I've never had the experience of thinking that a saw the pattern and being wrong.

Most Less Wrong readers' performance on Raven's Matrices would be between 2 SD and 3 SD above the mean, and I'd guess that the threshold for seeing the pattern in this particular item is in the same range. Rapidity with which one sees the answer probably gives incremental predictive power, but I'd guess that the improvement in predictive power would be much less than the improvement coming from testing untimed performance on more difficult items.

fancier mental infrastructure

How fancy? I solved it by thinking in terms of “canceling each other out”. So if a small circle is in cell 1 and cell 2 of a row, they cancel each other out and don't appear in cell 3, but if the circle is only in cell 1 or cell 2, it is preserved. The intuition of canceling each other out is taught to children as early as they're taught fractions: (2*3)/(3*5) = 2/5, because if 3 is both in numerator and denominator, you cross it out. This doesn't require knowing anything about logical operators.

V guvax vg'f ahzore gjb. Va rnpu pbyhza, gur funcr ba gbc trgf pebffcvrprf nqqrq naq vgf pbearef erzbirq, gura unf gur pbearef erghearq, xrrcf gur pebffcvrprf, naq ybfrf vgf zvqqyr.

Yes, this is what I try to do, and it is what I am able to do for, typically, a couple months at a time. Having someone else remind me that this is better than three hours all at once is good though. For some reason, I find myself slowly ignoring this advice from myself if I don't hear it from somewhere else every now and then. (avoiding this problem might be another good "stupid question"...)

As a somewhat recent follower of LW (less than 1 year), it was actually quite useful to sift through your critiques back then (while occasionally they felt a bit personal and unnecessarily emotionally-motivated, I still valued the gist of the content - they were refreshingly contrarian).

Basically, when I first stumbled upon LW, I was excited, awed, and to some extent hypnotized.

The content was an interesting mixture of mathematics, computer science, philosophy and cognitive science, and as a new reader, I found myself easily convinced of many of the main positions advocated. I'm typically skeptical of any extraordinary claims, but the way the content is generally presented here, seemingly scientific and authoritative, evaded my usual defenses.

After a few weeks of taking in a lot of this content, I googled LW and Eliezer to find out more, and stumbled upon some criticisms, as well as your blog, the RationalWiki, ..etc.

Yes, it was interesting to hear about the basilisk, and the apparent knee-jerk reaction of Eliezer, and the ensuing censorship. That exercise helped restore my usual (and useful) skepticism, and consequently I re-examined a lot of the claims and positions with a more careful eye.

I also remember checking out your user profile here on LW, and seeing that you are an active member of the community, and that even though you and others occasionally engaged in some of these heated debates, the fact that one of LW's more vocal critics was not banned or censored was also useful information that I gleaned from this exercise.

As a consumer of your critiques, I was enlightened but not turned-off from LW. In other words, I still somewhat drink the kool-aid, but I carefully check the drink before each sip.

So, thanks for providing a different perspective, and humanizing LW and its contributors, and good luck with your health and future endeavors.

Hello all!

I've only just registered on the lesswrong site, but I've been lurking on here for a while. The main reason as to why I finally decided to sign up is that I've been going more frequently to the Toronto meetup sessions and have found that there's tremendous value in thrusting myself into topics/discussions even when I'm not very well-read or knowledgeable on the topics before hand.

By merely listening in and pondering some questions I become more and more interested in the topic, catch some concepts by mere osmosis, and get interested to do further research on my own afterwards. So far that seems to work well and I'm certainly more knowledgeable than when I started.

So, following the same mentality, I thought that I should sign up and try to comment on some of the topics posted on here as a way to immerse myself further.

As for background: I'm a computer science grad with almost 10 years experience now. I like to read about psychology and to constantly learn new things. I'm interested in programming and intellectual discussions, artificial intelligence, winning at life ...etc.

I hope that's sufficient for an introductory comment! See you all around the site sometime.