Hi, this is a user profile for someone with a background in software, consciousness science, and rationality. I have a background in AI, technology, and design, and enjoy discussing those topics.
I can be found on the web at ttacademy.co where I am a alum of the lab affiliated with the community.
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Hey Less Wrong! My name is Josh, and I’m an engineer interested in Less Wrong as a community and a social experiment :)
I read the Sequences back in 2011 when I was in college at UC Berkeley studying engineering – they were a little smaller and more readable back then, and Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality was not yet at its full length. Over the next two years, I read the HPMOR and Sequences and read books on cognitive science like Thinking Fast and Slow, and Blink by Malcolm Gladwell. I also took a workshop with Valentine at CFAR in its early iteration—all I really remember is CFAR’s summary of mindfulness as “wiggle your toes.”
Since then I’ve been involved in computer science and AI research and discovery for ten years, more or less, mostly as a passionate reader and experimenter in the coding and concept space – looking at earlier models of ML pre-deep learning in its current form, probabilistic reasoning in robotics and control systems, and cybersecurity models in AI and social communication models. During my college years, I published a paper on measuring creativity with probabilistic models in ML using scikit-learn that was a little before its time—it was back in 2013! Now it seems LLMs and generative AI have really nailed how to do that.
I’ve hung out with a lot of Rats in my home base in Los Angeles, through the LW meetup, and also with folks in the Bay Area who live in Rat houses and organize meetups there. Over the last five years, I’ve been interested in Effective Altruism and attended several EA groups and events including EA Global in 2019 and organized EA events with guest speakers like Haseeb Qureshi and an EA/Rationality club in San Francisco which had about 10 members and sponsorship from the Center for Effective Altruism. Lately I have not been as involved in EA after watching the FTX and Sam Bankman-Fried problems break up the funding landscape and dilute core motivations for folks in problem areas of interest.
I hope to contribute to Less Wrong my unique model of thinking and decisionmaking which borrows from chaos theory, quantum entanglement, and family systems in psychology to describe how subtle perceptions of identity and influence form patterns in collective human decisionmaking. While I am by no means an expert in economics or game theory, I believe that the subtle clues of collective patterns in culture and social systems are everywhere if we know where to look. Rationality is a feature of a class of innovation culture communities which are seen throughout California and across the Western world in the US and Europe. I don’t know about other countries because I haven’t seen it there.
I am most interested in exploring the neural correlates of consciousness, meaning specifically software systems which influence and predict human decisionmaking, regardless of how we define consciousness, thoughts and feelings, and rationality both as a philosophy, a brand, and a lifestyle.