Hi. I’m Gareth McCaughan. I’ve been a consistent reader and occasional commenter since the Overcoming Bias days. My LW username is “gjm” (not “Gjm” despite the wiki software’s preference for that capitalization). Elsewehere I generally go by one of “g”, “gjm”, or “gjm11”. The URL listed here is for my website and blog, neither of which has been substantially updated for several years. I live near Cambridge (UK) and work for Hewlett-Packard (who acquired the company that acquired what remained of the small company I used to work for, after they were acquired by someone else). My business cards say “mathematician” but in practice my work is a mixture of simulation, data analysis, algorithm design, software development, problem-solving, and whatever random engineering no one else is doing. I am married and have a daughter born in mid-2006. The best way to contact me is by email: firstname dot lastname at pobox dot com. I am happy to be emailed out of the blue by interesting people. If you are an LW regular you are probably an interesting person in the relevant sense even if you think you aren’t.
If you’re wondering why some of my very old posts and comments are at surprisingly negative scores, it’s because for some time I was the favourite target of old-LW’s resident neoreactionary troll, sockpuppeteer and mass-downvoter.
Related: Philosopher Peter van Inwagen on the way that one philosopher can disagree with another while accepting that the other guy is smarter and better informed. (Which he points out both because he finds it interesting in itself, and to argue that there’s something inconsistent in complaining about religious believers—of whom he is one—believing things when the balance of the evidence is against them.)