Welcome to Less Wrong! (2012)

orthonormal

31 Welcome to Less Wrong! (2012)

26th Dec 2011

6 min read

31

If you've recently joined the Less Wrong community, please leave a comment here and introduce yourself. We'd love to know who you are, what you're doing, what you value, how you came to identify as a rationalist or how you found us. You can skip right to that if you like; the rest of this post consists of a few things you might find helpful. More can be found at the FAQ.

(This is the third incarnation of the welcome thread, the first two of which which now have too many comments to show all at once.)

A few notes about the site mechanics

Less Wrong comments are threaded for easy following of multiple conversations. To respond to any comment, click the "Reply" link at the bottom of that comment's box. Within the comment box, links and formatting are achieved via Markdown syntax (you can click the "Help" link below the text box to bring up a primer).

You may have noticed that all the posts and comments on this site have buttons to vote them up or down, and all the users have "karma" scores which come from the sum of all their comments and posts. This immediate easy feedback mechanism helps keep arguments from turning into flamewars and helps make the best posts more visible; it's part of what makes discussions on Less Wrong look different from those anywhere else on the Internet.

However, it can feel really irritating to get downvoted, especially if one doesn't know why. It happens to all of us sometimes, and it's perfectly acceptable to ask for an explanation. (Sometimes it's the unwritten LW etiquette; we have different norms than other forums.) Take note when you're downvoted a lot on one topic, as it often means that several members of the community think you're missing an important point or making a mistake in reasoning— not just that they disagree with you! If you've any questions about karma or voting, please feel free to ask here.

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It's definitely worth your time commenting on old posts; veteran users look through the recent comments thread quite often (there's a separate recent comments thread for the Discussion section, for whatever reason), and a conversation begun anywhere will pick up contributors that way. There's also a succession of open comment threads for discussion of anything remotely related to rationality.

Discussions on Less Wrong tend to end differently than in most other forums; a surprising number end when one participant changes their mind, or when multiple people clarify their views enough and reach agreement. More commonly, though, people will just stop when they've better identified their deeper disagreements, or simply "tap out" of a discussion that's stopped being productive. (Seriously, you can just write "I'm tapping out of this thread.") This is absolutely OK, and it's one good way to avoid the flamewars that plague many sites.

EXTRA FEATURES:

There's actually more than meets the eye here: look near the top of the page for the "WIKI", "DISCUSSION" and "SEQUENCES" links.

LW WIKI: This is our attempt to make searching by topic feasible, as well as to store information like common abbreviations and idioms. It's a good place to look if someone's speaking Greek to you.

LW DISCUSSION: This is a forum just like the top-level one, with two key differences: in the top-level forum, posts require the author to have 20 karma in order to publish, and any upvotes or downvotes on the post are multiplied by 10. Thus there's a lot more informal dialogue in the Discussion section, including some of the more fun conversations here.

SEQUENCES: A huge corpus of material mostly written by Eliezer Yudkowsky in his days of blogging at Overcoming Bias, before Less Wrong was started. Much of the discussion here will casually depend on or refer to ideas brought up in those posts, so reading them can really help with present discussions. Besides which, they're pretty engrossing in my opinion.

A few notes about the community

If you've come to Less Wrong to discuss a particular topic, this thread would be a great place to start the conversation. By commenting here, and checking the responses, you'll probably get a good read on what, if anything, has already been said here on that topic, what's widely understood and what you might still need to take some time explaining.

If your welcome comment starts a huge discussion, then please move to the next step and create a LW Discussion post to continue the conversation; we can fit many more welcomes onto each thread if fewer of them sprout 400+ comments. (To do this: click "Create new areticle" in the upper right corner next to your username, then write the article, then at the bottom take the menu "Post to" and change it from "Drafts" to "Less Wrong Discussion". Then click "Submit". When you edit a published post, clicking "Save and continue" does correctly update the post.)

If you want to write a post about a LW-relevant topic, awesome! I highly recommend you submit your first post to Less Wrong Discussion; don't worry, you can later promote it from there to the main page if it's well-received. (It's much better to get some feedback before every vote counts for 10 karma- honestly, you don't know what you don't know about the community norms here.)

If you'd like to connect with other LWers in real life, we have meetups in various parts of the world. Check the wiki page for places with regular meetups, or the upcoming (irregular) meetups page.

There's also a Facebook group. If you've your own blog or other online presence, please feel free to link it.

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.)

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31 Welcome to Less Wrong! (2012)

by orthonormal

26th Dec 2011

6 min read

1440

31

(This is the third incarnation of the welcome thread, the first two of which which now have too many comments to show all at once.)

A few notes about the site mechanics

EXTRA FEATURES:

There's actually more than meets the eye here: look near the top of the page for the "WIKI", "DISCUSSION" and "SEQUENCES" links.

A few notes about the community

There's also a Facebook group. If you've your own blog or other online presence, please feel free to link it.

A list of some posts that are pretty awesome

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.)

Open Threads

Personal Blog

31

Mentioned in

56Welcome to Less Wrong! (2010-2011)

40Sticky threads?

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Jakinbandw14y10

Is "god exists, has the properties I believe it to have, and wants to stay hidden" really the only reason you can think of for the observable universe being as we observe it to be?

My own belief is closer to: "Something very powerful and supernatural exists, doesn't seem to be hostile, and doesn't mind that I call it the Christian God." And while I would answer 'no' to that question, the amount of evidence that there is something supernatural if far greater than the amount of evidence that there are millions of people lying about their experiences.

For instance, every culture has a belief in the supernatural. Now I would expect that social evolution would trend away from such beliefs. If you say, I can dance and make it rain, and then you fail, you would get laughed at. If you don't believe me gather a bunch of your closest friends and try it. The reason for people to believe someone else is if they had proof to back it up, or they already had reason to believe. Humans aren't stupid, and I don't think we've become radically more intelligent in the last couple thousand years. Why then is belief in the supernatural* everywhere? Is it something in our makeup, how we think? I have heard such a thing discounted by both sides. So there must be some cause, some reason for people to have started believing.

And that's without even getting into my experiences, or those close to me. As was suggested, misremembering, and group hallucination are possible, but if that is the case than I should probably check myself and some people I know into a medical clinic because I would be forced to consider myself insane. Seeing things that aren't there wold be a sign of something being very wrong with me, but I do not any any other symptoms of insanity so I strongly doubt this is the case.

I suppose when I get right down to it, either I and some others are insane with an unknown form of insanity, or there is something out there.

*(outside of the realm of what human science commonly accepts)

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Dolores198414y40

And while I would answer 'no' to that question, the amount of evidence that there is something supernatural* if far greater than the amount of evidence that there are millions of people lying about their experiences.

Surprisingly, no. That said, religious people aren't lying. They're not even a lot crazier than baseline. I've had experiences which I recognize from my reading to be neurological that I might otherwise attribute to some kind of religious intervention. And those are coming from an atheist's brain not primed to see angels or gods or anyth... (read more)

12TheOtherDave14y

For what it's worth, I'm .9+ confident of the following claims: 1) there exist phenomena in the universe that "human science" (1) doesn't commonly accept. 2) for any such phenomenon X, X doesn't mind that you call it the Christian God 3) for any such phenomenon X, X doesn't mind that you call it a figment of your imagination 4) for any such phenomenon X, X is not "hostile" (2) to humans So it seems we agree on that much. Indeed, I find it likely that most people on this site would agree on that much. [...] As above, I think the evidence supporting the idea that there exist phenomena in the universe that "human science" (1) doesn't commonly accept is pretty strong. The evidence supporting the idea that people lie about their experiences, confabulate their experiences, and have experiences that don't map to events outside their own brains despite seeming to, is also pretty strong. These aren't at all conflicting ideas; I am confident of them both. Do you mean to suggest that, because there exist such phenomena, human reports are therefore credible? I don't see how you get from one to the other. [...] Not really, no. It happens to people all the time. I had the experience once of being visited by Prophetic Beings from Outside Time who had a Very Significant Message for me to impart to the masses. That doesn't mean I'm crazy. It also doesn't mean that Prophetic Beings from Outside Time have a Very Significant Message for me to impart to the masses. [...] Again: there are almost certainly many things out there. That doesn't mean that every experience you have is an accurate report of the state of the universe. And if the particular experience you had turns out not to be an accurate report of the state of the universe, that doesn't mean you're insane. ========== (1) Given what I think you mean by that phrase. For example, nuclear physics was outside the realm of what human science commonly accepted in the year 1750, so was supernatural then by this definition, a

0thomblake14y

I don't believe you've read much of the content on this site. There are a host of human cognitive biases that would lead to belief in the supernatural. Perhaps most notably, we attribute agency to non-agents. It's easy to see how that would be adaptive in the ancestral environment; just look at the truth table for "That sound was an animal and I believe that sound was an animal" and the outcomes of each possibility.

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