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.
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.
Hi everyone,
I'm Leisha. I originally came across this site quite a while ago when I read the Explain/Worship/Ignore analogy here. I was looking for insight into my own cognitive processes; to skip the unimportant details, I ended up reading a whole lot about the concept of infinity once I realized that contemplating the idea gave me the same feeling of Worship that religion used to. It still does, to some extent, but at least I'm better-informed and can Explain the sheer scale of what I'm thinking of a little better.
I didn't return here until yesterday, when I was researching the concept of rational thought (by way of cognitive processing, Ayn Rand, and Vulcans!) For background, I'm a Myers-Briggs F-type (INFJ) who has come to realize that while emotion has its value, it's certainly not to be relied upon for making sound judgements. What I'm looking to do, essentially, is to repair the faulty processes within my own mind. I've spent a lot of time reaching invalid conclusions because the premises I have been working from were wrong; the original input I was given (before I was of an age to think critically) was incorrect. I'm tracing back the origin of a lot of the aliefs I have, only to find that they're based on values I no longer hold to be important. My value-sets need tweaking.
Unlike with a computer, though, with a mind you can't just delete what you need to and start over. Those detrimental thought-processes need to be overwritten with something that works better. That's why I'm here, essentially, as a complement to my inner work. I'm here to read about a more rational way of thinking, to try out ideas, to compare and to analyze. I intend to work through the Sequences, a little at a time.
I expect to read much more than I comment. If I assess myself honestly and fairly, then I'm not an unintelligent person, but I am (particularly by comparison with the subset represented at this website!) uneducated, and so a great deal of the math and science will likely be beyond my comprehension at this point. However, I thought I'd post here to introduce myself anyway, and to say what a valuable resource this site looks to be. I look forward to reading more.
Other trivia: I'm female, which I know puts me in the minority here. I enjoy science fiction and am working on some original pieces of my own. I'm interested in psychology, anthropology and the "weirder" parts of physics. I like to think about the very large and very small ends of the scale, and contemplate the big questions about who we are, how we got here and where we're going. I'm a libertarian and a feminist, and I drink tea.
Hmm... Explain/worship/ignore is one of the first articles I remember reading too.
I wish you the warmest welcome.
Make sure to at least read the Core Sequences (Map and Territory, Mysterious Answers to Mysterious Questions, Reductionism), as there is a tendency in discussion on this site to be rash against debaters who have not familiarized themselves with the basics.