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 sometimes, and take a neutral approach to evidence—allowing any of these to cloud your judgement means you won’t get reliable data. That said, I’ve still learned quite a bit from LW, most importantly how to express these ideas about rationality to other people.
I’m not sure I could pinpoint what moment brought me to this mindset, but it was possibly the moment I understood why the scientific method was about trying to disprove, rather than prove, your hypothesis; or perhaps when I realized that the empiricisist’s obligation to admit when they are wrong was makes them strong. Other things that have helped me along the way—the author Neal Stephenson, the comedian Tim Minchin, and Richard Fenyman.
My other interests, most of which I have no formal training in but I have read about in my own time or have learned about through conversation with friends, include:
-politics—I consider myself to be socially liberal but economically ignorant
-languages (I speak a little German and less Irish, have taken brief courses in other languages), linguistic relativism
-writing, and the correct use of language
-quantum physics (in an interested layman way—I am aware of a lot of the concepts, but I’m by no means knowledgeable)
-psychology
as well as many other things which are less LW-relevant!
Thank you to the founders and contributors to the site who have made it such an interesting collection of thoughts and ideas, as well as a welcoming forum for people to come and learn. I think I’ll learn a lot from it, and hopefully some day I’ll be able to repay the favour!
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 sometimes, and take a neutral approach to evidence—allowing any of these to cloud your judgement means you won’t get reliable data. That said, I’ve still learned quite a bit from LW, most importantly how to express these ideas about rationality to other people.
I’m not sure I could pinpoint what moment brought me to this mindset, but it was possibly the moment I understood why the scientific method was about trying to disprove, rather than prove, your hypothesis; or perhaps when I realized that the empiricisist’s obligation to admit when they are wrong was makes them strong. Other things that have helped me along the way—the author Neal Stephenson, the comedian Tim Minchin, and Richard Fenyman.
My other interests, most of which I have no formal training in but I have read about in my own time or have learned about through conversation with friends, include:
-politics—I consider myself to be socially liberal but economically ignorant
-languages (I speak a little German and less Irish, have taken brief courses in other languages), linguistic relativism
-writing, and the correct use of language
-quantum physics (in an interested layman way—I am aware of a lot of the concepts, but I’m by no means knowledgeable)
-psychology
as well as many other things which are less LW-relevant!
Thank you to the founders and contributors to the site who have made it such an interesting collection of thoughts and ideas, as well as a welcoming forum for people to come and learn. I think I’ll learn a lot from it, and hopefully some day I’ll be able to repay the favour!
-Bill