Would this be the best place to introduce onesself?

That would actually be the welcome thread, but this is a close second best.

I have mixed feelings about this post. On one hand I found it fairly useful, and would have found it extremely useful before I independently the topic and got most of your advice from other sources. On the other hand, I'm not really sure its on topic for Less Wrong.

To the Stars - I found this through HP:MoR's author notes so you may have heard of it already, but its awesomeness makes it worth mentioning anyway. It is an enthralling transhumanist, quasi-rationalist, far future sequel to PMMM. It also bears a strong resemblance to the Old Man's War series in the same way that HP:MoR is clearly inspired by Ender's Game. It (generally) stands on its own, but has major spoilers for PMMM and to a lesser extent the cannon spin-off PMOM.

Theists?

Buss's Evolutionary Psychology is good if you are specially looking for the evolutionary psychology element not so sure about general evolutionary biology books. Also we have a dedicated textbook thread.

I was openly warned by a professor (who will likely be on the dissertation committee) not to talk about this project widely.

Did they say why?

Given the seemingly high interest I'm considering researching a full post on this. However, going just off what I remember from psyc classes the short answer is we don't know and suspect that you can't alter them much, at least not without doing something drastic. That said, putting yourself in social groups were the desired trait is common/expected looks relatively promising. Additionally, it may be possible to change your behavior in ways that emulate the effects of a big five change without technically changing your personality. In particular the Getting Things Done I learned from CfAR is supposed to boost your effective conscientiousness, and I have observed that to kinda be the case since I adopted it.

As someone who has done a CFAR workshop, and a lot of online rationality stuff (including, but not limited to reading ~90% of the sequences) I second this. I'll also add that do think having a strong theoretical background going in enhances the practical training.

As she stared at her wall, she understood that she would have to deal with it, accept it all as a new part of her existence. That was the only reasonable thing to do. She didn't have to be happy about it, but the universe wasn't structured around her happiness.

-To The Stars

I have asperger syndrome and I'm suffering from quite bad OCD. I hope to be able to improve my rationality so that one day I'll be able to write an article about "how rationality cured my OCD"...

Have you read Brain Lock?