Introduce yourself here. Here are a few things you could share. But share whatever you want. Any kind of normal introductory information is good.
I work as a lawyer.
I’ve been spending some time learning math lately.
I listen to audiobooks.
I like cooking food sometimes.
Occasionally I play games. Not in a while though (since finishing BotW). Baldur’s Gate 3 looks interesting but I think it’s not finished yet. I’ll let them finish it!
Re CF goal, I don’t know if I have a very specific goal. Maybe it’s kind of like “engage with it at a hobby level and try to learn a thing or two.”
Re forum posts, I want to try to be helpful and to practice kindness. 
I was part of the FI community for many years and TCS before that. So I’ve been around forever.
Elliot = smart guy! Has figured out important things.
CF = important, good. Synthesizes some good existing stuff that was not already synthesized and builds upon it with novel stuff that Elliot figured out.
Have read most of Rand, lots of Popper, some of Szasz and Goldratt and the Austrian economists.
Hi.
I like Critical Rationalism and Classical Liberalism. I like Objectivism where it doesn’t contradict those two.
I like games a lot. I like programming and math too.
I’m interested in understanding the phenomenon of intelligence, and AGI.
I’m curious what it would be like to go and live on Mars.
I’m not sure what I want to do next with my life. I want to improve my thinking and problem solving and make a good choice about what to do next. I’m not in a rush.
I have visited curi.us occasionally and found it interesting. I only just found out about this forum.
-MC
Hello.
I like Karl Popper and Ayn Rand and Elliot Temple.
I make, play, and record music, and I work as a live sound engineer. I have not been to university.
I think Elliot is a really good philosopher, the best I know of. I have found his work very valuable.
I have been a spectator at this forum for about a year and have been reading ET’s blogposts at the curi blog for approximately two years. I found ET’s blog while searching for Popper-related things. ET’s work caused me to become interested in Rand.
I have never used a discussion forum or any online forum before and I have never written anything.
A goal of mine is to become a more organised thinker. I am unsatisfied with the state that my knowledge is in. I am unsatisfied with my skill level at reading, text analysis, and having productive conversations. I have been working through Elliot’s grammar course with the goal of improving my grammar knowledge. And I am currently watching his Youtube playlist tutoring InternetRules on idea trees with the goal of learning to make discussion trees.
I have no plans for CF forum posts as yet. I am going to familiarise myself with the forum guidelines and the forum features.
Hello, my name is Nihal. I’ve been a fan of Ayn Rand’s work since high school (about ~7 years ago), though I don’t know exactly when I started reading her. I’ve consumed a good bit of material on Objectivism on and off throughout the years and found Elliott, or more specifically his curi blog, through a YouTube comment in either Rucka Rucka Ali’s Objectivism videos or Kirk Wilcox’s videos where he was mentioned as a very positive philosopher.
I have been lurking on and off for about the same time as I got into Objectivism as when I get into something I really get into it. I finally decided to create an account here to actually put what I agree with into practice.
I have no firm plans with my life (part of the reason I decided to actually make an account and take this philosophy stuff more seriously) however the career of choice I keep coming back to in the chaos of my mind is becoming some sort of lawyer.
My hobbies consist of reading and gaming. I read primarily manga and Chinese web novels when it comes to fiction. I used to play a lot of competitive games but I’d tilt a lot and make excuses for myself. Nowadays I play mainly single player games. Some of my favorites are Hollow Knight, Dark Souls 3 and Dead Cells.
I see philosophy as useful and necessary to my life and I want to get better at philosophy. My goal here is to use this as a tool to help me actually learn and get better at philosophy and my broader goal is to organize my life.
See above, at the top of the post.
I think he’s smart and puts out a lot of valuable material. Though, truthfully I haven’t concretized his ideas that much and put them into practice.
I’m primarily familiar with Objectivism. I’ve read most of Ayn Rand’s fiction and non-fiction. Outside of Objectivism, I am vaguely familiar with Popper through Elliott and have started reading Conjectures and Refutations within the past month or so. I have also consumed Leonard Peikoff’s History of Philosophy course on ARI and I am vaguely familiar with the history of philosophy.
I’m in my early 20s. I’m studying AI and computer science in university. I find intelligence, consciousness and creativity interesting. I knew that wouldn’t be what I would learn in uni, but I was also interested in automation using AI, like self-driving cars.
The topic I most enjoy to think, discuss and read about is philosophy. I am leaning towards becoming a philosopher and earning money through programming/data science.
I would also like being a software entrepreneur. That would probably take more time than a regular job, and I think I would prefer a ratio more towards philosophy than business/programming.
I would really like to live forever by solving aging. However success would be very dependent on this ultimate goal, and I wouldn’t value the sub-goals along the way nearly as much. It would be a risky bet on whether it was worth spending my life on. I also don’t have as much intrinsic interest in biology as I have in physics. And I am more interested in philosophy and programming than physics.
I liked math as a kid, then school beat out all the joy for intellectual matters in me. I rediscovered the joy of contemplating ideas when I read about astronomy in a physics class.
I watched Jordan Peterson at the time. I was more interested in the philosophy and psychology than the politics. So I got into existentialist philosophy and Jungian psychology. I listened to a podcast on Nietzsche, read books from Camus, Kafka, Jung and Orwell, and watched yt content like Academy of Ideas.
I thought the ideas were interesting to contemplate, but I didn’t find them extremely impressive. Being new to philosophy I assumed these “great” thinkers were still to complicated for me to fully appreciate yet. Now I think they are irrational and/or mystical (Orwell is still good).
I also had a way more positive and optimistic sense of life than them.
After some time I wanted to know about politics too. I was going to learn about capitalism and socialism. I wanted to be fair, unbiased and rational, and therefore give both a chance. What happened was I came across pro-capitalist arguments first and went down that path, never getting to any socialist literature (besides yt videos).
I discovered Ayn Rand through Yaron Brook. Objectivism was impressive. It seemed rational, and clear, and therefore confident.
Yaron Brook talked positively about BoI. I was excited to find other rational thinkers. So I search for “David Deutsch Ayn Rand” and found Elliots video about DD attacking her. I then watched Easy Answers and Planning Reforms. I was impressed. I thought they were very reasonable, non-tribalist, and nuanced. I have been reading stuff from Elliot and lurking at the forum since then, which is ~2.5 years ago.
I intended to join the forum many times before.
I took the advice from Learning from Great Books and have since read ~125 books (~65 as audiobooks/TTS) in 2 years. I started reading the year before in which I read ~17 books.
I read, and enjoyed, Sanderson and Heinlein. I like the fiction Rand recommended: Ninety-three, Quo Vadis, Ivanhoe, The Scarlett Letter, and Mickey Spillane.
I like reading economics, history, biographies and other non-fiction. I would like to read more science books in the future.
Relevant philosophy to CF I have read:
I think Elliot is the best living philosopher and as far as I can tell his philosophical contribution with CF is significant.
I admire Elliot’s rationality, honesty, integrity and spirit of energetic progress.
When I found Paths Forward I thought that this is what someone who is really committed to reason and truth-finding would do. It shows an attitude of doing everything reasonably possible to be rational and find truth by seeking debate. I imagine it would be similar to Socrates’ dedication to truth.
I think his Archives Non-Endorsement Policy and writing for ~20 years without compromising or pandering for popularity, shows his honesty, integrity and independence.
I admire his productivity in volume of writing and debating, and in the production of new useful philosophy ideas.
I want to live a rational and moral life. I want to learn the best existing philosophy of reason, which is CF, to the point where I can improve upon on it.
Welcome to the forum. FYI, most of my money is from programming not philosophy.
There are a lot of sub-goals relevant to aging and it’s unclear what is most important. E.g. anything that makes science more effective is relevant. Anything that helps with rationality is relevant. Debatably, science/biology is handicapped enough by current methods that it’s going very slowly or maybe it’s unrealistic for it to ever solve aging without methodology changes. Improving rationality may be more important (has a better chance to get big results sooner) than working directly on medical research.
Similar arguments apply to other fields. If you could spread Paths Forward around and get intellectuals, companies and politicians to have debate policies, you’d simultaneously be working on longevity, world peace, AGI, and pretty much anything else good that you care to name.
I was good at math and chess, then programming, before finding philosophy. I was bored in school.
Why now?
Cool. If you want recommendations to read next based on that list, I’d say more Goldratt books and CF essays, then more Popper later. But I don’t know much about your situation and you should follow your own interests.
I also do like The Early Ayn Rand and would recommend it more than her newsletters or letters.
Thought so.
When I was evaluating longevity work I thought I would learn philosophy and use that be more effective than past attempts. But maybe spreading reason and Paths Forward would more effective for longevity specifically, since theres only so much one person/organization can do.
I was better at STEM fields and always among the better in my class, but not clearly the best or anything.
I usually didn’t pay attention in class, was daydreaming for the most part. Math classes were going too slowly.
A problem with classes is if you get interested in the topic you get better faster than the others and then classes becoming boring because they are too easy now. You would have to hold back interest in order to enjoy the classes.
Well, why not before? I already liked Oism, and I liked your stuff right away. I was procrastinating. I always thought I had to do something else first, e.g. prepare for exam, do the assignments, learn some programming. When anything got done there was always a new thing to do.
I didn’t feel much urgency, it doesn’t feel like it was 2.5 years ago. Since I always thought that I would join the forum soon, and that I agreed with CF (explicitly, with lip service), I already to some degree identified with being rational and a CFist. That may have relieved any sense of urgency.
I started journaling based on your advice, but I have done it sporadically. I recently started again and I wrote mostly about whether to join the forum now. I did a small project where I considered whether reason was worth it to pursue, and whether I should join CF, by writing out my thoughts. I was going to treat it rationally, be honest and unbiased about it, consider the negatives. I read Reason is Urgent; Now or Never and Philosophy: Who Needs It (the title essay), I already had read them, and had high opinions of both, but this time I was writing comments on them and thinking that it might literally be now or never.
I thought I’d write commentary on the file I wrote and share if I joined.
I like improvements that improve my ability to improve (this makes reason the best thing ever, since it improves about everything, and especially how to learn and improve). I have had this idea since I was quite little, iirc. When I play games I like strategies where I invest as much as possible early on in order to get maximum gain later. The connection is: I think by learning better project management through Goldratt then that would have the most effect on all my later learning. Also he might be the easiest.
But I enjoy reading Rand the most. I want to read all these things and take notes and discuss them. I haven’t taken notes because I wanted to expose them to criticism when I had joined the forum, that also made me put off reading a lot of philosophy because I was waiting. At some point I realized that I wasn’t joining soon (not until the semester was over for example), so I started reading anyway, without taking notes. So I don’t consider myself done with Oism. I think of myself as being a beginner at all of this.
I would have already read it if I could get a physical copy of it without paying tariffs (I want a physical collection of Rand books). I might just get a digital version and the physical one later.
Atlas Shrugged:
—that to withhold your contempt from men’s vices is an act of moral counterfeiting, and to withhold your admiration from their virtues is an act of moral embezzlement—
Also I haven’t spoken on other forums, or much in public at all. So I had some reluctance because of that.
I think the decisive argument stuff is my best idea but that Paths Forward stuff is the best option for trying to cause significant change in the world. Idk if you’ve seen A Plan to Improve the World: 20 Rational Debate Advocates