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.)
Hello, I've been lurking around Less Wrong for several months, mostly reading through the sequences. I especially enjoyed the ones on free will and happiness theory.
I finally created an account a week or so ago so that I could express interest in a Salt Lake City meetup. And now here I am introducing myself.
I’m a thirty year old white male living in Salt Lake City. I write point of sale software by day, and video games by night.
I think my primary motivation into rationality was my upbringing. I was raised in a very religious, and rather unhealthy home. That coupled with the facts that the LDS culture isn’t particularly friendly to nerds, and that I seemed to believe in a different God than most of my fellow churchgoers led to me being told all the time that I was wrong. So, the only way to ever be right was to painstakingly trace my beliefs back to original assumptions that anyone would agree with.
Less Wrong is actually the first source I’ve found on rational thinking, so my self taught methods seem a bit sloppy next to the elegance of the thinking that goes on here.
My big interest, the thing that drives me, is art. You know the feeling you get when you hear an amazing piece of music? Or see a fantastic movie? Or play an incredible game? I want to understand that, I want to know what it does to your brain, and how I could reproduce it.
Anyway, I look forward to being a part of the community. I probably won’t comment much unfortunately, still have some biases that tend to get in the way of that, but I’ll be here lurking, and watching.
Two links containing many more links, to give you a tab explosion.