Survey finished- erred on the side of not screwing up Yvain's numbers where possible, but I'm curious what the ideal way to mark down Religious Background for results of families that divorced over religious disagreement is. Also had a really strong desire (thwarted, but present) to put a SQL injection into the question about whether the universe is a simulation, which is a bad idea no matter what the answer turns out to be or whether I could conceivably affect the simulation. It's like a pascal's wager mixed with a Russian roulette, only the gun is fully loaded. Either I screw up the numbers, I tank the survey, or I crash the simulation. Dear brain, we were reading about akrasia just recently, were you paying attention?

I think the most frequently used identity I have was created why a public speaking teacher commented that I was just fine acting on stage, but became very shy and nervous when I was speaking as myself. I don't recall if this was her idea or mine, but I developed a 'character' that was basically me sans said shyness. Large body language, typically spoke louder, almost a caricature of confidence. While it was originally just for speaking to large groups, it quickly got used for any conversation with people who weren't my close friends. Sometime during college, I got so accustomed to using this 'character' that I realized it wasn't exactly an act any more.

Ironically, a very useful identity was one I abandoned- in high school, I thought of myself as a prodigy, far smarter than the hopeless plebeians around me. This was probably useful, as it kept me focused on learning on my own when the class didn't move fast enough. On the other hand, as soon as I hit college, I realized this wasn't very helpful since it stopped me from asking questions, noticing that I didn't understand the material, and working usefully with the other students. I think it was very useful while I had it, but by far the most important lesson I learned in those four years was that I am not a genius. (I'm smart, but there's an order of magnitude difference from where I thought of myself and where I see myself now.)

Also, I don't know if "Typical mind and gender identity" is the blog post that you stumbled across, but I am very glad to have read it, and especially to have read many of the comments. I think I had run into related ideas before (thank you, Internet subcultures!), but that made the idea that gender identity has a strength as well as a direction much clearer.

I'm afraid I haven't been active online recently, but if you live in an area with a regular in-person meetup, those can be seriously awesome. :)

Skyler here, a 21 year old technology student. Born and raised in the backwoods of Vermont to ahem philosophically diverse parents, was encouraged to read pretty much every philosophical book the library had except for Ayn Rand. So naturally I gravitated towards that as soon as I became enough of a teenager, but apparently completely missed the antagonism towards non-geniuses and couldn't for the life of me figure out why I seriously disliked every objectivist I met.

About two years ago, I had a professor who introduced me to HPMoR, which I enjoyed immensely. It took me around a month to move to the sequences. They seem to have had the curious property of seeming perfectly obvious, like someone simply expressing what I already knew just in better words, and while a lot of them do fall close in broad subject to things I'd written about before, the only use I'd had for bayesian statistics prior to reading them was spam filters. (And then the author's notes pointed me to Worm, which consumed a month or two.)

A couple of weeks ago however, I encountered a post on SlateStarCodex (which I'd been reading after stumbling upon it through unrelated browsing) about trans people, and somehow around the same time got linked to Alicorn's Polyhacking article. My positions previously were similar to the authors (Thought of both transgender and polyamory as mildly wrong and not understandable) and both made a solid argument that actually changed my mind. This was not the "Oh, of course I knew that" of the sequences, but a "Huh. I thought that was wrong, but they have good points. Let me think for five minutes and see if there are any more arguments for or against I can think of now." By the end of the respective days, I had a different opinion than I previously had, and was beginning to make changes in how I conducted myself because of one of them. In addition, they both seemed like interesting people I could relate to, and a community of such people could be really fun. (As opposed to Eliezer Y.- That is, I can imagine having a conversation with these people, whereas if I was in a conversation with Eliezer Y. I would feel compelled to take notes.)

So yeah. I'm here to see how many other topics require me to change my mind, and to hopefully have cool conversations with interesting people. Any recommendations on where to start?