Good day, everyone.

I am a chemistry undergraduate from Istanbul, and I am currently doing my double major in Material Engineering. I was born and raised in Istanbul, which is my current place of residence. I have come across LessWrong through my attempts to search for forums of like-minded people, and LessWrong seemed to be a decent choice. I am alien to the forum culture, except for Reddit which is more of a social media platform than anything else.

My journey with rationality is a turbulent one, to say the least. Even if I was able to come to sensible conclusions, I am prone to delude myself in my train of thought. During high school, the beginning of which intersects with the pandemic, the the different worlds of the teacher’s pet and the chronically online individual crashed into each other. The result was not the most pleasing, and it left me with the suspicion that the world is not the well-lubricated machine that I thought it was. And so, I have thought about remedies that I could compliment into the world to a certain extent. At first, I tried to converse with my high school friend, who was Marxist-Leninist. Although I initially subscribed to core ideas of communism, I have come to find that the material that I have needed to read to reach a level that is satisfactory to me was not possible, especially with my lack of reading habit back then.

After a while, the next step that I have tried to take was self-improvement, or at least the self-improvement that contemporary manosphere influencer marketed. It was compelling to do their bidding, as the clear and convincing, yet abrasive, message that existed within that circle compelled my teenage self into jumping into a world of bootstraps-type self-education and boot camp process that was laced with upfront misogyny that I tried to brush off as “it gets views.” This chapter lasted much longer than the former, as the rhetoric of this circle managed to compel me into being stubborn when it comes to habit formation, since a sizeable part of the self-improvement compendium did include good habits such as meditation, physical exercise and journaling, habits that I still do today. The devotion into this sets of habits increased well into the early 2024, where I would employ tactics to overexert myself in ways that would have me at odds with people around me. There was a time when I have genuinely subscribed to their worldview, but it would wane eventually.

One of the key problems with this worldview was that it went at odds with much of the learning profile and philosophy of International Baccaleaureate, of which I was an alumnus to during the climax of my self-improvement escapades. This caused a definite crash in my grades. The fact that it was the salad day of LLMs did not help too. Long story short, I passed, but with the lowest possible grade. Luckily, I was able to mitigate the damage by having a gap year to study for the local exams.

After that, I am here. My primary aims are to, first, get my majors in a way that is admirable. Meanwhile, I am trying to develop a self-improvement system that is independent of the content creation oriented and sentiment-heavy side of the community. I have been trying to make a few adjustments that will hopefully clear out the rhetoric, but the project is still at its prototype stage, to say the least.