I like something with ‘rationality’ and ‘less wrong’ in it. I don’t think it’s helpful to have ‘the sequences’ in the title if an aim to to have non less-wrongers pick it up.
What are the odds of a physical book? Would make a great gift, and gifting an ebook still seems weird. I’m still undecided about whether I like my books made out of dead trees or not.
Hi everyone, I’m Chris. I’m a physics PhD student from Melbourne, Australia. I came to rationalism slowly over the years by having excellent conversations with like minded friends. I was raised a catholic and fully bought into the faith, but became an atheist in early high school when I realised that scientific explanations made more sense.
About a year ago I had a huge problem with the collapse postulate of quantum mechanics. It just didn’t make sense and neither did anything anyone was telling me about it. This led me to discover that many worlds wasn’t as crazy as it had been made out to be, and led me to this very community. My growth as a rationalist has made me distrust the consensus opinions of more and more groups, and realising that physicists could get something so wrong was the final nail in the coffin for my trust of the scientific establishment. Of course science is still the best way to figure things out, but as soon as opinions become politicised or tied to job prospects, I don’t trust scientists as far as I can throw them. Related to this is my skepticism that climate change is a big deal.
I am frustrated more by the extent of unreason in educated circles than I am in uneducated circles, as people should know better. For example, utilitarian morality should be much more widespread in these circles than it is. But moral issues are often politicised, and you know what they say about politics here.
I’m pretty social and would love to meet more rationalist friends, but I have the perception that if I went to a meetup most people would be less extroverted than me, and it might not be much fun for me. Also since I do physics and am into heavy metal, my social circles at the moment are like 95% male, and it seems pretty silly to invest effort in developing a new social group unless it does something about that number, which I’m pretty sure less wrong meetups will not. So I’m probably not going to look into this, even though I enjoy the communities writings online.
Though I find the writing style to sometimes be a bit dense and not self contained (requiring reading a lot of past posts to make sense of.) I find myself preferring the writing style of a rationalist blog like slatestarcodex (or its previous incarnation), and if the same issue is being discussed in two places I’ll generally read it there instead because I prefer the more casual writing style.