A few notes about the site mechanics
A few notes about the community
If English is not your first language, don't let that make you afraid to post or comment. You can get English help on Discussion- or Main-level posts by sending a PM to one of the following users (use the "send message" link on the upper right of their user page). Either put the text of the post in the PM, or just say that you'd like English help and you'll get a response with an email address.
* Normal_Anomaly
* Randaly
* shokwave
* Barry Cotter
A note for theists: you will find the Less Wrong community to be predominantly atheist, though not completely so, and most of us are genuinely respectful of religious people who keep the usual community norms. It's worth saying that we might think religion is off-topic in some places where you think it's on-topic, so be thoughtful about where and how you start explicitly talking about it; some of us are happy to talk about religion, some of us aren't interested. Bear in mind that many of us really, truly have given full consideration to theistic claims and found them to be false, so starting with the most common arguments is pretty likely just to annoy people. Anyhow, it's absolutely OK to mention that you're religious in your welcome post and to invite a discussion there.
A list of some posts that are pretty awesome
I recommend the major sequences to everybody, but I realize how daunting they look at first. So for purposes of immediate gratification, the following posts are particularly interesting/illuminating/provocative and don't require any previous reading:
- Your Intuitions are Not Magic
- The Apologist and the Revolutionary
- How to Convince Me that 2 + 2 = 3
- Lawful Uncertainty
- The Planning Fallacy
- Scope Insensitivity
- The Allais Paradox (with two followups)
- We Change Our Minds Less Often Than We Think
- The Least Convenient Possible World
- The Third Alternative
- The Domain of Your Utility Function
- Newcomb's Problem and Regret of Rationality
- The True Prisoner's Dilemma
- The Tragedy of Group Selectionism
- Policy Debates Should Not Appear One-Sided
- That Alien Message
More suggestions are welcome! Or just check out the top-rated posts from the history of Less Wrong. Most posts at +50 or more are well worth your time.
Welcome to Less Wrong, and we look forward to hearing from you throughout the site.
(Note from orthonormal: MBlume and other contributors wrote the original version of this welcome message, and I've stolen heavily from it.)
Hi! I'm Eric, a freshman at UC Berkeley. I've been lurking on Overcoming Bias/Less Wrong for a long time.
I had been reading OB before LW existed; I don't even remember when I started reading OB (maybe even before high school!). It's too long ago for me to remember clearly, but I think I found OB while I was reading about transhumanism, which I was very interested in. I still agree with the ideas of transhumanism, and I guess I would still identify myself as a transhumanist, but I don't actively read about it much anymore. I read LW less than I used to, but I'm starting to read it more now; LW and OB are basically the only transhumanist-related blogs that I still read.
I guess I like this site because I like things that are interesting and make me think; there are a lot of good and interesting ideas floating around here, and the quality of the posts and comments is excellent. I don't think I've encountered a single other site with such good comments. I like to say that I'm too curious and have too many interests; I spend a lot of time reading about things that interest me and I don't know what I want to do.
Why am I introducing myself and no longer lurking after all these years? I used to be really bad at expressing myself in writing: I wrote slowly and badly, and reading my old blog comments makes me cringe. I was good at reading, and at producing grammatically correct sentences, but I was terrible at actually using written language to get my ideas across. For example, just two years ago (in 11th grade), I scored 80/80 on the Writing Multiple Choice section of the SAT, but only 7/12 on the essay! Now, though, I find that I can write just fine (and I have no idea why this suddenly happened). So I'm finally introducing myself because I can finally write decent posts and comments :)
A quick question for more experienced LW commenters: I posted a comment (http://lesswrong.com/lw/8nr/intuitive_explanation_of_solomonoff_induction/5k5b) on an old, non-promoted post, and it didn't show up in the recent comments section. As a result, no one seems to have even seen it, and I don't know whether my addition was useful or not. How can I make these kinds of contributions visible in the future?
It's currently non-intuitive, but the "recent comments" for the main section appear only to those who've selected to see the main section, and the "recent comments" for the discussion appear only to those who've selected the discussion. This is one of the silliest aspects of this site's design.