That wasn’t my core intent, and I’m sorry I angered you by making it look like it was. Honestly I’m a bit of a pop-politics junkie. I also followed the tea party closely, as well as the campaigns of minor candidates like ron paul, because I found it interesting to see how well non-core-party rhetoric would work.
I guess I wanted LW to have a discussion page about it or something because we are a big powerful monkey tribe, and because the stupid ancestral part of my brain respects that, and wants to see what the tribe thinks of my interests. Putting in that little bit about potentially getting involved in the party was going too far, and I’m sorry about that.
Hi there everyone, I’m a programmer by trade and a video game maker by inclination. I first ran across Less Wrong while random-walking through tvtropes. I read a little of it, found it daunting but fascinating, and it… sat in my bookmarks for about a year after that.
Later, I random-walked upon Harry Potter atMoR, and it rekindled my interest. I’d read a chapter, get on lesswrong, and try and find all the tricks that harry (or other characters) used for that chapter. It was still slow going, because I wanted not just to read the material, but to absorb it and become stronger (Tsuyoku Naritai!)
I… pretty desperately needed it. I grew up in a rural community with an absolutely abhorrent school system, even by the standards of the american school system. I had a middle-school understanding of math and logic going into college, and am still recovering from the effects of a bad start (Bayesian theory and the QM sequence are on the very edge of what’s possible for me, but stronger, stronger, I will learn)
I ‘came out’ as an atheist two years ago to my parents, and began rearranging my life insurance to go to an Alcor membership two weeks ago. All in all, I’m not terribly new to ‘critical’ thinking in terms of not taking a claim at face value, but still learning how to truly deeply analyze claims as a rationalist.
So um.. hi