Hello all -
My name is Colin, and I am a long time lurker / RSS reader. Thanks for posting this welcome message, as it gave me motivation to finally get registered.
I stumbled onto LW from Eliezer Yudkowsky’s “An Intuitive Explanation of Bayes’ Theorem”, which I found when trying to explain to my mother what I was up to in graduate school, and why I was so excited about it. I have been interested in science and epistemology for as long as I can remember, so finding that there are principled ways to reason about uncertainty was pretty amazing to me.
I most enjoy the LW articles about the application of careful reasoning to personal decision making, as that is something I constantly struggle with. I enjoy being a Bayesian at work (sonar signal processing), but have more trouble at home. For example, I have a constant internal debate about riding my motorcycle, as it is simultaneously the most fun and dangerous of my activities. It is much harder to do the math when there aren’t numbers...
Thank you for all the interesting posts!
I think I can do this! I read “The Age of Spiritual Machines” when it came out, and remember marking in the margins about whether or not I agreed with each. I was in high school at the time, and think I left the book at home when I left for college. I will see if it is still there.
Though I also agree with the comment from handofixue that making the predictions is much harder than judging them.