Welcome to Less Wrong! (July 2012)

Paul Crowley

31 Welcome to Less Wrong! (July 2012)

18th Jul 2012

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 fourth incarnation of the welcome thread, the first three of which which now have too many comments. The text is by orthonormal from an original by MBlume.)

A few notes about the site mechanics

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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 article" 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.)

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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
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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.

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31 Welcome to Less Wrong! (July 2012)

by Paul Crowley

18th Jul 2012

6 min read

850

31

(This is the fourth incarnation of the welcome thread, the first three of which which now have too many comments. The text is by orthonormal from an original by MBlume.)

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.

Open Threads

Personal Blog

31

New Comment

Rendering 0/850 comments, sorted by

top scoring

(show more) Click to highlight new comments since: Today at 10:20 PM

Some comments are truncated due to high volume. (⌘F to expand all)Change truncation settings

Moderation Log

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Desrtopa14y130

Personally, for their first female protagonist, I felt like Pixar could have done a lot better than a Rebellious Princess. It's cliche, and I would have liked to see them exercise more creativity, but besides that, I think the instructive value is dubious. Yes, it's awfully burdensome to have one's life direction dictated to an excessive degree by external circumstances and expectations. But on the other hand, Rebellious Princesses, including Merida, tend to rail against the unfairness of their circumstances without stopping to consider that they live in societies where practically everyone has their lives dictated by external circumstances, and there's no easy transition to a social model that allows differently.

Merida wants to live a life where she's free to pursue her love of archery and riding, and get married when and to whom she wants? Well she'd be screwed if she were a peasant, since all the necessary house and field work wouldn't leave her with the time, her family wouldn't own a horse, unless it was a ploughhorse she wouldn't be able to take out for pleasure riding, and she'd be married off at an early age out of economic rather than political necessity. And she'd be similarly out of luck if her parents were merchants, or craftsmen, or practically anyone else. Like most Rebellious Princesses, she has modern expectations of entitlement in a society where those expectations don't make sense.

It sucks to be told you can't do something you love because of societal preconceptions; "You shouldn't try to be a mathematician, you're a girl," "'You're a black ghetto kid, what are you doing aiming to be a businessman?" etc. But Rebellious Princesses are in a situation more analogous to "You might want not to have to go to school and be able to spend your time partying with friends and maybe make a living drawing pictures of cartoons you like, but there's no social structure to support you if you try to do that."

By the end of the movie, Merida and her mother birepbzr gurve cevqr naq zhghny zvfhaqrefgnaqvat, naq Zrevqn'f zbgure yrneaf gb frr gur vffhr sebz ure Zrevqn'f cbvag bs ivrj naq abg sbepr ure vagb n fhqqra zneevntr sbe cbyvgvpny rkcrqvrapl, juvyr Zrevqn yrneaf... gung fur ybirf ure zbz rabhtu gb abg jnag ure gb or ghearq vagb n orne? Fhccbfvat gur bgure gevorf jrera'g cercnerq gb pnyy bss gur zneevntr, naq fur jnf fghpx pubbfvat orgjrra n cebonoyl haunccl zneevntr naq crnpr, be ab zneevntr naq jne, jbhyq fur unir pubfra nal qvssreragyl guna fur qvq ng gur fgneg bs gur zbivr?

This probably all sounds like I disapproved of the movie a lot more than I really did, but I definitely wouldn't rank it alongside Mulan terms of positive social message. Mulan wanted to bring her family honor and keep her father safe, so she went and performed a service for her society which demanded great perseverance and courage, which her society neither expected nor encouraged her to perform. Merida wasn't happy with the expectations and duties her society placed on her, so she tried to duck out of them, nearly caused a disaster, and ultimately got what she wanted without having to make a hard choice between personal satisfaction and doing her part for her society.

Showing 3 of 4 replies (Click to show all)

Bugmaster14y50

I thought that Brave was actually a somewhat subversive movie -- perhaps inadvertently so. The movie is structured and presented in a way that makes it look like the standard Rebellious Princess story, with the standard feminist message. The protagonist appears to be a girl who overcomes the Patriarchy by transgressing gender norms, etc. etc. This is true to a certain extent, but it's not the main focus of the movie.

Instead, the movie is, at its core, a very personal story of a child's relationship with her parent, the conflict between love and pride, and... (read more)

4Vaniver14y

Upvoted. My thoughts on Brave are over here, but basically Merida is actually a really dark character, and it's sort of sickening that she gets away with everything she does. Interesting enough to repeat is my suggestion for a better setting: [...] Of course, it's difficult to make a movie glorifying sweatshop labor, whereas princesses are distant enough to be a tame example.

1Ajeya Cotra14y

I understand your critique, and I mostly agree with it. I actually would have been even happier if Merida had bitten the bullet and married the winner - but for different reasons. She would have married because she loved her mother and her kingdom, and understood that peace must come at a cost - it would still very much count as a movie with no romantic angle. She would have been like Princess Yue in Avatar, a character I had serious respect for. When Yue was willing to marry Han for duty, and then was willing to fnpevsvpr ure yvsr gb orpbzr gur zbba, that was the first time I said to myself, "Wow, these guys really do break convention." Merida would have been a lot more brave to accept the dictates of her society (but for the right reasons), or to find a more substantial compromise than just convincing the other lords to yrg rirelbar zneel sbe ybir. But I still think it was a sweet movie.

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