I’m currently an electrical engineering student. I suppose the main thing that drew me here is that I hold uncommon political views (market libertarian/minarchist, generally sympathetic to non-coercive but non-market collective action); I think that view is “correct” for now, but I’m sure that a lot of my reasons for holding those beliefs are faulty, or there’d probably be at least a few more people who agree with me. I want to determine exactly what’s happening (and why) when politics and political philosophy come up in a conversation/internal monologue and I end up thinking to myself “Ah, good, my prior beliefs were exactly correct!”, with the eventual goal of refining/discarding/bolstering those beliefs, because the chances that they actually were correct 100% of the time is vanishingly small.
That’s what got me hooked on LW, at least, but pretty much everything here is interesting.
I would add “writing it down” to the decreasing activation cost list, or at least working it into “Very clear, straightforward instructions”. For me, things generally get done much faster when I put them in my planner, or even just in a text file on my desktop, than when they’re left to float around in my head. Whether that’s because the task is made into clear and straightforward instructions, or because it creates a sense of urgency (“Oh man, it’s written down, I gotta do it”), or just because it exists as a thing in the world rather than an idea, I don’t know, but it’s definitely a result.
Also, this article convinced me to finally stop procrastinating on setting up a LW account after a few months of readership. Hello!