Edit: This post refers to the original version of LessWrong, which ran between February 2009 and March 2018. The About page referring to the period from March 2018 to the present can be found here.

 

Over the last decades, new experiments have changed science's picture of the way we think - the ways we succeed or fail to obtain the truth, or fulfill our goals. The heuristics and biases program, in cognitive psychology, has exposed dozens of major flaws in human reasoning. Social psychology shows how we succeed or fail in groups. Probability theory and decision theory have given us new mathematical foundations for understanding minds.

Less Wrong is devoted to refining the art of human rationality - the art of thinking. The new math and science deserves to be applied to our daily lives, and heard in our public voices.

Less Wrong consists of three areas: The main community blog, the Less Wrong wiki and the Less Wrong discussion area.

Less Wrong is a partially moderated community blog that allows general authors to contribute posts as well as comments. Users vote posts and comments up and down (with code based on Reddit's open source). "Promoted" posts (appearing on the front page) are chosen by the editors on the basis of substantive new content, clear argument, good writing, popularity, and importance.

We suggest submitting links with a short description. Recommended books should have longer descriptions. Links will not be promoted unless they are truly excellent - the "promoted" posts are intended as a filtered stream for the casual/busy reader.

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Sample posts:

Politics is the Mind-Killer Policy Tug-O-War Are Your Enemies Innately Evil?
The Affect Heuristic We Change Our Minds Less Often Than We Think Conjunction Controversy
Feeling Rational Knowing About Biases Can Hurt You Newcomb's Problem
Probability is in the Mind Absence of Evidence is Evidence of Absence Einstein's Arrogance
The Bottom Line Making Beliefs Pay Rent Tsuyoku Naritai

To read through Less Wrong systematically, use the Sequences.

Less Wrong was established as a sister site to the blog Overcoming Bias, where Eliezer Yudkowsky originally began blogging under the chief editorship of Robin Hanson, and contains many old posts imported from OB.

To some extent, the software of LW is still under development. The code that runs this site is forked from the open source Reddit base, and is hosted on Github. Our public issue tracker is hosted at Google Code. Contributions of code or issues are welcome and volunteer Python developers are cordially solicited (see this post). More information on how to contribute is available at the LW Github wiki.

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3 comments, sorted by Click to highlight new comments since: Today at 2:09 AM

Less Wrong consists of three areas: The main community blog, the Less Wrong wiki and the Less Wrong discussion area.

Maybe redirect the lesswrong.com/r/discussion/ link & description to the "Ask a Question" beta?

This is the old version, kept for the sake of not deleting old things. It is not meant to be an accurate description of modern LW.

Ah, makes sense.