I can't say I blame you for not reading it; it took me about three months to get through it! However Common Sense Atheism has An Intuitive Explanation of Eliezer Yudkowsky’s Intuitive Explanation of Bayes’ Theorem, it's much easier to read and explains many of the bits that Eliezer skips over.
As for integrating the importance of rationality I scarcely know where to begin; it's a large topic. First and foremost read this. Secondly realise how important opinions are, and that it's not okay to "have your own opinion" as schools will common condition their students to believe. That's not to say don't have different opinions to other people when you have a (justified) belief that your opinion reflects reality better, it's to say it's not okay to have false opinions. One of the reasons reading An Intuitive Explanation is important is that it helps convey the idea that your beliefs should correspond exactly to what you expect from reality.
It's hard to put into context why this is so important, but think if you will back to the cause of the WW2 Holocaust. All of that happened because of what people believed. To get a taste of how bad that sort of thing is look into current affairs, things happening in Syria, Bahrain, and so on. Religious extremists are another example of this, as are racists. All of these "evil" people are not inherently evil, they just have beliefs that make them think that what they're doing is right.
All of that injustice done, all of those people hurt and killed because people are not inherently rational. You could end up as one of those victims, but the worst part is you could be the one doing the evil and not even know it. It might help to read this.
On a separate note, regarding emotions and acting irrationally because of them the best thing is to reduce them. Either you'll find that the emotion is flagging up a real problem and you can take the appropriate action, or they'll end up dissipating.
Sorry that turned into a bit of an essay but it is a big topic and my experience of explaining it is limited. If you’ve got questions or anything I’m more than happy to answer/try to answer them. Hope all this is helpful.
And my bad, I’ve only ever encountered your name in relation to MGS, my apologies for that.
Thanks for your input, it was quite enlightening. I especially appreciate the Common Sense Atheism post. That's a wonderful blog and what originally led me to this site, but I had no idea that article was on there.
Concerning what you said about the Holocaust and such, that had actually occurred to me before, but in a different manner. I reasoned that even if I felt 99% certain that my moral beliefs were accurate, there was that 1% chance that they could be wrong. Hitler may well have felt 99% certain that he was correct. I became to afraid to really do muc...
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:
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.)