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.)
Hey everyone,
I'm Jost, 19 years old, and studying physics in Munich, Germany. I've come across HPMoR in mid-2010 and am currently translating it into German. That way, I found LW and dropped by from time to time to read some stuff – mostly from the Sequences, but rarely in sequence. I started reading more of LW this spring, while a friend and I were preparing a two day introductory course on cognitive biases entitled “How to Change Your Mind”. (Guess where that idea came from!)
I'm probably going to be most active in the HPMoR-related threads.
I was very intrigued by the Singularity- and FAI-related ideas, but I still feel kind of a future shock after reading about all these SL4 ideas while I was at SL1. Are there any remedies?
There are two remedies: Thinking about the ideas, and reading other people's thoughts about the ideas.
I generally recommend the former first, followed by the second, followed by the first again - don't read too much without giving yourself time to think the ideas through for yourself.
My general rule with new ideas is to get the summary first and think it through - my personal goal is to have (at least) one criticism, (at least) one supporting argument, and (at least) one derived idea before I read other people's thoughts on the matter.