Hello, Less Wrong! I’m Wes W., which username I’ve chosen as a compromise between anonymity and real-life-usability, since I do intend/hope to get involved in meatspace once my schedule permits.
I’ve been lurking here and working my way through the Sequences for a couple months now. I’m intentionally pacing myself, so I can process things sufficiently. (Also, it’s mildly alarming to finish reading a post and find that my brain has already vented all previous opinions on the topic and replaced them with the writer’s.) I don’t really know anymore how I found this site, because I’ve been aware of its existence for a couple years, but only recently realized both the full extent of the material here, and that I wanted to be involved in it.
I’ve been an atheist for several years, following another several years of diminishing faith in my native Mormonism, but it wasn’t until I started reading Eliezer that this felt like a good thing, rather than a loss.
I currently have a job as a math tutor, which I originally got as just a college summer job, but turned into an “oh, this is what I want to do with my life” thing, so I’m now working on becoming a teacher. So clarity of thought is especially helpful to me, since I have to know something backwards and forwards in my sleep before I can do much to help a student understand. Ideas like “guessing the teacher’s password” and “how could I regenerate this knowledge, if I lost it” have been directly useful to me, and I also hope to get better at overcoming akrasia.
In my family, there is a story about my great-aunt when she was a child, involving a game where she was allowed to choose between a nickel and a dime. She took the nickel instead of the dime, and all the grown-ups got a chuckle at her cute naivete. This continued long past the age when she should have known the smaller dime was nevertheless more valuable, and eventually her mother realized she was well aware that, if she took the dime even once, people would stop inviting her to play that game.
It’s not a tooth-fairy story specifically, but yes, there certainly are children that clever.