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
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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.)
Glad to be of help!
Well the thing about probabilities (in Bayesian statistics) is that they represent the amount of evidence you have for the true state of reality. In general being 50% certain means you have no evidence for your belief, less that 50% means you have evidence against it and greater than 50% means you have evidence for it. You'll get to it as you read more of An Intuitive Explanation.
The important thing to note is that to be 99% certain something is true as a rationalist you actually have to have evidence for it being true. Rather than feeling that you're 99% certain, Bayes theorem allows you to see how much evidence you actually have in a purely quantitative way. That's why there's so much talk of "calibration" here, it's an attempt at aligning the feeling of how certain you are with how certain the evidence says you should be.
You can also work out the expected value of what your actions would be if you are wrong. For Hitler, if he thought there was a 1% chance of him being wrong he could work out the expected number of wasted lives as 0.01*11,000,000 which is 110,000 (and that's using the lower bound of people killed during the holocaust). Hence, if I were Hitler, I wouldn't risk instigating the holocaust until I had much more information/evidence. Being rational is about looking at the way the world is and acting based on that.
The point is, the most moral thing to do is the most likely thing to be moral. If God turns out to exist (although there are masses of evidence against that) and he asks you why you weren't a religious fundamentalist, you'll have a damn good answer.