Hello! I’m gostaks, and I’m new to LessWrong and the rationalism community in general. I’m an engineering major who took a philosophy class in January, and ever since I’ve been poking around the internet looking for folks with interesting ideas. I found LessWrong through a link on Slate Star Codex, and I figure that six hours of reading is enough to justify making an account (at the very least so I can track which posts I have or haven’t read). Planning to lurk for a while, plug through the sequences, and then figure out how to get interesting LessWrong posts to show up on my dreamwidth reading page.
I would very much appreciate recommendations of blogs/LessWrong users/posts/books that would make a good starting point for a rationalism noob!
Are you familiar with Ada Palmer’s Terra Ignota series? One of the major groups in the series, the Humanists, are very focused on human excellence and potential. They’re very closely tied to the Olympics and competitive sports. Incidentally, the world of Terra Ignota is quite colorful (metaphorically, because it’s a series of novels) and imo does a better than average job representing diverse lifestyles and aesthetics.