Thought it was about time to do one of these since I’ve made a couple of comments!
My name’s Carl. I’ve been interested in science and why people believe the strange things they believe for many years. I was raised Catholic but came to the conclusion around the age of ten that it was all a bit silly really, and as yet I have found no evidence that would cause me to update away from that.
I studied physics as an undergrad and switched to experimental psychology for my PhD, being more interested at that point in how people work than how the universe does. I started to study motor control and after my PhD and a couple of postdocs I know way more about how humans move their arms than any sane person probably should. I’ve worked in behavioural, clinical and computational realms, giving me a wide array of tools to use when analysing problems.
My current postdoc is coming to an end and a couple of months ago I was undergoing somewhat of a crisis. What was I doing, almost 31 and with no plan for my life? I realised that motor control had started to bore me but I had no real idea what to do about it. Stay in science, or abandon it and get a real job? That hurts after almost a decade of high-level research. And then I discovered, on Facebook, a link to HPMOR. And then I read it all, in about a week. And then I found LW, and a job application for curriculum design for a new rationality institute, and I wrote an email, and then flew to San Francisco to participate in the June minicamp...
And now I’m in the midst of writing some fellowship applications to come to Berkeley and study rationality—specifically how the brain is Bayesian in some ways but not in others, and how that can inform the teaching of rationality. (Or something. It’s still in the planning stages!) I’m also volunteering for CFAR at the moment by helping to find useful papers on rationality and cognitive science, though that’s on somewhat of a back burner since these fellowships are due very soon. Next month, in fact.
I’ve started a new blog: it’s called ‘Joy in the Merely Real’, and at the moment I’m exploring a few ideas about the Twelve Virtues of Rationality and what I think about them. You can find it at:
Hello everyone,
Thought it was about time to do one of these since I’ve made a couple of comments!
My name’s Carl. I’ve been interested in science and why people believe the strange things they believe for many years. I was raised Catholic but came to the conclusion around the age of ten that it was all a bit silly really, and as yet I have found no evidence that would cause me to update away from that.
I studied physics as an undergrad and switched to experimental psychology for my PhD, being more interested at that point in how people work than how the universe does. I started to study motor control and after my PhD and a couple of postdocs I know way more about how humans move their arms than any sane person probably should. I’ve worked in behavioural, clinical and computational realms, giving me a wide array of tools to use when analysing problems.
My current postdoc is coming to an end and a couple of months ago I was undergoing somewhat of a crisis. What was I doing, almost 31 and with no plan for my life? I realised that motor control had started to bore me but I had no real idea what to do about it. Stay in science, or abandon it and get a real job? That hurts after almost a decade of high-level research. And then I discovered, on Facebook, a link to HPMOR. And then I read it all, in about a week. And then I found LW, and a job application for curriculum design for a new rationality institute, and I wrote an email, and then flew to San Francisco to participate in the June minicamp...
And now I’m in the midst of writing some fellowship applications to come to Berkeley and study rationality—specifically how the brain is Bayesian in some ways but not in others, and how that can inform the teaching of rationality. (Or something. It’s still in the planning stages!) I’m also volunteering for CFAR at the moment by helping to find useful papers on rationality and cognitive science, though that’s on somewhat of a back burner since these fellowships are due very soon. Next month, in fact.
I’ve started a new blog: it’s called ‘Joy in the Merely Real’, and at the moment I’m exploring a few ideas about the Twelve Virtues of Rationality and what I think about them. You can find it at:
themerelyreal.blogspot.com
Looking forward to doing more with this community in the coming months and years. :)