Nice to have you here. Those are some cool names you dropped.
I approve of attending the Quaker meeting: I don't think there's any better way to quickly meet good people than to find religious groups.
Did you take the 2011 Less Wrong survey, out of curiosity?
No, I didn't take the survey. Until this month I was focused on reading through the archives and didn't even try to keep up with new posts.
I'm a long-time occasional reader/lurker, since the Overcoming Bias days. I was introduced to this community years ago by Patri Friedman whom I know socially from college. (As long as I'm name-dropping, I also shared a suite with Steve Rayhawk at the same school...) In the past year I read and loved MoR, and took Stanford's online AI class, both of which prompted me to finally go back and read all of the main sequences and related back-material.
My degree is in math and computer science. I currently work as a programmer for the Mozilla project, and I'm trying to work on projects to use technology to solve important problems for humanity. I'm also a parent of a preschooler, which I find creates many new challenges in rationality (even in possibly trivial situations, like teaching children about Santa Claus). And although I am an atheist, I attend a Quaker meeting. Similar to Buddhism, I find (some varieties of) Quaker practice both compatible with and conducive to rational thought. I might find something useful to say about this in discussions here about meditation, religion, and community.
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Koan answers here for:
I think this one gets more complicated when you include beliefs about things like theorems of logic, e.g., "Any consistent formal system powerful enough to describe Peano arithmetic is incomplete." It seems to me that this belief is meaningful, yet independent of any sensory experience or physical law. That is, it's not really a belief about "the universe" of atoms or quantum fields or whatnot. Perhaps it would be better to talk about these "beliefs" as a separate category.