I would probably use different words, but I believe I fit Jonah’s description. Before finding LW, I felt strongly isolated. Like, surrounded by human bodies, but intellectually alone. Thinking about topics that people around me considered “weird”, so I had no one to debate them with. Having a large range of interests, and while I could find people to debate individual interests with, I had no one to talk with about the interesting combinations I saw there.
I felt “weird”, and from people around me I usually got two kinds of feedback. When I didn’t try to pretend anything, they more or less confirmed that I am weird (of course, many were gentle, trying not to hurt me). When I tried to play a role of someone “less weird” (that is, I ignored most of the things I considered interesting, and just tried to fit)… well, it took a lot of time and practice to do this correctly, but then people accepted me. So, for a long time it felt like the only way to be accepted would be to supress a large part of what I consider to be “myself”; and I suspect that it would never work perfectly, that there would still be some kind of intellectual hunger.
Then I found LW and I was like: “whoa… there actually are people like me! too bad they are on the other side of the planet though”. Then I found some of them living closer, and… going to meetups feels incredibly refreshing. First time in my life, I don’t have to suppress anything, to play any role. I just am… in an environment that feels natural. I finally started understanding how people can enjoy having social contacts.
Now let’s imagine that in a parallel universe, those LessWrongers who live in a city near to mine, would instead be my neighbors since my childhood, or that we would be classmates at high school. I believe my life would be very different. (I believe there are people like this in my city, but the problem is finding those few dozen individuals among the hundreds of thousands, especially when there is no word in a public vocabulary to describe “us”.)
I can’t the article now, but I believe it was written by Lewis Terman, where he observed how successful are highly intelligent people. He found a difference between those who were “intelligent people in an intelligent environment” and those who were “isolated intelligent people”. The former were usually very successful in life: they could talk with their parents and friends as equals, share their algorithms for life success, fit into their environment. The latter felt isolated, and often burned out at some moment of their lives. The conclusion was that for a highly intelligent person, having similarly highly intelligent family and friends makes a huge difference in their lives. -- When you observe the difference between “academia” and “LessWrong”, it may be related to this.
It is easier to be academically successful when your parents are. You can pick good habits and strategies from them; you can debate your work and problems with them. If you are the only academically inclined person in the family, you lead a double life: the “real life” outside of school, and the “academic life” inside. The more you focus on your work, the more it feels like you are withdrawing from everything else. On the other hand, if you come from the same culture, focusing on the work makes you fit into the culture.
I am going to break a taboo here, but I don’t know how to tell it otherwise. I have IQ about four or five sigma above the average. The difference between me and the average Mensa member is larger that the difference between Mensa and the general population. Many people in Mensa seem kind of dense to me, and average people, those are sometimes like five-years old children. (I believe for many people on LessWrong it feels the same.) Sure, intelligence in not everything: other people have skills and traits that I lack, sometimes have more success than me, and I admire that. It’s just… so difficult to talk with them like with adult people. But when I go to LW meetup, it’s like “whoa… finally a group of adult people, how amazing!”.
But I’m already an old man, relatively speaking. Now I am 39; I found LW when I was 35. Finally I have a company of my peers (still not in my own city), but it can’t fix the three decades of my life that already passed in isolation. It can make my life better, but I will always have the emotional scars of chronic loneliness. Oh, how much I envy those lucky kids who can go to LW meetups as teenagers. Makes me wonder how much my own life could be different; I probably wouldn’t recognize myself.
Of course, this is just one data point; I don’t know how typical or atypical I am within the LW community.
I am not giving up, and I hope I will still achieve some big success.
In the shortest term… I have a baby now, which turned my life upside down a bit, so I need to solve some logistic problems first (e.g. to buy a new flat) and get used to the new situation. It might take a year. -- Not complaining here; I always wanted to have children, but it’s taking time and energy and money, so my options are now more limited than usual. I believe it will be okay in a few months, but today, I am rather busy and tired. Also, having a family limits my options; for example if I would decide that moving to another city would make my life better, it is no longer only my own decision. My hands are a bit more tied than they would be if I were 25 again.
I still didn’t give up completely on starting a rationalist community in my own city, and I have two specific plans. (1) These days I am finishing the translation of the LW Sequences book; when it is ready, I will distribute it freely and try to make it popular, and hope that people who enjoy it will contact me. (2) In September, I plan to do some rationality “lectures” (advertising for LW and for the translated book) on at least one high school, and one university.
I will probably not do anything scientific, ever; that train has already gone. Cannot compete with 20-years olds with fresh brains and fresh memories of their university lectures, who don’t have a family to feed. It would be wiser to focus fully on my personal life and making money, because that’s what I have to do anyway. -- The current plan is writing computer games, because the entry costs are almost zero, and I can do it at home in the evenings when the baby sleeps. (I have to keep the day job to pay bills.) Later, when the baby grows up and starts attenting school, I may try something more ambitious.
But still, even if my plans succeed and I live till 80, I will not be able to do as much as in the hypothetical parallel universe where I would find a LW community as a teenager (and also live till 80). But it will still be better than yet another parallel universe where LW doesn’t exist at all or where I am somehow unable to find it.
It is so painful to have an easily available possible world in which you find LessWrong earlier than in the real world. I ran into LW/OB five times since I was 16 and didn’t stick around until I was 21. I can’t imagine what I would be like with five years of exposure to the important things that I’ve been exposed to in the past six months, as well as having grown alongside the community, seeing as how I came around near the time that LW began.
I also didn’t stick with LW at the first time. I found an article linked from somewhere, I believe it was “Well-Kept Gardens Die By Pacifism”, I was impressed, but then I left. A year or two later, I again randomly found an article, then I saw it was the same website as the previous one, so I was like “Oh, this website contains multiple interesting articles” and started clicking on random links in text. Then I cautiously posted a few comments in the Open Thread—some got downvotes, some got upvotes—and kept reading...
So, somewhere in the parallel Everett branch there is a version of me that didn’t return to LW anymore, or just returned, read one article, and left again. Poor guy; he probably spends a lot of time having stupid debates on other websites.
What do you believe you would have done differently, if you would stick around here at 16?
I would probably use different words, but I believe I fit Jonah’s description. Before finding LW, I felt strongly isolated. Like, surrounded by human bodies, but intellectually alone. Thinking about topics that people around me considered “weird”, so I had no one to debate them with. Having a large range of interests, and while I could find people to debate individual interests with, I had no one to talk with about the interesting combinations I saw there.
I felt “weird”, and from people around me I usually got two kinds of feedback. When I didn’t try to pretend anything, they more or less confirmed that I am weird (of course, many were gentle, trying not to hurt me). When I tried to play a role of someone “less weird” (that is, I ignored most of the things I considered interesting, and just tried to fit)… well, it took a lot of time and practice to do this correctly, but then people accepted me. So, for a long time it felt like the only way to be accepted would be to supress a large part of what I consider to be “myself”; and I suspect that it would never work perfectly, that there would still be some kind of intellectual hunger.
Then I found LW and I was like: “whoa… there actually are people like me! too bad they are on the other side of the planet though”. Then I found some of them living closer, and… going to meetups feels incredibly refreshing. First time in my life, I don’t have to suppress anything, to play any role. I just am… in an environment that feels natural. I finally started understanding how people can enjoy having social contacts.
Now let’s imagine that in a parallel universe, those LessWrongers who live in a city near to mine, would instead be my neighbors since my childhood, or that we would be classmates at high school. I believe my life would be very different. (I believe there are people like this in my city, but the problem is finding those few dozen individuals among the hundreds of thousands, especially when there is no word in a public vocabulary to describe “us”.)
I can’t the article now, but I believe it was written by Lewis Terman, where he observed how successful are highly intelligent people. He found a difference between those who were “intelligent people in an intelligent environment” and those who were “isolated intelligent people”. The former were usually very successful in life: they could talk with their parents and friends as equals, share their algorithms for life success, fit into their environment. The latter felt isolated, and often burned out at some moment of their lives. The conclusion was that for a highly intelligent person, having similarly highly intelligent family and friends makes a huge difference in their lives. -- When you observe the difference between “academia” and “LessWrong”, it may be related to this.
It is easier to be academically successful when your parents are. You can pick good habits and strategies from them; you can debate your work and problems with them. If you are the only academically inclined person in the family, you lead a double life: the “real life” outside of school, and the “academic life” inside. The more you focus on your work, the more it feels like you are withdrawing from everything else. On the other hand, if you come from the same culture, focusing on the work makes you fit into the culture.
I am going to break a taboo here, but I don’t know how to tell it otherwise. I have IQ about four or five sigma above the average. The difference between me and the average Mensa member is larger that the difference between Mensa and the general population. Many people in Mensa seem kind of dense to me, and average people, those are sometimes like five-years old children. (I believe for many people on LessWrong it feels the same.) Sure, intelligence in not everything: other people have skills and traits that I lack, sometimes have more success than me, and I admire that. It’s just… so difficult to talk with them like with adult people. But when I go to LW meetup, it’s like “whoa… finally a group of adult people, how amazing!”.
But I’m already an old man, relatively speaking. Now I am 39; I found LW when I was 35. Finally I have a company of my peers (still not in my own city), but it can’t fix the three decades of my life that already passed in isolation. It can make my life better, but I will always have the emotional scars of chronic loneliness. Oh, how much I envy those lucky kids who can go to LW meetups as teenagers. Makes me wonder how much my own life could be different; I probably wouldn’t recognize myself.
Of course, this is just one data point; I don’t know how typical or atypical I am within the LW community.
I am not giving up, and I hope I will still achieve some big success.
In the shortest term… I have a baby now, which turned my life upside down a bit, so I need to solve some logistic problems first (e.g. to buy a new flat) and get used to the new situation. It might take a year. -- Not complaining here; I always wanted to have children, but it’s taking time and energy and money, so my options are now more limited than usual. I believe it will be okay in a few months, but today, I am rather busy and tired. Also, having a family limits my options; for example if I would decide that moving to another city would make my life better, it is no longer only my own decision. My hands are a bit more tied than they would be if I were 25 again.
I still didn’t give up completely on starting a rationalist community in my own city, and I have two specific plans. (1) These days I am finishing the translation of the LW Sequences book; when it is ready, I will distribute it freely and try to make it popular, and hope that people who enjoy it will contact me. (2) In September, I plan to do some rationality “lectures” (advertising for LW and for the translated book) on at least one high school, and one university.
I will probably not do anything scientific, ever; that train has already gone. Cannot compete with 20-years olds with fresh brains and fresh memories of their university lectures, who don’t have a family to feed. It would be wiser to focus fully on my personal life and making money, because that’s what I have to do anyway. -- The current plan is writing computer games, because the entry costs are almost zero, and I can do it at home in the evenings when the baby sleeps. (I have to keep the day job to pay bills.) Later, when the baby grows up and starts attenting school, I may try something more ambitious.
But still, even if my plans succeed and I live till 80, I will not be able to do as much as in the hypothetical parallel universe where I would find a LW community as a teenager (and also live till 80). But it will still be better than yet another parallel universe where LW doesn’t exist at all or where I am somehow unable to find it.
It is so painful to have an easily available possible world in which you find LessWrong earlier than in the real world. I ran into LW/OB five times since I was 16 and didn’t stick around until I was 21. I can’t imagine what I would be like with five years of exposure to the important things that I’ve been exposed to in the past six months, as well as having grown alongside the community, seeing as how I came around near the time that LW began.
I also didn’t stick with LW at the first time. I found an article linked from somewhere, I believe it was “Well-Kept Gardens Die By Pacifism”, I was impressed, but then I left. A year or two later, I again randomly found an article, then I saw it was the same website as the previous one, so I was like “Oh, this website contains multiple interesting articles” and started clicking on random links in text. Then I cautiously posted a few comments in the Open Thread—some got downvotes, some got upvotes—and kept reading...
So, somewhere in the parallel Everett branch there is a version of me that didn’t return to LW anymore, or just returned, read one article, and left again. Poor guy; he probably spends a lot of time having stupid debates on other websites.
What do you believe you would have done differently, if you would stick around here at 16?