there’s still the problem that you have to think about your own physical mortality in a very concrete way. A way which requires choices, for hours and perhaps even days.

I'm baffled that this is the stumbling block for so many people. I can understand being worried about the cost/uncertainty trade-off, but I really don't understand why it's any less troublesome than buying life insurance, planning a funeral, picking a cemetery plot, writing a will, or planning for cremation. People make choices that involve contemplating their death all the time, and people make choices about unpleasant-sounding medical treatments all the time.

Is it not less gruesome than the alternatives of skeletonizing in a flame, or by slow decay? No. But the average person manages to mostly avoid thinking of the alternatives, and the funeral industry helps them do it.

Well, maybe more people would sign up if Alcor's process didn't involve as much thinking about the alternatives? I had thought that the process was just signing papers and arranging life insurance. But if Alcor's process is turning people away, maybe that needs to change.

Maybe I'm just deluding myself: I'm not in a financial position to sign up yet, and I plan on signing up when I am. But I can't see the "creep factor" being an issue for me at all. I have no idea what that would feel like.

(Just FYI, I don't think Zian gets a notification unless you reply to his comment.)

I would also appreciate it if you shared the web app. (I've got food problems all over the place, and I probably haven't figured out all of them yet.)

I would also appreciate it if you shared the web app. (I've got food problems all over the place, and I probably haven't figured out all of them yet.)

Do you really need to build a whole web application for this? It seems like overkill. Why not just use a spreadsheet?

After "dying" twice on Habit RPG and reading the first few chapters of Don't Shoot the Dog (via a Reddit post from EY, the evidence seems to indicate that I'm trying to make too big of a change too quickly (or, too many small changes).

I'm going to look for a way to pause or temporarily hide items on Habit RPG. I'm also open to similar sites that are more stable. Habit RPG tries really hard with good fundamentals but it doesn't work reliably in Internet Explorer or Firefox. I'm aware that they're rewriting the site but I'm trying to change things now and I suspect that using "Habit RPG is down, why bother today?" as an excuse isn't a good idea.

Looks like a great idea. It's certainly an easy way to build a version of Sequences with explanatory comments. Optimally, such comments would appear in the actual article but this is a good step towards that.

Hi there!

I found HPMoR via TVTropes and then found LessWrong via HPMoR. I decided to hang around after reading the explanation of Bayes Theorem on Eliezer's personal site and finding it quite nice. Also, it matched up with how I thought of Bayes's theorem. You could say that I got attracted to LW by confirmation bias. :)

On a more useful note, I got interested in rationality/etc. through a somewhat convoluted path. I got introduced to Bayes Theorem via Paul Graham when I built a website filter for a science fair project.

My reading material also contributed heavily. I've also always been a fast and constant reader so discovering the (FREE!) interlibrary loan offered by the University of California was a boon. Major nonfiction books that affected me were cognitive science stuff (especially Dan Ariely) and books on how things/processes/systems work I distinctly recall re-re-re-checking out a book on landfills and waste management in elementary school because it was long enough to be somewhat thorough and had enough photos to be interesting. Major fiction influences include books by Thornton Burgess, the Redwall series, and David Brin. I got introduced to the concept of fanfiction by the Redwall Online Community and spent many years in related activities so it wasn't too much of a leap for me to take HPMoR seriously. Getting keyword matches between Ariely and HPMoR kept me hooked, never mind the bit about arbitraging gold and silver, which I can't believe Harry hasn't tried doing by now.

Another thing that helped me take the ideas in Less Wrong seriously was my constant desire to re-examine by beliefs. For example, I've always been interested in the ideas in Christian apologetics.

As for where I started at LW, I can't really say. I know I read stuff that confirmed what I already knew like things about the Planning Fallacy. The first bit of new material was probably Mysterious Answers (and those in its sequence).

I would immediately download this iff it had a GUI.

I'm currently working on a website application to figure out what I can't eat. It will use Bayes Theorem. This could make a huge difference in my life.

I also found that I'm really good at asking lots of questions when I'm stuck but not good at realizing that I need to stop working on something until more resources arrive.