Hey everyone,
As I continue to work through the sequences, I’ve decided to go ahead and join the forums here. A lot of the rationality material isn’t conceptually new to me, although much of the language is very much so, and thus far I’ve found it to be exceptionally helpful to my thinking.
I’m a 24 year old video game developer, having worked on graphics on a particular big-name franchise for a couple years now. It’s quite the interesting job, and is definitely one of the realms I find the heady, abstract rationality tools to be extremely helpful. Rationality is what it is, and that seems to be acknowledged here, a fact I’m quite grateful for.
When I’m not discussing the down-to-earth topics here, people may find I have a sometimes anxiety-ridden attachment to certain religious ideas. Religious discussion has been extremely normal for me throughout my life, so while the discussion doesn’t make me uncomfortable, my inability to come to answers that I’m happy with does, and has caused me a bit of turmoil outside of discussion. Obviously there is much to say about this, and much people may like to say to me, but I’d like to first get through all the sequences, get all of my questions about it all answered, pay attention a bit to the discussions here, and I’ll go from there. I have no grand hopes to finally put these beliefs to rest, but I will go to lengths to see whether it is something I should do. To pick either seems to me to suppose I have a Way to rationality, if I understand the point correctly. I would invite any and all discussion on the topic, and I appreciate the little “welcome to Theists” in the main post here. :)
See you all around.
So, I’ll say this. Eliezer’s posts put the nail in the coffin of my Theism in the matter of a couple months. My mind had to wait to be told the story of how I could sit, ponder, and wonder for night after night and allow my entire mind to get on board with a major worldview shift. Each individual post assailed the narratives I was telling myself; without the conclusions given to me up front, I was able to travel the journey to the conclusion on my own, which ended up far more compelling than previously read arguments with a more explicit agenda.
That said, now that I find myself much closer to both of your worldviews, I find your posts much more efficient, and I more often recommend yours to others over Eliezer’s. I do this because I expect more impatience on the part of others than I do in myself.
This is a problem I feel with Less Wrong in general, although I know little of what could be done. I often recommend posts to outsiders, only to receive little else than skepticism and comments at the styles or apparent agendas of the authors. “But the logic and evidence awareness make them unassailable!” does little to established narratives. Narratives which suggest that coffee-table books by authors on the New York Times bestsellers list who give TED talks are the quickest route to insight. This was never a narrative I had, and was already looking for insight in new places, and so the initial thrust of taking the time to read the Sequences was all I really needed to be carried along by them more or less to their finish line.
Your point about different audiences is at point here. For most of the world, the Sequences and the scattershot back-referenced posts here are completely irrelevant to established patterns of trawling trusted mediums for dinner-party political wisdom. But giving in to that attitude would heavily decrease the value of this site to most of its current participants. Especially me, so don’t do it, yo.