Name: Alex D
Age: 26
Education: MSc Epidemiology/Biostatistics
Occupation: Epidemiologist
Location: Canada
Hobbies: Reading, travel, learning, sport.
I found OB/LW through Eliezer’s Bayes tutorial, and was immediately taken in. It’s the perfect mix of several themes that are always running through my head (rationality, atheism, Bayes, etc.) and a great primer on lots of other interesting stuff (QM, AI, ev. psych., etc). The emphasis on improving decision making and clear thinking plus the steady influx of interesting new areas to investigate makes for an intoxicating ambrosia. Very nice change from many other rationality blogs, which seem to mostly devote themselves to the fun-but-eventually-tiresome game of bashing X for being stupid/illogical/evil (clearly, X is all of these things and more, but that’s not the point). Generally very nice writing, too.
As for real-life impact, LW has:
grown my reading list exponentially,
made me want to become a better writer,
forced me to admit that my math is nowhere near where it needs to be,
made my unstated ultimate goal of understanding the world as a coherent whole seem less silly, and
altered my list of possible/probable PhD topics.
I’ll put some thought into my rationalist origins story, but it may have been that while passing several (mostly enjoyable) summers as a door-to-door salesman, I encountered the absolutely horrible decision making mechanisms of lots and lots of people. It kind of made me despair for the world, and probably made me aspire to do better. But that could be a false narrative.
“The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool.” -- Richard Feynman