Please reply to this comment if you intend to participate, and are willing and able to free up a few hours per week or fortnight to work through the suggested reading or exercises.

Please indicate where you live, if you would be willing to have some discussion IRL. My intent is to facilitate an online discussion here on LW but face-to-face would be a nice complement, in locations where enough participants live.

(You need not check in again here if you have already done so in the previous discussion thread, but you can do so if you want to add details such as your location.)

I suggest experimenting with asking questions, and see how they go over.

My high school chemistry class (about thirty students) got two scores of 795 and six of 800 (the maximum) on the PSAT test, and I'm convinced that while some of the credit goes to the reasonable and sensible teacher, a lot goes to one of the students who kept asking questions-- at least for me, many of his questions were things I wanted to ask, but couldn't quite get to asking.

Hi.

I came here following Eliezer when he left OB. I think the main reasons why I am not participating more are:

• I am an undergraduate student just starting to learn about rationality. I often struggle to understand the main posts and I am quite far from being able to contribute useful knowledge, new insights or a qualified opinion to any of the discussion here.
• But why not ask more questions? I usually consider asking questions an extremely important thing to do. The problem is, although I have pretty much read all of the current posts, I have not yet caught up with all the older material. So I think I do not have the right to ask questions and bother you with things that you might already have explained elsewhere in full detail. I feel like I should first do my part of the work before I can expect others to take the time and explain things to me.
• I am from Germany and not an English native speaker. Writing something in an environment with such high linguistic standards is additionally intimidating (I regularly come across words in LW posts that I have never seen before and have to look them up - to me a sign that my language skills are not appropriate to write here. Coming to speak of it: please excuse my bad language!)
• the karma-system clearly conveys the message that the community only wants the most qualified contributions - I simply do not feel fit to provide them.

By the way: I was a silent reader for quite a long time. Then I finally signed up a while ago to vote for a comment that I thought should get more attention. This did not work because as a newly registered user I did not have enough karma to vote and so I gave up. Apparently the community does not even consider me fit to vote, so I won't do it.

Thank you all who are contributing to this site, lurking here and knowing one is not alone is such a pleasure!