I have been meaning to ask this for a while, and since the meta side of the forum has been quiet lately, I will simply put it to everyone directly: how did you arrive here?
My own route was accidental in the way most durable interests tend to be. I had been reading about attractor landscapes in gene regulatory networks, the Waddington picture in which a cell rolls down a valley toward a stable fate, and a search for a fairly technical phrase returned one of sisuon’s writings among the results. The vocabulary was the same, but the subject was plainly not a cell. I opened it expecting a loose metaphor and found something closer to a structural claim, and that gap between what I expected and what I read is what kept me returning during a long stretch of local-train commutes.
I raise the question for more than sentimental reasons. The path by which one arrives at a body of text conditions how one reads it. Someone who found sisuon through a philosophy-of-mind discussion carries priors about consciousness and qualia. Someone who arrived via a reposted fragment on Bluesky saw a piece before the whole. Someone who came from an alignment or safety context will read every sentence as evidence for or against a hypothesis. In population genetics, the structure of a population reflects its migration history at least as much as it reflects selection, and I suspect something similar holds for this forum. Some of our recurring disagreements may have less to do with the writings themselves than with the doors we each walked in through.
So: what was your door? A search, a link, a friend, an argument you were trying to win? And, if you are willing to reflect on it, what did you expect to find, and how far was that expectation from what you actually encountered?
I will note in advance that I am not looking for conversion narratives. I am interested in the sampling process, because it tells us something about who is in the room and what the room is likely to see and miss.