From your blog:

Recently it occurred to me that a large part of being addicted to Reddit isn't actually the content but the fact that the links turn purple when you click on them. And my brain is slightly obsessed with turning all the blue purple, all the time.

This is amazing, yet seems so obvious in retrospect. So many of us have turned into blue-minimizing robots without realizing it. Hopefully breaking the reward feedback loop with your extension would force people to try to examine their true reasons for clicking.

I have read some of the sequences and such but - I guess I'm a rationalist at heart already, maybe because I've studied lots of logic and such, but a lot of it of the basic stuff seemed pretty apparent to me. I was already up to speed on Bayes and quantum mechanics, for example, and never considered anything other an atheism. And I already optimize and try to look at life in terms of expected payoffs and other very rational things like that. But, it's possible I've missed a lot of the material here - I find navigating the site to be pretty unintuitive.

Be very careful thinking you are done. I was in pretty much exactly the same position as you about a year ago. ("yep, I'm pretty rational. Lol @ god; I wonder what it's like to have delusional beliefs"). After a year and a half here, having read pretty much everything in the sequences and most of the other archives, running a meetup, etc, I now know that I suck at rationality. You will find that you are nowhere near the limits, or even the middle, of possible human rationality.

Further, I now know what it's like to have delusional beliefs that are so ingrained you don't even recognize them as beliefs, because I had some big ones. I probably have more. There not easy to spot from the inside.

On the subject of atheism... I used to be an atheist, too. The rabbit hole you've fallen into here is deep.

The Seattle guys are pretty cool, from those I've met. Go hang out with them.

Hi, I'm Alex.

Every once in a while I come to LessWrong because I want to read more interesting things and have more interesting discussions on the Internet. I've found it a lot easier to spend time on Reddit (having removed all the drivel) and dredging through Quora to find actually insightful content (seriously, do they have any sort of actual organization system for me to find reading material?) in the past. LessWrong's discussions have seemed slightly inaccessible, so maybe posting an introduction like I'm supposed to will set in motion my figuring out how this community works.

I'm interested in a lot of things here, but especially physics and mathematics. I would use the word "metaphysics" but it's been appropriated for a lot of things that aren't actually meta-physics like I mean. Maybe I want "meta-mathematics"? Anyway, I'm really keen on the theory behind physical laws and on attempts at reformulating math and physics into more lucid and intuitive systems. Some of my reading material (I won't say research, but ... maybe I should say research) recently has been on geometric algebra, re-axiomizing set theory, foundations and interpretations of quantum mechanics, reformulations of relativity, quantum field theory's interpretation, things like that. I have a permanent distaste for spinors and all the math we don't try to justify with intuition when teaching physics, so I've spent a lot of my last few years studying those.

I was really intrigued by the articles/blog posts? on what proofs actually mean and causality a few months ago; that's when I started reading the site. I've spent the better part of the last year sifting through all kinds of math ideas related to reinterpretations or 'fundamental' insights, so I hope hanging around here can expose me to some more.

Oh, and I've spent a good amount of time on the Internet refuting crackpots who think they solved physics, so I, um, promise I'm not one.

I'm a programmer by trade and have a good interest in revolutionary (or just convenient) software projects and disruptive ideas and really naive, idealist world-changing ideas, which is fun.

I have read some of the sequences and such but - I guess I'm a rationalist at heart already, maybe because I've studied lots of logic and such, but a lot of it of the basic stuff seemed pretty apparent to me. I was already up to speed on Bayes and quantum mechanics, for example, and never considered anything other than atheism. And I already optimize and try to look at life in terms of expected payoffs and other very rational things like that. But, it's possible I've missed a lot of the material here - I find navigating the site to be pretty unintuitive.

I'm based in Seattle and I hope to go to the meetups if they... ever happen again. I mostly just like talking to smart people; I find it makes my brain work better - as if there's some sort of 'conversation mode' which hypercharges my creativity.

Oh, and I have a blog: http://ajkjk.com/blog/. I'm slightly terrified of linking it; it's the first time I've shown it to anyone but friends. It only has 6 posts so far. I've written a lot more but deleted/hid them until they're cleaned up.

Odd, the last paragraph of the above seems to have gotten chopped. Restored. No, I haven't particularly heard anyone else point that out but wouldn't be surprised to find someone had. It's an important point and I would also like to know if anyone has developed it further.