User:Dark Charles

Hello, my name is Charles Rambo. I'm twenty-one years old and currently live in Escondido, California, where I've spent the majority of my life. I want to move back up to the Bay Area, however. I'm a former UC Berkeley student, and majored in math. I graduated in May of 2009 and am currently unemployed. As a result, I have plenty of time to play on Wikipedia. At some point, I hope to go back to school. I would describe myself as introverted, pensive (though not necessarily intelligent), realistic and honest; I'm not particularly social, but I have the best intentions in mind.

Writing/editing is enjoyable to me, though at times it frustrated me. In fact, on occasion I have delusions about becoming an author. I'm a grammar freak. But I actually make a lot of mistakes, myself, and it drives me crazy. Coming to terms with the fact that I'm a sloppy person is something that I need to work on. Some common mistakes that I make: treating "be" as a preposition, forgetting what I wrote and being redundant as a result, spelling private "privet," experience "experence," believe "beleive," quit "quite" and it's common for me to write a periods when an exclamation or question mark should be used. In addition, I find that I use the wrong part of speech/tense a lot. It's mainly a product of revision: I revise a sentence and for some reason I only read the first part of a word and don't notice that it's the wrong part of speech/tense. There are probably a lot more; it's always difficult to notice your own mistakes. As such, consider this my apology for all the mistakes that I've made and will make.

I enjoy Wikipedia because it's a great source for information, above all else. It's wonderful that so many normal people are coming together and creating so much simply because they want to help out. Wikipedia's open source format gives it the ability to adapt to changes quickly and helps to reduce biases, within articles, that a single author will inevitably add. The benefits are well worth the costs:the only problems are a bit of vandalism, a few typos here and there and, perhaps, a small number of erroneous edits, all of which can be fixed with ease.

I've edited quite a few articles on here, and am using this account primarily to keep track of what I've done. The majority of my edits were done under the IP addresses: 24.7.69.232, 24.7.70.7, 75.213.201.201, 75.214.42.12 and my prior user account semistablesystem (I know, dumb name). Tragically, I frequently forget to log in. You can see my recent contributions by clicking here.

As far as politics go, I try to be as objective as possible and exclude myself, at least officially, from a particular political affiliation (though I'm not very good at staying neutral). In my opinion, most political discourse is unhealthy. People form groups to propagate their political views. Then members convey ideas to one another and, since everyone agrees, the they are distorted and become unreasonably strong. Another problem is that members try to venerate their group, and the issues become secondary. In summery: People with a particular political affiliation tend to develop an ingroup mentality, which shuts down open minded thinking (idea stolen from Jonathan Haidt). I've spent a small amount of time thinking about how we might be able to fix this problem, but I don't want to go into that here (it would be too controversial and my ideas aren't completely developed anyway).