Greets, all!

I'm a walking stereotype of a LessWrong reader:

I'm a second-year undergraduate student at a decent public university, double majoring in math and computer science and compensating for the relatively unchallenging material even at the graduate level by taking 2-3x the typical workload; this is allowed by my specific college, which is a fantastic program I'd strongly recommend to high school students who happen to be reading this. (I'll happily go in to more depth if for anyone even slightly interested.)

I'm white, male, atheist, libertarian. I intend to sign up for cryonics once I have a job, because I am having tons of fun and want to continue to do so.

I've been reading LessWrong for three or so years, and have by now read all of the sequences and nearly all of the miscellaneous posts, as well as the most highly-rated discussion threads. I've also read and loved MoR. I could not, at this point, tell you how I found either of them.

I read this site, and study rationality, because I want to win.

I hold almost no views which would be notably controversial with the mainstream here, except perhaps these, presented with the hope of inspiring discussion:

• Infanticide of one's own children should be legal (if done for some reason other than sadism) for up to ten months after birth. Reason: extremely young babies aren't yet people.
• Discrimination against youths aged 13 and above out to be viewed, in a reasonable society, in the same light as racism. Reason: broadly, discrimination based on group membership should be frowned upon if the variance within a group dominates the variance between groups. In such cases group membership is a bad predictor and is thus very unfair to individuals. Given this, and on the assumption that variance within the group of 13- to 21-year-olds dominates the variance between the groups of 13- to 21-year-olds and over-21's, we ought not to discriminate against youths.

(edit: formatting)

ETA: This is the first LW discussion I've participated in, so I hope you'll forgive my using this space to ask about the conventions of the community broadly. If you look below, a lot of my comments are getting voted down. For statements of opinion, this I understand, at least if the convention is "vote down things you disagree with" as opposed to "vote down things which don't contribute to the discussion". But why are my questions voted down? This one, in particular:

I'm curious now, though. What do you think defines an agent as a person, for the moral calculus? How is it that ten-month-old babies meet this definition? Do, say, pigs also meet this definition?

which as I type this is at -1.

Please interpret this as an honest question about community standards, not an implicit rebuke or anything like that.

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Thanks, I'm always looking for sneaky ways to reduce inferential distances with my Facebook friends. My subversive anti-faith sermon posted with this article was:

On Christmas day, 1861, Lincoln's ability to be skeptical of his own intuitions helped him avert war with Britain.

It is easy to assert, without evidence, what we believe, hope, or wish to be true. It is more difficult, as our human biases compel us to dismiss dissenting voices, to properly doubt, to give reality a fair hearing, and to come to a conclusion at odds with who we were the day before.

EDIT: Typo correction; Lincoln ≠ 1961.

I find I have very little access to my own motivation algorithms, so that things I think I want to do and things I actually end up doing do not always align very well. External deadlines (as opposed to self-imposed ones) are some of the only things that consistently motivate me, but they don't work very well for personal goals.

That's a rather timid estimate, don't you think? Unless you consider "wart nuked from orbit" to include cases where we try to nuke it from orbit but somehow miss the intended target site.

That procedure didn't appear in Aliens, but duct tape sure did.

I've had plantar warts on my left heel for about a year. Been duct-taping them for 2.5 months. Seems to be working, albeit slowly.

I've actually thought "I wonder if this will ever come up on LW...? Nah."

Radical phalangectomy; it's the only way to be sure.

I was thinking that the downvotes were a reaction to the last sentence, though like prase I had a hard time figuring out what you were asking for. I'm reading "capable of forming empirical conjectures for mathematics" as capable of using evidence to make reasonable guesses about the answers to math problems and "discover the principle of mathematical proof" as figure out that mathematics principles can be proven. Is this close to your intended meaning?

We can, but as this case study points out, social/unfocused discussions usually have poor attendance because hanging out is harder to justify than having a specific purpose. It would be fine for a first meeting, probably, but I'd expect most would find more important things to do the second or third time around if we're not doing anything obviously useful.

From your first link:

In all but strictly formal uses, plural pronouns have become acceptable substitutes for the masculine singular.

English isn't C++, a form is pretty much defined as acceptable by usage.