Hello, I’m Jeff, I found this site via a link on an XKCD forum post, which also included a link to the Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality fan-fic. I read the book first (well, what has been written so far, I just couldn’t stop!) and decided that whoever wrote that must be made of pure awesome, and I was excited to see what you all talked about here.
After some perusal, I decided I had to respond to one of the posts, which of course meant I had to sign up. The post used keyboard layouts (QWERTY, etc.) as an example of how to rephrase a question properly in order to answer it in a meaningful way. Posting my opinion ended up challenging some assumptions I had about the QWERTY layout and the Dvorak layout, and I am now three and a half hours into learning the Dvorak layout in order to determine which is actually the better layout (based on things I read it seemed a worthwhile endeavor, instead of too difficult like I assumed).
I would have posted this in Dvorak layout, but I only have half the keys down and it would be really, really slow, so I switched back to QWERTY just for this. QWERTY comes out practically as I think it—Dvorak, not so much yet. The speed with which I’m picking up the new layout also shatters some other assumptions I had about how long it takes to retrain muscle memory. Turns out, not long at all (at least in this case), though becoming fluent in Dvorak will probably take a while.
I would say I am a budding rationalist, and I hope this site can really speed my education along. If that doesn’t tell you enough about who I am, then I don’t really know what else to say.
Hello, I’m Jeff, I found this site via a link on an XKCD forum post, which also included a link to the Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality fan-fic. I read the book first (well, what has been written so far, I just couldn’t stop!) and decided that whoever wrote that must be made of pure awesome, and I was excited to see what you all talked about here.
After some perusal, I decided I had to respond to one of the posts, which of course meant I had to sign up. The post used keyboard layouts (QWERTY, etc.) as an example of how to rephrase a question properly in order to answer it in a meaningful way. Posting my opinion ended up challenging some assumptions I had about the QWERTY layout and the Dvorak layout, and I am now three and a half hours into learning the Dvorak layout in order to determine which is actually the better layout (based on things I read it seemed a worthwhile endeavor, instead of too difficult like I assumed).
I would have posted this in Dvorak layout, but I only have half the keys down and it would be really, really slow, so I switched back to QWERTY just for this. QWERTY comes out practically as I think it—Dvorak, not so much yet. The speed with which I’m picking up the new layout also shatters some other assumptions I had about how long it takes to retrain muscle memory. Turns out, not long at all (at least in this case), though becoming fluent in Dvorak will probably take a while.
I would say I am a budding rationalist, and I hope this site can really speed my education along. If that doesn’t tell you enough about who I am, then I don’t really know what else to say.