Yeah thanks for the advice I look forward to exploring some of those links. I would like to note that when writing the post I was feeling kind of lost and especially lonely. I still have my old friends, my family is still there. They don’t know how I feel about god and stuff, but I am not too worried about it. I am rather introverted but hardly socially awkward. I really enjoy making new friends, learning about them hanging out. I just end up moving on and have a harder time with lasting relationships. I am very comfortable alone and prefer it 90% of the time. I have made friends with a couple of people from each of my classes at college. Some better some less so but all of them probably willing to hangout with me. I also plan on going to a nearby LessWrong meetup tomorrow. Overall I am really comfortable with my social life and the problem is far less extreme than I thought it was. The new friends are incredibly diverse and have been fun to hang out with. And overall my mental health is in a much better condition. I still am feeling stressed about an inevitable confrontation with my parents, close friends and relatives. They are great people but they truly believe in god heaven and hell, it is the most important thing in their lives. I have seen the pain that is caused when someone leaves, they truly would prefer that they had died in belief. I can hardly imagine what a similar experience would be like for someone more socially dependent. 

I am making plans for summer and fall. I hope to be a lot more financially stable and self reliant by the end of summer and have a plan for doing so. I am super excited about the classes I am registered for and can’t wait until spring. School work is very difficult right now as the semester is coming to an end and at the same time I am taking night/online classes for high school credits. It has been rough but I have been implementing methods from a Cal Newport book. For time management and fighting procrastination. I am having to postpone a lot of my personal interests and projects until the summer, but the work has got to be done. And in a month it will all be over.  

The past month has been an interesting experience but I am happy it happened. I feel more in control of my future and am much more optimistic about my dreams. 
Having goals and plans for getting there has probably been the best thing for my outlook. 

I’ll apply to the intro fellowship course, thank you it looks especially interesting. 

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2303.08774v3.pdf#page=64 
This is a technical report about GPT-4, on page 64 it details a process they use for self improvement in training. It generates training data by itself super cool. 
Credit to Vladimir_Nesov from LessWrong who linked and mentioned this in a discussion, interesting stuff. 

Hi everyone, some of this is an emotional dump if it goes against any guidelines or something I can change it. And if you don’t want to read something kind of depressing I understand. I don’t usually share period but I want the advice and I need to feel part of some group. It is a very long post and I in it I am working through some stuff mentally. It is hardly just an introduction, but if you can call it that it is a thorough one. I probably only felt comfortable commenting this based on the consideration shown in responses to O Carciente’s post.

I am an 18 year old senior just finishing up high school. What is next is complicated but I am excited to share. 
First my username Xor, it comes from my favorite programing language Ti-Basic not the language I use the most or find the most useful. However it is my first love, how I found programming. Xor is a binary or boolean logic operator it takes two true or false statements and compares them. If one statement is true and the other is false the operation is true, if both are true or both are false then the operation is false. It also looks and sounds pretty cool, plus I hardly ever get it.

I would like to share my dream and how it involves altruism. But first I want to explain my current situation. I live with my mom and dad who are christians. All my life I have believed in god. The church I went to is extreme in some ways. I have only ever seen a handful of movies all in school. For the last six years I have been struggling with doubts about christianity. Why are all other religions wrong. How can we be so sure. How come the bible is wrong compared to science. I have always been taught this is sin. I struggled with it for a long time silently I hardly ever ask for help much less for forgiveness. I found all of the answers and believed. No argument could stop me I knew an answer I had already questioned it all myself. Other religions, big bang, evolution and the rest of science I explained every thing to myself. Fifteen chapters into ”Rationality: From Ai to Zombies” by Eliezer Yudkowsky I became an atheist it wasn‘t an argument that convinced me it was understanding my mind. First there was a sense of freedom and excitement. But with it came pain, I feel incredibly lonely, I don’t believe I will get to die and see my little brother in heaven. My church is an extremely tight community, I have no friends outside of church nor family. I work for and with guys from my church at a small tech company. I have no money for my own apartment. No perspective job. I am scared but excited I can’t wait to see what the future holds for me. Sorry a lot this section might not be very important but I felt the need to share. This is me working it all out as I made this transition in self identity a few days ago. Ironically the day before Good Friday.
 
Besides my current state of mental stability, there are a couple of other effects this has had on my course of life. I was always pushed away from school, pulled actually by my friend group. I can’t blame it all on my friend group in the end it was my decision and to a degree I was happy with it. I love books and naturally excelled at school when I was younger. I grew older and found out that this wasn’t ideal for my social life and started slacking. I was already in advanced classes and have passed them without putting in effort. My parents forced me to continue applying myself to a degree. This has lead to a pretty bad GPA and left me unprepared for any further education. Things have changed in the last half a year. For my senior year I signed up for PSEO, getting high school and college credits through a community college. I failed every course I registered for except an online economics class that I gamed. I put in effort but not enough and eventually I was in too deep and I didn’t have a real way out. I spent the last quarter of the semester in the library rediscovering my love for reading and a new one for learning. 

Finally leading to a positive direction my current goals. I managed to get back into PSEO going from absolutely not wanting to be there to fighting to go with all that I had. My mom, dad and counselors told me not to. If I didn’t pass I wouldn’t graduate high school. It hasn’t been easy but I am doing well and am going to pass all of my classes as well as graduate high school. I am going back to the same community college in the fall. In the meantime I want to teach my self how to learn and think rationally, to control my self perfectly. I want to fill out my understanding in math, physics, biology, and writing. Then come fall I want to be amazing in school perform as perfectly as I know I am capable of. 

As for altruism I want to become a teacher. I want to build a course to teach everything in the most optimal way. I want to learn exactly how the human brain works when it comes to learning. How it processes, stores and organizes information. I want to build the single best tool for learning ever created. I want it to be so good that it is eventually deployed as the software used as direct interface with the brain. And make it free, the altruistic part. I want nobody anywhere to suffer because they can’t afford an education that they need. This is a big dream but I have some ideas on getting there. For now I am designing a course on learning which I will put on YouTube eventually turning that into a website and eventually build that into the end goal. For now I might be able to start saving up some of my own money so I can live by myself and get to work on changing the world. 

Fwheehwhf 


I will probably be bouncing around here and LessWrong, which is how I found EA forum, commenting and posting about what I find interesting. I hope to find on these forums mentors, friends and community. I am mostly here to learn ask and be taught. I am interested in the workings of the world, hungry to fix my ignorance and satisfy my curiosity.

In the style of Lex Fridman (if you don’t know him fix that) I’ll finish with a quote I like “We are all in the gutter but some of us are looking at the stars” - Oscar Wilde