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 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?