Ohhhhh. WOW! Damn. Now I feel bad.
I have been acting like a bull in a china shop, been an extremely ungracious guest, and have taken longer than I prefer to realize these things.
My deepest apologies.
My only defenses or mitigating circumstances:
1. I really didn't get it
2. My intentions were good
I would like to perform a penance of creating or helping to create a newbie's guide to LessWrong. Doing so will clarify and consolidate my understanding and hopefully provide a useful community resource in recompense for the above and appreciation for those who took the time to write thoughtful comments. Obviously, though, doing so will require more patience and help from the community (particularly since I am certainly aware that I have no idea how to calibrate how much, if anything, you actually want to make too easily accessible) -- so this is a also request for that patience and help (and I'm making the assumption that the request will be answered by the replies ;-).
Thanks.
What I didn't get?
Some of it was mistaken assumptions about karma. Much more of it was the lack of recognition of the presence of a huge amount of underlying structure which is necessary to explain what looks like seemingly irrational behavior (to someone who doesn't have that structure). I also didn't recognize most of the offered help because I didn't understand it. (Even just saying to a newbie, "I know that you don't recognize this as help because you don't get it yet but could you please trust me that it is intended as help" would probably convince many more people to just look again rather than bailing).
Some of the epiphany was figuring out the various parts that make up karma and truly recognizing its accuracy and efficiency. A lot more of it was just figuring out that there had to be structures present to explain the seemingly irrational behavior. Yeah, that's duh! obvious in hindsight but it's difficult to figure out by yourself (until you catch the underlying regularities and make the right assumptions).
One of the largest problems for newbies is that the culture has evolved a great many "terms of art" that are not recognizable as such to the newbie. Getting "hammered" for questioning the upvote of a comment apparently without substance was a shock for me. Fortunately, the underlying consistency of the "irrationality" was also becoming apparent at the same time.
Just reading and even fully understanding the sequences does not fully prepare one for contributing here. This fact is NOT evident to new contributors. Smacking a new contributor on the nose (with karma) while pointing at a sequence that they are rather sure that they comprehended and nothing else is not going to make sense to them until they have the necessary understandings.
One must understand the expected process and expectations of contribution and understand the "terms of art" that are invariable used in the evaluatory comments. Clear and confused have very specific meanings here that do not unpack correctly unless you have the underlying structure/understanding. I was also very shocked by the number of perceived strawmen and the community's acceptance of them -- contrary to virtually every other "rational" website.
I know that I still don't have all of it but most of the behavior that totally baffled me before and appeared irrational now makes total sense. The rules are totally different here from what I expected/assumed and the unnoticed phase change caused my "rational" behavior to be deemed "irrational" (only because it was ;-) and "irrational" behavior to be widely accepted (not what you expect on a site devoted to rationality ;-).
Most of what I think I have in mind is just to point out where and explain why the rules are very different from what is likely to be assumed by an outsider. In particular, it's very hard to accept that you're confused and wrong when your bayesian priors give that a low probability -- and a near-zero probability when the people informing you aren't making sense and acting irrationally (except when they're all doing it -- and doing it consistently).
The real epiphany was when I said "F it. These people are managing to be consistent. There has to be some set of rules that allow them to do that. Now . . . . what the F are they?" And, for me, that was pretty rapidly followed by the "Ohhhhh. WOW! Damn. Now I feel bad." of my apology.
If I could figure out some way to be helpful to steer people towards that epiphany without actually giving it to them, it would be ideal. Some work is necessary to fully integrate something like this. On the other hand, if it's too hard and confusing, I think that a lot of people will (and do) bail out with a very bad taste in their mouths (which I still believe is very contrary to the stated goals of the community).
I'm also looking for any interested individuals who would like to help.
Not helping. I still have no idea whether you actually changed your mind about anything. You say you did, but you didn't give any specific detail (explicit statements about the beliefs you changed; I don't expect you should've changed your mind so soon, for that matter). The change that's obvious is that you snapped out of adversarial mode, which is great (and in long term sufficient to start learning), but is generally unrelated to changes in what you believe.
For example, people in crackpot hubs can well agree with each other on all the contradicting and meaningless woo they generate, thus starting to agree with the community is generally not a sure sign of changing your mind.