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, my name is Alexey, and although I've been around the website for a while and have been an active LessWrongian in real life meetups, I haven't actually introduced myself on the website yet. So here it goes.
I am an undergraduate student at the University of Cambridge, specialising in synthetic biology and aiming to go on to do research in that field. I am interested in raising x-risk awareness within the SynBio community and advancing a safe approach to research in this area.
I was introduced to LW by a friend, and soon realised that there is actually a community of rational people interested in much the same things as I am. I have enjoyed reading the Sequences and have definitely learned a lot.
Since finding the LW website and community has been such a great experience for me, I introduced many of my friends to it, have participated in setting up the Cambridge meetup group; and more recently organised the first meetup in Budapest. I find it very rewarding to be able to talk to and make friends with fellow rationalists!
As for my interests within the scope of LW, I find that I am interested in self-improvement in terms of identifying and overcoming biases, building and expanding rationalist communities and working on x-risk reduction in synthetic biology. In fact, I find that biologists are underrepresented within the LW community and hope that my knowledge of the subject can translate into useful contributions to the discussions here on the LW website, and in real life LW meetups!