Hello everyone!
Thank You for this site and for sharing your thoughts, for genuinely trying to find out what is true. What is less wrong. This has brightened my view of humanity. :)
My name is Lara, I’m from Eastern Europe, 18 years old, currently studying physics, reading a lot and painting in my free time. For about a year and a half now I’ve been atheist; before then- devout and sincere christian, religious nerd of the church. A lot of things in the doctrine bothered me as compltely illogical, unfair and just silly, and somehow I tried to reason it all out, I truly believed, that the real Truth will be with God and that he will help me understand it better. As it turned out, truth seeking and religiosity were incompatible.
Now I’m fairly ‘recovered’- getting used to the new way of thinking about the world, but still care about what is really true and important, worth devouting my life to(fundamentalist upbringing :)). As I still live with my family, it is hard to pretend all the time, knowing they will have no contact with me whatsoever, when I come out; it is really good to find places like this, where people are willing to dig as deep as possible, no matter what, to understand better.
So thanks and sorry for my english. I hope someday I’ll be able to add something useful here and learn much more.
Welcome! Your English is excellent, don't worry on that count.
...also, that's a really tough predicament (hiding your atheism from your fundamentalist family), and I don't have anything wise to say about it, except that it isn't the end of the world when they do find out, and that often people will break their religious commitments rather than really abandon their children (so long as they can think of a religiously acceptable excuse to do so). But I'm not really qualified to give that advice. Hang in there!
I sympathize with you as I'm an atheist with a fundamentalist family who would cut me out of their lives if they found out.
I also envy you, as you had your enlightenment happen at such an early age. I didn't have mine until I was pushing middle age and had created a family of my own...all whom were also fundamentalist. I still live "in the closet" so to speak...
Thank you all for support, it is incredibly important.
Unfortunately it is a church norm to cut off everyone who leaves, and the doctrine is such that there is no way to be ‘inbetween’. The community is quite closed and one’s whole life is determined- from the way we dress(girls especially), to the way we make carriers (or stay at home and raise children). So in the beginning I decided not to tell anyone at all, knowing how painful it would be for everyone, but after some time I realised that I could not live like that my whole life; though egoistically, after I earn enough money to leave, I will.
Hi; I'm a lurker of about one year, and recently decided to stop lurking and create an account.
I'm an undergraduate in Portland-area Oregon. I study mathematics and computer science at Pacific University. I've been interested in rationality for a very long time, but Less Wrong has really provided the formalism necessary to defend certain tactics and strategies of thought over others, which has been very...helpful. :)
Speaking of Portland, it seems that there are many Portland Less-Wrongians and yet there is no meetup. I would like to start a meetup, so I need a bit of Karma to get one started.
Hi, I'm 15, so sadly cannot say much of my education yet, but at least I've read a fair deal. I find the ideas on this site somewhat unappreciated among my age group, but fascinating for me. I've lurked here for close to a year, but I'm irrationally shy of speaking over the internet. I hope to contribute if I find what I think interesting, regardless of my adverseness to commenting. Thank you for the welcome!
Hi everyone! I'm Ozy.
I'm twenty years old, queer, poly, crazy, white, Floridian, an atheist, a utilitarian, and a giant geek. I'm double-majoring in sociology and psychology; my other interests range from classical languages (although I am far from fluent) to guitar (although I suck at it) to Neil Gaiman (I... can't think of a self-deprecating thing to say about my interest in Neil Gaiman). I use zie/zir pronouns, because I identify outside the gender binary; I realize they're clumsy, but English's lack of a good gender-neutral pronoun is not my fault. :)
One of my big interests is the intersection between rationality and social justice. I do think that a lot of the -isms (racism, sexism, ableism, etc.) are rooted in cognitive biases, and that we're not going to be able to eliminate them unless we understand what quirks in the human mind cause them. I blog about masculism (it is like feminism! Except for dudes!) at No Seriously What About Teh Menz; right now it's kind of full of people talking about Nice-Guy-ism, but normally we have a much more diverse front page. I believe that several of the people here read us (hi Nancy! hi Doug! hi Hugh, I like you, when you say I'm wrong you...
Hi; I've been reading LessWrong for more than a year and a half, now, but I never quite got around to making an account until today.
So, introduction: I'm eighteen years old, female, transgender. I live in California, USA. I don't have a lot of formal education; I chose to be homeschooled as a little kid because my parents were awesome and school wasn't, and due to disability I've not yet entered college.
The road to rationalism was fairly smooth for me. I'm a weirdo in enough ways that I learned early on not to believe things just because everyone else believed them. It took a little bit longer for me to learn not to believe things just because I had always believed them.
I guess my major "Aha!" moment came when I was fourteen, after I finally admitted to myself that I was transgender. I had lied to myself, not to mention everyone else, for almost a decade and a half. I had shied away from the truth every time I'd had the opportunity to see it. And while I'd had pretty good reasons for doing so (Warning: Big-ass PDF), the truth felt better. Not only that, but knowing the truth was better, in measurable ways; it allowed me to begin to move my life in a direction I ac...
Hello!
I'm a 20 year old student at Georgia Tech, double majoring in Industrial Engineering and Psychology, and am spending the current semester studying abroad at the University of Leeds in the UK.
I read HPMOR this weekend on a bus trip to London and as soon as I returned I found this site and have been enthralled by the Sequences, which I am slowly working my way through.
All of my life I have loved to read and learn new things and think through them, but last year I came to the realization that my curiosity had started to die in my late high school years. I found myself caring about getting a good grade and then abruptly forgetting the information. Much of what I was "learning" I never truly understood and yet I was still getting praise from teachers for my good grades, so I saw no reason to invest more effort. Early last year, I realized that this was happening and attempt to rededicate myself to finding things that again made me passionate about learning. This was a major contribution to adding Psychology as a second major.
This semester of new classes in a new educational system combined with the past few days of reading the Sequences have sparked my interest in man...
Hi, I’m Brigid. I’ve been reading through the Sequences for a few weeks now, and am just about to start the Quantum Section (about which I am very excited). I found out about this site from an email the SIAI sent out. I’m an Signals Intelligence officer in the Marine Corps and am slated to get out of the military in a few months. I’m not too sure what I am going to do yet though; as gung-ho as I originally was about intel, I’m not sure I want to stay in that specific field. I was a physics and political science major in college, with a minor in women’s studies. I’ve been interested in rationality for a few years now and have thoroughly enjoyed everything I’ve read so far here (including HPMOR) . Also, if there is anyone who is interested in starting a Meetup group in Hawaii (Oahu) let me know!
How would the Sequences be different, other than in the QM parts, if we lived in a classical universe, or if we had not yet discovered QM?
a perfect clone of you is no longer you
The lack of identity of individual particles is knock down argument against our identities being based on the identities of individual particles. However, if there was identity of individual particals, this does not require that the identity of individual particles contribute to our identities, it would just remove a knock down argument against that idea.
it's not meant to be skipped, and it's highly relevant to rationality in general.
A few people have asserted this, but how is it actually relevant? Is it just a case study, or is there something else there? As RichardKennaway asks, how does QM make a difference to rationality itself?
Hey, I'm -name withheld-, going by Benedict, 18 years old in North Carolina. I was introduced to Less Wrong through HPMoR (which is fantastic) and have recently been reading through the Sequences (still wading through the hard science of the Quantum Physics sequence).
I'm here because I have a real problem- dealing with the consequences of coming out as atheist to a Christian family. For about a year leading up to recent events, I had been trying to reconcile Christian belief with the principles of rationalism, with little success. At one point I settled into an unstable equilibrium of "believing in believing in belief" and "betting" on the truth of religious doctrine to cover the perceived small-but-noteworthy probability of its veracity and the proposed consequences thereof. I'd kept this all secret from my family, putting on a long and convincing act.
This recently fell apart in my mind, and I confronted my dad with a shambling confession and expression of confusion and outrage against Christianity. I'm... kinda really friggin' bad at communicating clearly through spoken dialogue, and although I managed to comport myself well enough in the conversation, my dad...
my dad is unconvinced that the source of my frustrations is a conflicting belief system so much as a struggle with juvenile doubts.
That is roughly speaking what juvenile doubts are. The "juvenile" mind tackling with conflicts in the relevant socially provided belief system prior to when it 'clicks' that the cool thing to do is to believe that you have resolved your confusion about the 'deep' issue and label it as a juvenile question that you do not have to think about any more now that you are sophisticated.
Next week, from July 30 to August 3, he's going to take me to this big huge realignment thing,
You clearly do not want to go. His forcing you is a hostile act (albeit one he would consider justified) but you are going along with it. From this, and from your age, I infer that he has economic power over you. That is, you live with him or he is otherwise your primary source of economic resources. I will assume here that your Best Alternative To Negotiated Agreement (BATNA) sucks and you have essentially no acceptable alternative to submission to whatever power plays your father uses against you. Regardless of how the religious thing turns out, developing your pot...
Hi Benedict!
Bad news first: You will not be able to defend yourself. This is not because you're 18, it's not because you can't present your arguments in a spectacular fashion.
It is because noone will care about your arguments, they will wait for the first chance to bring some generic counter-argument, probably centering on how they will be there for you in your time of implied juvenile struggle, further belittling you.
And - how aggravating - this is actually done in part to protect you, to protect the relationship with your dad. With the kind of social capital, pride and identity that's on the line for your father, there is no way he could acknowledge you being right - he'd have to admit to himself that he's a phony in his own eyes, and a failure as a parent and pastor in the eyes of his peers.
To him it may be like you telling him he wasted his life on an imaginary construct, while for you it's about him respecting your intellectual reasoning.
Maybe the rational thing to do is not strive for something that's practically unattainable - being respected as an atheist on the basis of your atheist arguments - but instead focus on keeping the relationship with your parent intact while y...
Several people have alreadt given good answers to your position on infanticide, but they haven't mentioned what is in my opinion the crucial concept involved here: Schelling points.
We are all agreed that is is wrong to kill people (meaning, fully conscious and intelligent beings). We agree that adult humans beings are people (perhaps excluding those in irreversible coma). The law needs to draw a bright line separating those beings which are people, and hence cannot be killed, from those who are not. Given the importance of the "non-killing" rule to a functioning society. this line needs to be clear and intuitive to all. Any line based on some level of brain development does not satisfy this criterion.
There are only two Schelling points, that is obvious, intuitive places to draw the line: conception and birth. Many people support the first one, and the strongest argument for the anti-abortion position is that conception is in fact in many ways a better Schelling point than birth, since being born does not affect the intrinsic nature of the infant. However, among people without a metaphysical commitment to fetus personhood, most agree that the burdens that prohibition of a...
I do think there are some advantages to setting the cutoff point just slightly later than birth, even if by just a few hours:
*evaluations of whether a person should come into existence can rest on surer information when the infant is out of the womb
(All this assumes that late-term abortions are a morally acceptable choice to make in their own right, of course, rather than something which must be legally tolerated to preserve maternal bodily autonomy.)
Part of my difficulty is that some humans, such as infants, have less blicket than animals. If its ok to kill animals, then there's no reason to say it's not ok to kill blicket-less humans. Then I realize that even though it's legal to kill animals, it's still something I can't do for anything except certain bugs. Even spiders I let be, or take outside.
Don't worry, there would probably be a baby killing service if it were legal. Just like we have other people to kill animals for us.
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.
I would recommend against expressing this opinion in your OKCupid profile.
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.
Arbitrary limits like "ten months" don't make for good rules - especially when there's a natural limit that's much more prominent: childbirth.
What exactly counts as "people" is a matter of convention; it's best to settle on edges that are as crisp as possible, to minimize potential disagreement and conflict.
Also "any reason other than sadism", eh? Like "the dog was hungry" would be okay?
I broadly agree that babies aren't people, but I still think infanticide should be illegal, simply because killing begets insensitivity to killing. I know this has the sound of a slippery slope argument, but there is evidence that desire for sadism in most people is low, and increases as they commit sadistic acts, and that people feel similarly about murder.
From The Better Angels of Our Nature: "Serial killers too carry out their first murder with trepidation, distaste, and in its wake, disappointment: the experience had not been as arousing as it had been in their imaginations. But as time passes and their appetite is rewhetted, they find the next on easier and more gratifying, and then they escalate the cruelty to feed what turns into an addiction."
Similarly, cathartic violence against non-person objects (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catharsis#Therapeutic_uses) can lead to further aggression in personal interactions.
I don't think we want to encourage or allow killing of anything anywhere near as close to people as babies. The psychological effects on people who kill their own children and on a society that views the killing of babies as good are too potentially terrible. Without actual data, I can say I would never want to live in a society that valued people as little as Sparta did.
harmful, unsympathetic psychopaths
There is another, quite different, situation where it happens: Highly stressed mothers of newborns.
...The answer to this couldn’t be more clear: humans are very different from macaques. We’re much worse. The anxiety caused by human inequality is unlike anything observed in the natural world. In order to emphasize this point, Robert Sapolsky put all kidding aside and was uncharacteristically grim when describing the affects of human poverty on the incidence of stress-related disease.
"When humans invented poverty," Sapolsky wrote, “they came up with a way of subjugating the low-ranking like nothing ever before seen in the primate world.”
This is clearly seen in studies looking at human inequality and the rates of maternal infanticide. The World Health Organization Report on Violence and Health reported a strong association between global inequality and child abuse, with the largest incidence in communities with “high levels of unemployment and concentrated poverty.” Another international study published by the American Journal of Psychiatry analyzed infanticide data from 17 countries and found an unmistakable “pattern of powerlessness, pov
Infanticide has been considered a normal practice in a lot of cultures. The Greeks and Romans, for example, don't seem to have been run down by psychopaths.
I don't think we have a good way to know about the later harmful actions of people who kill their infants. Either we find them out and lock them up, in which case their life is no longer really representative of the population, or we don't know about what they've done.
Okay, got it. I agree that in a culture that condemns infanticide, people who do it anyway are likely to be quite different from the people who don't. But Bakkot's claim was that our culture should allow it, which should not be expected to increase the number of psychopaths.
I'm also not sure that unbounded social stigma is an effective way to deter people who essentially don't care about other people. We don't really know of good ways to change psychopathy.
(edited for clarity)
I've worked with parents of very disabled children, and it's not an easy life. For mothers especially, it becomes your career. I can imagine a lot of parents might consider infanticide if they knew that was going to be their life.
Ditto, as someone who works in disability care and child care (including infant care), I support the baby-killing scenario.
I worked for a family that had a severely mentally and physically disabled 6-year old. She was at infant-level cognition, practically blind, and had very little control over her body. There was almost nothing going on mentally, but she was very volatile about sounds/music/surroundings. You could tell if she was happy or sad by whether she was laughing or crying, and she cried a LOT.
Trying to get her to STOP crying was extremely difficult, because there was no communication, and she never wanted the SAME things. However it was also very important to get her calm QUICKLY because if she cried too long she would have a "meltdown", be near inconsolable, throw up, and then you'd have to vent her stomach.
Her parents were the best at reading her. They trained people by pretty much putting you in a room with her, until you developed an ineffable intuitive ability to keep her happy. When I moved to a different city, it took them about 3-4 months to find a replacement for me who wouldn't quit by the second day. I was driving back to my old city once a week to ...
Hi everybody,
I’m male, 24, philosophy student and live in Amazon, Brazil. I came across to LessWrong on the zombies sequence, because in the beginning, one of my intelectual interests was analytic philosophy. I saw that reductionism and rationality have the power to respond various questions, righting them to something factually tractable. My goals here is to contribute to the community in a useful form, learn as much as possible, become stronger and save the world reducing the risks of human extintion. I'm looking for some advice in these topics: bayesian epistemology, moral uncertain and the complexity of the wishes. If some of the participants in the forum can help me, I will be very grateful.
Hi all,
I'm 25 from Israel. I worked in programming for 4 years, and have recently decided to move on to more interesting stuff (either math, biology, or neurology, don't know).
I'm new in LW, but have read OB from time to time over over the past 5 years. Several months ago I ran into LW, (re)read a lot of the site, and decided to stick around when I realized how awesome it is.
Nice to meet you all!
Ron
minimalist, 17, white, male, autodidact, atheist, libertarian, california, hacker, studying computer science, reading sequences, intellectual upbringing, 1 year bayesian rationalist, motivation deficient, focusing on skills, was creating something similar to bayesian rationality before conversion, have read hpmor (not intro to lw), interested in contributing to ai research in the future
"Minimalist" is implied by the sparsity of the rest of the comment, and so is ironically redundant.
There are a few other reasons I could be formatting my introduction that way, such as being bad at English or writing in general. I used "minimalist" both as a heads up for the format and to draw away from the other possible explanations.
I'm sure you're aware at this point, but with that description you blend into the wallpaper.
Thank you for creating a comment to link "stereotypical Less Wrong reader". If only you were a couple of years older.
Since you're 17, have you looked into the week-long summer camp?
Consider restarting with a different account name. Trolling (that is, trying to provoke people) is not welcome here, and when your username is "troll", people will not (and should not) give you the benefit of doubt.
On an elitist gaming forum I used to frequent (RPG Codex), we called such things "post-ironic" (meaning "post-modern as fuck online performance art").
Basically the joke is that everyone gets the joke, and that allows its author to act as if it was no joke, and self-consciously reference that fact - which is the joke.
Less Wrong,
After lurking for about a week, I decided to register today. I have read some of the Sequences and a good many posts and comments. I am a life long agnostic who recently began to identify as atheist. I am interested in rationality for many reasons, however, my primary reason is that I'd like to learn more about rationality to help me get over my fear of death. A fear that I feel is very irrational, yet I am unable to shake it.
I am 39, female and a mother, I have lots of college under my belt but no degree. I guess I never really cared about that. I am also a schizophrenic and that makes rationality quite challenging for me. (Not that it's not challenging for many people.)
I am looking forward to reading more of the Sequences and hope to be able to comment or post in the near future. I am glad I found this site. Thanks for your time.
I've been lurking here on and off since the beginnings at OB, IIRC, though more off than on. Expressed in the language of the recent survey: I'm an 43-year-old married white male with an advanced humanities degree working in the technical side of for-profit IT in the rural USA. I was raised in a non-theist environment and was interested in rationality tools from an early age. I had a spontaneous non-theistic mystical experience when I was 17 that led me to investigate (but ultimately reject) a variety of non-materialist claims. This led to a life-long interest in the workings of the brain, intuition, rationality, bias, and so on.
I enjoy LW primarily because of the interest in conscious self-improvement and brain hacking. I think that the biggest error I see in general among self-described rationalists is the tendency to undervalue experience. My thinking is probably informed most strongly by individual athletics, many of the popular writers in the rationalist tradition, and wide variety of literature. These days, I'm nursing obsessions with Python programming, remote backcountry cycling, and the writing of Rebecca Goldstein.
There are indeed a couple of different ways I do mean it, but my best specific examples come from athletics. About eight or nine years ago I started getting seriously interested in long distance trail running. Like most enthusiastic autodidacts I started reading lots of material about shoes, clothing, hydration, nutrition, electrolytes, training, and so on. As I'm sure you've seen, a lot of people on the Internet can get paralyzed by analysis in the face of vast easily available information. In particular, they have a lot of trouble sorting out conflicting information gained from other knowledgeable people.
Frequently, further research will help you arrive at less-wrong conclusions. However, in some endeavors there really is a great deal of individual variation, and you just have to engage in lengthy, often-frustrating self-experimentation to figure out what techniques or training methods work best for you. This base of experience can't really be replaced by secondary research. Where research skill comes in, though, is in figuring out where to focus that secondary research (and this in itself is a skill that is honed by experience). As a friend of mine likes to put it: the best prac...
I'm a 22-year-old mathematics graduate student, moving to Boston next year.
I was recommended HPMoR by another Boston math grad student, followed the authors' notes to read most of the sequences, and then started following lesswrong, although I didn't create an account until recently.
I can't say how I came to actually be a rationalist, though---most of the sequences seemed true or even obvious in hindsight when I first read them, and I've always had a habit of remembering "x tells me y is true" instead of "y is true" when x tells me y is true.
I'm signed up for cryonics. (Current probability estimates 90% that it preserves enough information to be reversible, 95% that I'll die with enough notice to be preserved, 50% that humanity'll advance far enough to reverse it, and 70% that CI'll survive that long.)
I'm vegetarian for carbon efficiency and because the animals that produce most of our meat have negative utility from awful conditions. I don't think sentience is the right standard; is there a good past lesswrong discussion about that?
I heard about LW from a startup co-founder. I'm 22, in Pittsburgh, graduating college in 4 months and on my 2nd startup. Raised hard-core Catholic, and still trying to pull together arguments from various sources as to the existence of God. The posts on LW have certainly helped, and I'd say I'm leaning towards atheism - though it's been a short journey of only 6 months or so since I've started to question my religion.
I'm very interested in the Singularity movement and how that will shape human philosophy and morality. I've also done some body hacking and started tracking my time, an interest which I think a lot of the LW community shares. Looking forward to becoming more active in the community!
Welcome!
The best unsolicited advice I have to give is this: your philosophical leanings are immensely sensitive to psychology, and in particular to the sort of self you want to project to the people around you. So if you want to decide one way or another on a philosophical question that's tormenting you, the biggest key is to surround yourself (socially, in real life) with people who will be pleased if you decide that way. If you want to do your best to figure out what's true, though, the best way is to surround yourself with people who will respect you whatever you decide on that matter, or else to get away from everyone you know for a week or two while you think about it.
Good luck!
Hello LW readers,
Long time lurker here. Just created this account so I can, probably, participated more in LW discussion.
I'm male, 27 years old, from Indonesia. I work as freelance software developer. I love music and watching movies. Any movies. Movie is the only way I can detached from reality and have a dream without a sleep.
I come from Muslim family, both of my parent is Muslim. Long story short, after finished my college, with computer science degree, I tried to learn extend my knowledge more in Islam. I read a lot of books about Islam history, Islam teaching, Quran commentary, book that explain hadith and Quran, etc. Every books that my parents have. Soon, with the help of Internet, I renounce my faith and become an atheist. I see rationalism, philosophy in general, as the way to see the world without giving any judgments. Because, in the end, there is no absolute truth, only facts and opinions.
I know LW from /r/truereddit, and has been reading some of the articles and discussions in here, very informative and thoughtful. The only thing I can help here probably by translating some of articles, especially the Sequences, into Bahasa Indonesia.
Because, in the end, there is no absolute truth, only facts and opinions.
Eliezer's essay The Simple Truth is a nice argument for the opposite. The technical name for his view is correspondence theory. A short summary is "truth is the correspondence between map and territory" or "the sentence 'snow is white' is true if and only if snow is white".
Hello! I'm male, 20-something, educator, living in Alberta, Canada. I came across LessWrong via some comments left on a Skepchick article.
My choice to become an educator is founded upon my passion for rational inquiry. I work in the younger grades, where teaching is less about presenting and organizing knowledge and more about the fundamental, formative development of the human brain. Because of this, I am interested in exploring the mental faculties that produce "curiosity behaviors" and the relationship between these behaviors and motivation.
I'm a constructivist at heart; I help guide my students to become masterful thinkers and doers by modifying environmental variables around them. Essentially, I trick them into achieving curriculum-mandated success by 'exploiting' their mental processes. In order to do this effectively, I need to understand as best I can the processes that guide human thoughts and behaviors. This is something I have been interested in since I was young - I am fortunate to have found a career that allows me to explore these interests and use my understanding to better my students'.
I've considered myself to be a rationalist since i was 16 or so, and ...
Hello Less Wrong!
I am a twenty year old female currently pursuing a degree in programming in Washington State, after deciding that calculus and statistics was infinitely more interesting to me than accounting and economics. I found LW via HPMOR, and tore through the majority of the Sequences in a month. (Now I'm re-reading them much more slowly for better comprehension and hopefully retention.)
I wish to improve my rationality skills, because reading the Sequences showed me that there are a lot of time-wasting arguments out there, and I want to spend my time doing productive, interesting, and fun things instead. Also, I've always enjoyed philosophy, so finding a site that uses scholarship and actual logic to tackle critical issues was amazing.
Other defining things about me: I like cooking, folding origami, playing video games, and reading science fiction, fantasy, and history books. I struggle with procrastination and akrasia. I look forward to self-improvement!
Howdy,
tl;dr This seems like a place that I can use to shore up some of my cognitive shortcomings, eliminate some bias and expand my worldview. Maybe I can help someone else along the way.
I have been reading the material here for the last several days and have decided that this is a community that I would like to be a part of and hopefully contribute to. My greatest interests are improving my map of the territory(how great is that analogy?), using my constantly improving map to be a better husband and father, and exploring transhumanist ideas and conceits.
I came to be a rationalist when I started reading somewhat milquetoast skeptical literature. Having been raised religious and having served in the Marine Corps I have found that I have a tendency to allow arguments from authority too much credence. If I am not careful I can serve as quite the dutiful drone.
It became important over the last few months that I be able to do as much of my own philosophical and scientific legwork as possible. If an author or speaker that I enjoy espouses ideas I am inclined to agree with it is vital (in my estimation) that I either be able to verify the information presented myself or locate reliable...
Hello there!
I think I first saw LessWrong about three years ago, as it frequently came up in discussions on KW, the forum formerly linked to the Dresden Codak comic. This makes mine one of the longer lurking periods, but I've never really felt the urge to take discussion to the actual posts being discussed and talked about them elsewhere when I felt the need to comment. All this changed when Alicorn told me that when I was asked to make a post relevant to LessWrong that meant I actually had to post it on LessWrong (a revelation which I should have probably anticipated). So it has come to this.
The simplest place to start describing myself is by saying that I'm the type of person that skims through the 200 most recent comments to see which ones are well liked before writing anything.* In real life terms, I've finished up my bachelor's degree in December, after making various errors. Unfortunately, with it finished, I have discovered that I lack motivation to pursue a standard career, since just about the only things I find myself caring about are stories, knowing the future (in the general, not the personal, respect), and understanding things, particularly things related to people. (...
Hello all.
I've been lurking around here and devouring the sequences for about two years now. I haven't said much because I rarely feel like I have much that's useful, or I don't feel knowledgeable about the subject. But I thought I might start commenting a bit more.
I'm 19, in Florida and studying engineering. I really want to do something that will bring the world forward in some way, and right now that has me pointed at trying to put my personal effort towards nanotechnology. For now though I'm just trying to win classes and learn as much as I can.
Not too much more than 'hi', but there it is.
Hello!
I'm a mathematician and working as a programmer in Berlin, Germany. I read HPMOR after following a recommendation in a talk on Cognitive Psychology For Hackers and proceeded to read most of the sequences.
Reading LW has had several practical consequences for me: Spaced repetition and effective altruism were new to me. Things have also improved around social skills, exercise and nutrition.
I'm also part of a small Berlin LW meetup: spuckblase and me have met twice - and now we got contacted by two other Berlin based lurkers which prompted the creation of a wiki entry and a mailing list. We're now planning the first meetup that will actually get a meetup post and be announced in advance.
Hi there. I'm Hermione (yes, really). I went to my first LW meetup recently and I'm now working on the Rationality Curriculum, so it feels like time to introduce myself and start getting involved in discussions.
There are a lot of things I'd be interested in talking about. I only found LW a couple of months ago so I'm trying to level up in rationality and work out how to teach others to do so at the same time. I'll probably be posting about this and asking for advice. Has anyone written about their experiences of reading the sequences for the first time? Should I try and absorb things really quickly, or is it better to take it slowly, and if so, what comes first? That kind of thing.
I've also been inspired by Alicorn's Luminosity sequence and have been piloting a beeper experiment, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi style. In order to understand myself and my moods better, I've been recording what I'm doing and how I feel at random times (3x/day). I'd like to improve the indicators I've been using. I struggle to get the right balance between quantitative (more analysable) and qualitative (more accurate). Any suggestions?
Finally, I'd really like to meet some more rationalists in person, so please PM me if you're in Brussels!
Hi people :) I'm 16 from France and the Philippines, going to a Christian boarding school. Um, i met a guy on Omegle... he gave me a link to this website after a conversation about Christianity. Long story short, I'm confused. Maybe someone would like to help me get my head straight?
Hello LW community, my name is Karl, but please call me MHD for short; here's a lot of sentences beginning with "I..." :
I am a 19 year old, slightly gifted individual, male of gender and psyche, bi, hard to define my preferred relationship structure; honestly my gonads and sexual preference are mostly irrelevant here.
I came here by way of HPMoR and was pressed to do some serious reading by my good friend, known around here as Armok_GoB.
I have at time of writing read sequences MaT and MAtMQ along with some non-structured link-walking, looking to read Reductionism next. My attitude is so far positive, but I read it with a healthy dose of sceptic afterthought and note-taking to verify that it really does make sense. You see, my native language is not English, and I have read a study that one is more gullible when communicating in a non-native language.
My mind is built for logical thinking and I have a knack for mathematics, physics and language. I know approx. 12 turing complete programming languages (C likes, LISPs, ML family, SmallTalk-esque, Assembly) reasonably well. I am looking into Tensors, Bayesian probability, formal logic, type theory, quantum physics, relativity, ...
I am not a fan of cryonics because I know that freezing, regardless of method, is a very good way to destroy tissue
Cryonics uses vitrification, which protects from the tissue-destroying crystal formation.
http://www.alcor.org/Library/html/vitrification.html
Hi all, I'm a lurker of about two years and have been wanting to contribute here and there - so here I am. I specialize in ethics and have further interests in epistemology and the philosophy of mind.
Salutations and whatnot! My name is Joyce, I'm a high school sophomore. Probably on the younger side of the age spectrum here, but I don't mind starting young. The idea of rationality isn't new to me, I've always been more inclined to the "truth", even when it sometimes hurts. In my mind knowing more about the truth = better person, so that's my motivation for being here. I'm have better grades than the average, but for the past couple of years the thing I hated most about myself was the fact that I usually "coast" a class, get my A, and then promptly forget everything I've done in the class. My goal was "get an A", not "learn something new". I'd like to learn new things now, and actually retain it, instead of just coasting by. Knowledge is power. I want to be the best, like no one ever was.
Um. When I was younger, perhaps ten, while I was tinkering with Photoshop, my older cousin approached to me and tried to introduce to me the idea of fallacies. He's...nine years older than me, so he was a barely an adult. I forgot most of the conversation, but from what I DO remember, blaming a stomachache on the last thing you ate was falling prey to SOME...
Hello, Less Wrong.
Like some others, I eventually found this site after being directed by fellow nerds to HPMOR. I've been working haphazardly through the Sequences (getting neck-deep in cognitive science and philosophy before even getting past the preliminaries for quantum physics, and loving every bit of it).
I can't point to a clear "aha!" moment when I decided to pursue the LW definition of rationality. I always remember being highly intelligent and interested in Science, but it's hard for me to model how my brain actually processed information that long ago. Before high school (at the earliest), I was probably just as irrational as everyone else, only with bigger guns.
Sometime during college (B.S. in mechanical engineering), I can recall beginning an active effort to consider as many sides of an issue as possible. This was motivated less from a quest for scientific truth and more from a tendency to get into political discussions. Having been raised by parents who were fairly traditional American conservatives, I quickly found myself becoming some kind of libertarian. This seems to be a common occurrence, both in the welcome comments I've read here and elsewhere. I can'...
Hi, I'm Nick Bone ... Just joined the site.
I'm based in the UK and interested in a wide variety of topics in science and associated philosophy. In particular, the basics of rationality (deductive and inductive logic, Bayesian Theorem, decision theory), foundations of mathematics (logic and set theory). Plus some of the old staples (classical arguments for/against existence of God, first cause, design, evil and so on).
My background is in mathematics and computer science (PhD in maths) and I'm currently working in an area of applied game theory. Generally I found the site by Googling, and the quality of discussion seems rather higher than on other discussion boards. Hope I can contribute.
By the way, I started off by putting together some thoughts on the "Doomsday Argument" and Strong Self-Selection Assumption which I hadn't seen discussed before. Since I'm brand new, and have no karma points, I'm not sure where to post them. Any suggestions?
Common reasons I downvote with no comment: I think the mistake is obvious to most readers (or already mentioned) and there's little to be gained from teaching the author. I think there's little insight and much noise - length, unpleasant style, politically disagreeable implications that would be tedious to pick apart (especially in tone rather than content). I judge that jerkishness is impairing comprehension; cutting out the courtesies and using strong words may be defensible, but using insults where explanations would do isn't.
On the "just a-holes" note (yes, I thought "Is this about me?"): It might be that your threshold for acceptable niceness is unusually high. We have traditions of bluntness and flaw-hunting (mostly from hackers, who correctly consider niceness noise when discussing bugs in X), so we ended up rather mean on average, and very tolerant of meanness. People who want LW to be nicer usually do it by being especially nice, not by especially punishing meanness. I notice you're on my list of people I should be exceptionally nice to, but not on my list of exceptionally nice people, which is a bad thing if you love Postel's law. (Which, by Postel's law, nobody but me has to.) The only LessWronger I think is an asshole is wedrifid, and I think this is one of his good traits.
So, am I a second-class citizen because I found this place via MoR?
Anyways, I've been Homeschooled for the majority of my education thus far, mostly due to my Creationist parents' concerns about government-run schools. Fortunately they didn't think to censor the internet, and here I am. My PSATs showed me in the 98th percentile, so I expect I'll be able to get into a decent university. Plan A has always been Engineering, but after going through a few of the more inspirational sequences I think I may readjust my plans and try to do some good for this planet. How does one get into the Singularity business?
Hello,
I'm a 26 year old guy from the UK. I've finished writing my Ph.D. thesis in "Quantification of risk in large scale wind power integration" and I'm now working as a phone-app framework developer. I spent the last year on a round the world travel where I have spent a lot of my time writing practical philosophy. After coming back I found this site and read the core sequences. I loved them, they echoed a lot of my previous thoughts then took them much further. I felt like they would be easier to understand if they were one article so I have been re-writing bits of them for my own benefit. I am in two minds whether to post them here but I would appreciate the feedback to see if I have understood what was written.
Thanks to Emile for suggesting I come here write something. I hope to get to the New York meetup on Sunday; I'm not ready for "rituals" and futuristic music just yet.
I just ran across LW by trying google terms along the lines of memetics "belief systems", etc., which led me to some books from late 90s like "Virus of the Mind", and in the last 2-3 years some just "OK" books on religions as virus-like meme systems. This kind of search to see what people may have said about some odd combination of thoughts that I suspect might be fruitful has brought me interesting results in the past. E.g. by googling ontological comedian, I discovered Ricky Gervais which has brightened my life (his movie "The Invention of Lying" out to be of interest to LW-ers). I'm interested in practical social epistemology -- trying to come up with creative responses to what looks like major chunks of the population (those pesky folks who elect presidents) being less and less moored in reality and going off into diverse fantasy lands -- or to put it another way, a massive breakdown in common sense about what sources are reliable.
I asked someone how she makes s...
Hello, everyone. I'm Lykos, and it's a pleasure to finally be posting here. I'm a high school junior and I pretty much discovered the concept of rationality through HP:MoR. I'm not sure where I discovered THAT. I'm an aspiring author, and am always eager to learn more, and rationality, I've found, has helped me with my ideas, both for stories and in general. I've currently read the Map and Territory sequence, and am going through Mysterious Answers to Mysterious Questions. I doubt I'll be posting much- I'll probably be spending most of my time basking in the intelligence of the rest of you.
Either way, it is a pleasure to join the community. Thank you.
Hiya,
I've been occasionally reading for a while, and have decided to get a login. I suppose the reason I'm here is that it's become important in the last 2 years or so that my beliefs are as accurate as possible. I've slowly had to let go of some beliefs because the evidence didn't seem to support them, and while that's been painful it has been worthwhile.
I'm also a friend of ciphergoth's - we've discussed less wrong a lot! I don't feel like I know a great deal yet - I still need to read more of the sequences, so I'll stick to asking questions until I feel I know more :-).
I'm 28, female, and I live in Cambridge, UK. My academic background is in the philosophy/politics/economics area, and I work in accounts.
coffeespoons
I'm very excited to have found this community. In a way, it's like meeting a future, more evolved version of myself. So many things that I've read about here I've considered before, but often in a more shallow and immature way. A big thanks to all of you for that!
To the topic of me, I'm 24, male, and Swedish. After studying some of PJ Eby's work, I identify strongly as a naturally struggling person. I've been trying to figure out why for all my life, I think I read Wayne Dyer at about the same age as Eliezer read Feynman. Since then I've read a lot more, and at this point it seems like I have very credible explanations for why things turned out as they did.
Still, even though I might think I ought to have the tools now to stake out a better future path for myself, I'm plagued by learned helplessness and surrounded by ugh-fields. But as I see it there is only one best way forward - to learn more and then attempt to do things better.
I'm a great admirer of the stoic philosopher Lucius Seneca. Here's a short segment from one of his letters that resonates with me:
...It is clear to you, I know, Lucilius, that no one can lead a happy life, or even one that is bearable, without the pursuit o
19 male, currently in Florida.
Used to be a hardcore Christian. Then I started looking for alternate explanations and wound up believing in magic because I wanted it to be real. Then I read HP:MoR and it changed my life. My head is on a lot straighter now.
At first I thought this was just something cool. Then I was talking to someone about investing a fairly large amount of money. As we were talking, I was conscious of myself changing my plans to agree with him simply because he was nice. Despite this, he still changed my mind even though I recognized that he did it by being nice instead of a good argument. Had to go home before I could think clearly again.
It scared me that I could be so easily swayed by the Dark Arts, as I've heard them referred to. This might be something worth taking seriously after all.
So now I'm about to use what I learned to buy a car. A year ago, I would've just gone down with an informed friend and pick up something functional. Now I'm going down with a friend and a journal, identifying several possible vehicles and taking notes, then spend a week doing research on price, making sure I'm not being swayed by the salesman being nice, etc. before I actually spend any money.
I look forward to becoming less wrong.
If "hunting down" psychopaths is our goal, we'd do better to look for people who torture or kill animals. My understanding is that these behaviors are a common warning sign of antisocial personality disorder, and I'm sure it's more common than infanticide because it's less punished. Would you advocate punishing anyone diagnosed with antisocial personality right away, or would you want to wait until they actually committed a crime?
I'd put taboos in three categories. Some taboos (e.g. against women wearing trousers, profanity, homosexuality, or atheism) seem pointless and we were right to relax them. Some taboos, like those against theft and murder, I agree we should hold in place because they produce so little value for the harm they produce. Some, like extramarital sex and abortion, are more ambiguous. They probably allow some people to get away with unnecessary cruelty. But because the the personal freedom they create, I think they produce a net good.
I put legalized infanticide in the third category. I gather you put it in the second? In other words, do you believe the harm it would create from psychopaths killing babies and generally being harder to detect would be greater than the benefit to people who don't raise unwanted children?
Sorry, you pointed out a counterargument made by Vladimir_Nesov, in a confrontational manner.
Also, thank your for reminding me that I have to sharpen my posting abilities.
Vladimir Nesov made a very true counterargument, you endorsed it to test my ability to change my standpoint. Nothing wrong with that; and lo and behold, I actually have. Congratulations, you and Vladimir_Nesov both get an upvote from the new guy.
Hello, I'm 16 years old and from the UK. I found this blog via MoR and I'vebeen lurking for a few months now (this is my first post I think), and I'm slowly but surely working my way through the sequences. I think I've gotten to the point where I can identify a lot of the biases and irrational thoughts as they form in my brain, but unfortunately I'm not well-versed enough in rationality to know how to tackle them properly yet.
Greetings, everyone. My name is Elizabeth, and I am a young adult female beginning to learn how to think for herself. I stumbled across this website right after reading Alicorn's fanfiction Luminosity in the summer of 2010. Due to some personal issues, life in general, and a dead hard drive, I stopped visiting Less Wrong up until a couple of weeks ago.
I found Less Wrong attractive because of its being a free resource on learning the art of rationality. Borderline Personality Disorder runs in my family, and so my hypothesis is that I personally am drawn to things like LW partly in order to "self-medicate" after years of chaos, unpredictability, and irrationality. Chances are likely that I will be very quiet on this website for several months at least: for one thing, that is my usual modis operandi when learning about and researching a topic; for another, it would seem that I need to thoroughly acquaint myself with the sequences and other such work in order to fully understand and be able to contribute to more recent posts/discussions.
Hi y'all. I'm a senior in high school in the Silicon Valley who's been lurking for a couple of months. I've been working my way through the Sequences since then. I don't know how much I have to contribute to the discussion, since I'm a bit of a newcomer to rationalism, but I enjoy reading everyone else's discussions.
I was introduced to this site through my philosophy class- a research project on transhumanism led me to Eliezer Yudkowsky's site, which led me to here. I came here for the Sequences, stayed here for the intelligent discussion (just like almost everyone else on this page). I'm really interested in computer science and economics and how they intersect with rationality.
I'm afraid you may have your bottom line written already. In the age of ultrasound and computer generated images or even better in the future age of transhuman sensory enhancement or fetuses being grown outside the human body the exact same argument can be used against abortion.
Especially once you remember the original context was a 10 month old baby, not say a 10 year old child.
Hi everyone,
A few of you have met me on Omegle. I finally signed up and made an account here like you guys suggested.
About me: I'm 26 years old, and my hobbies include creative writing and PC games. My favorite TV show is Rupaul's Drag Race.
I think I share almost all of the main positions that people tend to have in this community. But I actually find disagreements more interesting, so that's mainly what I'm here for. One of my passions in life is debating. I did debate team and that sort of thing when I was younger, but now I'm more interested in how to seriously persuade people, not just debating for show. I still have a lot of improving to do, though. If anyone wants to exchange notes or get some tips, then let me know.
Love,
Flora
Hello!
I'm 18, an undergraduate at University of Virginia, pre-law, and found you through HPMOR.
Rationality has been a part of me for almost as long as I can remember, but for various reasons, I'm only recently starting to refine and formalize my views of the world. It is heartening to find others who know the frustration of dealing with people who are unwilling to listen to logic. I've found that it is difficult to become any better at argument and persuasion when you have a reputation as an intelligent person and can convince anyone of anything by merely stating it with a sufficiently straight face.
More than anything else, I hope to become here a person who is a little less wrong than when I came.
This "intelligent reputation" discussion is interesting.
I had kind of an odd situation as a kid growing up. I went to a supposedly excellent Silicon Valley area elementary school and was generally one of the smartest 2-4 kids in my class. But I didn't think of myself as being very smart: I brushed off all the praise I got from teachers (because the villains and buffoons in the fiction I read were all arrogant, and I was afraid of becoming arrogant myself). Additionally, my younger brother is a good bit smarter than me, which was obvious even at that age. So I never strongly identified as being "smart".
When I was older I attended a supposedly elite university. At first I thought there was no way I would get in, but when I was accepted and got in I was astonished by how stupid and intellectually incurious everyone was. I only found one guy in my entire dorm building who actually seemed to like thinking about science/math/etc. for its own sake. At first I thought that the university admissions department was doing a terrible job, but I gradually came to realize that the world was just way stupider than I thought it was, and assuming that I was anything close to normal was not an accurate model. (Which sounds really arrogant; I'm almost afraid to type that.)
I wonder how else being raised among those who are smarter/stupider than you impacts someone's intellectual development?
but decided to skip over it as no information seemed lost either way and it had bonus illustrative and comical effect in the likely event that I was using the wrong term.
Given all the evidence on 'bouncy' and 'npple-count' I must admit the comic illustration that sprung to mind may not have been the one you intended!
Hello,
My name is John Paton. I'm an Operations Research and Psychology major at Cornell University. I'm very interested in learning about how to improve the quality of my thinking.
Honestly, I think that a lot of my thoughts about how the world works are muddled at the moment. Perhaps this is normal and will never go away, but I want to at least try and decrease it.
At first glance, this community looks awesome! The thinking seems very high quality, and I certainly want to contribute to the discussion here.
I also write at my own blog, optimizethyself.com
See you in the discussion!
-John
Hi Less Wrong, I'm a PhD researcher in Computational Neuroscience, with a background in AI and machine learning, and some past experience in the computing industry as software engineer. I live in Singapore, although I am French. Are there other members residing in Singapore?
Hello,
I am a nearly seventeen year old female in the US who was linked by a friend to The Quantum Physics Series on LessWrong after trying to understand whether or not determinism is /actually/ refuted by Quantum Mechanics. I am an atheist, I suppose.
This all began as a fascination with science because I thought it would permit me to attain ultimate knowledge, or ultimate understanding and thus control of "matter". Later, I became fascinated with nihilism and philosophy, in search of defining "objectivity". It took off from there and now I am currently concerned with consciousness and usage of artificial intelligence to transfer our biological intelligence to a more effective physical manifestation.
I'm a little scared, naturally, because I think this would change a lot of what we currently understand as humans. As Mitchell Heisman describes, there exists a relationship between the scientist and the science. If the scientist is changed, I would think that the science, or knowledge, would in itself change. Some questions I have ATM: "Does objectivity exist? Can it be created? Can the notion or belief or idea of objectivity be destroyed? Will intelligence bec...
Hello people, 49 year old father of 4 sons, 17-27, eldest of 9,i come from a background of mormonism, my parents having been converted when i was 3.
So my reality was the dissonance of mormon dogma and theology vs what i was being 'taught' at school,vs what i experience for my self.
Now, having been through the divorce of my parents(gross hypocrisy if you're a mormon) the suicide of my brother and my own divorce,also finding myself saying i would die/kill for my beliefs,i began to realise what a mess i was and started asking questions,leaving the church (demonstrating with placards every sunday for 2 years) in 1996.
So i found myself wanting and needing a new philosophy! I'm particularly interested in learning how to 'be less wrong'! I'm still looking around and am currently interested in the non aggression principle.
I look forward to learning the tools i see here,so that i may make more considered choices.I recognise i'm a clumsy communicator and probably i'm somewhat retarded in comparison to a lot of you. Anyway i look forward to watching and learning,maybe even contributing one day! Tim.
Hi! I found LW by HPMoR like so many other people, and I have found a lot of interesting articles on here. I'm only 12, so there are tons of articles that I don't understand, but I am determined to figure them out. My name is Chloe and I hope that we can be friends!
Hello to all! I'm a 17-year-old girl from Bulgaria, interested in Mathematics and Literature. Since I decided to "get real" and stop living in my comfortable fictional world, I've had a really tough year destroying the foundations of my belief system. Sure, there are scattered remains of old beliefs and habits in my psyche that I can't overcome. I have some major issues with reductionism and a love for Albert Camus ("tell me, doctor, can you quantify the reason why?" ).
In the last year I've come to know that it is very easy to start believing without doubt in something (the scientific view of the world included), perhaps too easy. That is why I never reject an alternative theory without some consideration, no matter how crazy it sounds. Sometimes I fail to find a rational explanation. Sometimes it's all too confusing. I'm here because I want to learn to think rationally but also because I want to ask questions.
Harry James Potter-Evans-Verres brought me here. To be honest, I hate this character with passion, I hate his calculating, manipulative attitude, and this is not what I believe rationality is about. I wonder how many of you see things as I do and how many would think me naive. Anyway, I'm looking forward to talking to you. I'm sure it's going to be a great experience.
I'm male, early 40s who grew up in the midwestern US but have lived in the UK for the past 10 years. I had a very strong evangelical/fundamentalist upbringing, but at the same time an obsessively "rational" attitude which developed in large part from my covert reading of period sf (the sort in which rebellious yet rational engineers outsmarted their rigid hierarchically-minded superiors and their extremely technologically advanced antagonists at the same time). No surprise therefore that my religious beliefs began to dissolve as soon as I went to university, finally coming out of the closet as a de-convert in 1999.
I'm a postdoctoral researcher in cognitive science - with secondary interests in philosophy of science, especially the manner of scientific inference and the different extents to which Bayesian inference has taken hold in different scientific domains at the present time. I've been lurking here for a few years after seeing posts or comments in various places elsewhere by people like ciphergoth and David Gerard (neither of whom I know in person).
I also tend to make way too many parenthetical statements when I write; even though I am completely aware I am overdoing it I just can't avoid it.
Hello. My name is Konrad and I stumbled upon LessWrong a few weeks ago from Reddit. I've browsed some of the main pages since then, but until now haven't committed to reading much. I hope that after registering I'll be able to participate in the community and learn more. I'm 16 years of age and would describe myself as an agnostic theist. I'd also say that I'm curious about knowledge and the world so hopefully I'll learn a lot from this website.
Hi all,
My name is Glenn Thomas Davis. I am a 48-year old male living in Warren, NJ with my wife and 5-year old daughter. I was born and raised in Ketchikan, Alaska. I am a creative director for a pharmaceutical marketing agency. I have been interested in science and skepticism since reading Godel, Escher, Bach in my 20's, but became a really serious skeptic and atheist after I started listening to the Skeptics' Guide to the Universe podcast in 2005ish. I beacame a fan of Eliezer and the Singularity Institute after seeing him speak on Bloggingheads 3 years ago, and I recently subscribed to the Overcoming Bias NYC listserve.
Most of my online friends are from the San Francisco Bay Area where I lived for many years. Not exactly the world's most rational bunch, and they don't often appreciate my atheist rants. I have been delaying introducing myself here because I am resistant to putting in the effort and time to become a known presence from the ground up, or even to write a proper introductory post. However, it recently occurred to me I could just share pieces of writing I've already done for other, less like-minded groups. Here's one:
--
(In response to an otherwise rational person who ...
Hello Less Wrong community, I am Kouran.
What follows may be a bit long, and maybe a little dramatic. I'm sorry if that is uncourteous, still I feel the following needs saying early on. Please bear with me.
I'm a recently be-bachelored sociologist from the Netherlands, am male and in my early twenties. I consider myself a jack of several trades – among them writing, drawing, cooking and some musical hobbies – but master of none. However, I do entertain the hope that the various interests and skills add up to something effective, to my becoming someone in a position to help people who need it, and I intend to take action to approach this end.
I found Less Wrong through the intriguing Harry Potter fanfiction story called 'the Methods of Rationality.' The story entertains me greatly, and the more abstract themes stimulate me and I find myself wishing to enter discussions regarding these matters. Instead of bothering the author of the story I decided to have a look here instead. Please note that I write this before having read any of the Sequences and only a few smaller articles. I intend to get on that soon, but as introductions go I feel it is better to present myself first. I hope you...
It sounds like the Straw Vulcan talk might be relevant to some of your thoughts on rationality and emotion...
It's been a while, so I just wanted to express approval of these welcome threads. A glance over the comments we've gotten over the years should reveal that they really do make people feel welcome and help people get into discussion on the site.
Hi everyone. 23 year old south american software developer/musician here. I've been lurking around and reading for a couple of months now and I've found a lot of useful and interesting information here. It has actually triggered in me a lot of thinking about thinking, about reflexivity and the need for being aware of one's methods of thinking/learning/communicating etc.
I've been having some thoughts lately on the positive aspects of "rationality-motivated" socialization, mainly because of what I've learned of LW's weekly meetups and also because it has been, so far, pretty difficult to find someone who's interested about rationality. The first google searches took me nowhere, though I have still to look somewhere around philosophy/mathematics departments of local universities.
Anyway thanks for the information and the friendly welcome, and also for the big corpus of material you make available.
I'm 22, Male, an undergraduate at Singapore Management University studying information systems. Interest in AI.
I want to live a "good" life, but different people/culture uses different value systems to view life... some focus on the 'Ending', some focus on the 'Journey', some sees no value at all... Therefore, I'm looking for a way to objectively measure the value of a person's life. (not sure if that is even possible)
Found LW while reading up on Singularity. Would love to make some LW friends. feel free to add me on facebook~ http://fb.me/mengxiang
Hi!
Long time lurker here.
I'm 26 years old, CS graduate living in Wrocław (Poland), professional compiler developer, cryptography research assistant and programmer. I'm an atheist (quite possibly thanks to LW). I consider the world to be overall interesting. I have many interests and I always have more things to do than I have time for. I'm motivated by curiosity. I'm less risk-averse than most people around me, but also less patient. I have a creative mind and love chellanges. While being fairly successful lone wolf until now, I seek to improve my people skills because I belive I can't get much further all by myself.
When I found LW for the first time, it absorbed me. It took me about 4 months at 4-6h a day to read all of the Sequences and comments. While I strongly disagree with some of the material, I consider LW to have accelerated my personal developement 2 to 3 times simply by virtue of critical mass and high singal to noise ratio. I don't know any better hub for thought (links welcome!). I joined becuse I finally have something to say.
W.
Hello; my name is Brian. It is with some trepidation that I post here because I am not entirely sure how or where I can contribute. On the other hand, if I knew how I could contribute then I probably wouldn't need to post here.
I seem to be a bit older than most people whose introductions I have read here. I am 58. I have spent most of my life as a software engineer, electrical engineer, technical writer, businessman, teacher, sailor, and pilot. (When I was young Robert A. Heinlein advised against specialization, an admonition I took to heart.)
My most recent endeavor was a 5-year stint in a private school as a teacher of science, math, history, government, engineering, and computer science/programming. The act of trying to teach these subjects in a manner that provides the necessary cross-connection caused me to discover that I needed to try to understand more about how I think and learn, as my ultimate goal was to help my students determine for themselves how they think and learn. Being able to absorb and regurgitate facts and algorithms is not enough. Real learning requires the ability to discover new understanding as well. (I am rather a fan of scientific method, as inefficient ...
Greetings fellow Ration-istas!
First of all, I'd like to mention how glad I am that this site and community exist. For many years I wondered if there were others like me, who cared about improving themselves and their capacity for reason. And now I know - now I just need to figure out how to drag you all down to sunny San Diego to join me...
My name is Brett, and I'm a 28 year old Computational Biologist in San Diego, California. I've thought of myself as a materialist and an atheist since my freshman year in college, but it wasn't until after I graduated that I truly began to care about rationality. I realized that though I was unhappy with my life, as a scientist I had access to the best tools around for turning that around - science and reason.
I was born with a de novo genomic translocation on my 1st chromosome that left me with a whole raft of medical problems through-out my childhood - funnel chest, cleft palate, mis-fused skull, you name it. As a result I was picked on and isolated for most of my childhood, and generally responded to stress by retreating into video games and SF novels. So I went to school to study genetics and biology, and I graduated from college with a ...
Hi,
I'm a German student-to-be (I am going to start studying IT in October) and I am interested in almost anything connected with rationality, especially the self improvement, biases and "how to save the world" parts. I hope that lesswrong will be (and it already has been to a certain amount) one of the resources for (re-)shaping my thinking and acting towards a better me and a better world.
I came here, like so many others ;-), because I wanted to check out the foundations/concepts behind HPMOR and I could not just leave again. So over the last few months I visited again and again to read some of the sequences and posts.
As I am interested in science, especially physics, maths, technology and astronomy, I have a question that I would like to ask the lesswrong community: What is a fast and secure way of determining the trustworthiness of scientists and scientific papers? I ask this because there is a lot of pseudoscience and poorly done science out there which often isn't easy to distinguish from unconventional/disrupting science (at least not for me).
all the best Viper
Hi everyone! I am still a high school student but very interested in what I read here on LessWrong! I decided to register to contribute to discussions. Until now, I have been lurking but hopefully I will be able to join the conversation in a useful way.
Hi all! I have been lurking LW for a few months (years?). I believe I was first introduced to LW through some posts on Hacker News (http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=olalonde). I've always considered myself pretty good at rationality (is there a difference with being a rationalist?) and I've always been an atheist/reductionist. I recently (4 years ago?) converted to libertarianism (blame Milton Friedman). I was raised by 2 atheist doctors (as in PhD). I'm a software engineer and I'm mostly interested in the technical aspect of achieving AGI. Since I was a kid, I've always dreamed of seeing an AGI within my lifetime. I'd be curious to know if there are some people here working on actually building an AGI. I was born in Canada, have lived in Switzerland and am now living in China. I'm 23 years old IIRC. I believe I'm quite far from the stereotypical LWer on the personality side but I guess diversity doesn't hurt.
Nice to meet you all!
Hello everyone!
I am Jayesh Kumar Gupta. I am from Jodhpur, India. I have been interested in rationality for some years now. I came across this site via HPMOR. I had been reading posts on the site for some years now, while trying to wade my way through the gigantic Sequences, but was not confident enough to join this group, (people here seem to know so much). Right now I am an undergraduate student at IIT Kanpur. Hopefully I too will contribute something to the site in the future.
Thanks!
Hello to the LessWrong universe.
I'm 23 years old. A lover of music (Last.fm): Ravel, Mozart, Radiohead, Sigur Rós, Animal Collective. And driven to learn.
My goal right now is to become a philosophy professor, and participate in radical, reason oriented movements to influence social change.
I value the intellect, the body, life, and the universe. I value learning - to improve the lives of others and myself, and to live most accordingly with 'nature.' I value those who direct themselves in a rational manner.
My rationality quest began when I was a child, always using legos to build new things and drawing. Eventually video games came into my life and problem solving drove me. However, due to immaturity and the social life of a middle/high schooler, I never really progress intellectually despite my love for science and 'deep' conversations with friends.
It wasn't until I was 20, and ended my relationship with a girl that philosophical thought dawned upon me. It was sparked by the breakup, because her family was religious and I molded myself to that lifestyle, but when it was over there was nothing there. I suppose, after losing who I thought was the love of my life, I began to se...
Hi, my name is Alexey, and although I've been around the website for a while and have been an active LessWrongian in real life meetups, I haven't actually introduced myself on the website yet. So here it goes.
I am an undergraduate student at the University of Cambridge, specialising in synthetic biology and aiming to go on to do research in that field. I am interested in raising x-risk awareness within the SynBio community and advancing a safe approach to research in this area.
I was introduced to LW by a friend, and soon realised that there is actually a community of rational people interested in much the same things as I am. I have enjoyed reading the Sequences and have definitely learned a lot.
Since finding the LW website and community has been such a great experience for me, I introduced many of my friends to it, have participated in setting up the Cambridge meetup group; and more recently organised the first meetup in Budapest. I find it very rewarding to be able to talk to and make friends with fellow rationalists!
As for my interests within the scope of LW, I find that I am interested in self-improvement in terms of identifying and overcoming biases, building and expanding rationalist communities and working on x-risk reduction in synthetic biology. In fact, I find that biologists are underrepresented within the LW community and hope that my knowledge of the subject can translate into useful contributions to the discussions here on the LW website, and in real life LW meetups!
I'm reposting this here because there was a thread swap and I didn't get any takers in the former thread. Please let me interview you! It will be fun and wont take up too much time!
Hello, my name is Brett, and I am an undergraduate student at the University of North Texas, currently studying in the Department of Anthropology. In this semester, my classmates and I have been tasked with conducting an ethnographic study on an online community. After reading a few posts and the subsequent comments, LessWrong seemed like a great community on which to conduct an ethnography. The purpose of this study is to identify the composition of an online community, analyze communication channels and modes of interaction, and to glean any other information about unique aspects of the LessWrong community.
For this study I will be employing two information gathering techniques. The first of which will be Participant Observation, where I will document my participation within the community in attempts to accurately describe the ecosystem that comprises LessWrong. The second technique will be two interviews held with members of the community, where we will have a conversation about communication technique...
Hi, I am Raiden. For most of my life I have been an aspiring rationalist, even though I didn't call myself by that name. I was raised to think that I was some sort of super genius (it was a big shock in my later elementary school years to discover that I wasn't the smartest person in the world). This had the effect of causing me to associate some of my identity with intelligence. This led me to be a traditional rationalist; I had much admiration for the Spock stereotype, and I have been a atheist since childhood despite a fundamentalist religious family. In my freshmen year of high school, I was exposed to some self-help books that led me to seriously consider other virtues besides intelligence to be of value. This slowly revolutionized my view of the world.
Over the course of the next summer, I was exposed to the philosophy of Objectivism, and quickly became a strong adherent to it. I was from the beginning in agreement with the "Open Objectivist" group which said Objectivism is not a complete philosophy. I agree that objectivism descended into some sort of cult, and that Ayn Rand was one of history's greatest hypocrites. I also came to believe that this didn't disquali...
Hello! I came here researching free will for a school project. I'm currently 18, studying science at a fairly basic level in a small town in Sweden. I've so far read a few articles and the sheer amount of interesting thoughts in the articles made me want to stay. When I read what Lesswrong stands for, I knew I wanted to be a part of it, to try to become a better, hopefully wiser person.
I've liked philosophy for a long time, and don't usually like "because" as an answer for anything. I want to find out reasons behind everything. I'm so far not as good as I wish, due to limited time and wanting to read a lot of the articles, but not having enough time. However, I find it difficult to abandon half-read articles, even though they can be a bit of a long read compared to what I'm used to, excluding books.
Since I'm easily influenced by new ideas, too, as long as they make sense, I'm expecting myself to switch a lot. Lesswrong seems interesting, anyway, and I want to know more. I want more perspectives and thoughts. So far Lesswrong seems wonderful, and I think I'll like it. Hoping the community can oversee shortcomings when needed, but I'm expecting you all to be a nice bunch.
For science, and a greater understanding. Hopefully I'll be able to learn from you. But it's late now, and I'll be going now. Just thought I'd say hi.
Hello. I'm a 19-year-old student at Stanford University majoring in Computer Science. I'm especially interested in artificial intelligence. I've been reading lesswrong for a couple months and I love it! There are lots of great articles and discussions about a lot of the things I think about a lot and things that I hadn't thought about but proceeded to think about after reading them.
I've considered myself a rationalist for as long as I can remember. I've always loved thinking about philosophy, reading philosophy articles, and discussing philosophy with other people. When I started reading lesswrong I realized that it aligned well with my approach to philosophy, probably because of my interest in AI. In the course of searching for a universal epistemology I discovered Solomonoff induction, which is an idea that I've been obsessed with for a couple years. I even wrote a paper about it. I've been trying to apply this concept to epistemology and cognitive science.
My current project is to make a practical framework for resource-bounded Solomonoff induction (Solomonoff induction where the programs are penalized for taking up too much time). Since resource-bounded induction ...
First, any single relaxed taboo is a blow against the entire net of ethical inhibitions
This is not an uncontested statement.
I've posted a few rationality quotes, so it sounds like time to introduce myself. I'm a 22 year old software project manager from Wisconsin, been reading LW since June or so when MOR was really going strong.
I've been a very rational thinker for my whole life, in terms of explicitly looking for evidence/feedback and updating behaviors and beliefs, but only began thinking about it formally recently. I was raised Christian, and I consider my current state the result of a slow process of resolving dissonance based on contradictions or insufficient/contrary evidence. I'm most interested in theory of government and achieving best results given the rather unreliable ability of voters to predict or understand outcomes of different policies.
I also think, though, that ethics is just as important as rationality- choosing the correct goals is just as necessary as succeeding towards those goals. I've seen appreciation of this within LW that, for me, really sets it apart, so I hope I can make a larger contribution. As someone once said, the choice between Good and Evil is not about saying one or the other, but about deciding which is which.
Hello, I'm a high school senior who discovered this site somewhere on reddit and deeply enjoyed this article (http://yudkowsky.net/rational/the-simple-truth) and decided to check out more posts. I'm planning on studying engineering in college but I try to have a well-rounded knowledge on a myriad of subjects apart from math and science. The content here is very enticing and intellectually stimulating, and I will probably frequent this site in the future.
It happens to all of us sometimes, and it's perfectly acceptable to ask for an explanation.
I'd like to note that while acceptable to ask for an explanation, it is downright counterproductive to be petulant. Don't bother getting upset until you know why.
Hello lesswrong community!
"Who am I?" I am a Network Engineer, who once used to know a bit of math (sadly, not anymore). Male, around 30, works in IT, atheist - I think I'll blend right in.
"How did I discover lesswrong?" Like the vast majority, I discovered lesswrong after reading HPMOR many years ago. It remains my favourite book to this day. HPMOR and the Sequences taught me a lot of new ideas and, more importantly, put what I already knew into a proper perspective. By the time HPMOR was finally finished, I was no longer sure where my worldview happened
Consider your second expectation falsified and update on it, as a "bayesian rationalist" would.
Hello to the LW Community. My name is Glenn, 49, from Boulder, Colorado. After completing my Master's degree in Economics, I began a career in investment management, with a diversion into elected politics (a city council, a regional council of governments, then the Colorado state legislature, along with corporate on non-profit boards). My academic work focused on decision theory and risk analysis and my vocation on their practical application. Presently, I manage several billion dollars' worth of fixed-income portfolios on behalf of local governments and ...
Hi! My name is Paul, and I've been an aspiring rationalist for years. A long time ago, I realized implicitly that reality exists, and that there is only one. I think "rationality" is the only reasonable next thing to do. I pretty much started "training" on TvTropes, reading fallacies and the like there, as well as seeing ways to analyze things in fiction. The rules there apply to real life fairly well.
From there, I discovered Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, and from there, this site. Been reading quite a bit on and off over...
Hello, everyone! I'm 21, soon to graduate from IIT Bombay, India. I guess the first time I knowingly encountered rationality, was at 12, when I discovered the axiomatic development of Euclidean geometry, as opposed to the typical school-progression of teaching mathematics. This initial interest in problem-solving through logic was fueled further, through my later (and ongoing) association with the Mathematics Olympiads and related activities.
Of late, I find my thoughts turning ever more to understanding the working and inefficiencies of our macro-economy, ...
Hello folks! I'm a student of computer science, found Less Wrong a few years ago, read some articles, found myself nodding along, but didn't really change my mind about anything significant. That is, until recently I came across something that completely shattered my worldview and, having trouble coping with that, I found myself coming back here, seeking either something that would invalidate this new insight or help me accept it if it is indeed true. Over the past few days, I have probably been thinking harder than ever before in my life, and I hope to contribute to discussions here in the future.
Hi everyone. I have been lurking since the site started, but did not have the courage to start posting until recently. I am a male college graduate in his mid-twenties, happily engaged and currently job-hunting, and have been fascinated by science and reason since I was a child. I was one of those people who actually identified with the "Hollywood Rational" robots and aliens in science fiction and wanted to be more like them. Science and science fiction socialized me and made me curious about the inner working of the universe.
I love the sequen...
Greetings, everyone.
My name is Francisco, and I am from Malaga, Spain. I am a dabbling rationalist, and a programmer/troubleshooter.
I started walking the path of rationality when I started keeping track of good luck/normal luck/bad luck events in order to check if Murphy's law was actually true, and then wondering why people actually believed in it. Later, I started reading about fallacies, and I finally arrived at LW via HMPOR, like many people.
I am currently reading my way through the Sequences, but my current project is to make Bayes' theorem more acce...
Hi all,
My name's Lars. I'm from Melbourne, Australia, and have a background in software/mathematics/languages. I've also tutored classes in logic and artificial intelligence. Like a lot of folks commenting here, I've been reading articles on LessWrong for a while, but now I'm keen to understand the community around it a bit more.
I've been interested in rationality for some years. One of my favourite posts so far is "Intellectual Hipsters and Meta-contrarianism". It helped me notice signalling in arguments, and reduce greatly the amount I do it my...
Hello everyone! I'm 19 years old BA student of Finance & Accounting from Poland. For some time I have been interested in rationalism, yet in my country internet community oriented with it is rather fledgling and mostly just non-theist in nature. I was brought here by HPMOR. I know Bayes' Theorem from my statistics classes, but it wasn't until recently that I began to understood how it could influence my way of thinking.
Please forgive me if I make small language errors in my posts, while I understand mostly everything written here (barring things that I...
Hello, all.
I'm an agnostic artist and general proponent of thinking (although I hope to become a more specific proponent of thinking now that I'm here) who enjoys working behind the scenes.
I'm the new executive assistant for the Center of Modern Rationality, and look forward to doing what I can to help get the Center running as smoothly as possible. If I'm doing my job right, you shouldn't even know I'm here.
Well, OK, let's examine it then.
We have some activity.
We see no particular reason to prevent people from doing that activity.
We see no good reason for people to do that activity.
We have a proposed law that makes that activity illegal.
Do I endorse that law?
The only case I can think of where I'd say yes is if the law also performs some other function, the benefit of which outweighs the inefficiencies associated with preventing this activity, and for some reason separating those two functions is more expensive than just preventing the activity. (This sort of...
I often "claim" my downvotes (aka I will post "downvoted" and then give reason.) However, I know that when I do this, I will be downvoted myself. So that is probably one big deterrent to others doing the same.
On the other hand if people agree with your reasons they often upvote it (especially back up towards zero if it dropped negative).
For one thing, the person you are downvoting will generally retaliate by downvoting you (or so it seems to me, since I tend to get an instant -1 on downvoting comments)
I certainly hope so. I would...
(Reposted from the wrong thread, per Kutta's suggestion)
If by "rationalist", the LW community means someone who believes it is possible and desirable to make at least the most important judgements solely by the use of reason operating on empirically demonstrable facts, then I am an ex-rationalist. My "intellectual stew" had simmered into it several forms of formal logic, applied math, and seasoned with a BS in Computer Science at age 23.
By age 28 or so, I concluded that most of the really important things in life were not amenable to th...
Hi
I'm Andrew, a 41 year old actuary, living in Chicago (and Sao Paulo in the summers). I came to rationality under the influence of Ayn Rand and the writing of Richard Dawkins but actually found the site after being sent a link by my sister. I am not a computer programmer at all, but read extensively on subjects like behavioral psychology, physics, genetics, evolution, and anything interesting related to real science. I am trying to apply the lessons from behavioral psychology and many other fields (including game theory, space design, use of incentives an...
Hi, I'm Laur, I'm in my mid-thirties (wow, when did that happen?), a software developer from Romania, currently living in the Netherlands. I found this site, as many others, via MoR, and I've been lurking for a while now - I'm subscribed to the RSS feed and slowly working my way through the sequences.
When young (and arguably foolish), I've made a few "follow your heart' kind of decisions that resulted in significant damage to my personal life, finances and career. For the past seven years I've been working my way out of that hole mainly by analysing ...
Hi everyone. I am an engineering graduate student in the SF Bay area, and will be working at a tech company in the south bay starting in the summer.
I have been lurking on this forum for about a year and a half, but this post convinced me to register for an account. I serendipitously found Less Wrong through an interesting post about the Amanda Knox murder trial. I have read a few of the sequences and all of MoR. I hope to get more involved in the future!
Retired Mechanical Engineer with the following interests/prejudices.
Longstanding interest in philosophy of science especially in the tradition of Karl Popper.
Atheist to a first approximation but I can accept that some forms of religious belief can be regarded as "translations" of beliefs I hold and therefore not that keen on the "New Atheist" approach. Belong to a Humanist group in London (where I heard of LW). This has led me to revive an old interest in moral philosophy, especially as applied to political questions.
Happy to be called ...
Hi, I am interested in the neurobiology of decision-making and rationality and happened to stumble upon this site and decided to join.
-Cheers.
Hey everyone,
I'm Jost, 19 years old, and studying physics in Munich, Germany. I've come across HPMoR in mid-2010 and am currently translating it into German. That way, I found LW and dropped by from time to time to read some stuff – mostly from the Sequences, but rarely in sequence. I started reading more of LW this spring, while a friend and I were preparing a two day introductory course on cognitive biases entitled “How to Change Your Mind”. (Guess where that idea came from!)
I'm probably going to be most active in the HPMoR-related threads.
I was very int...
Hi! So I've actually already made a few comments on this site, but had neglected to introduce myself so I thought I'd do so now. I'm a PhD candidate in computer science at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. My research interests are in AI and Machine Learning. Specifically, my dissertation topic is on generalization in reinforcement learning (policy transfer and function approximation).
Given this, AI is obviously my biggest interest, but as a result, my study of AI has led me to applying the same concepts to human life and reasoning. Lately, I'v...
Hi, I'm a long-time reader of Eliezer's various scribblings and I'm interested in getting a meetup group going in Minneapolis after we've had a few false starts. This is the post I'm trying to gather the karma to enable:
Meetup: Twin Cities, MN (for real this time)
THE TIME: 15 April 2012 01:00:00PM (-0600) THE PLACE: Purple Onion Coffeeshop, 1301 University Avenue Southeast, Minneapolis, MN
Hi. Let's make this work.
Suggested discussion topics would be:
Hello, I am a very likable, shy young person who lives in Austria and loves you guys.
Hi, I'm Josh. I found this site by way of HPMOR more than half a year ago, but just now got around to making an account. I hadn't seen any reason to until I actually had something to add to a conversation. After registering and leaving a few comments here and there, i figured i may as well introduce myself.
Im 17 years old and trying to narrow down what to do with my life. My long term goal, much like most patrons to this site, is to do as much as i can to aid the development of FAI. Im smarter than the vast majority of people, but i doubt that im anywhere...
Hi all! I am a 23 year old Singaporean student studying Computer Science in the United States. I'm interested in Psychology, Statistics, Math, Physics, Biology, Chemistry, Politics, and some other things. It is an exciting time to be young! I'm really looking forward to space elevators, and I'm still curious to see how quantum computers would change things. In the mean time, people's lives are being molded by the increasing amounts of available information that is presented in a way that is relevant to them. I am excited to see what the world would be like...
Hello Less Wrong.
I've been lurking for a while and just decided to register. I have occasionally wanted to comment, but felt i should have an intuitive understanding of the community and its values before doing so.
I consider myself to have been trained in rationality from a very young age. My father was a philosophy professor, and at many points in my life i have found myself referring back to conversations with him in which he attempted to demostrate how to think correctly. I also consider my mother to be a strong rationalist, and thus consider myself qui...
Hi, I've been lurking on LessWrong for quite a while now - around a year -, but saw this post and decided to comment. I hope this is useful as feedback to the admins.
I'm a 22 year old student at UT Austin. As of last Fall, I'm pursuing a PhD in Computer Science. My specialization is Machine Learning. And I'm committed to doing everything in my power to hasten the Singularity :P. I have a BTech in CS from IIT Bombay, India.
I've considered myself a rationalist for as long as I can remember. I found less wrong through Overcoming Bias and from Elizier's posts ...
Hello, I'd like to keep this short; hopefully that's ok. I am 22. I live in the SF bay area and have been living here for the last 5 years. I am a self-taught computer scientist, with a bachelor's degree in a more 'creative' field. Currently I am most interested in computer vision as well as various social aspects of technology. I've been making my way through the sequences in the past couple weeks, but I've been reading the LW discussions for about a year now.
Greetings from Southampton, UK.
Male, 46, Maths graduate, software developer, career in transitional state (moving into music composition - slowly!).
Until about the age of 30 I didn't really make an effort to identify my own biases and irrational beliefs, and I had a lot of unsupported beliefs in my mind. I've been gradually correcting this through online reading and thinking, but I feel that until recently I lacked one of the essential elements of wisdom: clarity of focus. I'm hoping to learn that now.
Since I was divorced in 2004, I've increasingly become ...
Hi, I'm 53 years old, from Gloucester, UK.
I work from home over the internet running IT systems.
I studied Maths for 2 years at Cambridge, then Computer Science in my 3rd year.
I came across this site after becoming interested in the trial of Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito ( just subsequent to their acquittal in October 2011 ).
I made an analysis of the Massei report ( http://massei-report-analysis.wikispaces.com/ ) and concluded that the defence case was much more probable than the prosecution case.
I'm interested in a rational basis for assessing guilt ...
If I downvote with comment, it's usually for a fairly specific problem, and usually one that I expect can be addressed if it's pointed out; some very clear logical problem that I can throw a link at, for example, or an isolated offensive statement. I may also comment if the post is problematic for a complicated reason that the poster can't reasonably be expected to figure out, or if its problems are clearly due to ignorance.
Otherwise it's fairly rare for me to do so; I see downvotes as signaling that I don't want to read similar posts, and replying to s...
Hello,
I've been reading LessWrong for a year or so, and made an account about two months ago to comment on the survey. Seeing as I have continued to comment, I suppose that I should introduce myself.
I am an 18 year old college student, majoring in neuroscience. I don't affiliate politically, though I do have opinions on specific policy issues. In particular, I think that we should allow more experimental policies if the potential risks are not too high, perhaps testing them locally.
I don't remember exactly how I came to start reading LessWrong, but I have...
Hello, I've been lurking around Less Wrong for several months, mostly reading through the sequences. I especially enjoyed the ones on free will and happiness theory.
I finally created an account a week or so ago so that I could express interest in a Salt Lake City meetup. And now here I am introducing myself.
I’m a thirty year old white male living in Salt Lake City. I write point of sale software by day, and video games by night.
I think my primary motivation into rationality was my upbringing. I was raised in a very religious, and rather unhealthy home....
Hi.
I'm a fiction writer and while I strive towards rationalism in my daily life, I can also appreciate many non-rational things: nonsensical mythologies, perverse human behaviors, and the many dramas and tragedies of people behaving irrationally. My criteria for value often relates to how complex and stimulating I find something... not necessarily how accurate or true it may be. I can take pleasure in ridiculous pseudo-science almost as much as actual science, enjoy a pop-science theory as much as deep epistemology, and I can find a hopelessly misguided p...
Hey LW community. I'm an aspiring rationalist from the Bay Area, in CA, 15 years old.
I found out about this site from Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, and after reading some of the discussions, I decided to become a member of the community.
I have never really been religious at any time of my life. I dismissed the idea of any kind of god as fiction around the same time you would find out that Santa isn't real. My family has never been very religious at all, and I didn't even find out they were agnostic until I recently. That said, I would consi...
Hey guys. My name is Michael and I'm a business student living in Little Rock, Arkansas. I've recently become fascinated by the work of SI and I'm interested in participating any way I can. I've long considered myself a rationalist after I abandoned religion in my teens. However lately I realized I need to interact with other rationalists in order to further my development. I'm considering trying to attract more LessWrong members from where I live. If anybody has any advice concerning that I'd be happy to hear it.
Greetings! I joined under my usual username a little while ago, that I use everywhere on the web. Then I realized - this is very public, and I'd rather not worry about potential clients or employers drawing conclusions from what I write about my akrasia, poor planning, depression or anything like that. So here's the version of me that's slightly less connected to my real life identity.
Very briefly:
Hello!
I'm a graduate student in mathematics and came across Less Wrong by, uh, Googling "Bayes' Theorem". I've been putting off creating an account for the past month or so, because I've had absolutely no free time on my hands. Now that the semester's winding down, I've decided to try it out, although I may end up disappearing once things get going again in the fall.
Out of the posts I've read on LW so far, I'm the most impressed by the happiness and self-awareness material -- but also intrigued by the posts on math, especially probability, and wi...
Hi,
I am the first in a family of budding rationalists to jump in to the LessWrong waters. I got my start as a Rationalist when I was born and was influenced very heavily through my childhood by my parents' endless boxes of hard sci-fi and old school fantasy. Special mention goes to The World of Null-A (and its sequel) in introducing the notions of a worldview being 'false to facts', and a technique the main character uses (the "cortical-thalamic pause") which is very similar to "I notice that I am confused." I read everything avidly an...
Hello community. My name is Drew Smithyman and I am an executive assistant at CFAR. I have not been with them long, nor have I been reading the sequences very long, but I intend to continue doing both.
I need to post a discussion thread about some interviews we need to do - could people please do me the favor of upvoting this comment twice so that I may start one as soon as possible?
Thank you.
Hello there people of LessWrong. I'm a 24 years old dude from a small country called Romania who has been reading stuff on this site since 2010 when Luke Muehlhauser started linking here. I'm a member of Mensa and got a B.A. in Management.
I have to admit that there are more things that interest me than there is time for me to study them so I can't really say I'm an expert in anything, I just know a lot of things better than most other people know them. That's not very impressive I guess but I hope that in 5 years from now there will be at least one think I...
Hey everyone,
I'm a 20 year old student of Serbian literature (from Serbia). I found this site while browsing through some math blogs and it seems very nice.
About me: Currently my main interest is writing short stories. I view them as arranging words so they appeal to my own emotions, intuition, subconscious, what not. I also like mathematics and I like to explore relations and find out new rules between numbers, lines, etc., although it sometimes bores me because my imagination has to be strictly inside the boundaries of logic there, while with literature ...
I'm 41, working on a wiki project for sustainability and development, which I love (and part-time on a related project which I like and actually get paid for). I use the same username everywhere, so if you're curious, you won't have trouble finding the wiki project.
I'm a one-time evangelical Christian. I think it was emotional damage from my upbringing that made me frightened to let go of that, and I stayed a believer for 9 years, starting in my late teens. I took it extremely seriously, and there were good things about that. But with hindsight, I would di...
I discovered this community through HP:MoR; I joined the discussion because there was a comment about the work which I wished to make. I've started reading the articles as well and am enjoying doing so.
Looking forward to all the shiny ideas!
Hi,
I recently found myself making a rather impassioned defense of how living logically does not preclude living morally. As I have found monitoring my actions to be more reliable than introspection, this was a much better confirmation of "I think this is the right thing to do" than my saying to myself that I think this is the right thing to do.
Other proximate causes include TVTropes via Methods of Rationality (obviously), one of my acquaintances linking several articles in succession from this site, and the fact that I find myself extremely prone...
I'm being a fucking idiot tonight.
If I downvote you for calling a valuable lesswrong contributor a fucking idiot is that a compliment or a criticism? ;)
Downvoted for sarcasm. I was under the impression that (unsubtle forms of) sarcasm in non-humorous discussions are outlawed on LW, and that's very OK with me.
Downvoted for being a wet blanket and incorrect assumption of sarcasm. If it's ok to talk about the implications of legalizing infanticide then it is ok to follow the weirdtopia through and have fun with it. I adamantly refuse to take on a sombre tone just because people are talking about killing babies. My due diligence to the seriousness of babykilling with my expression of clear opposition - wit...
Yes, and my question is how do you know?
I trust his word.
What makes you so quick to dismiss your interlocutor
You're spinning this into a dismissal, disrespect of Bakkot's intellectual capability or ability to reason. Yet disagreement does not equal disrespect when it is a matter of different preferences. It is only when I think an 'interlocutor' is incapable of understanding evidence and reasoning coherently (due to, say, biases or ego) that observing that reason cannot persuade each other is a criticism.
as a babyeating alien?
He is a [babykilli...
For legal reasons, there'd just have to be a clear procedure where parents would take or refuse the decision, probably after being informed of the baby's overall condition and potential in the presence of a witness. I can't imagine how it could be realistically practiced without one.
Humans are pretty ok with making cold decisions in the abstract that they could never carry out themselves due to physical revulsion and/or emotional trauma.
The number of people that would sign a death order is greater than the number of people that would kill someone else...
Hi! I'm Eric, a freshman at UC Berkeley. I've been lurking on Overcoming Bias/Less Wrong for a long time.
I had been reading OB before LW existed; I don't even remember when I started reading OB (maybe even before high school!). It's too long ago for me to remember clearly, but I think I found OB while I was reading about transhumanism, which I was very interested in. I still agree with the ideas of transhumanism, and I guess I would still identify myself as a transhumanist, but I don't actively read about it much anymore. I read LW less than I used t...
Hey, okay, so, I'm Colt. 20, white, male, pansexual, poly, Oklahoma. What a mix, right? I'm a sophomore in college majoring in Computer Engineering and minoring in Cognitive Science, both of which are very interesting to me. I grew up with computers and read a lot of sci-fi when I was younger (and still do) which I attribute to making me who I am today. A lot of Cory Doctorow's work, along with Time Enough for Love by Heinlein and Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep are some of my favorites. I found HPMoR a while back and eventually found my way here, maybe last ...
Illusion of transparency seems relevant; even if you know why you picked that username, others can only guess, and their guess should be expected to match their experience, not your private knowledge.
I'm a new member, and I want to say hello to this awesome community. I was led to this website after encountering a few people who remarked that many of my opinions on a wide range of subjects are astonishingly similar to most of the insights that have been shared on LessWrong so far. Robert Aumann is right -- rational agents cannot agree to disagree. ;-)
I am sure there are many things I can learn from other LW readers, and I look forward to participating in the discussions whenever my busy schedule allows me to. I would also like to post something that I wrote quite some time ago, so I'll do the shameless thing and ask for upvotes -- please kindly upvote this comment so that I will have enough karma points to make a post!
Hello!
I am joining this site as a senior in Engineering Science (most of my work has biomedical applications) in college. I am 22 years old, and despite my technical education, have less online presence (and savvy) than my Aunt's dog. As a result, I apologize in advance for anything improper I may do or cause.
Some personal background: I grew up in the Appalachian foothills of northwestern New Jersey, USA with two brothers in a (mildly observant, Conservative) Jewish household. I mention this because the former explains my insular upbringing, as oppose...
I am a retired engineer with an interest in game theory modeling. This blog site appears to offer a worthwhile trove of information and access to feedback that can be useful. I look forward to participating.
Hello! I found this site due to a series of links that impressed me and tickled my curiosity. It started out with an article an author friend of mine posted on FB about "Incognito Supercomputers and the Singularity". It points out a possible foreshadowing of the advent of avatars as written about in his and his brother's books.
I am female, 55 years old, and tend to let my curiosity guide me.
I call myself a spiritual atheist. It wasn't until I could reconcile my intangible (spiritual?) experiences with my ongoing discovery that religion's d...
Hey all. i figured that after a few long months of lurking, I might as well introduce myself (that way when I post elsewhere, someone doesn't feel obligated to smack my nose politely with a rolled-up newspaper and send me here), even though I can never figure out what to say.
I've now finished all the Sequences and I've successfully resisted the urge to argue with comments that are years old, and I think I've learned a lot. One of the high moments was that I had just finished reading the Zombie sequence when I met a friend of a friend, who started to postu...
...That may be the case, and I won't disagree that some claims are fabricated. However for the rest imagine the following: A parent has two children, and he gives a present (say a chocolate that they eat) to each child without the other child knowing. Each child takes this to mean that they are the parents favorite. After all they have proof in the gift. They get into an argument over it. However because their beliefs about why the gifts were given are wrong, the fact that the gifts were given remains.
In the same way it is possible that a supernatural* being
Well, mass hysteria is a real thing, but if a large group of people who have no prior reason to cooperate all claim the same unusual observations, it's certainly much stronger evidence that something unusual was going on than one individual making such claims.
Many, possibly even all religions though, make claims of supernatural events being witnessed by large numbers of people, and religions make enough mutually exclusive claims that they cannot all be true, so we know that claims of large scale supernatural observations are something that must at least so...
Good point. Though I guess we could still say that the weak AI is recursively self-improving in this scenario -- it's just using the developers' brains as its platform, as opposed to digital hardware.
Can't we limit the meaning of "self-improving" to at least stuff that the AI actually does? We can already say more precisely that the AI is being iteratively improved by the creators. We don't have to go around removing the distinction between what an agent does and what the creator of the agent happens to do to it.
hello! I was introduced to LessWrong through HPMOR. I find rationality interesting as someone who was brought up in an extremely religious household, and trying to wade through what I actually believe rather than what I was taught.
I'm seventeen and am interested in the rationality summer summer camp, but the "gifted in math" part is stopping me short. I'm in honors and ap classes, but I'm not especially amazing at math, nor am I especially bad at it. Is genuine interest in the subject matter enough?
Hello!
I should have read this post before I started posting.
I'm here because figuring out how thinking works is something I am interested in doing. I'm a freshman student in mathematics somewhere on planet Earth, but I know an unpredictable amount of mathematics beyond what I am supposed to. Particularly category theory. <3 Cat. Terrible at it for now though.
I hope I can say things which are mostly interesting and mostly not wrong, but my posting record already contains a certain number of errors in reasoning...
Hello,
I have been coming to this site for about a month now. I would prefer to be known as HungryTurtle if that is okay.
I have a friend who I like to play with who recommended this site to me. Honestly, I was coming to this site hoping to find some fun people to play with. When I say "play" I do not mean it in a condescending way. My concept of play is similar to the idea of The Beginner's Mind in Buddhism. Anyway, being here a month, I have realized that the ideas on this blog have great meaning to its members, and that to not address them i...
Hello, I am Kris,
I study Mathematics and Computer Science at Oxford, I am interested in learning about Bayesian statistics/machine learning and its principles (Cox's theorem, Principle of MaxEnt) and tend to do things (overly) rigorously.
From my very limited experience, it appears that lesswrong applies these principles to real life, which is interesting as well, but at the moment I am more focused on Jaynes' "robot model".
I really like Jaynes' book, however it has come to my attention that some parts are outdated/unrigorous and I'm hoping that this forum will tell me what the state of the art is.
Looking forward to becoming part of the community :)
I just discovered this page today after goggling "believe in beliefs." I was searching for discussions much like what found here. You see, I am nether theist nor atheist. I am what I refer to as "naturalist". I also identify myself as libertarian, hippie, free thinker. There maybe another name for this belief system of I mine but I have yet to have found it. I identify the "God" of the Bible and Koran as what science refers to as our "Universe". I believe they are one in the same after studying the context of the ...
Well, of course I don't think that allowing murder without restriction is going to make everyone fun-theoretically better off, let alone maximally satisfy their preferences over the utilitarian criteria I actually believe in. My original claim was a lot narrower than that, and in any case I'm mostly playing devil's advocate at this point; although I really do think that fun-theoretic optimization is best approached without reflexively minimizing things like fear or pain on grounds of our preexisting heuristics. That said, I'm not sure this is always goin...
Consider this (and this related thread) from the genes' point of view. It may be worth having all of your carriers do risky things, if the few that die of them are more than made up for by the ones who survive and learn something from the experience (such as how to kill big fierce animals without dying).
For a gene, there's nothing reckless about having your carriers act recklessly at a stage in their lives when their reproductive survival depends on learning how to do dangerous things.
Hi everyone,
I am Freetrader, 31, from Barcelona. I am an engineer and I worked in the industry for some years, especially in the fields of operations management and quality, since I enjoy analyzing stuff and creating systems.
I have a very eclectic nature and I'm a bit of a hack, jumping from one thing to another (which is a trait I don't like very much of myself), anyway this led me to often change jobs from one company to another (luckily it seems I am good at getting new jobs, for some reason), until I finally realized that I was not good at getting the...
Hi all,
I'm a 23 year old male living just outside of Philadelphia, PA, and this is my first post to LessWrong after having discovered the site through HPMoR the Summer of 2010. I have been reading through the Sequences independently for the past year and a half.
To make a long story short, I came to consider myself an aspiring rationalist after I used rational methods to successfully diagnose myself with Tourette Syndrome this past May (confirmed by a neurologist) after my symptoms, which I had exhibited since age three and a half, had been missed or misdi...
Hello everyone!
I'm a 21 years old and study medicine plus bayesian statistics and economics. I've been lurking LW for about half a year and I now feel sufficiently updated to participate actively. I highly appreciate this high-quality gathering of clear-thinkers working towards a sane world. Therefore I oftenly pass LW posts on to guys with promising predictors in order to shorten their inferential distance. I'm interested in fixing science, bayesian reasoning, future scenarios (how likely is dystopia, i.e. astronomical amounts of suffering?), machine intelligence, game theory, decision theory, reductionism (e.g. of personal identity), population ethics and cognitive psychology. Thanks for all the lottery winnings so far!
Hi!
I'm 29, and I am a programmer living in Chicago. I just finished up my MS in Computer Science. I've been a reader of Less Wrong since it was Overcoming Bias, but never got around to posting any comments.
I've been rationality-minded since I was a little kid, criticizing the plots and character actions of stories I read. I was raised Catholic and sent to Sunday school, but it didn't take and eventually my parents relented. Once I went away to college and acquired a real internet connection, I spent a lot of time reading rationality-related blogs and websites. It's been a while, but I'd bet it was through one of those sites that I found Less Wrong.
Hullo everyone
It's nice to be here. I think. I'm not quite sure about any of this but, hope to be able to understand it someday. If not soon. Hopefully this site will be able to broaden my mind and help with my dismal opinion of the world and it's people as of late.
My name is Tamiko, or Miko if you prefer. I have been living in Southern California for the last 12 years and am currently 17 and a half years old. Recently I have been reading a certain fan-fic called Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality. That is what lead me to this site. What pulled m...
If they really love you, they'll let you make decisions for yourself.
This isn't actually true. If your parents don't let you do what you want you shouldn't modus tollens to thinking they don't love you. That would be terrible.
There appears to be two "Welcome to Less wrong!" blog posts. I initially posted this in the other, older one:
I’m 20, male and a maths undergrad at Cambridge University. I was linked to LW a little over a year ago, and despite having initial misgivings for philosophy-type stuff on the internet (and off, for that matter), I hung around long enough to realise that LW was actually different from most of what I had read. In particular, I found a mix of ideas that I’ve always thought (and been alone amongst my peers in doing so), such as making beliefs...
You can call me Witzvo. My determination of whether I'm a "rationalist" is waiting on data to be supplied by your responses. I found HPMOR hilarious and insightful (I was hooked from the first chapter which so beautifully juxtaposed a rationalist child with all-too-realistic adults), and lurked some for a while. I have one previous post which I doubt ever got read. To be critical, my general impression of the discussions here is that they are self-congratulatory, smarter than they are wise, and sometimes obsessed with philosophically meaningful b...
Hello everyone. I’ve joined this site because I have a goal of being a very rational person. Intelligence and logic are very important to me. Actually I have spent many years seeking truth and reality. Probably the same as everyone else spending time here. I’m not here to prove anything but rather to learn and have my own ideas tested and checked. I’m hoping to remember the rules and etiquette so that I don’t come across the wrong way ( very easy to do when not face to face ) or waste any ones time. I’m a family man who is concerned about my children’s fu...
Found HPMOR, changed my life, etc. Been reading for a couple years, and I figure it's finally time to start actually doing something. Not an academic at all. I'm in the Army and spend my free time with creative writing, but I understand most of the material, and I am capable of applying it.
I have a question that's not in the FAQ. I recently read The Social Coprocessor Model. I want to reread it again in the future without keeping a tab permanently open. There is a save button near the bottom, and I clicked it. How exactly does this work? I can't figure out...
I'm a master's candidate to Logic at UvA. Rationality is one of my interests, altough I seem to come from the opposite side of the specter of everyone at LessWrong (from metaphysics and philosophy to rationality).
I am very interested in observing the reductionist approach, even more so after learning Eliezer values GEB so highly.
As dlthomas says, Cat is the category of all (small) categories. (The small is there in certain (common (?)) axiomatizations only, in which CAT is the quasi-category of all categories.) In abjectly terrible metaphor, a category can be taken as a mathematical structure which represents a particular field of mathematics. So you have things like Grp, the category of groups and group homomorphisms, for group theory, Top, which contains topological spaces and continuous transformations for topology, Set for set theory, etc, etc... This is why they are called ca...
Hello there. I am Plubbingworth. I am twenty, and I first caught wind of the delicious stench of Rationality all the way from where I was before, but only after I began to seek it. HILARIOUS COINCIDENCE: I read about the Less Wrong Community and read HPMOR completely separately without realizing the connection, how funny is that?!
Anyway. I was reading and absorbing and learning as much as I could from every facet of this wonderful website, when I realized, to my dismay, that there was not much of a concentration in the use of Rationality in this fine state...
Hello everybody! My name is Fish and I'm almost 20. I'm at a decent enough university studying physics, mathematics, and computer science. My GPA in math and science courses is 4.0 so I applied to a better college a few months ago. Hopefully I'll get in :D. I'm currently interested in quantum computing as a career, but obviously that's not final.
Having two molecular biologists as parents, I grew up understanding evolution, the scientific method, and other such Important Things. I was never religious, despite the fact that my neighbors dragged me to church ...
Hello, and thank you for the welcome.
The panoply of my writings on the Web more resembles a zoo or cabinet of curiosities than a well groomed portfolio. None the less, for your delectation (or, at least, amusement), here is a smattering:
The Thoughtful Manifesto
Thought is good.
Thought is the birthright of every human being. Having a brain capable of rational thought is what distinguishes people from animals. To dispara...
Hi everyone, I am a 19 year old undergraduate science student majoring in statistics living in Australia. For fun I play chess and flute which I am quite mediocre at but find them both stimulating and challenging. I am always trying to improve myself in one way or another, whether it be learning or practicing skills.
I have an academic interest in maths, statistics and biology and would eventually want to be a biostatistician. I was originally seen as academically gifted, however after years of not working hard, I am trying to regain my academic vigor and ...
There's a tradition of examining that frame here that's probably inherited from Overcoming Bias; it's related to a model of human cognitive evolution as driven primarily by political selection pressures, which seems fairly plausible to me. I should probably mention, though, that I don't think it's a complete model; it's fairly hard to come up with an unambiguous counterexample to it, but it shares with a lot of evo-psych the problem of having much more explanatory than predictive power.
I think it's best viewed as one of several complementary models of behavior rather than as a totalizing model, hence the "frame" descriptor.
they probably instinctively appear much less "person-like" or "likely to become a human" even if the mother sees one while doing a crude abortion on her own - maybe even for an evolutionary reason - so that she wouldn't be left with a memory of killing something that looks like a human.
blinks
How can a LWer even think this way? I suggest you reread this. I'm tempted to ask you to think 4 minutes by the physical clock about this, but I'll rather just spell it out.
Lets say you are 8 months pregnant in the early stone age. What is a be...
if everyone who'd find it preferable to our world was (in real life) hit by a truck tomorrow, my utility function would increase.
Downvoted.
You just said that you want me dead in real life.
I don't see how this is at all acceptable. Having a different viewpoint than you (note: I have never killed any babies, nor do I have any desire to) does not make saying these things towards me, and others with my view, ok.
I suspect that "babykilling is OK in and of itself, but it's a visible marker for psychosis and we want to justify taking action against psychotics and therefore we criminalize babykilling anyway" isn't a particularly stable thought in human minds, and pretty quickly decomposes into "babykilling is not OK," "psychosis is not OK," "babykillers are psychotic," a 25% chance of "psychotics kill babies," and two photons.
I know it's stupid to jump in here, but you don't mean psychotic or psychosis. You mean psychopathic (a.k.a. sociopathic). Please don't lump the mentally ill together with evil murderers. Actual psychotic people are hearing voices and miserable, not gleefully plotting to kill their own children. You're thinking of sociopaths. Psychotics don't kill babies any more than anyone else. It's sociopaths who should all be killed or otherwise removed from society.
Some of the traits listed on the wikipedia page for psychopathy are traits that I want and have modified myself towards:
Psychopaths do not feel fear as deeply as normal people and do not manifest any of the normal physical responses to threatening stimuli. For instance, if a normal person were accosted in the street by a gun-wielding mugger, he/she might sweat, tremble, lose control of his/her bowels or vomit. Psychopaths feel no such sensations, and are often perplexed when they observe them in others.
Psychopaths do not suffer profound emotional trauma such as despair. This may be part of the reason why punishment has little effect on them: it leaves no emotional impression on them. There are anecdotes of psychopaths reacting nonchalantly to being sentenced to life in prison.
Some psychopaths also possess great charm and a great ability to manipulate others. They have fewer social inhibitions, are extroverted, dominant, and confident. They are not afraid of causing offense, being rejected, or being put down. When these things do happen, they tend to dismiss them and are not discouraged from trying again.
Hello. I'm William. I am a thirty year-old undergraduate student in the University of Wisconsin--Madison's Industrial and Systems Engineering department, with some additional study in Computer Science.
The study of logic and rational thought have always been hobbies of mine. My interest in mathematical optimization techniques has also been developing for decades, but this interest in these dark arts started taking steroids when I realized simple ways to apply the techniques to video games and Poker.
I originally stumbled upon this site two years ago, while ...
I expect them to not care due to this being LW.
The choice of a name can provide some evidence about whether it's a good-faith account or not; and the name "troll" is providing evidence against. If you told people why you chose that name that might serve to counteract the effect, but I think you've not yet done so... Needing to justify your nick may seem unfair to you, but consider it from the point of view of someone who doesn't know you.
Hi Everyone,
I came across this website, LessWrong, from a philosophy forum. I'm new to this type of thing. I'm not a writer, nor a philosopher, but only someone that is interested in knowing the real truths, whether good, bad, or ugly. It appears to me that most people seem to believe in that which is most palatable to them, that which makes them feel best. I think I am different.
As I see it, all of reality exists ‘only’ from within my mind. All that I know about ‘anything’ come from the thoughts and feelings within my mind. Without thoughts and feelings, ...
Hey Less Wrong,
My name is Wes von Hochmuth and I am a 21 yr-old college Junior at the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma, Washington, nearby Seattle. I'm studying History and Neuroscience with a minor in Computer Science. It's an interesting combination. Tell you the truth, I am studying History because of my interest in Futurology and Futurism. Details aside, a thesis of mine has been, "If we study the past with history, how is it we study the future, history's opposite?"
This interest has driven me to start a community of my own, called r/Futu...
Hello!
I am a university student studying biology in Ontario. I've actually known about lesswrong for a few years before I joined. My good friend likes to share interesting things that he finds on the internet, and he has linked me to this site more than once. Over time, lesswrong has grown increasingly relevant to my interests. Right now, I'm mainly reading posts and dabbling in the sequences. But I hope that I will be able to contribute some ideas in posts or comments once I get used to how things work around here. Some things that interest me are rhetor...
Hello, LessWrong. I'm 20 years old, originally from Bulgaria, living and studying Software Engineering in London (just finished my 1st year). I have always wanted to know a lot about human thinking, because of my need to be as optimal as possible plus my interest in technical things plus my tendency to seek rigorous explanations. I still have a deep interest in psychology and I see some potential very powerful applications I'll feel inefficient without. The second thing I love is programming.
As a rationalist, I'm very strict to myself. I always go for the ...
Why does everyone think that I want to convert them to Christianity?
You claim to have evidence that should convince you to be a Christian. We want to know that evidence. The Litany of Tarski applies: if God exists, I wish to believe that God exists. If God does not exist, I wish to believe that God does not exist.
If you were in a group and you were shown a box with 5 dice in it for a brief moment, but later everyone agreed that there were only 4 dice...
This is a pretty standard example of reasoning under uncertainty. You have two possible events, "there were 5 dice" vs. "there were 4 dice". You want to assign a probability to each event, because, not being omniscient, you don't know how many dice there actually were. You have several percepts, meaning pieces of evidence: your memories and the claims of the other people. Each of these percepts...
I can't speak for thomblake, but there are experiences that could convince me that there was a powerful entity that intervened on behalf of humanity. They just haven't happened. And I have reasons to believe that they will never happen, including the fact that they haven't happened before - absence of evidence is evidence of absence.
I pose the question of what does being a superior rationalist do for you
In the aggregate of all possible worlds, I expect it will let me lead a happier and more fulfilling life. This isn't to say that there aren't situations where it will disadvantage me to be a rationalist (a killer locks me and one other person in a room with a logic puzzle. He will kill the one who completes the puzzle first...) but in general, I think it will be an advantage. Its like in the game of poker, sometimes, the correct play will result in losing. That is okay though, i...
"Something very powerful and supernatural* exists, doesn't seem to be hostile, and doesn't mind that I call it the Christian God."
For what it's worth, I'm .9+ confident of the following claims:
1) there exist phenomena in the universe that "human science" (1) doesn't commonly accept.
2) for any such phenomenon X, X doesn't mind that you call it the Christian God
3) for any such phenomenon X, X doesn't mind that you call it a figment of your imagination
4) for any such phenomenon X, X is not "hostile" (2) to humans
So it seems we agree on that much.
Indeed, I find it likely that most people on this site would agree on that much.
the amount of evidence that there is something supernatural* if far greater than the amount of evidence that there are millions of people lying about their experiences.
As above, I think the evidence supporting the idea that there exist phenomena in the universe that "human science" (1) doesn't commonly accept is pretty strong. The evidence supporting the idea that people lie about their experiences, confabulate their experiences, and have experiences that don't map to events outside their own brains despite seeming to,...
Hi everyone. I've been lurking here for a couple of years, but decided to register so I could contribute. I work in software and am in my early 30s.
I found this site through overcomingbias, which in turn I came across through the GMU-linked economics blogs. However, I wouldn't describe myself as a rationalist - I find the discussions here interesting, but I think that, by and large, folk wisdom is pretty accurate.
I love the sequences and Eliezer's writings generally - they are what first got me reading the site, and I have been greatly enjoying following the reposts. The ones on zombies in particular have really caused me to re-evaluate my thinking.
Thanks, and look forward to meeting you all!
Hi, I'm a (white, male) physics student from Germany and 20 years old. My main reason for not believing in any religion is Occam's razor. (I'm not sure whether this makes me atheist or agnostic. Any thoughts on that would be appreciated.)
I stumbled across HPMoR by accident in 2010 and read "Three Worlds Collide" and some other texts on Eliezer's personal website. During 2011, I did some Sequences-hopping (i.e. I started at one article and just followed inline links that sounded interesting, thus causing a tab explosion) I finally registered a few...
OK, now I am confused.
This whole thread started because you said:
[SIAI] are assuming that any AGI will inevitably (plus or minus epsilon) self-improve itself to transhuman levels.
and I asked why you believed that, as distinct from "...any AGI has a non-negligible chance of self-improving itself to transhuman levels, and the cost of that happening is so vast that it's worth devoting effort to avoid even if the chance is relatively low"?
Now you seem to be saying that SI doesn't believe that any AGI will inevitably (plus or minus epsilon) self-i...
As best I can tell it is impractical as an actual decision-making procedure for more complex cases, at least assuming well-formalized priors. As a limit to be asymptotically approached it seems sound, though -- and that's probably the best we can do on our hardware anyway.
i.e., to rewrite its own code, and possibly rebuild its own hardware, in order to become smarter and smarter -- then its intelligence will grow exponentially, until it becomes smart enough to easily outsmart everyone on the planet.
Recursively, not necessarily exponentially. It may exploit the low hanging fruit early and improve somewhat slower once those are gone. Same conclusion applies - the threat is that it improves rapidly, not that it improves exponentially.
Hello all, I am a man of indiscriminate age (not true) and of indiscriminate gender (also not true). I hope you've learnt a lot about me. I'm curious about nearly all things. Thanks.
Hello Everyone,
I heard about this site during my time at Yale as an undergrad, I am now a PhD student at Rice University in Environmental Engineering. I noticed the meetup for Houston seems to have died in May, if that turns out to be true I would like to start one. I am enjoying HPMOR immensely. I am very interested in raising the sanity waterline, and I am something of a policy wonk. I tend to follow separation of church and state issues, as well as science policy/creationism in the classrooms especially. I did read the intro on partisanship in the forums.
So much interesting stuff.
I've been reading through the sequences, and one peeked my desire to post, so I created an account. There are actually many things being discussed here that interest me. I'm not sure I'm a rationalist though, as I believe there are some lies that should be maintained rather than destroyed.
I'm interested in personal identity, not "Quantum Mechanics and Personal Identity", but where does "me" end.
The sound bite is "Am I my hat?" or to be more verbose, is my hat an extension of myself, and thus a part of...
Hullo, I've been lurking around for quite a while after being introduced to LessWrong through the well-trodden HPMoR route.
I'm rather awful at this sort of thing, so here are my vital statistics: I'm 18, Male and live in the East Midlands region of the United Kingdom. The subject I pursue academically is Physics, however the scope of my interests is far larger and not worth detailing. Though I will say that working out what the ideal political system would look like is high on my to-do list.
More recently I've been toying with the idea of making a couple o...
Often, that means learning what true things to believe.
You don't learn which true things to believe or which false things to disbelieve. You learn (how to figure out) which things are true or false.
Completely independent of any of the rest of this, I absolutely endorse the legality of lying to people about why my child died, as well as the ethics of telling them it's none of their damned business, with the possible exception of medical or legal examiners. I certainly endorse the legality of lying to my mother about it.
Further, I would be appalled by someone who felt entitled to demand such answers of a mother whose child had just died (again, outside of a medical or legal examination, maybe) and would endorse forcibly removing them from the presence of a mother whose child has just died.
I would not endorse smacking such a person upside the head, but I would nevertheless be tempted to.
If I have a choice of parents, and a dietician is the most useful parent to have for achieving my goals, then yes, choosing a dietician for a parent is a rational choice. Of course, most of us don't have a choice of parents.
If I believe that children of dieticians do better at achieving their goals than anyone else, then choosing to become a dietician if I'm going to have children is a rational choice. (So, more complicatedly, is choosing not to have children if I'm not a dietician.)
Of course, both of those are examples of decisions related to the state o...
Irrationality, which I would for now define as all human action and awareness that isn't rational thinking or that doesn't follow a rationally defined course of action
Some of the disagreement is definitional. We define rationality as achieving your goals. Rationality should win. Any act or [ETA: mental] process that helps with achieving goals is rational.
There's a followup assertion in this community that believing true things helps achieving goals. Although not all people in history have believed that, it's hard to deny that human thinking patterns...
Well, couching things in terms of status-signaling is conventional around here. But, sure, there are probably better candidates. Do you have anything in particular in mind you think should have been nominated instead?
I was being a bit pedantic. When she says "don't lump the mentally ill together with evil murderers" I think she means "don't lump [psychotic] people in with evil murderers", which I don't disagree with. However, not all sociopaths are evil murderers. I would even say it's wrong to lump these mentally ill sociopaths together with evil murderers.
In other words, AspiringKnitter,
Please don't lump the mentally ill together with evil murderers.
Also, many people on this site are just a-holes. Sorry.
I think it's more that there are a few a-holes, but they are very prolific (well, that and the same bias that causes us to notice how many red lights we get stopped at but not how many green lights we speed through also focuses our attention on the worst posting behavior).
How can you be so sure? Historically speaking, infanticide is the human norm.
It is just the last few centuries that some societies have gotten all upset over it.
In some respects modern society is closer in norms to societies that practised infanticide 100 years ago than to Western society of 100 years ago and we consider this a good thing. Why assume no future changes or no changes at all would go in this direction? And that likewise we'll eventually consider these changes good?
It is certainly weak evidence in favour of a practice being nasty that societies which practice it are generally nasty in other ways. But it is just that, weak evidence.
Hi all,
Long time lurker, first time poster. I've read some of the Sequences, though I fully intend to re-read and read on.
I'm an undergrad at present, looking to participate in a trend I've been observing that's bring some of the rigor and predictive power of the hard sciences to linguistics.
I'm particularly interested in how language evolved, and under what physical/biological/computational constraints; What that implies about the neural mechanisms behind human behavior; and how to use those two to construct a predictive and quantitative theory of lingui...
Hi! I have read for a while. I read HPMOR and enjoyed the sequences. I prefer not to say where I live.
Hi Everyone, I stumbled upon this website while reading a comment on reddit, I am a programmer living in India , I came back to India in march after living in the US for 6 years.
I am interested in cognitive psychology and have started working on a pet project of mine to implement the various cognitive tasks available on commercial websites in my own website http://brainturk.com .
I hope to contribute to some discussions and learn from others here.
Hi! I discovered LW about a year ago and now I actually created an account. I study philosophy, and biology as minor. Sometimes I'm rather shocked by the things my fellow students believe and how they argue for their beliefs; I wish something like LW would be part of the standard curriculum. My main interests are ethics, philosophy of mind and evolutionary biology, and I'm looking forward to participating in discussions on these issues. Especially on ethics, as I'm skeptical regarding some of the views advocated on here (I'm a utilitarian). As someone who had read the original books several times, I was also delighted to find out about HPMoR recently.
I said "slavery stops," not "quality of life improves." Getting employers to compete in a way that benefits workers is a different problem, and obtaining for the workers the freedom to choose to starve (rather than, say, being executed as an example to others) is only the first step.
Quality of life for workers is also a very different problem from quality of life for open-market-adopted children, which was the original topic.
Hi, Worthstream here. I'm from Italy, as you will no doubt notice from my unusual choice of words. (Europeans then to overuse latin derived words in my experience)
I'm graduated in computer science, currently working as a web programmer, the kind of technical background i think is quite common here, judging by the number of useful applets and websites built by community members (Beeminder, just to name the first that comes to mind).
I'm a regional coordinator of the italian Mensa, a society i joined thinking that i would have found a lot of rational people. ...
Hello. I come from HPMoR. I identify as Christian, though my belief and reasons for belief are a bit more complex than that. I'll probably do a post on that later in 'how to convince me 2+2=3'. I also get told that I over think things.
Anyway, that's not the reason I joined. I was reading an article by Eliezer Yudkowsky and he stated that whatever can be destroyed by truth should be. This got me wondering in what context that was meant. My first thought was that it meant that we should strive to destroy all false beliefs, which has the side effect of not l...
Hello all, it seems like it is a common enough occurrence that it no longer seem embarrassing, but I too found LW via HPMOR, which was referred to me by a friend; my eyes and neck hurt for at least a week after spending far too much time reading from a laptop. I have a BS and an MS in mechanical engineering, I have spent some time as a researcher, a high school teacher and I am currently being an actual engineer at a biodiesel plant.
Growing up everyone told me I was going to become an engineer (I was one of those kids that took apart my toys to see how th...
Hello all! I'm a student of Mathematics and Computer Science and a fan of physics, linguistics, psychology, and biology.. I found lesswrong through HPMOR. I would say that I've been a rationalist for most of my life. Cognitive biases and logical fallacies, as well as methods for recognizing them, were explained to me at a young age. Unfortunately, lately I've noticed that I'm not holding myself to the same standards of rationality that I used to, and even worse, I've noticed myself using the fact that I'm being rational as an excuse to be unpleasant. So, partially in an effort to begin reforming myself and partly in search of something to help alleviate my boredom this summer, I made an account here.
Came here doing research on QM and decided to try out some ideas. I learn to swim best by jumping right in over my head. My style usually doesn't win me many friends, but I recognize who they are pretty fast, and I learn what works and what doesn't.
Someone once called me jello with a temper....but I'm more like a toothless old dog, more bark than bite. The tough exterior has helped me in many circumstances.
On the first day as a new kid in high school, I walked up to the biggest, baddest senior there, with all his sheep gathered around him in the parking ...
I stumbled here while searching some topic, and now I've forgotten which one. I've been posting for a few weeks, and just now managed to find the "About" link that explains how to get started, including writing an intro here. Despite being a software engineer by trade these past 27-odd years, I manage to get lost navigating websites a lot, and I still forget to use Google and Wikipedia on topics. Sigh. I'm 57, and was introduced to cognitive fallacies years as long ago as 1972. I've tried to avoid some of the worst ones, but I also fail a lot. I ...
Hi,
I'm a software engineer in Adelaide, Australia. I've tried to be a rationalist all of my life, but had no idea that there were actual techniques that you can learn from others. I'd simply tried to confront myself on the biases that books told me I had, with various degrees of success. I'm very excited to be here.
One thing that bothers me, though, is that I am feeling increasingly isolated from others. It used to be that I had thought just enough to be 1 inferential step ahead of others. This made me seem smart when I talked. Now, I'm more than 1 inferen...
By my understanding, learning is basically when a program collects the data it uses itself through interaction with some external system. Self-modification, on the other hand, is when the program has direct read/write acces to its own source code, so it can modify its own decision-making algorithm directly, not just the data set its algorithm uses.
As far as I understand, the mission of SIAI (the people who host this site) is to prevent the rise of un-Friendly AGI, not to actually build one.
I think they are kind of keen on the idea of not dying too. Improving the chances that a Friendly AI will be created by someone is probably up there as a goal too.
On the off chance that you're actually trying to engage seriously here... you nod here in the general direction of an important point that comes up a fair bit on this site, namely that for human purposes it's not enough to be arbitrarily good at optimizing, it also matters what I'm optimizing for.
Put another way: sure, one way of becoming really successful at achieving my goals is by discarding all goals that are difficult to achieve. One way of becoming really successful at promoting my values is by discarding my existing values and replacing them with s...
Hello, I am Nicholas, an undergraduate studying music at Portland State University. Even though my (at least academic) primary area of study is the arts, the philosophy of rationality and science has always been a large part of my intellectual pursuits. I found this site about a year ago and read many articles, but I recently decided to try to participate. Even before I was a rationalist, my education was entirely self-driven by a desire to seek the truth, even when the truth conflicted with what was widely believed by those around me (teachers, parents, e...
Could you clarify this point a little?
Sure.
The Internet is full of people who seem to have as one of their primary goals to expound their chosen tribe's political affiliation and defend it against all opposition, even in spaces predominantly dedicated to something else.
If LessWrong becomes a place where local norms allow discussion of the nominal rationality of Libertarianism, or Liberalism, or Conservatism, or whatever, and contrasting it with the demonstrable irrationality of other political ideologies, I expect that a subset of those people will devote significant resources to expounding their chosen tribe's political affiliation and defend it against one another, taking care to from time to time intone the magic formulas "it would be rational to" and "that's not rational" to mask, perhaps even from themselves, the reality of what was going on.
I'd find LW a less useful community were that to happen. I suspect I'm not alone.
I though the primary goals of LW include refining and promoting human rationality, and I see no reason why this goal would not apply to politics.
Can you clarify this point a little? I don't see where I'm suggesting that this goal doesn't apply to politics. What I'm saying is I'm skeptical that a public internet group like LW can achieve this goal as applied to politics.
The primary goal of the present LessWrong community is to refine and promote human rationality. The primary goal of people who would register to join political conversations on LessWrong is liable to be different.
Sorry, I'm just here ironically to recite empty platitudes about empiricism.
But seriously, figuring out how to know that is one of the big projects here.
Hi. I've studied Computer Science and Mathematics at the undergraduate level. I currently work as a software engineer, but have been looking into fields that would allow me to work with more mathematics. I am also very much interested in entrepreneurship from both the "fix problems I see with the world" and the "get really wealthy" perspectives.
I have been reading LW and OB off and on for years, but have never quite made it through all of the sequences.
I am mainly interested in efficient learning and applications of rationality to eve...
It's not that anyone hates you; they might kill you because they're afraid of you killing them first, if there were no legal deterrent against killing.
In particular, if you had any conflict with someone else in a world where killing was legal, it would quite possibly spiral out of control: you're worried they might kill you, so you're tempted to kill them first, but you know they're thinking the same way, so you're even more worried, etc.
How do you know?
It is a core belief of Bakkot's - nothing is going to change that. His thinking on the matter is also self consistent. Only strong social or personal influence has a chance of making a difference (for example, if he has children, all his friends have children and he becomes embedded in a tribe where non-baby-killing is a core belief). For my part I understand Bakkot's reasoning but do not share his preference based premises. As such changing my mind regarding the conclusion would make no sense.
More succinctly I don't expect reasoning wit...
When currently thinking in far mode about this you like the idea, but seeing it in practice might easily horrify you.
I say the same about the general shape of your modern-society-with-legalized-infanticide.
For your own safety, in every regard that such people could threaten it.
I don't think society considers that a valid reason for discrimination.
Also please remember surgeons can do nasty things to me without flinching if they wanted to, people do also occasionally have such fears since we even invoke this trope in horror movies.
Well, I've always thought that it's enormously and horribly wrong of us.
I generally agree.
But on the other hand I think we should give our revealed preference some weight as well, remember we are godshatter, maybe we should ...
Less Wrongcomments are threadedfor
If you've come to Less Wrong todiscuss a particular topic,
we havemeetupsin
Another example of this bug.
Edit: Apparently this is a known problem.
I hope this finds you all well. Since I was young, I have independently developed rationalism appreciation brain modules, which sometimes even help me make more rational choices than I might otherwise have, such as choosing not to listen to humans about imaginary beings. The basis for my brand of rationality can be somewhat summed up as "question absolutely everything," taken to an extreme I haven't generally encountered in life, including here on LW.
I have created this account, and posted here now mainly to see if anyone here can point me at t...
By discussing this, we're only giving in to this;
| Oh but dang if there aren't like over a thousand comments here, jeez i don't want to sound like i'm crying for attention but i'm TOTALLY CRYING FOR ATTENTION, srsly i need help you dudes
What do you mean "only"? In the context of a thorough introduction, and a relevant request for advice lampshading his degree of desire for an answer like this is certainly excusable.
It's not "giving in" when you choose to do something you reflectively endorse doing without being subject to any more manipulation than a forthright request.
I came to this site in search for truth. Or at least find some people that will help me identify that which is real or true and that which is not. I think one of my tools to do that is to debate with other people in the seek for same things I am. Not many people are really interested about that imo, or are really educated to be able to help me as much as I need. Because this problem a friend of mine directed me to this site, where I should find those people. The huge problem here is how this community decides to trade information. This "Article/commen...
Hello, everyone.
Recent college grad here from the Madison area. I've been aware of this site for years, but started taking it seriously when I stumbled upon it a few months ago, researching evidential (vs causal) decision theory. I realized that this community seriously discusses the stuff I care about - that really abstract, high-minded stuff about truth, reality, and decisions. I'm a math person, so I'm more interested in the theoretical, algorithmic side of this. I've been a rationalist since, at 15, I realized my religion was bunk, and decided I needed to know what else I was wrong about.
Hellow Lesswrong!
My name is Ryan and I am a 22 year old technical artist in the Video Game industry. I recently graduated with honors from the Visual Effects program at Savannah College of Art and Design. For those who don't know much about the industry I am in, my skill set is somewhere between a software programmer, a 3D artist, and a video editor. I write code to create tools to speed up workflows for the 3D things I or others need to do to make a game, or cinematic.
Now I found lesswrong.com through the Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality podcas...
It doesn't actually matter what line you use to define those reference points, however. [...] Within the theory here, consciousness makes your reference line special [...] The direction the patterns propagate doesn't really matter.
I'm not sure I understand what you mean. Can you describe a real or hypothetical experiment that would have different results depending on whether or not time is an artifact of consciousness?
Ah, I see what you mean. I don't think one has to believe in objective morality as such to agree that "morality is the godshatter of evolution". Moreover, I think it's pretty key to the "godshatter" notion that our values have diverged from evolution's "value", and we now value things "for their own sake" rather than for their benefit to fitness. As such, I would say that the "godshatter" notion opposes the idea that "maladaptive is practically the definition of immoral", even if there is something of a correlation between evolutionarily-selectable adaptive ideas and morality.
How would you define "parent," then? It's not a tangent, it's an important edge case. I'm trying to understand exactly where our views on the issue differ.
For what it's worth, I agree with you unreservedly on the age discrimination thing. In fact, I think it's the root of a lot of the current economic problems: a majority of the population is essentially being warehoused during their formative years, and then expected to magically transform into functional, productive adults afterward.
I think this example shows that what matters is not the consequences of your actions, but your intent when you take those actions.
From whose point of view ? If you are committed to poisoning your hapless friend, then presumably you either don't care about morality, or you'd determined that this action would be sufficiently moral. If, on the other hand, I am attempting to evaluate the morality of your actions, then I can only evaluate the actions you did, in fact, perform (because I can't read your mind). Thus, if you gave your friend a cup of tea with s...
In the same way it is possible that a supernatural* being is out there, and people are just misinterpreting what the gifts it bestows mean.
Sure, it's possible, but lots of things are possible, even if we limit them to the things we humans can imagine. We can imagine quite a lot: Cthulhu, Harry Potter, the Trimurti, Gasaraki, werewolves of all kinds, etc. etc. The better question is: how likely is it that a supernatural being exists ?
I have no way to prove I am not lying however so what would be the point?
If you have evidence that could overcome the low prior for God's existence were you not lying, then that would be worth hearing even if we would believe you're lying. I'm not aware of such evidence for particular deities.
I don't agree that supernatural should be defined as "outside of the realm of what human science commonly accepts."
There are lots of phenomena that science can't explain, or for which there is no commonly accepted explanation. That's not particularly interesting. What would be interesting is a phenomena that science admits it will never be able to explain.
A single experience of that kind would be terrible evidence for Christianity, and merely poor evidence for the supernatural. A coherent set of experiences indicative of a consistent, ongoing supernatural world (or specifically a Christian world) would be much more convincing.
A bit of both. I knew about Bayes' theorem for a while, as a not-terribly-exciting mathematical statement. But I had a few discussions about the philosophy of it, if you will, when taking a class on information theory. That sort of thing is interesting to read about, and that's how I ended up typing it into Google.
By far the most useful introduction to Bayes' theorem I've read, though, was in this short story, which I found later. I don't often use Bayes' theorem, but when I do, I prefer to do the calculation in my head, because it impresses people. This i...
I have decks for:
English vocabulary. I've learned many new words and sometimes get an explanation for a word I had only inferred the meaning of from the context - and guessed wrongly.
Family facts, mostly birthdays. It's a minor thing really, but I used to not know how old everyone is. And more than once I felt bad when someone asked about the age of a parent and I had to say 'no idea'.
Random facts I've looked up several times before or that I don't want to have to ever admit not knowing. Like the age of the solar system, the first few digits of Euler
Clarified in the edit. This site very much focusses on choosing rationally (between very few options), what one should believe, and such. If you want to achieve your goals, you need to get better at problem solving, which you do by solving various problems (duh). Problem solving involves picking something good out of a space of enormous number of possibilities.
Unless "man" is taken to mean "member of humanity."
Also, gender isn't necessarily the same as biological sex.
I hate to sound trite, but you could also try taking a few math and physics classes, or perhaps online equivalents thereof (perhaps somewhere like the Khan Academy, though I haven't looked at their physics videos myself and cannot endorse them). There's nothing wrong with reading articles and listening to advice, but nothing beats doing the work yourself. Well, at least it has been helpful for me personally; YMMV.
I can't see why that makes a difference in the context of my question, so feel free to choose whichever interpretation you prefer.
For my part, it seems entirely plausible to me that a person's understanding of what it means to be the primary caregiver for a child will change between time T1, when they are pregnant with that child, and time T2, when the child has been born... just as it seems plausible that a person's understanding of what a three-week stay in the Caribbean will be like will change between time T1, when they are at home looking at brochure...
I can't say I blame you for not reading it; it took me about three months to get through it! However Common Sense Atheism has An Intuitive Explanation of Eliezer Yudkowsky’s Intuitive Explanation of Bayes’ Theorem, it's much easier to read and explains many of the bits that Eliezer skips over.
As for integrating the importance of rationality I scarcely know where to begin; it's a large topic. First and foremost read this. Secondly realise how important opinions are, and that it's not okay to "have your own opinion" as schools will common condition...
It's not a rhetorical question, you know. What happens if you try to answer it?
I have a pill in my hand. I'm .99 confident that, if I take it, it will grant me a thousand units of something valuable. (It doesn't matter for our purposes right now what that unit is. We sometimes call it "utilons" around here, just for the sake of convenient reference.) But there's also a .01 chance that it will instead take away ten thousand utilons. What should I do?
It's called reasoning under uncertainty, and humans aren't very good at it naturally. Personally, my instinct is to either say "well, it's almost certain to have a good effect, so I'll take the pill" or "well, it would be really bad if it had a bad effect, so I won't take the pill", and lots of studies show that which of those I say can be influenced by all kinds of things that really have nothing to do with which choice leaves me better off.
One way to approach problems like this is by calculating expected values. Taking the pill gives me a .99 chance of 1000 utilons, and a .01 chance of -10000 utilons; the expected value is therefore .99 1000 - .01 10000 = 990 - 100; the result is positive, so I should ta...
Hi! Thanks for the welcome!
Studying abroad has been amazing - it's really making me think about all sorts of things I've never thought of and I'm loving noticing the subtle cultural differences!
If I have any questions, I'll be sure to PM you - thank you so much for the offer! :)
I have lots of particular views and some general views on decision theory. I picked on decision theory posts because it's something I know something about. I know less about some of the other things that crop up on this site…
I'm not sure where you live, but is killing someone who you think will try to kill you some day actually considered self-defense for legal purposes there? I'm pretty sure self-defense doesn't cover that in the US.
Okay. What kind of murder are we talking about? What made up most of the extra-- was it all sorts of things or was it duels? And was it accepted or was it frowned on? Were murderers prosecuted? Did victims' families avenge them?
I'm not historian enough to say for sure, unfortunately. Judicial duels were part of the culture there, but the textual sources indicate that informal feuds were common, as were robbery and various other forms of informal violence. You could bring suit upon a murderer or other criminal in order to compel them to pay blood money or suffer in kind, but there was much less central authority than we're used to, and nothing resembling a police force.
I agree that we shouldn't assume that emotionally volatile people fail upon most such temptations.
I agree that my reasoning here is cold (indeed, I said as much myself, though I used the differently-loaded word "dispassionate").
I agree that if impulse control is generally nonhereditable (and, again, I don't just mean genetically), the argument I use above doesn't apply.
I agree that different cultures train their members to "control their emotions" to different degrees. (Or, rather, I don't think that's true in general, but we've specifi...
It's all irrelevant to my point, which is a self-contained criticism of a particular argument you've made in this comment and doesn't depend on the purpose of that argument.
(Your quoting someone else's writing without clarification, in a reply to my comment, is unnecessarily confusing...)
You use an invalid argument to argue for a correct conclusion. It doesn't generally follow that something that can't be improved is not worth "worrying about", at least in the sense of being a useful piece of knowledge to pay attention to.
I think the word rationality could use protection against too much emotional attachment to it. It should retain a specific meaning instead of becoming 'everything that's useful'.
I'm not in love with using the word "rationality" for what this community means by rationality. But (1) I can't come up with a better word, (2) there's no point in fighting to the death for a definition, and (3) thanks to the strength of various cognitive biases, it's quite hard to figure out how to be rational and worth the effort to try.
I admire the community's mission to try and change people. But by the same line of argument I use above I think focusing only on how people think and how they might think better is not going to be enough.
One level up, consider who does the focusing how. The goal may be to build a bridge, an tune an emotion, or correct the thinking in your own mind. One way of attaining that goal is through figuring out what interventions lead to what consequences, and finding a plan that wins.
If it is in the genetic interests of the children to perform actions with such-and-such a risk level relative to the reward in social recognition, why is it not in the genetic interests of the parent to promote that precise risk level in the child?
You may find the article in http://lesswrong.com/lw/jx/we_change_our_minds_less_often_than_we_think/5lkb well worth your time.
I mean, to my mind, having a diëtician for a parent ... is not rational
Assuming for the moment that having a dietitian for a parent really does help one achieve one's goals, yes it is rational, to the extent that it can be described as an act or process. That is, if you can influence what sorts of parents you have, then you should have a dietitian.
Similarly, it would be rational for me to spend 20 minutes making a billion dollars, even though that's something I can't actually do.
OK, then... I suspect you and I have very different understandings of what being property entails. If you're interested in unpacking your understanding, I'm interested in hearing it.
Hypothetical question: if my child expresses the desire to go live with some other family, and that family is willing, and in my judgment that family will treat my child roughly as well as I will, is it OK for me to deny that expressed desire and keep my child with me?
Even granting that, it's still true that if Nornagest is right and my emotional responses are calibrated in terms of expected status-maximization, then it makes sense to consider emotional responses in terms of (among other things) status-maximization for legal purposes.
I agree that pretty much all communication does this, yes. Sometimes explicitly, sometimes implicitly.
As to why... because I see the norm you're pushing as something pretty close to the cultural baseline of the "friendly" pole of the American mainstream, which I see as willing to trade off precision and accuracy for getting along. You may even be pushing for something even more "get along" optimized than that.
I mostly don't mind that the rest of my life more or less optimizes for getting along, though I often find it frustrating when i...
...Akon was resting his head in his hands. "You know," Akon said, "I thought about composing a message like this to the Babyeaters. It was a stupid thought, but I kept turning it over in my mind. Trying to think about how I might persuade them that eating babies was... not a good thing."
The Xenopsychologist grimaced. "The aliens seem to be even more given to rationalization than we are - which is maybe why their society isn't so rigid as to actually fall apart - but I don't think you could twist them far enough around to believe
1) How can you so easily predict others' level of distress if you don't feel much distress from that source in the first place?
Looking at other humans. Perhaps even humans in actually existing different cultures.
2) Don't forget about scale insensitivity. Don't forget that some scale insensitivity can be useful on non-astronomical scales, as it gives bounds to utility functions and throws a light on ethical injunctions.
This is a good counter point. I just think applying this principle selectively is too easy to game a metric, to put too much weight to it in preliminary discussion.
Because its illegal to kill other people's pets or destroy their property? Duh.
So, premeditated killing of someone else's child should be criminal damage rather than murder?
I've never held that other people should be allowed to kill your baby, for precisely that reason
(rereads thread) Why, so you haven't. I apologize; the fear of having my baby killed (well, by anyone other than me, anyway) is as you say irrelevant to your point. My error.
Hey everyone!
I'm a programmer from the triangle area on the east coast. I'm interested in applied rationality through things like auto-analytics.[1] I'm also interested in how humans can best adapt to information technology. Seriously, people, this internet thing? It is out there!
From what I gather of LW stereotypes my personal life is so cliche I'm not even going to bother. Uh, I think tradition is kind of important? I guess that makes me kind of unique . . .
[1] Specifically I'm interested in getting a standardized database format for things like food con...
For those who think that morality is the godshatter of evolution, maladaptive is practically the definition of immoral.
Disagree? What do you mean by this?
Edit: If I believe that morality, either descriptively or prescriptively, consists of the values imparted to humans by the evolutionary process, I have no need to adhere to the process roughly used to select these values rather than the values themselves when they are maladaptive.
Actually...
...The 55 mph speed limit was a vain attempt by the Federal government to reduce gasoline consumption; initially passed in the 1974 Emergency Highway Energy Conservation Act the law was relaxed in 1987 and finally repealed in 1995 allowing states to choose their speed limits. Highways and cars are safer today than in the 1970s and on many highways speed limits were increased to 65 mph. Higher speed limits are often safer because what is worse than speed is variable speed, some people driving fast and some driving slow. When the speed limit is set
The slave trade thing might be prevented by specifically forbidding the quick or anonymous sale of children. Have the current and prospective parents jump through some hoops, get interviewed by a social worker, etc. and the whole thing thoroughly documented. Find an equilibrium that keeps the nonmonetary transaction costs high enough that low-level slave traders won't think it's worth the trouble to 'go legit,' and the paper trail thick enough that corrupt aristocrats won't want to take the risk of public humiliation, without actually making it more difficult for the beleaguered biological parents than raising an unwanted child themselves.
This question is fraught with politics and other highly sensitive topics, so I'll try to avoid getting too specific, but it seems to me that thinking of this sort of thing purely in terms of a potentiality relation rather misses the point. A self-extracting binary, a .torrent file, a million lines of uncompiled source code, and a design document are all, in different ways, potential programs, but they differ from each other both in degree and in type of potentiality. Whether you'd call one a program in any given context depends on what you're planning to do with it.
Knowing more about the processes that actually gave rise to your parents' pronouncements on religion, do you think you were right to assign as much weight of evidence to them as you originally did?
Well, you are certainly a lot better at Bayesian Statistics than I am. But if I am to base my "physics-defying, benevolent, superintelligent sky wizard" hypothesis on evidence such as badly written holy books that look spuriously like hodge-podge culture dumps, the general religious disagreement, the continued non-answering of prayers, failure to divine simple mathematical or physical truths, and how science is significantly more productive, well... Every time a prayer goes unanswered I can theoretically update on it for a lower credence. Every c...
Positing a divine being is a more complex explanation than any physical explanation I can conceive of.
Really? Can you not, by way of conception, take the divine being scenario, hack around with it so that it can no longer be considered a divine being then tack on some arbitrary and silly complexity? (Simulations may be involved, for example.)
Conceiving of complex stuff seems to be a trivial task, so long as the complexity is not required to be at all insightful.
[Note: Skip stuff in brackets if religious talk annoys or offends you]
(Why does everyone assume that this has to do with religion? If I was asking this about religion wouldn't that already signify that I didn't believe, I just wanted to? My belief comes from actual events that I have witnessed, and tested, and been unable to falsify. )
The example with the bleeding out was sort of a personal one because it happened to me. I cut my foot with an axe. I was far from help, and a helicopter wouldn't pick me up for another 4 hours. If I had been off to the side b...
Have you noticed any confusion?
It just seems almost too good to be true that I now get what plenty of genius quantum physicists still can't.
Hmm, "too good to be true"... Does this suggest anything?
In physics, you can get absolutely clear-cut issues. Not in the sense that the issues are trivial to explain. But if you try to apply Bayes to healthcare, or economics, you may not be able to formally lay out what is the simplest hypothesis, or what the evidence supports.
So why bother with an example where Bayes works the worst and is most con...
This is an actual testable prediction. Suppose such an exception is found experimentally (for example, self-decoherence due to gravitational time dilation, as proposed by Penrose, limiting the quantum effects to a few micrograms or so). Would you expect EY to retract his Bayesian-simplest model in this case, or "adjust" it to match the new data? Honestly, what do you think is likely to happen?
Honestly, when the first experiment shows that we don't see quantum effects at some larger scale when it is otherwise believed that they should show up, I expect EY to weaken, but not reverse, his view that MWI is probably correct - expecting that there is an error in the experiment. When it has been repeated, and variations have shown similar results, I expect him to drop MWI, because it now longer explains the data. I don't have a specific prediction regarding just how many experiments it would take; this probably depends on several factors, including the nature and details of the experiments themselves.
This is from my personal model of EY, who seems relatively willing to say "Oops!" provided he has some convincing evidence he can point to; this model is derived solely from what I've read here, and so I don't ascribe it hugely high confidence, but that's my best guess.
I don't think those definitions really capture some of the relevant connotations that weirdness has related to accuracy and consistency. I personally didn't even realize the exact problem you had with the commenter because the way zhe used "weird" made perfect sense to me.
I also don't like prescriptivist theories of grammar very much and think that the original comment was clearly understandable and was perhaps less clearly intended to subvert the common belief that "QM is weird", which is a belief that has been criticized in multiple p...
Human level intelligence is unable to improve itself at the moment (it's not even able to recreate itself if we exclude reproduction). I don't think monkey level intelligence will be more able to do so. I agree that the SIAI scenario is way overblown or at least until we have created an intelligence vastly superior to human one.
Is that question literal or metaphorical?
Almost certainly metaphorical. I mean, at the very least the Marines would have used explosives rather than fire.
That said, where there exists a measurable difference between an implementable approximation of utilitarianism and an implementable approximation of some other moral principle X, then it makes sense to consider oneself a utilitarian or an Xian even if one is, as you say, accepting deviations from utilitarianism or X in order to achieve implementability.
You guys seriously should invest in general problem solving exercises.
Would just googling "problem solving exercises" be enough? What are you talking about, exactly?
I think what Dmytry is talking about is that Less Wrong does not stand up to its goals.
Eliezer Yudkowsky once wrote that rationality is just the label he uses for his "beliefs about the winning Way - the Way of the agent smiling from on top of the giant heap of utility."
Wouldn't it make sense to assess if you are actually winning by solving problems or getting rich etc...
hi
i don't think much of rationality but i like smart people.
now pls hug me in a very rational way.
thanks
Ideally, you should aim to defeat the strongest version of your opponent's argument that you can think of--it's a much better test of whether your position is actually correct, and it helps prevent rationalization. Rather than attacking a version of your opponent's argument that is weak, you should attack the strongest possible version of it. On LessWrong we usually call this Least Convenient Possible World, or LCPW for short. (I've also seen it called "steel man," because instead of constructing a weaker "straw man" version of your opp...
Imagine a snowball that's rolling down an infinite slope. As it descends, it picks up more snow, rocks, sticks, maybe some bugs, I don't know. Maybe there are dry patches, too, and the snowball loses some snow. Maybe the snowball hits a boulder and loses half of its snow, and what remains is less than 10% original snow material. But it still can be said to be this snowball and not that snowball because its composition and history are unique to it - it can be identified by its past travels, its momentum, and the resulting trajectory. If this can be taken to...
What's so great about the ability to (justify to yourself that it's okay to) skip over the Chinese Room Argument that it's worth making your overall epistemology provably worse at figuring out what's true?
Nothing.
Can you actually prove it's worse, or were you just asking a hypothetical?
...More generally, there's a big difference between lying to yourself and lying to other people. Lying to others is potentially useful when their actions, if they knew the facts, would contradict your goals. It's harder to come up with a case where your actions would contr
Right, I meant that you could just add the vocabulary of noting meditation to the beeper study without actually doing the meditation.
Maybe. Maybe society would create new norms to fix that.
I'd like to mention that I'm emphatically not a libertarian (in fact identifying as socialist), and find many absurdities with its basic concept (see Yvain's "Why I Hate Your Freedom); however, I'd always like to learn more about how it could plausibly work from its proponents, and am ready to shift towards it if I hear some unexpectedly strong arguments.
At least in my country, killing someone for self-defence is already legal.
Right, but "I accidentally ran over his dog, and I was worried that he might kill me later for it, so I immediately backed up and ran him over" probably won't count as self-defense in your country. But it's the sort of thing that traditional game theory would advise if killing was legal.
This really is a case where imposing an external incentive can stop people from mutually defecting at every turn.
...(Plus, I don't think I'm going to threaten to kill someone in the forese
But the fear you get from Silent Hill is fear you can walk away from and know you're not going to be attacked by zombies and nor will your loved ones. You choose when to feel it. You choose whether to feel it at all, and how often. Making fear that is known to be unfounded available on demand to those who choose it is not even in the same ballpark as making everyone worry that they're going to be killed.
So I repeat my question: does the regret and remorse in case 1 actually matter? For example, what if a parent was regretful and remorseful about having their child forcibly put up for adoption; would that change your position?
I understand the argument that the infant's life is valuable, and am not challenging that here. It was your invoking the parent's regret and remorse as particularly relevant here that I was challenging.
Maybe.
Suppose, for example, that what you're describing here as instability/emotional volatility -- or, more operationally, my likelihood of doing something unrecoverable-from which I generally abhor based on a very quickly passing once-in-a-lifetime temptation -- is hereditable (either genetically or behaviorally, it doesn't matter too much).
In that case, I suspect I would rather that infants born to emotionally volatile/unstable parents ten million years ago had not matured to breeding age, as I'd rather live in a species that's less volatile in that wa...
See What Do We Mean By "Rationality".
Summary: "Epistemic rationality" is having beliefs that correspond to reality. "Instrumental rationality" is being able to actualize your values, or achieve your goals.
Irrationality, then, is having beliefs that do not correspond to reality, or being unable to achieve your goals. And to the extent that humans are hard-wired to be likely irrational, that certainly is a bug that should be fixed.
my moral beliefs are consequentialist, and therefore actually formulated as "prevent the greatest possible number of murders" rather than "kill the fewest possible people personally", so it's not actually accurate to say I have to override moral beliefs to advocate removing sociopaths from society.
Of course. I agree that one death is preferable to many, no matter who or what does the killing. I am talking about the effects on yourself of endorsing murder, and possibly the less noble real reason you chose that solution.
Maybe you have ...
He started "investigating" a child's value to parents with things like the status they could gain from it, instead of obvious things like their instinctive emotional response to it, etc. That's manifestly not what most parents think and feel like.
Why do you feel it's correct to interpret it as defection in the first place?
In case you were wondering the translation of this from social-speak to Vulcan is:
Calling people assholes isn't a defection, therefore you saying - and in particular feeling - that labeling people as assholes is a defection says something personal about you. I am clever and smooth for communicating this rhetorically.
So this too is a defection. Not that I mind - because it is a rather mild defection that is well within the bounds of normal interaction. I mean... it's not li...
The difference is, I'm quite a bit more distrustful of your legal infanticide's perspectives than you're distrustful of my personal self-modification's perspectives.
I'm not sure this is so. We should update towards each other estimates of the other's distrustfulness. I'm literally horrified by the possibility of a happy death spiral around universal altruism.
Making ourselves care as much as we'd privately want to, at least to try and see how it goes?
Revealed preferences are precisely what we end up doing and actually desire once we get in a certain situation. Why not work it out the other way around? How can you be sure maximum utility is going with this shard line and not the other?
Because it sounds good? To 21st century Westerners?
For every example you list (polyamory, etc)
I think you mean "for every example you are likley to list", I didn't list any.
I bet I can find you a counterexample of equivalent strength.
What exactly would that accomplish? I said more similar in some respects, didn't I? I didn't say on net or overall.
if everyone who'd find it preferable to our world was (in real life) hit by a truck tomorrow, my utility function would increase.
I think you should take that back, personally. I can understand you saying it out of frustration, but saying that you want people dead is generally a bad thing to do.
Pretty negligible, but still orders of magnitude above Bakkot just altering society to tolerate infanticide on his own.
Do you mean that it's pretty certain that I'm not obliged to be trying to have as many children as possible at all times?
Or that it's pretty certain that the fact that it's not clear that adding a person to the universe (as things stand today) will, on average, increase the amount of fun had down the line is why I'm not obliged to be trying to have as many children as possible at all times?
Or both?
Also: how important is it to you to manage your handle's reputation in such a way as to maximize your ability to sway someone on LW in areas concerning ethical values and empathy?
Actually I doubt it's something that complicated. In my opinion, the site is not known because there are few people to publicize it, loop.
Anyhow, ARE there more LWers from Israel? I would really like it if there was a meetup here.
I'm happy to hear it! I'll be announcing a Philadelphia meetup shortly; I hope to see you on the comment thread!
Where are you? I'm in Fort Lauderdale and the Tampa area. If we're near each other maybe we could arrange one of those meetup thingies...
Could I get that more information, if more is to be had? I am a gad student, and somewhat disconnected from the undergrad social networks.
Hey all! I actually registered to ask a question. I'm trying to find this website that was linked from the comments section of a LW article. I believe the comment was left on a "Quotes" post this year. Basically, it was a website that seemed to be about either a technique or a book that was about listening to the different parts of your brain or self. Sorry if this is really vague, I don't know if anyone is ever going to actually read this, but I would appreciate an email to my username at gmail. I'll check back here again, and maybe try to get some karma so I can post a discussion thread about this. It's really bugging me because I can only vaguely remember what the website was about to begin with.
Well, I am glad we cleared that up. ;-) I'll make sure to remember, In case I ever forget my gender.
Well, keep in mind, even inside such a room social norms would rapidly evolve against letting things get too exciting, it's just that there wouldn't be any recourse to a larger legal system to resolve the finer points.
Maybe a big guy sits down in the corner with a tattoo across his bare chest saying "I am the lawgiver, if anyone in the room I watch is injured or killed without appropriate permission I will break the aggressor's arms" and mostly follows through on that. When somebody kicks the lawgiver's ass without taking over the job, everybody else votes with their feet.
Howdy.
I was a sometimes-reader of Overcoming Bias back in the day, and particularly fond of the articles on quantum physics. Philosophically, I'm an Objectivist. I identify a lot of people as Objectivist, however, including a lot of people who would probably find it a misnomer.
I created my account pretty much explicitly because I have some thoughts on theoretical (some might prefer the term "quantum", but for reasons below, this isn't accurate) physics and wanted (at this point, needed might be more accurate) feedback, and haven't had much succ...
Hello everyone, i'm new to this and i actually do not know much about what's going on here, i just need help to find some textbooks recommendation to boost my academic performance this session. i am a year 2 Accounting student in the University of Lagos (Unilag),Nigeria. i hope you will be of great help.
Hello Less Wrong Community, I am here because I need as many rational debaters as possible - and it looks like I have found the central chamber of the kingdom here!
I am working on a project called rbutr - it is a simple tool which allows rebuttals to be connected to claims on a webpage-level. The purpose of which is to alert internet users to the existence of rebuttals to the specific page they are viewing, providing them with a simple way to click through to the counter-argument page.
So ideally, the community heping to build this resource (which is going ...
What about fish? I'm pretty sure many fish are significantly more functional than one-month-old humans, possibly up to two or three months. (Younger than that I don't think babies exhibit the ability to anticipate things. Haven't actually looked this up anywhere reputable, though.)
I don't know enough about them - given they're so different to us in terms of gross biology I imagine it's often going to be quite difficult to distinguish between functioning and instinct - this:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/west_yorkshire/3189941.stm
Says that scientist...
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