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.)
Thanks for the post, I'll definitely look at it after I'm done replying to this one.
When you say "privilege arguments for the positions you already hold", do you mean "only allow arguments that allow you a better chance of winning"?
This sounds like the wrong thing to say, but... I'll say it anyways, I want to see your reaction: what if you don't develop a tendency to fight the easier battle? What you say makes sense: losing less = learning less, until the point where you start to win/lose at a 50/50 rate at least. What if you pick arguments for the sake of arguing, or you promise yourself that you would only argue for the truth? Or, as is the case for me, what if you you have the tendency to fight for both sides (heck, this post)? I actually agree with you on all points, but for some reason I want to know how you would answer the opposing side, if I were on it.
Ideally, you should aim to defeat the strongest version of your opponent's argument that you can think of--it's a much better test of whether your position is actually correct, and it helps prevent rationalization. Rather than attacking a version of your opponent's argument that is weak, you should attack the strongest possible version of it. On LessWrong we usually call this Least Convenient Possible World, or LCPW for short. (I've also seen it called "steel man," because instead of constructing a weaker "straw man" version of your opp... (read more)