Hi! I'm Matthew Graves. I adopted Vaniver as my callsign a long time ago for reasons I don't quite recall; I think the first place I used it was a MUD called 'Scrye' or something similar. I found LW through HPMoR, and have been here long enough that many of my old posts and comments no longer reflect my current positions. Before LW, I posted heavily on the xkcd messageboards. I have a policy to make my confusions public; that makes it easier for me to notice when I'm wrong, typically because other people notice that I'm wrong and point it out. (If you notice an opportunity to do that, please do.)

I'm a Data Scientist, and used to be a PhD student in Operations Research, which sometimes gets called Decision Science and which I generally explain to LWers as Industrial Rationality. It involves simulation, optimization, decision analysis, and similar topics.

Feel free to contact me by email, private message, Skype, or Steam. I use the same username at gmail and on Steam, but on Skype I'm cleversuggestion. I tend to respond more quickly to email than to PMs, but also enjoy talking in real-time. I'm happy to host couchsurfers in Austin.

I'm single and looking. (I'm a guy interested in guys.)

I wrote a sequence on Decision Analysis, and another on Control Theory.

I write reviews of books relevant to LW:

• Thinking and Deciding
• Causality
• Value-Focused Thinking
• Behavior: The Control of Perception
• Sapiens

Memo to future-me: the Amazon referral info is ref=nosim?tag=vglnk-c319-20 .