When I was in school, I viewed myself as a defender of rationality against the fuzzy and ant-scientific positions that I sometimes encountered in the philosophy department. My meta-positions were eerily similar to those that are preached here.
Less Wrong fascinates me because, when I can stand to read it, I see that it is full of people who have similar background commitments and standards of evidence as me, but who have reached shockingly different conclusions.
I think this post underestimates the possibility for mis-communication on the "fact" level.
First, facts are hard to figure out. This is a fact (heh) worth repeating again and again in a community like this one. When one claims to search for objective truth, one must be held to a very high standard.
Second, two people operating at the 'fact' level might misunderstand each other if they are making observations on different conceptual levels. Russel never accepted Godel's incompleteness work because he was unwilling to engage with Godel's meta-leve...
Here is one possible reason for being pleased to discover that one was unhappy in the past:
Times of apparent unhappiness can lead to great personal growth. For instance, the hardest, most stressful time of my life was studying for my physics honors exams. However, now that the exams are over, I am glad to have both the knowledge I gained in studying, and the self knowledge that I am capable of pushing myself as hard as I did. (Would skills learned during the missing time be retained? Even if they weren't, the latter reason above would still apply).
It woul...
I took the survey.