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Wow. Some of your other posts are intelligent, but this is pure troll-bait.
EDIT: I suppose I should share my reasoning. Copied from my other post lower down the thread:
Classic troll opening. Challenges us to take the post seriously. Our collective 'manhood' is threatened if react normally (eg saying "trolls fuck off").
Insulting straw man with a side of "you are an irrational cult".
"Seriously, I'm one of you guys". Concern troll disclaimer. Classic.
Again undertones of "you are a cult and you must accept my medicine or turn into a cult". Again we are challenged to take it seriously.
I didn't quite understand this part, but again, straw man caricature.
... (read more)You've got an interesting angle there, but I don't think AspiringKnitter is a troll in the pernicious sense-- her post has led to a long reasonable discussion that she's made a significant contribution to.
I do think she wanted attention, and her post had more than a few hooks to get it. However, I don't think it's useful to describe trolls as "just wanting attention". People post because they want attention. The important thing is whether they repay attention with anything valuable.
I don't have the timeline completely straight, but it looks to me like AspiringKnitter came in trolling and quickly changed gears to semi-intelligent discussion. Such things happen. AspiringKnitter is no longer a troll, that's for sure; like you say "her post has led to a long reasonable discussion that she's made a significant contribution to".
All that, however, does not change the fact that this particular post looks, walks, and quacks like troll-bait and should be treated as such. I try to stay out of the habit of judging posts on the quality of the poster's other stuff.
Thanks for letting me know. If most people disagree with my assessment, I'll adjust my troll-resistance threshold.
I just want to make sure we don't end up tolerating people who appear to have trollish intent. AspiringKnitter turned out to be positive, but I still think that particular post needed to be called out.
Well Kept Gardens Die By Pacifism.
4chan, where there is an interesting dynamic around trolling and getting trolled. Getting trolled is low-status, calling out trolls correctly that no-one else caught is high-status, and trolling itself is god-status, calling troll incorrectly is low status like getting trolled. With that culture, the art of trolling, counter-trolling and troll detection gets well trained.
I learned a lot of trolling theory from reddit, (like the downvote preventer and concern trolling). The politics, anarchist, feminist and religious subreddits have a lot of good cases to study (they generally suck at managing community, tho).
I learned a lot of relevant philosophy of trolling and some more theory from /i/nsurgency boards and wikis (start at partyvan.info). Those communities are in a sorry state these days.
Alot of what I learned on 4chan and /i/ is not common knowledge around here and could be potentially useful. Maybe I'll beat some of it into a useful form and post it.
Note that declaring Crocker's rules and subsequently complaining about rudeness sends very confusing signals about how you wish to be engaged with.
Hi, I am Alyssa, a 16-year-old aspiring programmer-and-polymath who found her way to the wiki page for Egan's Law from the Achron forums. From there I started randomly clicking on links that mostly ended up leading to Eliezer's posts. I was a bit taken aback by his attitude toward religion, but I had previously seen mention of his AI Box thing (where (a) he struck me as awesome, and (b) he said some things about "intelligence" and "wisdom" that caused me to label him as an ally against all those fools who hated science), and I just loved his writing, so I spent about a week reading his stuff alternately thinking, "Wow, this guy is awesome" and "Poor atheist. Doesn't he realize that religion and science are compatible?" Eventually, some time after reading Religion's Claim to be Non-disprovable, I came to my senses. (It is a bit more complicated and embarrassing than that, but you get the idea.)
That was several months ago. I have been lurking not-quite-continuously since then, and it slowly dawned on me just how stupid I had been -- and more importantly, how stupid I still am. Reading about stuff like confirmation bias and overconfidence, I gra... (read more)
So it is more just trolling.
Which, from the various comments Will has made along these lines we can roughly translate to "via incoherent abstract rationalizations Will_Newsome has not only convinced himself that embracing the crazy while on lesswrong is a good idea but that doing so is in fact a moral virtue". Unfortunately this kind of conviction is highly resistant to persuasion. He is Doing the Right Thing. And he is doing the right thing from within a complex framework wherein not doing the right thing has potentially drastic (quasi-religious-level) consequences. All we can really do is keep the insane subset of his posts voted below the visibility threshold and apply the "don't feed the troll" policy while he is in that mode.
Turns out LW is a Chesterton-esque farce in which all posters are secretly Wills trolling Wills.
That's some interesting reasoning. I've met people before who avoided leaving an evaporatively cooling group because they recognized the process and didn't want to contribute to it, but you might be the first person I've encountered who joined a group to counteract it (or to stave it off before it begins, given that LW seems to be both growing and to some extent diversifying right now). Usually people just write groups like that off. Aside from the odd troll or ideologue that claims similar motivations but is really just looking for a fight, at least-- but that doesn't seem to fit what you've written here.
Anyway. I'm not going to pretend that you aren't going to find some hostility towards Abrahamic religion here, nor that you won't be able to find any arguably problematic (albeit mostly unconsciously so) attitudes regarding sex and/or gender. Act as your conscience dictates should you find either one intolerable. Speaking for myself, though, I take the Common Interest of Many Causes concept seriously: better epistemology is good for everyone, not just for transhumanists of a certain bent. Your belief structure might differ somewhat from the tribal average around here, but the actual goal of this tribe is to make better thinkers, and I don't think anyone's going to want to exclude you from that as long as you approach it in good faith.
In fewer words: welcome to Less Wrong.
Erm. I can't say that this raises my confidence much. I am reminded of the John McCarthy quote, "Your denial of the importance of objectivity amounts to announcing your intention to lie to us. No-one should believe anything you say."
I don't think there are any of those around here. Most of us would prefer you didn't even believe in gods!
My name's Normal Anomaly, and I'm paranoid about giving away personal information on the Internet. Also, I don't like to have any assumptions made about me (though this is likely the last place to worry about that), so I'd rather go without a gender, race, etc. Apologies for the lack of much personal data. I can say that my major interest is biology, although I am not yet anything resembling an expert. I eventually hope to work in life extension research. I’m an Asperger’s Syndrome Sci Fi-loving nerd, which is apparently the norm here.
I used to have religious/spiritual beliefs, though I was also a fan of science and was not a member of an organized religion. I believed it was important to be rational and that I had evidence for my beliefs, but I was rationalizing and refusing to look at the hard questions. A couple years ago, I was exposed to atheism and rationalism and have since been trying to make myself more reasonable/less insane. I found LW through Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality a few months ago, and have been lurking and reading the sequences. I'm still scared of posting on here because it’s the first discussion forum where I have known myself to be intellectual... (read more)
Actually, I've come to notice that rhetoric and other so-called Dark Arts are still worth their weight in gold on LW, except when the harder subjects (math and logic) are at hand.
But LessWrong commenters definitely have plenty of psychological levers, and the demographic uniformity only makes them more effective. For a simple example, I guesstimate that, in just about any comment, a passing mention of how smart LessWrongers are is worth on average 3 or 4 extra karma points - and this is about as old as tricks can get.
I'm Ellen, age 14, student, planning to major in molecular biology or something like that. I'm not set on it, though.
I think I was browsing wikipedia when I decided to google some related things. I think I found some libertarian or anarchist blog that then had a link to Overcoming Bias or Lesswrong. Or I might've seen the word transhumanism on the wiki page for libertarianism and googled it, with it eventually leading here somehow. My memory is fuzzy as it was pretty irrelevant to me.
I'm an atheist, and have been for a while, as is typical for this community. I wasn't brought up religiously, so it was pretty much untheism that turned into atheism.
My rationalist roots... I've always wanted to be right, of course. Partly because I could make mistakes from being wrong, partly because I really, really hated looking stupid. Then I figured that I couldn't know if I was right unless I listened to the other side, really listened, and was careful. (Not enough people do even this. People are crazy, the world is mad. Angst, angst.) I found lesswrong which has given me tools to much more effectively do this. w00t.
I'm really lazy. Curse you, akrasia!
It should be obvious how I came up with my us... (read more)
Hi, Aspiring Knitter. I also find the Less Wrong culture and demographics quite different from my normal ones (being a female in the social sciences who's sympathetic to religion though not a believer. Also, as it happens, a knitter.) I stuck around because I find it refreshing to be able to pick apart ideas without getting written off as too brainy or too cold, which tends to happen in the rest of my life.
Sorry for the lack of persecution - you seem to have been hoping for it.
Very glad not to be persecuted, actually. Yay!
Hi, I'm Zoe. I found this site in a round-about way after reading Dawkin's The God Delusion and searching some things related to it. There was a comment in a forum mentioning Less Wrong and I was interested to see what it was.
I've been mainly lurking for the past few months, reading the sequences and some of the top posts. I've found that while I understand most of it, my high-school level math (I'm 16) is quite inadequate, so I'm working through the Khan Academy to try and improve it.
I'm drawn to rationalism because, quite simply, it seems like the world would be a better place if people were more rational and that has to start somewhere. Whatever the quotes say, truth is worthwhile. It also makes me believe in myself more to know that I'm willing and somewhat able to shift my views to better match the territory. Maybe someday I'll even advance from 'somewhat' into plain ol' 'able'.
My goals here, at this point, aren't particularly defined. I find the articles and the mission inspiring and interesting and think that it will help me. Maybe when I've learnt more I'll have a clearer goal for myself. I already analyze everything (to the point where many a teacher has been quite annoyed), so I suppose that's a start. I'm looking forward to learning more and seeing how I can use it all in my actual life.
Cheers, Zoe
That doesn't sound right. Here's a quote from Crocker's rules:
Another quote:
Quote from our wiki:
There's a decision theoretic angle here. If I declare Crocker's rules, and person X calls me a filthy anteater, then I might not care about getting valuable information from them (they probably don't have any to share) but I refrain from lashing out anyway! Because I care about the signal I send to person Y who is still deciding whether to engage with me, who might have a sensitive detector of Crocker's rules violations. And such thoughtful folks may offer the most valuable critique. I'm afraid you might have shot yourself in the foot here.
Welcome to LessWrong!
Do we? Do you hate Hindus, or do you just think they're wrong?
One thing I slightly dislike about "internet atheists" is the exclusive focus on religion as a source of all that's wrong in the world, whereas you get very similar forms of irrationality in partisan politics or nationalism. I'm not alone in holding that view - see this for some related ideas. At best, religion can be about focusing human's natural irrationality in areas that don't matter (cosmology instead of economics), while facilitating morality and cooperative behavior. I understand that some Americans atheists are more hostile to religion than I am (I'm French, religion isn't a big issue here, except for Islam), because they have to deal with religious stupidity on a daily basis.
Note that a Mormon wrote a series of posts that was relatively well received, so you may be overestimating LessWrong's hostility to religion.
Hello.
I've been reading Less Wrong from its beginning. I stumbled upon Overcoming Bias just as LW was being launched. I'm a young mathematician (an analyst, to be more specific) currently working towards a PhD and I'm very interested in epistemic rationality and the theory of altruist instrumental rationality. I've been very impressed with the general quality of discussion about the theory and general practice of truth-seeking here, even though I can think of places where I disagree with the ideas that I gather are widely accepted here. The most interesting discussions seem to be quite old, though, so reviving those discussions out of the blue hasn't felt like - for lack of a better word - a proper thing to do.
There are many discussions here of which I don't care about. A large proportion of people here are programmers or otherwise from a CS background, and that colors the discussions a lot. Or maybe it's just that the prospect of an AGI in recent future doesn't seem at all likely to me. Anyway, the AI/singularity stuff, the tangentially related topics that I bunch together with them, and approaching rationality topics from a programmer's point of view I just don't care about. Not ... (read more)
Easiest first: I introduced "dark arts" as an example of a label that distracted more than it added. It wasn't meant as a reference to or description of your posts.
In your previous comment, you asked the wrong question ('were they attempting to persuade?') and then managed to come up with the wrong answer ('nope'). Both of those were disappointing (the first more so) especially in light of your desire to spread your experience.
The persuasion was "please respond to me nicely." It was richly rewarded: 20 welcoming responses (when most newbies get 0 or 1), and the first unwelcoming response got downvoted quickly.
The right question is, what are our values, here? When someone expressing a desire to be welcomed uses influence techniques that further that end, should we flip the table over in disgust that they tried to influence us? That'll show them that we're savvy customers that can't be trolled! Or should we welcome them because we want the community to grow? That'll show them that we're worth sticking around.
I will note that I upvoted this post, because in the version that I saw it started off with "Some of your other posts are intelligent" and then show... (read more)
I sometimes feel discriminated against here for not being autistic enough.
Sorry, where does God say this? You are a Christian right? I'm not aware of any verse in either the OT or NT that calls for monogamy. Jacob has four wives, Abraham has two, David has quite a few and Solomon has hundreds. The only verses that seem to say anything negative in this regard are some which imply that Solomon just has way too many. The text strongly implies that polyandry is not ok but polygyny is fine. The closest claim is Jesus's point about how divorcing one woman and then marrying another is adultery, but that's a much more limited claim (it could be that the other woman was unwilling to be a second wife for example). 1 Timothy chapter 3 lists qualifications for being a church leader which include having only one wife. That would seem to imply that having more than one wife is at worst suboptimal.
That is a really good point. (Actually, Jesus made a stronger point than that: even lusting after someone you're not married to is adultery.)
You know, you could actually be right. I'll have to look more carefully. Maybe my understanding has been biased by the culture in which I live. Upvoted for knowledgeable rebuttal of a claim that might not be correct.
WHO I AM: I have 24 years of existence. I give math, chemistry and physics lessons to high school students since 17. I am pretty good at it and I never announced anywhere on planet that I give lessons - all new students appear from recommendations from older students. On the end of 2016 I already had 38 months going to the university, trying to get mechanical engineering credentials. I wasn't interested on the course - I really liked the math and the subjects, but the teachers sucked and the experience was, in general, terrible. I hated my life and was doing it just to look good for my parents - always loved arts and I study classical music since 14. I heard about "artificial intelligence" just once, and I decided all my actions in life should be towards automate the process of learning. I started a MIT Python course and then dropped out university. I am completely passionate about learning.
WHAT I'M DOING: (short-term) I am currently learning and doing beautiful animations with the python library called MANIM (Mathematical ANIMations). I am searching for people to unite forces to transform tens of posts in The Sequences into video content with this library. I h... (read more)
Hello! I'm a first-year graduate student in pure mathematics at UC Berkeley. I've been reading LW posts for awhile but have only recently started reading (and wanting to occasionally add to) the comments. I'm interested in learning how to better achieve my goals, learning how to choose better goals, and "raising the sanity waterline" generally. I have recently offered to volunteer for CFAR and may be an instructor at SPARC 2013.
I can't speak for Emile, but my own views look something like this:
Thus, I would say that I value "most people being able to engage in casual sex". I make no judgement, however, whether "most people should be willing to engage in casual sex". If you value monogamy, then you should be able to engage in monogamous sex, and I can see no reason why anyone could say that your desires are wrong.
(*) As well as many of our most prominent politicians. Heh.
Hello, Less Wrong.
I suppose I should have come here first, before posting anything else, but I didn't come here through the front door. :3 Rather, I was brought here by way of HP:MOR, as I'm sure many newbies were.
My name is Anthony. I'm 21 years old, married, studying Linguistics, and I'm an unapologetic member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.
Should be fun.
Hello, Less Wrong.
My name is Zachary Vance. I'm an undergraduate student at the University of Cincinnati, double majoring in Mathematics and Computer Science--I like math better. I am interested in games, especially board and card games. One of my favorite games is Go.
I've been reading Less Wrong for 2-3 months now, and I posted once or twice under another name which I dropped because I couldn't figure out how to change names without changing accounts. I got linked here via Scott Aaronson's blog Shtetl-Optimized after seeing a debate between him and Eliezer. I got annoyed at Eliezer for being rude, forgot about it for a month, and followed the actual link on Scott's site over here. (In case you read this Eliezer, you both listen to people more than I thought (update, in Bayesian) and write more interesting things than I heard in the debate.) I like paradoxes and puzzles, and am currently trying to understand the counterfactual mugging. I've enjoyed Less Wrong because everybody here seems to read everything and usually carefully think about it before they post, which means not only articles but also comments are simply amazing compared to other sites. It also means I try not to post too much so Less Wrong remains quality.
I am currently applying to work at the Singularity Institute.
OK.
FWIW, I agree that nyan-sandwich's tone was condescending, and that they used vulgar words.
I also think "I suppose they can't be expected to behave any better, we should praise them for not being completely awful" is about as condescending as anything else that's been said in this thread.
Yeah, you're probably right. I didn't mean for that to come out that way (when I used to spend a lot of time on places with low standards, my standards were lowered, too), but that did end up insulting. I'm sorry, nyan_sandwich.
Technically, it's "Christianity" that some of us don't like very much. Many of us live in countries where people who call themselves "Christians" compose much of the population, and going around hating everyone we see won't get us very far in life. We might wish that they weren't Christians, but while we're dreaming we might as well wish for a pony, too.
And, no, we don't ban people for saying that they're Christians. It takes a lot to get banned here.
Well, so far you haven't given us much of a reason to want you gone. Also, people who call themselves atheists usually don't really care whether or not you "hate God" any more than we care about whether you "hate Santa Claus".
Because you feel you have something you want to say?
Do you want a pony?
Greetings, LessWrong!
I'm Saro, currently 19, female and a mathematics undergraduate at the University of Cambridge. I discovered LW by the usual HP:MoR route, though oddly I discovered MoR via reading EY's website, which I found in a Google search about Bayes' once. I'm feeling rather fanatical about MoR at the moment, and am not-so-patiently awaiting chapter 78.
Generally though, I've found myself stuck here a lot because I enjoy arguing, and I like convincing other people to be less wrong. Specifically, before coming across this site, I spent a lot of time reading about ways of making people aware of their own biases when interpreting data, and effective ways of communicating statistics to people in a non-misleading way (I'm a big fan of the work being done by David Spiegelhalter). I'm also quite fond of listening to economics and politics arguments and trying to tear them down, though through this, I've lost any faith in politics as something that has any sensible solutions.
I suspect that I'm pretty bad at overcoming my own biases a lot of the time. In particular, I have a very strong tendency to believe what I'm told (including what I'm being told by this site), I'm particularly... (read more)
Hello fellow Less Wrongians,
My name is Josh and I'm a 16-year-old junior in high school. I live in a Jewish family at the Jersey Shore. I found the site by way of TV Tropes after a friend told me about the Methods of Rationality. Before i started reading Eliezer's posts, i made the mistake of believing I was smart. My goal here is mainly to just be the best that I can be and maybe learn to lead a better life. And by that I mean that I want to be better than everyone else I meet. That includes being a more rational person better able to understand complex issues. I think i have a fair grip on the basic points of rationality as well as philosophy, but i am sorely lacking in terms of math and science (which can't be MY fault obviously, so I'll just go ahead and blame the public school system). I never knew what exactly an logarithm WAS before a few days ago, sadly enough (I knew the term of course, but was never taught what it meant or bothered enough to look it up. I have absolutely no idea what i want to do with my life other than amassing knowledge of whatever i find to be interesting.
I was raised in a conservative household, believing in God but still trying to look at the world r... (read more)
HI, I'm GDC3. Those are my initials. I'm a little nervous about giving my full name on the internet, especially because my dad is googlible and I'm named after him. (Actually we're both named after my grandfather, hence the 3) But I go by G.D. in real life anyway so its not exactly not my name. I'm primarily working on learning math in advance of returning to college right now.
Sorry if this is TMI but you asked: I became an aspiring rationalist because I was molested as a kid and I knew that something was wrong, but not what it was or how to stop it, and I figure that if I didn't learn how the world really worked instead of what people told me, stuff like that might keep happening to me. So I guess my something to protect was me.
My something to protect is still mostly me, because most of my life is still dealing with the consequences of that. My limbic system learned all sorts of distorted and crazy things about how the world works that my neocortex has to spend all of its time trying to compensate for. Trying to be a functional human being is sort of hard enough goal for now. I also value and care about eventually using this information to help other people who've had simi... (read more)
Hi, I'm Taryn. I'm female, 35 and working as a web developer. I started studying Math, changed to Comp Sci and actually did my degree in Cognitive Science (Psychology of intelligence, Neurophysiology, AI, etc) My 3rd year Project was on Cyberware.
When I graduated I didn't see any jobs going in the field and drifted into Web Development instead... but I've stayed curious about AI, along with SF, Science, and everything else too. I kinda wish I'd known about Singularity research back then... but perhaps it's better this way. I'm not a "totally devoted to one subject" kinda person. I'm too curious about everything to settle for a single field of study.
That being said - I've worked in web development now for 11 years. Still, when I get home, I don't start programming, preferring pick up a book on evolutionary biology, medieval history, quantum physics, creative writing (etc) instead. There's just too damn many interesting things to learn about to just stick to one!
I found LW via Harry Potter & MOR, which my sister forwarded to me. Since then I've been voraciously reading my way through the sequences, learning just how much I have yet to learn... but totally fascinated. This site is awesome.
[Hi everyone!]
Hi, I'm Sarah. I'm 21 and going to grad school in math next fall. I'm interested in applied math and analysis, and I'm particularly interested in recent research about the sparse representation of large data sets. I think it will become important outside the professional math community. (I have a blog about that at http://numberblog.wordpress.com/.)
As far as hobbies go, I like music and weightlifting. I read and talk far too much about economics, politics, and philosophy. I have the hairstyle and cultural vocabulary of a 1930's fast-talking dame. (I like the free, fresh wind in my hair, life without care; I'm broke, that's Oke!)
Why am I here? I clicked the link from Overcoming Bias.
In more detail, I'm here because I need to get my life in order. I'm a confused Jew, not a thoroughgoing atheist. I've been a liberal and then a libertarian and now need something more flexible and responsive to reason than either.
Some conversations with a friend, who's a philosopher, have led me to understand that there are some experiences (in particular, experiences he's had related to poverty and death) that nothing in my intellectual toolkit can deal with, and so I've had to reconsider a ... (read more)
Rationalist origin: I discovered the scientific method in highschool and liked the results of its application to previously awkward social situations, so I extended it to life in general. I came up with most of OB's earlier material by myself under different names, or not quite as well articulated, and this community has helped refine my thoughts and fill in gaps.
Found LW: The FireFox add-on StumbleUpon took me to EY's FAQ about the Meaning of Life on 23 October 2005, along with Max More, Nick Bostrom, Alcor, Sentient Developments, the Transhumanism Wikipedia page, and other resources. From there, to further essays, to the sl4 mailing list, to SIAI, to OB, to LW, where I started interacting with the community in earnest in late January 2010 and achieved 1000 karma in early June 2010. Previous to the StumbleUpon treasure trove, I had been ... (read more)
Downvoted, by the way. I want to signal my distaste for being confused for you. Are you using some form of mind-altering substance or are you normally like this? I think you need to take a few steps back. And breathe. And then study how to communicate more clearly, because I think either you're having trouble communicating or I'm having trouble understanding you.
hi everybody,
I'm 22, male, a student and from Germany. I've always tried to "perceive whatever holds the world together in its inmost folds", to know the truth, to grok what is going on. Truth is the goal, and rationality the art of achieving it. So for this reason alone lesswrong is quite appealing.
But in addition to that Yudkowsky and Bostrom convinced me that existential risks, transhumanism , the singularity, etc. are probably the most important issues of our time.
Furthermore this is the first community I've ever encountered in my life that makes me feel rather dumb. ( I can hardly follow the discussions about solomonoff induction, everett-branches and so on, lol, and I thought I was good at math because I was the best one in high school :-) But, nonetheless being stupid is sometimes such a liberating feeling!
To spice this post with more gooey self-disclosure: I was sort of a "mild" socialist for quite some time ( yeah, I know. But, there are some intelligent folks who were socialists, or sort-of-socialists like Einstein and Russell). Now I'm more pro-capitalism, libertarian, but some serious doubts remain. I'm really interested in neuropsychological research of mystic exp... (read more)
Good day I'm a fifteen year-old high school student, Junior, and ended up finding this through the Harry Potter & MOR story, which I thought would be a lot less common to people. Generally I think I'm not that rational of a person, I operate mostly on reaction and violence, and instinctively think of things like 'messages' and such when I have some bad luck; but, I've also found some altruistic passion in me, and I've done all of this self observation which seems contradictory, but I think that's all a rationalization to make me a better person. I also have some odd moods, which split between talking like this, when usually I can't like this at all.
I'd say something about my age group but I can't think of anything that doesn't sound like hypocrisy, so I think I'll cut this off here.
Hi everyone, I've been reading LW for a year or so, and met some of you at the May minicamp. (I was the guy doing the swing dancing.) Great to meet you, in person and online.
I'm helping Anna Salamon put together some workshops for the meetup groups, and I'll be posting some articles on presentation skills to help with that. But in order to do that, I'll need 5 points (I think). Can you help me out with that?
Thanks
Mike
Do you really think it's only a bit overstated? I mean, has anybody been banned for being religious? And has anybody here indicated that they hate Christians without immediately being called on falling into blue vs. green thinking?
From her other posts, AspiringKnitter strikes me as being open-minded and quite intelligent, but that last paragraph really irks me. It's self-debasing in an almost manipulative way - as if she actually wants us to talk to her like we "only want [her] to hate God" or as if we "really hate Christians". Anybody who has spent any non-trivial amount of time on LW would know that we certainly don't hate people we disagree with, at least to the best of my knowledge, so asserting that is not a charitable or reasonable expectation. Plus, it seems that it would now be hard(er) to downvote her because she specifically said she expects that, even given a legitimate reason to downvote.
Hello everyone,
My name is Allison, and I'm 15 years old. I'll be a junior next year. I come from a Christian background, and consider myself to also be a theist, for reasons that I'm not prepared to discuss at the moment... I wish to learn how to view the world as it is, not through a tinted lens that is limited in my own experiences and background.
While I find most everything on this site to be interesting, I must confess a particular hunger towards philosophy. I am drawn to philosophy as a moth is to a flame. However, I am relatively ignorant about pretty much everything, something I'm attempting to fix. I have a slightly above average intelligence, but nothing special. In fact, compared to everyone on this site, I'm rather stupid. I don't even understand half of what people are talking about half the time.
I'm not a science or math person, although I find them interesting, my strengths lie in English and theatre arts. I absolutely adore theatre, not that this really has much to do with rationality. Anyway, I kind of want to get better at science and math. I googled the double slit experiment, and I find it.. captivating. Quantum physics holds a special kind of appeal to me, but unfortunately, is something that I'm not educated enough to pursue at the moment.
My goals are to become more rational, learn more about philosophy, gain a basic understanding of math and science, and to learn more about how to refine the human art of rationality. :)
Hello everyone!
Name: Tuesday Next Age: 19 Gender: Female
I am an undergraduate student studying political science, with a focus on international relations. I have always been interested in rationalism and finding the reasons for things.
I am an atheist, but this is more a consequence of growing up in a relatively nonreligious household. I did experiment with paganism and witchcraft for several years, a rather frightening (in retrospect) display of cognitive dissonance as I at once believed in science and some pretty unscientific things.
Luckily I was able to to learn from experience, and it soon become obvious that what I believed in simply didn't work. I think I wanted to believe in witchcraft both as a method of teenage rebellion and to exert some control over my life. However I was unable to delude myself.
I tried to interest myself in philosophy many times, but often became frustrated by the long debates that seemed divorced from reality. One example is the idea of free will. Since I was a child (I have a memory of trying, when I was in elementary school, of trying to explain this to my parents without success) I have had a conception of reality and free will that seemed fa... (read more)
Hi, AspiringKnitter!
There have been several openly religious people on this site, of varying flavours. You don't (or shouldn't) get downvoted just for declaring your beliefs; you get downvoted for faulty logic, poor understanding and useless or irrelevant comments. As someone who stopped being religious as a result of reading this site, I'd love for more believers to come along. My impulse is to start debating you right away, but I realise that'd just be rude. If you're interested, though, drop me a PM, because I'm still considering the possibility I might have made the wrong decision.
The evaporative cooling risk is worrying, now that you mention it... Have you actually noticed that happening here during your lurking days, or are you just pointing out that it's a risk?
Oh, and dedicating an entire paragraph to musing about the downvotes you'll probably get, while an excellent tactic for avoiding said downvotes, is also annoying. Please don't do that.
Talk of Aumann Agreement notwithstanding, the usual rules of human social intercourse that allow "I am no longer interested in continuing this discussion" as a legitimate conversational move continue to apply on this site. If you don't wish to discuss your religious beliefs, then don't.
The assumption that everyone here is either an atheist or a Christian is already wrong.
Well, for any given conversation about religion, yes. (Obviously, I expect different things if I post a comment about HP:MoR on that thread.)
I expected the last one, since mostly no matter what I do, internet discussions on anything important have a tendency to do that. (And it's not just when I'm participating in them!) I considered any conversions highly unlikely and didn't really expect the interaction to be stopped.
My expectations have changed a lot. After a while I realized that hateful insults weren't happening very much here on Less Wrong, which is awesome, and that the frequency didn't seem to increase with the length of the discussion, unlike other parts of the internet. So I basically assumed the conversation would go on forever. Now, having been told otherwise, I realize that conversations can actually be ended by the participants without one of these things happening.
That was a failure on my part, but would have correctly predicted a lot of the things I'd experienced in the past. I just took an outside view when an inside view would have been better because it really is different this time. That failure is adequately explained by the use of the outside view heuristic, which is usually useful, and the fact that I ended up in a new situation which lacked the characteristics that caused what I observed in the past.
How would gwern, Alicorn or NancyLebowitz confirm that anything I said by phone meant AspiringKnitter isn't Will Newsome? They could confirm that they talked to a person. How could they confirm that that person had made AspiringKnitter's posts? How could they determine that that person had not made Will Newsome's posts?
I don't think you'll be actively hated here by most posters (and even then, flamewars and trolling here are probably not what you'd expect from most other internet spaces)
I wouldn't read polyamory as a primary shared feature of the posters here -- and this is speaking as someone who's been poly her entire adult life. Compared to most mainstream spaces, it does come up a whole lot more, and people are generally unafraid of at least discussing the ins and outs of it.
(I find it hard to imagine how you could manage real immortality in a universe with a finite lifespan, but that's neither here nor there.)
You have to do a lot weirder or more malicious than that to get banned here. I frequently argue inarticulately for things that are rather unpopular here, ... (read more)
I think I just found my new motto in life :-)
I personally am an atheist, and a fairly uncompromising one at that, but I still find this line a little offensive. I don't hate all Christians. Many (or probably even most) Christians are perfectly wonderful people; many of them are better than myself, in fact. Now, I do believe that Christians are disastrously wrong about their core beliefs, and that the privileged position that Christianity enjoys in our society is harmful. So, I disagree with most Christians on this topic, but I don't hate them. I can't hate someone simply for being wrong, that just makes no sense.
That said, if you are the kind of Christian who proclaims, in all seriousness, that (for example) all gay people should be executed because they cause God to send down hurricanes -- then I will find it very, very difficult not to hate you. But you don't sound like that kind of a person.
Hey everyone.
I'm Jandila (not my birth, legal or even everyday name), I'm a 28-year old transgendered woman living in Minnesota. I've been following EY's writings off and on since many years ago on the sl4 mailing list, mostly on the topic of AI; initially I got interested in cognitive architecture and FAI due to a sci-fi novel I've been working on forever. I discovered LW a few years ago but only recently started posting; somehow I missed this thread until just recently.
I've been interested in bias and how people think, and in modifying my own instrumental ability to understand and work around it, for many years. I'm on the autistic spectrum and have many clusters of neurological weirdness; I think this provided an early incentive to understand "how people think" so I could signal-match better.
So far I've stuck around because I like LW's core mission and what it stands for in abstract; I also feel that the community here is a bit too homogenous in terms of demographics for a community with such an ostensibly far-reaching, global goal, and thus want to see the perspective base broadened (and am encouraged by the recent influx of female members).
Hey everyone,
My name is Jennifer Davies. I'm 35 years old and am married with a 3 year old daughter. I live in Kitchener, Ontario, Canada.
Originally a computer programmer, I gave it up after spending a year coding for a bank (around 1997). Motivated by an interest in critical thinking, I earned a BA in Philosophy.
Currently, I'm completing a one year post-grad program to become a Career Development Practitioner. I plan to launch a private practice in 2012 to help people find and live their passions while providing them with the tools to do so.
A friend introduced me to Harry Potter: Methods of Rationality and Less Wrong. I have never enjoyed a piece of reading more than that fanfic -- I even saved a PDF version to introduce to my daughter once she's able to benefit from it.
My main motivations (that I'm aware of) for becoming a member of this community are to: improve my thinking skills (and better understand/evaluate values and motivations), help clients to think more rationally, better encourage independent, critical thought in my daughter.
Although it can be painful at times (for my ego) to be corrected, I appreciate such corrections and the time put into them.
Any tips for teaching young children rationality? I'm at a loss and wonder if I need to wait until she's older.
I've existed for about 24 years, and currently live in Boston.
I regard many of the beliefs popular here - cyronics, libertarianism, human biodiversity, pickup artistry - with extreme skepticism. (As if in compensation, I have my own unpopular frameworks for understanding the world.) I find the zeitgeist here to be interestingly wrong, though, because almost everyone comes from a basically sane starting point - a material universe, conventionally "Western" standards of science, reason, and objectivity - and actively discusses how they can regulate their beliefs to adhere to these. I have an interest in achieving just this kind of regulation (am a "rationalist",) and am aware that it's epistemically healthy to expose myself to alternative points of view expressed in a non-crazy way. So hopefully the second aspect will reinforce the first.
As for why I'm a rationalist, I don't know, and the question doesn't seem particularly interesting to me. I regard it beyond questions of justification, like other desires.
Hi all, I'm Jen, an Australian Jewish atheist, and an student in a Computer Science/Linguistics/Cognitive Science combined degree, in which I am currently writing a linguistics thesis. I got here through recommendations from a couple of friends who visit here and stayed mostly for the akrasia and luminosity articles (hello thesis and anxiety/self-esteem problems!) Oh and the other articles too, but the ones I've mentioned are the ones that I've put the most effort into understanding and applying. The others are just interesting and marked for further processing at some later time.
I think I was born a rationalist rather than becoming one - I have a deep-seated desire for things to have reasons that make sense, by which I mean the "we ran some experiments and got this answer" kind of sense as opposed to the "this validates my beliefs" kind of sense. Although having said that I'm still prey to all kinds of irrationality, hence this site being helpful.
At some point in the future I would be interested in writing something about linguistic pragmatics - it's basically another scientific way of looking at communication. There's a lot of overlap between pragmatics and the ideas I've seen here on status and signalling, but it's all couched in different language and emphasises different parts, so it may be different enough to be helpful to others. But at the moment I have no intention of writing anything beyond this comment (hello thesis again!), the account is mostly just because I got sick of not being able to upvote anything.
I have a private message, dated 7 October, from an account with "less than five comments and [...] over 20 karma", which begins, "I'm Will_Newsome, this is one of my alts." (Emphasis mine.)
Will, I'm sorry it's turning out like this. I am not perfect myself; anyone who cares may look up users "Bananarama" and "OperationPaperclip" and see my own lame anonymous humor. More to the point, I do actually believe that you want to "keep the stars from burning down", and you're not just a troll out to waste everyone's time. The way I see it, because you have neither a job to tie you down, nor genuine intellectual peers and collaborators, it's easy to end up seeking the way forward via elaborate crazy schemes, hatched and pursued in solitude; and I suspect that I got in the way of one such scheme, by asserting that AK is you.
I'm confused. What happened overnight that made people suddenly start appreciating Will's advocacy of his own trolling here and the surrounding context? -5 to +7 is a big change and there have been similar changes to related comments. Either someone is sockpuppeting or people are actually starting to appreciate this crap. (I'm really hoping the former!)
Edit: And now it is back to -3. How bizarre!
I suspect that the reason for this is that the comment tree of which your post was a branch of is hidden by default, as it originates from a comment with less than -3 karma.
Um, on another note, could you just be less mean? 'Mean' seems to be the most accurate descriptor for posting trash that people have to downvote to stay hidden, after all.
Stick around. Your contributions are fine. Not everyone will be accusatory like nyan_sandwich.
Read through the Sequences and comment on what seems good to you.
In addition to what APMason said, I think that many Christians would disagree with your second statement:
Some of them are campaigning right now on the promise that they will "police people's morals"...
EY has read With Folded Hands and mentioned it in his CEV writeup as one more dystopia to be averted. This task isn't getting much attention now because unfriendly AI seems to be more probable and more dangerous than almost-friendly AI. Of course we would welcome any research on preventing almost-friendly AI :-)
Not everyone agrees with Eliezer on everything; this is usually not that explicit, but consider e.g. the number of people talking about relationships vs. the number of people talking about cryonics or FAI - LW doesn't act, collectively, as if it really believes Eliezer is right. It does assume that there is no God/god/supernatural, though.
(Also, where does this idea of atheists hating God come from? Most atheists have better things to do than hang on /r/atheism!)
For my own part, I think you're treating "being nice" and "liking the Christian God" and "hating Christians" and "wanting other people to hate God" and "only wanting other people to hate God" and "forcibly exterminating all morality" and various other things as much more tightly integrated concepts than they actually are, and it's interfering with your predictions.
So I suggest separating those concepts more firmly in your own mind.
To be fair, I'm sure a bunch of people here disapprove of some actions by the Christian God in the abstract (mostly Old Testament stuff, probably, and the Problem of Evil). But yeah, for the most part LWers are pretty nice, if a little idiosyncratic!
Azathoth (the "blind idiot god") is the local metaphor for evolution - a pointless, monomaniacal force with vast powers but no conscious goal-seeking ability and thus a tendency to cause weird side-effects (such as human culture).
Azathoth is how Eliezer described the process of evolution, not how he described the christian god.
Hi, my handle is gscshoyru (gsc for short), and I'm new here. I found this site through the AIBox experiment, oddly enough -- and I think I got there from TVTropes, though I don't remember. After reading the fiction, (and being vaguely confused that I had read the NPC story before, but nothing else of his, since I'm a fantasy/sci-fi junkie and I usually track down authors I like), I started reading up on all of Eliezer's writings on rationality. And found it made a lot of sense. So, I am now a budding rationalist, and have decided to join this site because it is awesome.
That's how I found you -- as for who I am and such, I am a male 22-year-old mathematics major/CS minor currently working as a programmer in New Jersey. So, that's me. Hi everyone!
Basically, no. If you want to criticize people for being rude to you just don't operate by Crocker's rules. Make up different ones.
A lot of intelligent folks have to spend a lot of energy trying not to be rude, and part of the point of Crocker's Rules is to remove that burden by saying you won't call them on rudeness.
Being honest and having reasonable expectations of being treated like a troll does not disqualify a post from being a troll.
Classic troll opening. Challenges us to take the post seriously. Our collective 'manhood' is threatened if react normally (eg saying "trolls fuck off").
Insulting straw man with a side of "you are an irrational cult".
"Seriously, I'm one of you guys". Concern troll disclaimer. Classic.
Again undertones of "you are a cult and you must accept my medicine or turn into a cult". Again we are challenged to take it seriously.
I didn't quite understand this part, but again, straw man caricature.
... (read more)Hello, Less Wrong!
I'm Bill McGrath. I'm 22 years old, Irish, and I found my way here, as with many others, from TVTropes and Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality.
I'm a composer and musician, currently entering the final year of my undergrad degree. I have a strong interest in many other fields - friends of mine who study maths and physics often get grilled for information on their topics! I was a good maths student in school, I still enjoy using maths to solve problems in my other work or just for pleasure, and I still remember most of what I learned. Probablity is the main exception here - it wasn't my strongest area, and I've forgotten a lot of the vocabulary, but it's the next topic I intend to study when I get a chance. This is proving problematic in my understanding of the Bayesian approach, but I'm getting there.
I've been working my way through the core sequences, along with some scattered reading elsewhere on the site. So far, a lot of what I've encountered has been ideas that are familiar to me, and that I try to use when debating or discussing ideas anyway. I've held for a while now that you have to be ready to admit your mistakes, not be afraid of being wrong som... (read more)
Hi, I'm Lincoln. I am 25; I live and work in Cambridge, MA. I currently build video games but I'm going to start a Ph.D program in Computer Science at the local university in the fall.
I identified rationality as a thing to be achieved ever since I knew there was a term for it. One of the minor goals I had since I was about 15 was devising a system of morality which fit with my own intuitions but which was consistent under reflection (but not in so many words). The two thought experiments I focused on were abortion and voting. I didn't come up with an answer, but I knew that such a morality was a thing I wanted -- consistency was important to me.
I ran across Eliezer's work 907 days ago reading a Hacker News post about the AI-box experiment, and various other Overcoming Bias posts that were submitted over the years. I didn't immediately follow through on that stuff.
But I became aware of SIAI about 10 months ago, when rms on Hacker News linked an interesting post about the Visiting Fellows program at SIAI.
I think I had a "click" moment: I immediately saw that AI was both an existential risk and major opportunity, and I wanted to work on these things to save the world. I fol... (read more)
Hello, I'm Jeff, I found this site via a link on an XKCD forum post, which also included a link to the Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality fan-fic. I read the book first (well, what has been written so far, I just couldn't stop!) and decided that whoever wrote that must be made of pure awesome, and I was excited to see what you all talked about here.
After some perusal, I decided I had to respond to one of the posts, which of course meant I had to sign up. The post used keyboard layouts (QWERTY, etc.) as an example of how to rephrase a question properly in order to answer it in a meaningful way. Posting my opinion ended up challenging some assumptions I had about the QWERTY layout and the Dvorak layout, and I am now three and a half hours into learning the Dvorak layout in order to determine which is actually the better layout (based on things I read it seemed a worthwhile endeavor, instead of too difficult like I assumed).
I would have posted this in Dvorak layout, but I only have half the keys down and it would be really, really slow, so I switched back to QWERTY just for this. QWERTY comes out practically as I think it - Dvorak, not so much yet. The speed with which... (read more)
Greetings, fellow thinkers! I'm a 19-year-old undergraduate student at Clemson University, majoring in mathematics (or, as Clemson (unjustifiably) calls it, Mathematical Sciences). I found this blog through Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality about three weeks ago, and I spent those three weeks doing little else in my spare time but reading the Sequences (which I've now finished).
My parents emigrated from the Soviet Union (my father is from Kiev, my mother from Moscow) just months before my birth. They spoke very little English upon their arrival, so they only spoke Russian to me at home, and I picked up English in kindergarten; I consider both to be my native languages, but I'm somewhat more comfortable expressing myself in English. I studied French in high school, and consider myself "conversant", but definitely not fluent, although I intend to study abroad in a Francophone country and become fluent. This last semester I started studying Japanese, and I intend to become fluent in that as well.
My family is Jewish, but none of my relatives practice Judaism. My mother identifies herself as an agnostic, but is strongly opposed to the Abrahamic religions and their co... (read more)
No offense intended, but: If you could take a pill that would prevent all pain from your conscience, and it could be absolutely guaranteed that no one would ever find out, how many twelve-year-olds would you kill for a dollar?
(Perhaps you meant to say that you were mostly egoist, or that your deliberatively espoused moral principles were egoistic?)
PS: Welcome to Less Wrong!
Eliezer, I've been thinking about this a lot. When I backed up and asked myself whether, not why, I realized that
1) I'm no longer sure what "I am an egoist" means, especially given how far my understanding of ethics has come since I decided that, and
2) I derive fuzzies from repeating that back to myself, which strikes me as a warning sign that I'm covering up my own confusion.
I originally wrote this for the origin story thread until I realized it's more appropriate here. So, sorry if it straddles both a bit.
I am, as nearly as I believe can be seen in the present world, an intrinsic rationalist. For example: as a young child I would mock irrationality in my parents, and on the rare occasions I was struck, I would laugh, genuinely, even through tears if they came, because the irrationality of the Appeal to Force made the joke immensely funnier. Most people start out as well-adapted non-rationalists; I evidently started as a maladaptive rationalist.
As an intrinsic (maladaptive) rationalist, I have had an extremely bumpy ride in understanding my fellow man. If I had been born 10 years later, I might have been diagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome. As it was, I was a little different, and never really got on with anyone, despite being well-mannered. A nerd, in other words. Regarding bias, empathic favoritism, willful ignorance, asking questions in which no response will effect subsequent actions or belief confidences, and other peculiarities for which I seem to be an outlier, any knowledge about how to identify and then deal with these peculiarities has been ex... (read more)
I suppose it's high time I actually introduced myself.
Hullo LW! I'm Elizabeth Ellis. That's a very common first name and a very common last name, so if you want to google me, I recommend "relsqui" instead. (I'm not a private person, the handle is just more useful for being a consistently recognizable person online.) I'm 24 and in Berkeley, California, USA. No association with the college; I just live here. I'm a cyclist, an omnivore, and a nontheist; none of these are because of moral beliefs.
I'm a high school dropout, which I like telling people after they've met me, because I like fighting the illusion that formal education is the only way to produce intelligent, literate, and articulate people--or rather, that the only reason to drop out is not being one. In mid-August of this year I woke up one morning, thought for a while about things I could do with my life that would be productive and fulfilling, and decided it would be helpful to have a bachelor's degree. I started classes two weeks later. GEs for now, then a transfer into a communication or language program. It's very strange taking classes with people who were in high school four months ago.
My major area of inte... (read more)
Greetings, all. Found this site not too long ago, been reading through it in delight. It has truly energized my brain. I've been trying to codify and denote a number of values that I held true to my life and to discussion and to reason and logic, but was having the most difficult time. I was convinced I'd found a wonderful place that could help me when it provided me a link to the Twelve Virtues of Rationality, which neatly and tidily listed out a number of things I'd been striving to enumerate.
My origins in rationality basically originated at a very, very young age, when the things adults said and did didn't make sense. Some of it did, as a matter of fact, make more sense once I'd gotten older - but they could have at least tried to explain it to me - and I found that their successes too often seemed more like luck than having anything to do with their reasons for doing things. I suppose I became a rationalist out of frustration, one could say, at the sheer irrationality of the world around me.
I'm a Christian, and have applied my understanding of Rationality to Christianity. I find it holds up strongly, but am not insulted that not everyone feels that way. This site may be... (read more)
My name is Laural, 33-yo female, degree in CS, fetish for EvPsych. Raised Mormon, got over it at 18 or so, became a staunch Darwinist at 25.
I've been reading OvercomingBias on and off for years, but I didn't see this specific site till all the links to the Harry Potter fanfic came about. I had in fact just completed that series in May, so was quite excited to see the two things combined. But I think I wouldn't have registered if I hadn't read the AI Box page, which convinced me that EY was a genius. Personally, I am more interested in life-expansion than FAI. I'm most interested in changing social policy to legalize drugs, I suppose; if people are allowed to put whatever existing substances in their bodies, the substances that don't yet exist have a better chance.
I also found this blog through HP:MoR.
My ultimate social value is freedom, by which I mean the power of each person to control their own life. I believe in something like a utilitarian calculus, where utility is freedom, except that I don't really believe that there is a common scale in which one person's loss of freedom can be balanced by another person's gain. However, I find that freedom is usually very strongly positive-sum on any plausible scale, so this flaw doesn't seem to matter very much.
Of course, freedom in this sense can only be a social value; this leaves it up to each person to decide their own personal values: what they want for their own lives. In my case, I value forming and sustaining friendships in meatspace, often with activities centred around food and shared work, and I also value intellectual endeavours, mostly of an abstract mathematical sort. But this may change with my whims.
I might proselytise freedom here from time to time. There would be no point in proselytising my personal values, however.
Hi all.
I found this site through Methods of Rationality (as I suspect many have, of late). I've been reading through the sequences and archives for a while, and am finally starting to feel up to speed enough to comment here and there.
My name is Sam. I'm a programmer, mostly interested in writing and designing games. Oddly enough, my username derives from my much-neglected blog, which I believe predated this website.
I've always relished discovering that I'm wrong; if there's a better way to consistently improve the accuracy of one's beliefs, I'm not aware of it. So the LW approach makes an awful lot of sense to me, and I'm really enjoying how much concentrated critical thinking is available in the archives.
I'm also polyamorous, and so I'm considering a post or two on how polyamory (and maybe other kinds of alternative sexualities) relates to the practice of rationality. Would there be any interest in that sort of thing? I don't want to drag a pet topic into a place it's unwanted.
Furthermore, I am overfond of parentheses and semicolons. I apologize in advance.
I'm Valerie, 23 and a brand new atheist. I was directed to LW on a (also newly atheist) friend's recommendation and fell in love with it.
Since identifying as an atheist, I've struggled a bit with 'now what?' I feel like a whole new world has opened up to me and there is so much out there that I didn't even know existed. It's a bit overwhelming, but I'm loving the influx of new knowledge. I'm still working to shed old patterns of thinking and work my way into new ones. I have the difficulty of reading something and feeling that I understand it, but not being able to articulate it again (something left over from defending my theistic beliefs, which had no solid basis). I think I just need some practice :)
EDIT: Your link to the series of posts on why LW is generally atheistic is broken. Which makes me sad.
I'm here because of SoullessAutomaton, who is my apartment-mate and long term friend. I am interested in discussing rhetoric and rationality. I have a few questions that I would pose to the group to open up the topic.
1) Are people interested in rhetoric, persuasion, and the systematic study thereof? Does anyone want a primer? (My PhD is in the History and Theory of Rhetoric, so I could develop such a primer.)
2) What would a rationalist rhetoric look like?
3) What would be the goals / theory / overarching observations that would be the drivers behind a rationalist rhetoric?
4) Would a rationalist rhetoric be more ethical than current rhetorics, and if so, why?
5) Can rhetoric ever be fully rational and rationalized, or is the study of how people are persuaded inevitably or inherently a-rational or anti-rational (I would say that rhetoric can be rationalized, but I know too many scholars who would disagree with me here, either explici... (read more)
I'm a 24 year old PhD student of molecular biology. I arrived here trying to get at the many worlds vs copenhagen debate as a nonspecialist, and as part of a sustained campaign of reading that will allow me to tell a friend who likes Hegel where to shove it. I'm also here because I wanted to reach a decision about whether I really want to do biology, if not, whether I should quit, and if I leave, what i actually want to do.
Hello. I've been browsing articles that show up on the front page for about a year now. Just recently started going through the sequences and decided it would be a good time to create an account.
Well, as best I can tell my maintainer didn't install the religion patch, so all I'm working with is the testaments of others; but I have seen quite a variety of such testaments. Buddhism and Hinduism have a typology of religious experience much more complex than anything I've seen systematically laid down in mainline Christianity; it's usually expressed in terms unique to the Dharmic religions, but vipassanā for example certainly seems to qualify as an experiential pointer to Buddhist ontology.
If you'd prefer Western traditions, a phrase I've heard kicked around in the neopagan, reconstructionist, and ceremonial magic communities is "unsubstantiated personal gnosis". While that's a rather flippant way of putting it, it also seems to point to something similar to your experiences.
I appreciate Will's contributions in general. Mostly the insane ones.
They remind me of a friend of mine who is absolutely brilliant but has lived his whole life with severe damage to vital parts of the brain.
The impression I have is that calling Crocker's rules being never acting offended or angry at the way people talk to you, with the expectation that you'll get more information if people don't censor themselves out of politeness.
Some of your reactions here are not those I expect from someone under Crocker's rules (who would just ignore anything insulting or offensive).
So maybe what you consider as "Crocker's rules" is what most people here would consider "normal" discussion, so when you call Crocker's rules, people are extra rude.
I would suggest just dropping reference to Crocker's rules, I don't think they're necessary for having a reasonable discussion, and they they put pressure on the people you're talking to to either call Crocker's rules too (giving you carte blanche to be rude to them), otherwise they look uptight or something.
My experience of LW is that:
Dunno if any of that answers your questions.
I would also say that nobody here has come even remotely close to "insult in every conceivable way" as an operating mode.
How do I insult thee? Let me count the ways.
I insult thee to the depth and breadth and height
My mind can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the lack of Reason and the craft of Bayes.
Do you mean improvement of the information content or the tone? If the former, I think saying "your comment was not informative enough, please explain more" is okay, both publicly and privately. If the latter, I think saying "your comment was not polite enough" is not okay under the spirit of Crocker's rules, neither publicly nor privately, even if the other person has declared Crocker's rules too.
What do you aspire to knit?
Acts 10:9-16:
On the morrow, as they went on their journey, and drew nigh unto the city, Peter went up upon the housetop to pray about the sixth hour:
And he became very hungry, and would have eaten: but while they made ready, he fell into a trance,
And saw heaven opened, and a certain vessel descending upon him, as it had been a great sheet knit at the four corners, and let down to the earth:
Wherein were all manner of fourfooted beasts of the earth, and wild beasts, and creeping things, and fowls of the air.
And there came a voice to him, Rise, Peter; kill, and eat.
But Peter said, Not so, Lord; for I have never eaten any thing that is common or unclean.
And the voice spake unto him again the second time, What God hath cleansed, that call not thou common.
This was done thrice: and the vessel was received up again into heaven.
If you read the rest of the chapter it's made clear that the dream is a metaphor for God's willingness to accept Gentiles as Christians, rather than a specific message about acceptable foods, but abandoning kashrut presumably follows logically from not requiring new Christians to count as Jews first, so.
(Upon rereading this, my first impression is how much creepier s... (read more)
The ten people I care about most in the world all happen to be Christians - devout, sincere Christians at that.
Hi, I've been hanging around for several months now and decided to join. My name is John and I found the site (I believe) via a link on CommonSenseAtheism to How to actually change your mind. I read through many of those posts and took notes and resonated with a lot. I loved EY's Twelve Virtues and the Litany of Gendlin.
I'm a graduate in mechanical engineering and work as one today. I don't know that I would call myself a rationalist, but only because I haven't perhaps become one. In other words, I want to be but do not consider myself to be well-versed in rationalist methods and thought compared to posts/comments I read here.
To close, I was brought to this site in a round-about way because I have recently de-converted from Catholicism (which is what took me to CSA). I'm still amidst my "quest" and blog about it HERE. I would say I'm not sure god doesn't exist or that Christianity is false, but the belief is no longer there. I seek to be as certain and justified I can in whatever beliefs I hold. LessWrong has seemed to be a good tool toward that end. I look forward to continuing to learn and want to take this opportunity to begin participating more.
Note: I also post as "Hendy" on several other blogs. We are the same.
Hello!
I work in a semi-technical offshoot of (ducks!) online marketing. I've always had rationalist tendencies, and reading the material on this website has had a "coming home" feeling for me. I appreciate the high level of discourse and the low levels of status-seeking behaviors.
I am female, and I read with interest the discussion on gender, but unfortunately I do not think I can contribute much to that topic, because I have been told repeatedly that I am "not like other women." I certainly don't think it would be a good idea to generalize from my example what other women think or feel (although to be honest the same could be said about my ability to represent the general populace).
I found my way here through the Harry Potter story, which a friend sent to me knowing that I would appreciate the themes. I am enjoying it tremendously.
Yup, our only flaw is modesty.
My name's Axel Glibert. I'm 21, I just finished studying Biology and now I'm going for a teaching job. I found this wonderful site through hp and the methods of rationality and it has been an eyeopener for me.
I've been raised in a highly religious environment but it didn't take very long before I threw that out of the window. Since then I had to make my own moral rules and attempts at understanding how the universe works. My firsts "scientific experiments" were rather ineffective but it caused me to browse through the science section of the local library... and now, more then a decade later, here I am!
I have long thought I was the only one to so openly choose Science over Religion (thinking even scientists were secretly religious because it was the "right thing to do") but then I found Less Wrong filled with like-minded people! For the past 3 months I've been reading through the core sequences on this site and now I've finally made an account. I'm still too intimidated by the sheer brilliance of some of the threads here to actually post but that's just more motivation for me to study on my own.
I'm Floris Nool a 24 year old recently graduated Dutch ex-student. I came across this site while reading Harry's new rational adventures, which I greatly enjoy by the way. I must say I'm intrigued by several of the subjects being talked about here. Although not everything makes sense at first and I'm still working my through the immense amounts of interesting posts on this site, I find myself endlessly scrolling through posts and comments.
The last few years I increasingly find myself trying to understand things, why they are like they are. Why I act like I do etc. Reading about the greater scientific theories and trying to relate to them in everyday life. While I do not understand as much as I want to, and probably never will seeing the amounts of information and theories out there, I hope to come to greater understanding of basically everything.
It's great to see so many people talking about these subjects, as in daily life hardly anyone seems to think about it like I do. Which can be rather frustrating when trying to talk about what I find interesting subjects.
I hope to be able to some day contribute to the community as I see other posters do, but until I feel comfortable enough about my understanding of everything going on here I will stay lurking for a while. Only having discovered the site two days ago doesn't exactly help.
I recently found Less Wrong through Eliezer's Harry Potter fanfic, which has become my second favorite book. Thank you so much Eliezer for reminding my how rich my Art can be.
I was also delighted to find out (not so surprisingly) that Eliezer was an AI researcher. I have, over the past several months, decided to change my career path to AGI. So many of these articles have been helpful.
I have been a rationalist since I can remember. But I was raised as a Christian, and for some reason it took me a while to think to question the premise of God. Fortunately as soon as I did, I rejected it. Then it was up to me to 1) figure out how to be immortal and 2) figure out morality. I'll be signing up for cryonics as soon as I can afford it. Life is my highest value because it is the terminal value; it is required for any other value to be possible.
I've been reading this blog every day since I've found it, and hope to get constant benefit from it. I'm usually quiet, but I suspect the more I read, the more I'll want to comment and post.
Hello! I'm Sam. I'm 17, a newly minted high school graduate, and I'll be heading off to Reed College in Portland, Oregon next month.
I discovered Less Wrong through a link (whose origin I no longer remember) to "A Fable of Science and Politics" a couple of months ago. The post was rather striking, and the site's banner was alluring, so I clicked on it. The result, over the past couple of months, has been a massive accumulation of bookmarks (18 directly from Less Wrong at the time of this writing) accompanied by an astonishing amount of insight.
This place is probably the most intellectually stimulating site I've ever found on the internet, and I'm very much looking forward to discovering more posts, as well as reading through the ones I've stored up. I have, until now, mostly read bits and pieces that I've seen on the main page or followed links to, partially because I haven't had time and partially because some of the posts can be intimidatingly academic (I don't have the math and science background to understand some of what Eliezer writes about), but I've made this account and plan to delve into the Sequences shortly.
To some degree, I think I've always been a rationa... (read more)
Hi. I'm Cole from Maryland. I found this blog through a list of "greatest blogs of the year." I've forgot who published that list.
I'm in my 23rd year. I value happiness and work to spread it to others. I've been reading this blog for about a month. I enjoy reading blogs like this, because I'm searching for a sustainable lifestyle to start after college.
Cheers
My name is Taiyo Inoue. I am a 32, male, father of a 1 year old son, married, and a math professor. I enjoy playing the acoustic guitar (American primitive fingerpicking), playing games, and soaking up the non-poisonous bits of the internet.
I went through 12 years of math study without ever really learning that probability theory is the ultimate applied math. I played poker for a bit during the easy money boom for fun and hit on basic probability theory which the 12 year old me could have understood, but I was ignorant of the Bayesian framework for epistemology until I was 30 years old. This really annoys me.
I blame my education for leaving me ignorant about something so fundamental, but mostly I blame myself for not trying harder to learn about fundamentals on my own.
This site is really good for remedying that second bit. I have a goal to help fix the first bit -- I think we call it "raising the sanity waterline".
As a father, I also want to teach my son so he doesn't have the same regret and annoyance at my age.
I go by Clarisse and I'm a feminist, sex-positive educator who has delivered workshops on both sexual communication and BDSM to a variety of audiences, including New York’s Museum of Sex, San Francisco’s Center for Sex and Culture, and several Chicago universities. I created and curated the original Sex+++ sex-positive documentary film series at Chicago’s Jane Addams Hull-House Museum; I have also volunteered as an archivist, curator and fundraiser for that venerable BDSM institution, the Leather Archives & Museum. Currently, I'm working on HIV mitigation in southern Africa. I blog at clarissethorn.wordpress.com and Twitter at @clarissethorn.
Besides sex, other interests include gaming, science fiction and fantasy, and housing cooperatives.
I've read some posts here that I thought had really awful attitudes about sexuality and BDSM in particular, so I'm sure I'll be posting about those. I would like it if people were more rational about sex, inasmuch as we can be.
Eh, I'm smart too. Looks to me like you were right the first time and need to have greater confidence in yourself.
Ignoring the more obvious jokes people make in introduction posts: Hi. My name is Robin. I grew up in the Eastern Time Zone of the United States, and have lived in the same place essentially all my life. I was homeschooled by secular parents - one didn't discuss religion and the other was agnostic - with my primary hobby being the reading of (mostly) speculative fiction of (mostly) quite high quality. (Again, my parent's fault - when I began searching out on my own, I was rather less selective.) The other major activity of my childhood was participation in the Boy Scouts of America.
I entered community college at the age of fifteen with an excellent grounding in mathematics, a decent grounding in physics, superb fluency with the English language (both written and spoken), and superficial knowledge of most everything else. After earning straight As for three years, I applied to four-year universities, and my home state university offered me a full ride. At present, I am a graduate student in mechanical engineering at the same institution.
In the meantime, I have developed an affection for weblogs, web comics, and online chess, much to the detriment of my sleep schedule and work ethic.... (read more)
Hey everyone,
My name is Owen, and I'm 17. I read HPMOR last year, but really got into the Sequences and additional reading (GEB, Thinking Fast and Slow, Influence) around this summer.
I'm interested in time management, with respect to dealing with distractions, especially with respect to fighting akrasia. So I'm trying to use what I know about how my own brain operates to create a suite of internalized beliefs, primers, and defense strategies for when I get off-track (or stopping before I get to that point).
Personally, I'm connected with a local environme... (read more)
Wikipedia and Google seem to think Eliezer is the authority on Crocker's Rules. Quoting Eliezer on sl4 via Wikipedia:
Also, from our wiki:
Looking hard for another source, something called the DoWire Wiki has this unsourced:
... (read more)I know Will Newsome in real life. If a means of arbitrating this bet is invented, I will identify AspiringKnitter as being him or not by visual or voice for a small cut of the stakes. (If it doesn't involve using Skype, telephone, or an equivalent, and it's not dreadfully inconvenient, I'll do it for free.)
More sex does not have to mean more casual sex. There are lots of people in committed relationships (marriages) that would like to have more-similar sex drives. Nuns wouldn't want their libido increased, but it's not only for the benefit of the "playahs" either.
Also, I think the highest-voted comment ("I don't think that any relationship style is the best (...) However, I do wish that people were more aware of the possibility of polyamory (...)") is closer to the consensus than something like "everyone should have as many partners ... (read more)
Hello Lesswrong
I am a nameless, ageless, genderless internet-being who may sometimes act like a 22 year old male from canada. I have always been quite rational and consciously aiming to become more rational, though I had never read any actual discussion of rationality, unless you count cat-v. I did have some possibly wrong ideas that I protected with anti-epistemology, but that managed to collapse on its own recently.
I got linked to lesswrong from reddit. I didn't record the details so don't ask. I do remember reading a few lesswrong articles and thinking ... (read more)
Hello LessWrong!
My name is Michelle. I am from the United States and am entering college this August. I am a graphic design student who is also interested in public speaking. I was lead to this site one day while browsing fanfiction. I am an avid reader and spend a good percentage of my life reading novels and other literature. I read HPMOR and found the story intriguing and the theories very interesting. When I finally reached the end, I read the author's page and realized that I could find more information on the ideas presented in the book. Naturally, ... (read more)
Hello Less wrong.
I've been reading Yudkowsky for a while now. I'm a philosophy major from NJ and he's been quite popular around here since I showed some of my friends three worlds collide. I am here because I think I can offer this forum new and well considered views on cognition, computability, epistemology, ontology, valid inference in general and also have my views kicked around a bit. Hopefully our mutual kicking around of each others views will toughen them up for future kicking battles.
I have studied logic at high levels, and have an intricate und... (read more)
Hi
Didn't realise that this thread existed, so this 'hello' is after 20 or so posts. Oh well! I found Less Wrong because my brother recommended TVtropes, that linked to Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, and THAT led me back here. I've now recommended this site to my brother, completing the circle.
I've always been interested in rationality, I guess: I wouldn't identify any particular point of 'becoming a rationalist', though I've had times where I've come across ideas that help me be more accurate. Including some on here, actually. There's a secon... (read more)
Hi everyone!
I found this blog by clicking a link on Eliezer's site...which I found after seeing his name in a transhumanist mailing list...which I subscribed to after reading Ray Kurzweil's The Singularity is Near when I was fifteen. I found Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality at the same time, and I've now successfully addicted my 16-year-old brother as well.
I'm 19 and I'm studying nursing in Ottawa. I work as a lifeguard and swim instructor at a Jewish Community Centre. (I'm not Jewish.) I sing in a girls' choir at an Anglican church. (I'm not C... (read more)
Er. For example, it is really hard to communicate here without being totally literal! And people don't get my jokes!:-)
I wasn't complaining. I was trying to point out that the risk of being discriminated against for having Aspergers Syndrome here was very low given the high number of autism spectrum commenters here and the general climate of the site. I thought I was making a humorous point about the uniqueness of Less Wrong, like "We're so different from the rest of the internet; we discriminate against neurotypicals! Take that rest of the world!&quo... (read more)
Hi there,
My name is Lachlan, 25 years old, and I too am a computer programmer. I found less wrong via Eliezer's site; having been linked there by a comment on Charles Stross's blog, if I recall correctly.
I've read through a lot of the LW backlog and generally find it all very interesting, but haven't yet taken the time and effort to try to apply the useful seeming guidelines to my life and evaluate the results. I blame this on having left my job recently, and feeling that I have enough change in my life right now. I worry that this excuse will metamorphose... (read more)
Hi, everyone, you can call me Gigi. I'm a Mechanical Engineering student with a variety of interests ranking among everything from physics to art (unfortunately, I know more about the latter than the former). I've been reading LW frequently and for long sessions for a couple of weeks now.
I was attracted to LW primarily because of the apparent intelligence and friendliness of the community, and the fact that many of the articles illuminated and structured my previous thoughts about the world (I will not bother to name any here, many are in the Sequences).
Wh... (read more)
Hi, I`m Michèle. I'm 22 years old and studying biology in Germany. My parents are atheists and so am I.
I stumbled upon this blog, started reading and couldn't stop reading. Nearly every topic is very interesting for me and I'm really glad I found people to talk about these things! Sometimes I find myself over emotional and unable to get the whole picture of situations. I'm trying to work on that and I hope I could get some insight reading this blog.
Hello.
My name is Dan, and I'm a 30 year old software engineer living in Maryland. I was a mostly lurking member of the Extropian mailing list back in the day and I've been following the progress of the SIAI sporadically since it's founding. I've made a few donations, but nothing terribly significant.
I've been an atheist for half my life now, and as I've grown older I've tended more and more to rational thinking. My wife recently made a comment that she specifically uses rational argument with me much more so than anyone else she has to deal with, even ... (read more)
Name: Karl Smith
Location: Raleigh, North Carolina
Born: 1978
Education: Phd Economics
Occupation: Professor - UNC Chapel Hill
I've always been interested in rationality and logic but was sidetracked for many (12+) years after becoming convinced that economics was the best way to improve the lives of ordinary humans.
I made it to Less Wrong completely by accident. I was into libertarianism which lead me to Bryan Caplan which lead me Robin Hanson (just recently). Some of Robin's stuff convinced me that Cryonics was a good idea. I searched for Cryonics and found ... (read more)
Hi all, my name's Drew. I stumbled upon the site from who-knows-where last week and must've put in 30-40 hours of reading already, so suffice to say I've found the writing/discussions quite enjoyable so far. I'm heavily interested in theories of human behavior on both a psychological and moral level, so most of the subject matter has been enjoyable. I was a big Hofstader fan a few years back as well, so the AI and consciousness discussions are interesting as well.
Anyway, thought I'd pop in and say hi, maybe I'll take part in some conversations soon. Looks like a great thing you've got going here.
Hi, I'm Hrishi, 26, male. I work in air pollution modelling in London. I'm also doing a part-time PhD.
I am an atheist but come from a very religious family background.
When I was 15, I once cried uncontrollably and asked to see God. If there is indeed such a beautiful supreme being then why didn't my family want to meet Him? I was told that their faith was weak and only the greatest sages can see God after a lot of self-afflicted misery. So, I thought nevermind.
I've signed up for cryonics. You should too, or it'll just be 3 of us from LW when we wake up on... (read more)
Atheist by default, rationalist by more recent inclination and training. I found OB via Stumbleupon and followed the yellow brick road to Less Wrong. In the spare time left by schoolwork and OB/LW, I do art, write, cook, and argue with those of my friends who still put up with it.
Will is good-looking, normal-sized, and not at all lumpy. If you must insult people, can you do it in a less wrong way?
Betting money. That is how such things work.
As a semi-militant atheist, I feel compelled to point out that, from my perspective, all interpretations of Proverbs as a practical guide to modern life look about equally silly...
There are places for this debate and they're not this thread. You're being rude.
The boring explanation is that Laoch was taught as the feet of PZ Myers and Hitchens, who operate purely in places open for debate (atheist blogs are not like dinner tables); talk about the arguments of religious people not to them, but to audiences already sympathetic to atheism, and thus care little about principles of charity; and have a beef with religion-as-harmful-organization (e.g. "Hassidic Judaism hurts queers!") and rather often with religious-people-as-outgroup-members (e.g. "Sally says abortion is murder because she's trying to manipulate me!"), which interferes with their beef with religion-as-reasoning-mistake (e.g. "Sadi thinks he can derive knowledge in ways that violate thermodynamics!").
The reading-too-much-HPMOR explanation is that Laoch is an altruistic Slytherin, who wants Knitter to think: "This is a good bunch. Not only are most people nice, but they can swiftly punish jerks. And there are such occasional jerks - I don't have to feel silly about expecting a completely different reaction than I got, it was because bad apples are noisier.".
I would have thought there ain't no such critter as "too much MoR", but after seeing that theory... ;)
I'd be interested to hear more about your understanding of what a computer is, that drives your confidence that being turned into one is a bad thing.
Relatedly, how confident are you that God will never make a computer that acts like you and thinks it is you? How did you arrive at that confidence?
I'm going to scoop TheOtherDave on this topic, I hope he doesn't mind :-/
But first of all, who do you mean by "an em" ? I think I know the answer, but I want to make sure.
From my perspective, a machine that thinks it is me, and that behaves identically to myself, would, in fact, be myself. Thus, I could not be "already dead" under that scenario, until someone destroys the machine that comprises my body (which they could do with my biological body, as well).
There are two scenarios I can think of that help illustrate my point.
1). Let's pretend that you and I know each other relatively well, though only through Less Wrong. But tomorrow, aliens abduct me and replace me with a machine that makes the same exact posts as I normally would. If you ask this replica what he ate for breakfast, or how he feels about walks on the beach, or whatever, it will respond exactly as I would have responded. Is there any test you can think of that will tell you whether you're talking to the real Bugmaster, or the replica ? If the answer is "no", then how do you know th... (read more)
That's a REALLY good response.
An em would be a computer program meant to emulate a person's brain and mind.
If you create such a mind that's just like mine at this very moment, and take both of us and show the construct something, then ask me what you showed the construct, I won't know the answer. In that sense, it isn't me. If you then let us meet each other, it could tell me something.
Because this means I could believe that Bugmaster is comfortable and able to... (read more)
If it helps, I've read Nagel, and would have gotten the bat allusion. (Dan Dennett does a very entertaining riff on "What is it like to bat a bee?" in response.)
But I consider the physics of qualia to be kind of irrelevant to the conversation we're having.
I mean, I'm willing to concede that in order for a computer program to be a person, it must be able to feel things in italics, and I'm happy to posit that there's some kind of constraint -- label it X for now -- such that only X-possessing systems are capable of feeling things in italics.
Now, maybe the physics underlying X is such that only systems made of protoplasm can possess X. This seems an utterly unjustified speculation to me, and no more plausible than speculating that only systems weighing less than a thousand pounds can possess X, or only systems born from wombs can possess X, or any number of similar speculations. But, OK, sure, it's possible.
So what? If it turns out that a computer has to be made of protoplasm in order to possess X, then it follows that for an upload to be able to feel things in italics, it has to be an upload running on a computer made of protoplasm. OK, that's fine. It's just an engineer... (read more)
Hello, Less Wrong.
I am Russian, atheistic, 27, trying to be rational.
Initially I came here to read a through explanation of Bayes theorem, but noticed that LessWrong contains a lot more than that and decided to stay for a while.
I am really pleased by quality of material and pleasantly surprised by quality of comments. It is rare to see useful comments on the Internet.
I am going to read at least some sequences first and comment if I have something to say. Though, I know I WILL be sidetracked by HP:MoR and "Three worlds collide". Well, my love for SF always got me.
Salutations, Less Wrong.
I'm an undergraduate starting my third year at the University of Toronto (in Toronto, Ontario, Canada), taking the Software Engineer specialist program in Computer Science.
I found Less Wrong through a friend, who found it through Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, who found that through me, and I found HP: MoR through a third friend. I'm working my way through the archive of Less Wrong posts (currently in March of 2009).
On my rationalist origins: One of my parents has a not-insignificant mental problem that result in subtl... (read more)
I'm 17 and I'm from Australia.
I've always been interested in science, learning, and philosophy. I've had correct thinking as a goal in my life since reading a book by John Stossel when I was 13.
I first studied philosophy at school in grade 10, when I was 14 and 15. I loved the mind/body problem, and utilitarianism was the coolest thing ever. I had great fun thinking about all these things, and was fairly good at it. I gave a speech about the ethics of abortion last year which I feel really did strike to the heart of the matter, and work as a good use of ra... (read more)
Hello, people.
I first found Less Wrong when I was reading sci-fi stories on the internet and stumbled across Three Worlds Collide. As someone who places a high value on the ability to make rational decisions, I decided that this site is definitely relevant to my interests. I started reading through the sequences a few months ago, and I recently decided to make an account so that I could occasionally post my thoughts in the comments. I generally only post things when I think I have something particularly insightful to say, so my posts tend to be infrequent... (read more)
Okay. Demographics. Boring stuff. Just skip to the next paragraph. I’m a masters student in mathematics (hopefully soon-to-be PhD student in economics). During undergrad, I majored in Biology, Economics and Math, and minored in Creative Writing (and nearly minored in Chemistry, Marine Science, Statistics and PE) … I’ll spare you the details, but most of those you won’t see on my resume for various reasons. Think: Master of None, not Omnidisciplinary Scientist.
My life goal is to write a financially self-sustainable computer game… for reasons I’ll keep secre... (read more)
Hi LW,
My name's Dan LaVine. I forget exactly how I got linked here, but I haven't been able to stop following internal links since.
I'm not an expert in anything, but I have a relatively broad/shallow education across mathematics and the sciences and a keen interest in philosophical problems (not quite as much interest in traditional approaches to the problems). My tentative explorations of these problems are broadly commensurate with a lot of the material I've read on this site so far. Maybe that means I'm exposing myself to confirmation bias, but so ... (read more)
Hello, community. I'm another recruit from Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality. After reading the first few chapters and seeing that it lacked the vagueness, unbending archetypes, and overt because the author says so theme that usually drives me away from fiction, then reading Less Wrong's (Eliezer's?) philosophy of fanfiction, I proceeded to read through the Sequences.
After struggling with the question of when I became a rationalist, I think the least wrong answer is that I just don't remember. I both remember less of my childhood than others seem... (read more)
deleted
Huh, I guess I should have come here earlier...
I'm Lorenzo, 31, from Madrid, Spain (but I'm Italian). I'm an evolutionary psychologist, or try to be, working on my PhD. I'm also doing a Master's Degree in Statistics, in which I discovered (almost by accident) the Bayesian approach. As someone with a longstanding interest in making psychology become a better science, I've found this blog a very good place for clarifying ideas.
I've been a follower of Less Wrong after reading Eliezer's essays on Bayesian reasoning some 3-4 months ago. I've known the Bayes t... (read more)
Bueno! I'm Jason from San Antonio, Texas. Nice to say 'hi' to all you nice people! (Nice, also, to inflate the number of comments for this particular post - give the good readers of Less Wrong an incrementally warmer feeling of camaraderie.)
I've been reading Overcoming Bias and Less Wrong for over a year since I found a whole bunch of discussions on quantum mechanics. I've stayed for the low, low cost intellectual gratification.
I (actually, formally) study physics and math, and read these blogs to the extent that I feel smarter...also, because the admitted... (read more)
Hi everyone!
I'm graduating law school in May 2010, and then going to work in consumer law at a small firm in San Francisco. I'm fascinated by statistical political science, space travel, aikido, polyamory, board games, and meta-ethics.
I first realized that I needed to make myself more rational when I bombed an online confidence calibration test about 6 years ago; it asked me to provide 95% confidence intervals for 100 different pieces of numerical trivia (e.g. how many nukes does China have, how many counties are in the U.S., how many species of spiders a... (read more)
Hello All,
my name is Markus, and just decided, after, well, years? of lurk-jumping from sl4 to OvercomingBias to LessWrong that maybe I should participate in the one or another discussion; not doing so seems to lead to constant increase of things I have a feeling I know but actually fall flat on the first occasion of another person posing a question.
The process of finding to (then non-existing) LW started during senior high, when I somehow got interested into philosophy, soon enough into AI. The interest in AI lead to interest in Weiqi (Chess was publicly ... (read more)
However intelligent he is, he fails to present his ideas so as to gradually build a common ground with lay readers. "If you're so smart, how come you ain't convincing?"
The "intelligent design" references on his Wikipedia bio are enough to turn me away. Can you point us to a well-regarded intellectual who has taken his work seriously and recommends his work? (I've used that sort of bridging tactic at least once, Dennett convincing me to read Julian Jaynes.)
I found OB through Marginal Revolution, which then led to LW. A few here know me from my previous job as a professional Magic: The Gathering player and writer and full member of the Competitive Conspiracy. That job highly rewarded the rationality I already had and encouraged its development, as does my current one which unfortunately I can't say much about here but which gives me more than enough practical reward to keep me coming back even if I wasn't fascinated ... (read more)
Hello, my friends. I'm a brazilian man, fully blind and gay...
I knew Fanfiction.net, HP MOR and LessWrong. I hope to learn more :)
TL;DR: I found LW through HPMoR, read the major sequences, read stuff by other LWers including the Luminosity series, and lurked for six months before signing up.
My name, as you can see above if you don't have the anti-kibitzing script, Daniel. My story of how I came to self-identify as a rationalist, and then how I later came to be a rationalist, breaks down into several parts. I don't remember the order of all of them.
Since well before I can remember (and I have a fairly good long-term memory), I've been interested in mathematics, and later science. One ... (read more)
Hey, I've been an LW lurker for about a year now, and I think it's time to post here. I'm a cryonicist, rationalist and singularity enthusiast. I'm currently working as a computer engineer and I'm thinking maybe there is more I can do to promote rationality and FAI. LW is an incredible resource. I have a mild fear that I don't have enough rigorous knowledge about rationality concepts to contribute anything useful to most discussion.
LW has changed my life in a few ways but the largest are becoming a cryonicist and becoming polyamorous (naturally leaned toward this, though). I feel like I am in a one-way friendship with EY, does anyone else feel like that?
I used to be an atheist before realizing that was incorrect. I wasn't upset about that; I had been wrong, I stopped being wrong. Is that enough?
I am a video game developer. I find most of this site fairly interesting albeit once in a while I disagree with description of some behaviour as irrational, or the explanation projected upon that behaviour (when I happen to see a pretty good reason for this behaviour, perhaps strategic or as matter of general policy/cached decision).
If you like it than you should have put an upvote on it.
The general impression of the Book of Job seems to be to lower people's opinion of God rather than raise their opinion of trolling.
I hope you're not seeing the options as "keep up with all the threads of this conversation simultaneously" or "quit LW". It's perfectly OK to leave things hanging and lurk for a while. (If you're feeling especially polite, you can even say that you're tapping out of the conversation for now.)
(Hmm, I might add that advice to the Welcome post...)
Please don't consider this patronizing but... the writing style of this comment is really cute.
I think you broke whatever part of my brain evaluates people's signalling. It just gave up and decided your writing is really cute. I really have no idea what impression to form of you; the experience was so unusual that I felt I had to comment.
Thanks to your priming now I can't see "AspiringKnitter" without mentally replacing it with "AspiringKittens" and a mental image of a Less Wrong meetup of kittens who sincerely want to have better epistemic practices. Way to make the world a better place.
You would be surprised... If it weren't for the internet archive much information would have already been lost. Some modern websites are starting to use web design techniques (ajax-loaded content) that break such archive services.
Son, I am disappoint.
Uh...uhm...hello?
"I see that you're trying to extrapolate human volition. Would you like some help ?" converts the Earth into computronium
Welcome! And congratulations for creating what's probably the longest and most interesting introduction thread of all time (I haven't read all the introductions threads, though).
I've read all your posts here. I now have to update my belief about rationality among christians: so long, the most "rational" I'd found turned out to be nothing beyond a repetitive expert in rationalization. Most others are sometimes relatively rational in most aspects of life, but choose to ignore the hard questions about the religion they profess (my own parents fall i... (read more)
Welcome to LessWrong. Our goal is to learn how to achieve our goals better. One method is to observe the world and update our beliefs based on what we see (You'd think this would be an obvious thing to do, but history shows that it isn't so). Another method we use is to notice the ways that humans tend to fail at thinking (i.e. have cognitive bias).
Anyway, I hope you find those ideas useful. Like many communities, we are a diverse bunch. Each of our ultimate goals likely differs, but we recognize that the world is far from how any of us want it to be,... (read more)
Welcome to Less Wrong.
I don't think much people here hate Christians. At least I don't. I'll just speak for myself (even if I think my view is quite shared here) : I have a harsh view on religions themselves, believing they are mind-killing, barren and dangerous (just open an history book), but that doesn't mean I hate the people who do believe (as long as they don't hate us atheists). I've christian friends, and I don't like them less because of their religion. I'm a bit trying to "open their mind" because I believe that knowing and accepting th... (read more)
Salutations, LessWrong!
I am Daniel Peverley, I lurked for a few months and joined not too long ago. I was first introduced to this site via HPatMOR, my first and so far only foray into the world of fan-fiction. I've been raised as a mormon, and I've been a vague unbeliever for a few years, but the information on this site really solidified the doubts and problems I had with my religion. Just knowing how to properly label common logical fallacies has been vastly helpful in my life, and a few of the posts on social dynamics have likewise been of great uti... (read more)
Hi, I've been lurking on Less Wrong for a few months now, making a few comments here and there, but never got around to introducing myself. Since I'm planning out an actual post at the moment, I figured I should tell people where I'm coming from.
I'm a male 30-year-old optical engineer in Sydney, Australia. I grew up in a very scientific family and have pretty much always assumed I had a scientific career ahead of me, and after a couple of false starts, it's happened and I couldn't ask for a better job.
Like many people, I came to Less Wrong from TVTropes vi... (read more)
Hello everybody, I'm Stefano from Italy. I'm 30, and my story about becoming a rationalist is quite tortuous... as a kid I was raised as a christian, but not strictly so: my only obligation was to attend mass every sunday morning. At the same time since young age I was fond of esoteric and scientific literature... With hindsight, I was a strange kid: by the age of 13 I already knew quite a lot about such things as the Order of the Golden Dawn or General Relativity... My fascination with computer and artificial intelligence begun approximately at the same a... (read more)
I started posting a while ago (and was lurking for a while beforehand), and only today found this post.
My parents were both science teachers, and I got an education in traditional rationality basically since birth (I didn't even know it had such a name as "traditional rationality", I assumed it was just how you were supposed to think). I've always used that experimental mindset in order to understand people and the rest of the universe. I'm an undergrad in the Plan II honors program at the University of Texas at Austin, majoring in Chemistry Pre... (read more)
Jeff Kaufman. Working as a programmer doing computational linguistics in the boston area. Found "less wrong" twice: first through the intuitive explanation of bayes' theorem and then again recently through "hp and the methods of rationality". I value people's happiness, valuing that of those close to me more than that of strangers, but I value strangers' welfare enough that I think I have an obligation to earn as much as I can and live on as little as I can so I can give more to charity.
G'day LW Im an Aussie currently studying at the Australian National University in Canberra. My name is Sam and i should point out that the 'G'day' is just for fun, most Australians never use that phase and it kinda makes me cringe.
At at this very moment i'm trying to finish my thesis on the foundations of inductive reasoning, which i guess is pretty relevant to this community. A big part of my thesis is to translate a lot of very technical mathematics regarding Bayesianism and Sollomonoff induction into philosophical and intuitive explanations, so this wh... (read more)
Hey Lesswrong! I'm just going to ramble for a second..
I like art, social sciences, philosophy, gaming, rationality and everything that falls in between. Examples include Go, Evolutionary Psychology, Mafia (aka Werewolves), Improvisation, Drugs and Debate.
See you if I see you!
Heikki, 30, Finnish student of computer engineering. Found Less Wrong by via the IRC-channel of the Finnish Transhumanist Association, which was found by random surfing ("Oh, there's a name for what I am?")
As for becoming a rationalist, I'd say the recipe was no friends and a good encyclopedia... Interest in ideas, unhindered by the baggage of standard social activities. One of the most influential single things was probably finding evolution quite early on. I remember (might be a false memory) having thought it would sure make sense if a horse'... (read more)
Hi everyone.
My name is Alan Godfrey.
I am fascinated by rational debate and logical arguments, and I appear to have struck gold in finding this site! I am the first to admit my own failings in these areas but am always willing to learn and grow.
I'm a graduate of mathematics from Trinity Hall, Cambridge University and probability and statistics have always been my areas of expertise - although I find numbers so much more pleasant to play with than theorems and proofs so bear with me!
I'm also a passive member of Mensa. While most of it does not interest me th... (read more)
My career as a rationalist began when I started doing tech support, and realized the divide between successful troubleshooting and what most customers tried to do. I think the key to "winning" is to challenge your assumptions about how to win, and what winning is. I think that makes me an instrumental rationalist, but I'm not quite sure I understand the term. I'm here because OB and ... (read more)
This community is too young to have veterans. Since this is the first such post, I think we should all be encouraged to introduce ourselves.
Thanks for doing this!
I'm a 20 year old mathematics/music double major at NYU. Mainly here because I want to learn how to wear Vibrams without getting self conscious about it.
We were talking about applying the metaphysics system to making an AI earlier in IRC, and the symbol grounding problem came up there as a basic difficulty in binding formal reasoning systems to real-time actions. It doesn't look like this was mentioned here before.
I'm assuming I'd want to actually build an AI that needs to deal with symbol grounding, that is, it needs to usefully match some manner of declarative knowledge it represents in its internal state to the perceptions it receives from the outside world and to the actions it performs on it. Given th... (read more)
There might not be many people here to who are sufficiently up to speed on philosophical metaphysics to have any idea what a Wheeler-style reality theory, for example, is. My stereotypical notion is that the people at LW have been pretty much ignoring philosophy that isn't grounded in mathematics, physics or cognitive science from Kant onwards, and won't bother with stuff that doesn't seem readable from this viewpoint. The tricky thing that would help would be to somehow translate the philosopher-speak into lesswronger-speak. Unfortunately this'd require some fluency in both.
Hmm, that doesn't sound right. I don't want to make celibate people uncomfortable, I just want to have more casual sex myself. Also I have a weaker altruistic wish that people who aren't "getting any" could "get some" without having to tweak their looks (the beauty industry) or their personality (the pickup scene). There could be many ways to make lots of unhappy people happier about sex and romance without tweaking your libido. Tweaking libido sounds a little pointless to me anyway, because PUA dogma (which I mostly agree with) predicts that people will just spend the surplus libido on attractive partners and leave unattractive ones in the dust, like they do today.
It's not exactly rigorous, but you could try leaving bagels at Christian and Wiccan gatherings of approximately the same size and see how many dollars you get back.