Hi. I’m a computer science student in Oulu University (Finland).
I don’t remember exactly how I got here, but I guess some of the first posts I read were about counterarguments to religious delial of evolution.
I have been intrested in rationality (along with sciense and technology) for a long time before I found lesswrong, but back then my view of rationality was mostly that it was the opposite of emotion. I still dislike emotions—I guess that it’s because they are so often “immune to reflection” (ie. persistently “out of sync” with what I know to be the right thing to do). However, I’m aware that emotions do have some information value (worse than optimal, but better than nothing) and simply removing emotions from human neuroarchitechture without other changes might result something functionally closer to a rock than a superhuman...
I’m an atheist and don’t believe in non-physical entities like souls, but I still believe in eternal life. This unorthodox view is because 1) I’m a (sort of) “modal realist”: I believe that every logically possible world actually physically exists (it’s the simplest answer I’ve found to the question “Why does anything exist at all?”) and 2) I don’t believe in identity distinct from physical mind state, ie. if a copy was made of my mind, I could not see any way of telling which of them was “me”/”original”, even if one of them was implemented in completely different hardware and/or was separated by large distance/time from my previous position in space-time. The result is that as long as there is a logically possible “successor” mind-state to my current mind-state, “I” will continue to experience “being”.
I’m intrested in politics, but I hope not to become mind-killed by it (or worse: already being mind-killed). If someone is intrested in knowing my political views and is not conserned of killing their mind, I put a short summary here in ROT13: V’z terravfu sne yrsg yvoreny/nanepuvfg, ntnvafg pbclevtug (nf vg pheeragyl vf) naq ntnvafg chavfuzragf. V unir nyfb (gbb znal gb erzrzore ng bapr be yvfg urer) bgure fznyyre aba-znvafgernz cbyvgvpny vqrnf.
I think I’m much better at epistemic rationality than instrumental rationality. I’m bad at getting things done. I’m a pessimist and usually think the bad side of things first, although I’m able to find the good side too if I deliberately search for it. I sometimes make a joke about it: “I’m a pessimist, therefore I’m—unfortunately—more likely than average to be correct.”
I have asperger syndrome and I’m suffering from quite bad OCD. I hope to be able to improve my rationality so that one day I’ll be able to write an article about “how rationality cured my OCD”...
I don’t want to lie to anyone, but I don’t think I’m morally required to say out loud everything I know. However because of many hidden assumptions in human language it is sometimes hard to find words that convey partial information, but not false information. Also in many social situations people are expected to lie and figuring out what to say without lying or causing unnecessary anger is non-trivial. For these reasons I can’t clain to be a perfect non-liar, although I try to. Am I hypocritical in this? - I don’t know.
I have problems at writing text, or to be more specific, figuring out what to write. I think of many different ways of converting my thoughts into text, but they all seem wrong in some way or another, so it takes a long time for me to write nothing and I likely give up. This applies to this post also—I started writing it for the previous welcome thread, and then gave up when the welcome thread started getting old and inactive. So I apologise if reply slowly or not at all. I hope that improving my rationality will help me in this problem also.
I’ve been lurking here for some years now and also had an account for a couple of years. I have several ideas for posts of my own. I don’t know if I ever get to post them, but I at least want to get rid of the trivial inconvience of the karma barrier.
Because there seems to be very smart people here in much greater consentration than in my everyday life, I expect that there may be significant shifts in my views resulting from conversations with you (many changes have already happened just because of reading lesswrong); nothing in this message should be considered as permanet.
I have asperger syndrome and I’m suffering from quite bad OCD. I hope to be able to improve my rationality so that one day I’ll be able to write an article about “how rationality cured my OCD”...
I’m a (sort of) “modal realist”: I believe that every logically possible world actually physically exists (it’s the simplest answer I’ve found to the question “Why does anything exist at all?”)
Edit: and now I take the time to find the relevant EY post, I see he already got halfway to that answer himself. Doesn’t look like anyone’s linked this paper in the comments there, actually.
Hi. I’m a computer science student in Oulu University (Finland).
I don’t remember exactly how I got here, but I guess some of the first posts I read were about counterarguments to religious delial of evolution.
I have been intrested in rationality (along with sciense and technology) for a long time before I found lesswrong, but back then my view of rationality was mostly that it was the opposite of emotion. I still dislike emotions—I guess that it’s because they are so often “immune to reflection” (ie. persistently “out of sync” with what I know to be the right thing to do). However, I’m aware that emotions do have some information value (worse than optimal, but better than nothing) and simply removing emotions from human neuroarchitechture without other changes might result something functionally closer to a rock than a superhuman...
I’m an atheist and don’t believe in non-physical entities like souls, but I still believe in eternal life. This unorthodox view is because 1) I’m a (sort of) “modal realist”: I believe that every logically possible world actually physically exists (it’s the simplest answer I’ve found to the question “Why does anything exist at all?”) and 2) I don’t believe in identity distinct from physical mind state, ie. if a copy was made of my mind, I could not see any way of telling which of them was “me”/”original”, even if one of them was implemented in completely different hardware and/or was separated by large distance/time from my previous position in space-time. The result is that as long as there is a logically possible “successor” mind-state to my current mind-state, “I” will continue to experience “being”.
I’m intrested in politics, but I hope not to become mind-killed by it (or worse: already being mind-killed). If someone is intrested in knowing my political views and is not conserned of killing their mind, I put a short summary here in ROT13: V’z terravfu sne yrsg yvoreny/nanepuvfg, ntnvafg pbclevtug (nf vg pheeragyl vf) naq ntnvafg chavfuzragf. V unir nyfb (gbb znal gb erzrzore ng bapr be yvfg urer) bgure fznyyre aba-znvafgernz cbyvgvpny vqrnf.
I think I’m much better at epistemic rationality than instrumental rationality. I’m bad at getting things done. I’m a pessimist and usually think the bad side of things first, although I’m able to find the good side too if I deliberately search for it. I sometimes make a joke about it: “I’m a pessimist, therefore I’m—unfortunately—more likely than average to be correct.”
I have asperger syndrome and I’m suffering from quite bad OCD. I hope to be able to improve my rationality so that one day I’ll be able to write an article about “how rationality cured my OCD”...
I don’t want to lie to anyone, but I don’t think I’m morally required to say out loud everything I know. However because of many hidden assumptions in human language it is sometimes hard to find words that convey partial information, but not false information. Also in many social situations people are expected to lie and figuring out what to say without lying or causing unnecessary anger is non-trivial. For these reasons I can’t clain to be a perfect non-liar, although I try to. Am I hypocritical in this? - I don’t know.
I have problems at writing text, or to be more specific, figuring out what to write. I think of many different ways of converting my thoughts into text, but they all seem wrong in some way or another, so it takes a long time for me to write nothing and I likely give up. This applies to this post also—I started writing it for the previous welcome thread, and then gave up when the welcome thread started getting old and inactive. So I apologise if reply slowly or not at all. I hope that improving my rationality will help me in this problem also.
I’ve been lurking here for some years now and also had an account for a couple of years. I have several ideas for posts of my own. I don’t know if I ever get to post them, but I at least want to get rid of the trivial inconvience of the karma barrier.
Because there seems to be very smart people here in much greater consentration than in my everyday life, I expect that there may be significant shifts in my views resulting from conversations with you (many changes have already happened just because of reading lesswrong); nothing in this message should be considered as permanet.
Have you read Brain Lock?
Welcome!
I recently saw an answer that’s even simpler: it’s a wrong question!
Edit: and now I take the time to find the relevant EY post, I see he already got halfway to that answer himself. Doesn’t look like anyone’s linked this paper in the comments there, actually.
Ner jr gnyxvat ntnvafg nal chavfuzrag urer, be whfg ivaqvpgvir chavfuzrag?