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.)
You can call me Witzvo. My determination of whether I'm a "rationalist" is waiting on data to be supplied by your responses. I found HPMOR hilarious and insightful (I was hooked from the first chapter which so beautifully juxtaposed a rationalist child with all-too-realistic adults), and lurked some for a while. I have one previous post which I doubt ever got read. To be critical, my general impression of the discussions here is that they are self-congratulatory, smarter than they are wise, and sometimes obsessed with philosophically meaningful but not terribly urgent debates. However, I do value the criteria by which karma is obtained. And I saw some evidence of responses being actually based on the merits of an argument presented, which is commendable. Also, Eliezer should be commended for sticking his neck out so far and so often.
I was born into a sect of Christianity that is heretical in various ways, but notably in that they believe that God is operating all for the (eventual) good of mankind, and that we will all be saved (e.g. no eternal Hell). I remain agnostic. Talk about non-falsifiability and Occam's razor all you like, but a Bayesian doesn't abandon the possibilities to which he assigns prior mass without evidence, and even then the posterior mass generally just drops towards 0, not all the way. Still, my life is basically secular; I don't think there's an important observable difference in how I live my life from how an atheist lives, and that's pretty much the end of the matter for me. Oh, perhaps I have times of weakness, but who doesn't?
I have formal training in statistics. I am very sympathetic to the Savage / de Finetti schools of subjective Bayesianism, but if I had to name my philosophy of science I'd call it Boxian, after George Box (c.f. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2982063; I highly recommend this paper AND the discussion. Sorry about the pay walls).
I find the Solomonoff/Kolmogorov/AIXI ideas fascinating and inspiring. I aspire to compute for example, (a computationally bounded approximation to) the normal forms of (a finite subsequence of) a countable sequence of de Bruijn lambda terms and go from there. I do not see any lurking existential crisis in doing so.
In fact, maybe I've missed something, but I have not yet identified an actionable issue regarding one of the much-discussed existential crises. I do not participate much in the political system of my country or even see how that would help particularly except and unless through actual rational discussion and other action.
I find far more profit in exploring ideas, such as say, Inventing on Principle (http://vimeo.com/36579366), or Incremental Learning in Inductive Programming (http://www.cogsys.wiai.uni-bamberg.de/aaip09/aaip09_submissions/incremental.pdf), either of which I would be happy to discuss.
I am also intellectually lonely.
That's probably more than enough. Go on and tell me something less wrong.
Well, the standard response to the whole 'agnostic' debate is that while probability is subjective, pobability theory is theorems: You and I are only ever allowed to assign credence according to the amount of evidence available, and the God hypothesis has little, so we believe little. This gives me the mathematical right to make the prediction "the Jeudo-Christian God does not exist" and expect to see evidence accordingly. We say ~God because that is what we expect.
Other than that, welcome to less wrong. If you have time to read a book draft sign... (read more)