Watched a lot of popular science YouTube videos and lectures, mostly sciences, almost no the most useful ones like evolutionary/behavioral/cognitive psychology, neurobiology, information theory, probability, game theory, DT, or economics and programming, or at least physics, math and human biology. Almost fully illiterate in history, don’t know anything except school course (and even my teacher said that schoolbooks we must use are very poor schoolbooks, probably it’s Russian specifics). Have at least decent basic biology knowledge, I don’t feel like our bodies are squashy but can regenerate because of vital power. Have sort of wide, but unrigorous and non-deep knowledge. Can’t derive wave function of atom of hydrogen.
Read really little of fiction, mostly fanfiction, mostly fantasy, almost no sci-fi.
Have done some thinking in intuitive math on topics like connection between 1+i, Pyfagors theorem and level of curve of our space.
From Russia, hated reading, was grateful to science, liked clever things, cheats, computers, coded since 9y, was going to become a programmer, read HPMoR at 12, but didn’t tried to solve any riddle, didn’t read sequences until 16y, until 2023 didn’t understood that rationality isn’t about Truth, it’s about Skills. Now trying to generate maximally useful thoughts, post some on LW.
I am from Russia. I liked to watch Discovery and other scientific channels from an age of ~7. I never liked to read, only listened sometimes, and when I have gone into school, I understood that books lied, we didn’t have nicks, bullies, D-graders or A-graders (I got some As, but Bs too, and no one got only As), there were no any correlation between being a good student, wearing glasses, liking reading and playing chess.
When I was 9 I learned some programming, I decided that I will work as a programmer when I grew up, because programmers do have really good salaries, can work from any point of the world with internet, and don’t need to show a diploma, just their skills, so I will not need to go to university, so I will not need to go into last two classes of school, I will just need to practice my skills for next ~7 years. Also it was work with computers and I really liked computers.
When I was 12 I found comment “it’s not excellent fic, it’s average, excellent is HP and Methods of Rationality”. My favourite fictional universe + rationality?? And such characteristic… It even costed to read it, even if it didn’t have an audiobook yet. And author was so dear that he said where actually you should drop it if you still don’t interested. It said wait until 10th chapter where it starts to be really cool.
But for me it was really cool from the first sentence. I was so interested in reading that one time I almost was late to school (which I never did even closely before). When I ended reading I decided that I will reread this precious treasure for whole my life, so it’s better to reread it only once in few year, so it will not become boring, which would be awful, because I’ve never seen any book even close to that ever before.
In the end there were said “it’s only shadow of Sequences”. I’ve “Fable of Science and Politics”. And it was not even close that good. So I decided that I will check them all eventually. But not now. I’ve read them only when was 16y and really regretted that it “only shadow” instead of “how to know everything HJPEV knows and even more”. I’ve all the sequences which were translated on Russian (a lot of even R: AZ weren’t). They changed my worldview. But I didn’t know English. And for a long time idea of reading through translator didn’t come into my mind.
Until 2023 I didn’t understood that rationality isn’t about Truth, it’s about Skills. I was trying to know all the truths to act out of them. I wasn’t trying to act by skills of performing such strategies which get maximum expected_utility according to correct models of my preferences and world around me. THAT was moment everything actually changed, not just worldview. In short terms I’ve started search for creative ideas for enhancing my everyday life, learned how to fully turn off any unwanted emotions (and just as a consequence removed 2-3 fears which were with me for whole my life), learned how to control my thoughts, enhanced my imagination, lifted up my mood, started to invent mental techniques.
Unfortunately I still had a lot of developed psychological blocks, which resisted to thinking about them to fix them. And one of them was making detailed plans for short term and short term future. I fixed this problem in the end. But I still have a lot of issues with motivation.
Now I have a lot of ideas to post on LW, which are probably significantly useful.
EniScien’s Bio thread
My knowledge state
Read books: HPMoR x7, Sequences x3, planecrash x2, “You’re joking Mr Feynman” x3, GEB 1⁄4, Fast and Slow Thinking 1⁄3
Didn’t read: all the other rationalist books. And just almost no books, probably the one I can remember is Better Angels of Our Nature.
Have read some Wikipedia pages.
Have 99.9%, 110K words on Russian on https://myvocab.info
Watched a lot of popular science YouTube videos and lectures, mostly sciences, almost no the most useful ones like evolutionary/behavioral/cognitive psychology, neurobiology, information theory, probability, game theory, DT, or economics and programming, or at least physics, math and human biology. Almost fully illiterate in history, don’t know anything except school course (and even my teacher said that schoolbooks we must use are very poor schoolbooks, probably it’s Russian specifics). Have at least decent basic biology knowledge, I don’t feel like our bodies are squashy but can regenerate because of vital power. Have sort of wide, but unrigorous and non-deep knowledge. Can’t derive wave function of atom of hydrogen.
Read really little of fiction, mostly fanfiction, mostly fantasy, almost no sci-fi.
Have done some thinking in intuitive math on topics like connection between 1+i, Pyfagors theorem and level of curve of our space.
TLDR
From Russia, hated reading, was grateful to science, liked clever things, cheats, computers, coded since 9y, was going to become a programmer, read HPMoR at 12, but didn’t tried to solve any riddle, didn’t read sequences until 16y, until 2023 didn’t understood that rationality isn’t about Truth, it’s about Skills. Now trying to generate maximally useful thoughts, post some on LW.
Current Detailed
I am from Russia. I liked to watch Discovery and other scientific channels from an age of ~7. I never liked to read, only listened sometimes, and when I have gone into school, I understood that books lied, we didn’t have nicks, bullies, D-graders or A-graders (I got some As, but Bs too, and no one got only As), there were no any correlation between being a good student, wearing glasses, liking reading and playing chess.
When I was 9 I learned some programming, I decided that I will work as a programmer when I grew up, because programmers do have really good salaries, can work from any point of the world with internet, and don’t need to show a diploma, just their skills, so I will not need to go to university, so I will not need to go into last two classes of school, I will just need to practice my skills for next ~7 years. Also it was work with computers and I really liked computers.
When I was 12 I found comment “it’s not excellent fic, it’s average, excellent is HP and Methods of Rationality”. My favourite fictional universe + rationality?? And such characteristic… It even costed to read it, even if it didn’t have an audiobook yet. And author was so dear that he said where actually you should drop it if you still don’t interested. It said wait until 10th chapter where it starts to be really cool.
But for me it was really cool from the first sentence. I was so interested in reading that one time I almost was late to school (which I never did even closely before). When I ended reading I decided that I will reread this precious treasure for whole my life, so it’s better to reread it only once in few year, so it will not become boring, which would be awful, because I’ve never seen any book even close to that ever before.
In the end there were said “it’s only shadow of Sequences”. I’ve “Fable of Science and Politics”. And it was not even close that good. So I decided that I will check them all eventually. But not now. I’ve read them only when was 16y and really regretted that it “only shadow” instead of “how to know everything HJPEV knows and even more”. I’ve all the sequences which were translated on Russian (a lot of even R: AZ weren’t). They changed my worldview. But I didn’t know English. And for a long time idea of reading through translator didn’t come into my mind.
Until 2023 I didn’t understood that rationality isn’t about Truth, it’s about Skills. I was trying to know all the truths to act out of them. I wasn’t trying to act by skills of performing such strategies which get maximum expected_utility according to correct models of my preferences and world around me. THAT was moment everything actually changed, not just worldview. In short terms I’ve started search for creative ideas for enhancing my everyday life, learned how to fully turn off any unwanted emotions (and just as a consequence removed 2-3 fears which were with me for whole my life), learned how to control my thoughts, enhanced my imagination, lifted up my mood, started to invent mental techniques.
Unfortunately I still had a lot of developed psychological blocks, which resisted to thinking about them to fix them. And one of them was making detailed plans for short term and short term future. I fixed this problem in the end. But I still have a lot of issues with motivation.
Now I have a lot of ideas to post on LW, which are probably significantly useful.