Salutations, Less Wrong,
My name is - surprisingly enough - Joey Goldman. Well, at least that is the name I ask people to call me...but I digress. I am 17 years old and - for the next two weeks - a junior in high school. Despite the fact that I was born and raised in London town, I attend an American school.
I was raised in a quasi-Jewish family. As far as I could tell during my younger childhood, neither of my parents had strong ties to the Jewish faith. Nevertheless, we observed the High Holidays and Shabbat and I was bar mitzvahed. Over time, however, I managed to wean us off any and all Jewry, save Pesach, which serves more as a family/friend reunion meal than anything else.
I never really had a Crisis of Faith, rather I just began to realise that belief in some mythical god figure was not a notion that I ever truly held. I never even considered theism a genuine option: I have never had personal experience with people who really believed. Judaism was always, for us, a matter more of tradition than anything. This is, perhaps, due to the fact that my family's community of friends comprises first generation immigrants from South Africa, for whom the synagogue acts as a community centre.
My father was, at a time, a professor philosophy and literary theory at a university in Israel, so I was always around thinking people. I was always a rationalist in training, but I only recently came to have a label for this feeling I had. Some time in the not so long ago, a friend shared lesswrong with me and I found a real phrontistery: a hub of like-minded (in the not groupthink way) people. I have not looked back since.
My main interests are broad. It would be hard for me to narrow them down beyond philosophy, maths, and (cognitive & physical) science!
I am still working my way through the early posts here. Hopefully I will begin contributing some time soon.
P.S. Looking forward to meeting some of my fellow Londoner's this coming Sunday.
Love some good post hoc ergo propter hoc.