his happy event being tainted by a uniformly negative response to this thread.

I don't see a lot of female names around here

It's not like your username sounds obviously feminine either, so how confident you are about whether a given user (except the obvious ones, say lukeprog or NancyLebovitz) is male or female?

But yes, according to the last survey, only around 10% of the people here are women, and even fewer among the most prolific contributors.

I don't see a lot of female names around here

It's not like your username sounds obviously feminine either, so how confident you are about whether a given user (except the obvious ones, say lukeprog or NancyLebovitz) is male or female?

But yes, according to the last survey, only around 10% of the people here are women, and even fewer among the most prolific contributors.

Welcome!

I don't like ever wearing shoes.

Have you tried out Vibrams? I have found them to be a delightful shoe replacement.

I am very unconfident in my skills at this point.

That feeling will fade as you read and do more. I do want to call back to something you said earlier, though:

I've always tried to be rational in an intuitive sort of way.

This is where you want to end up; it's one thing to talk a good game about biases, and another to understand them on the five second level. While reading through the sequences, it's helpful to try to turn the epiphanies into actions or reactions, rather than just abstract knowledge.

I did not think I was contributing anything positive to the world with my work.

If you are interested in putting your programming skills to work on rationality education, you might want to get to know some people at CFAR; there are a number of useful things that could exist but don't yet because no one has programmed them. (Here's an example of one of the useful things that does exist.)