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've been lurking on LessWrong for quite a while now - around a year -, but saw this post and decided to comment. I hope this is useful as feedback to the admins.
I'm a 22 year old student at UT Austin. As of last Fall, I'm pursuing a PhD in Computer Science. My specialization is Machine Learning. And I'm committed to doing everything in my power to hasten the Singularity :P. I have a BTech in CS from IIT Bombay, India.
I've considered myself a rationalist for as long as I can remember. I found less wrong through Overcoming Bias and from Elizier's posts about Bayes' Theorem and Decision Theory related posts which are linked around the internet. I stuck around because of the Rationality quotes threads and the relation to the Singularity Institute. I didn't think of it as a community so much as a multiple-author blog back then. Then I came to Austin, and I started attending the weekly meetups here. We have a small group, but it's great to find a set of like-minded people, and it's an important part of my week. I've been following Less Wrong a lot more closely since then. The group also rekindled my interest in SciFi. I bought a kindle, and I've been reading a fair bit now, along with a healthy dose of Non-Fiction. I haven't been writing in the comment threads, primarily out of laziness, but I'm trying to force myself out of it. I'm currently rereading Methods of Rationality ( I stopped somewhere in the middle last time), and I'm reading the sequences on my Kindle now (so thanks to whoever converted them to MOBI!)
I am a vegetarian being born into a pious Hindu family. Religion wore off as I became an atheist in my early teens. But I continue to be a vegetarian for moral and environmental reasons.