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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* Normal_Anomaly
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* 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.

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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 6:15 AM

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

Moderation Log

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lloyd14y-20

Thanks for the welcome.

I raised this pov of logic (reason or rationality when applied) because I saw a piece that correlates training reason with muscle training. If logic is categorical similar to a sense then treat it metaphorically as such, I think. Improving one's senses is a little different than training a muscle and is a more direct simile. Then there is the question of what is logic sensing? Sight perceives what we call light, so logic is perceiving 'the order' of things? The eventual line of thinking starts questioning the relationship of logic to intuition. I advocate the honing of intuition, but it is identical in process to improving one's reason. The gist being that intuition picks up on the same object that logic eventually describes, like the part of vision which detects movement in the field that is only detailed once the focal point is moved upon it.

As for vitalism, the life I speak of is to extend one's understanding of biological life - a self-directing organism - to see stars as having the same potential. The behavior of stars, and the universal structure is constrained in the imagination to be subject to the laws of physics and the metaphor for a star in this frame is a fire, which is lit and burns according to predictable rules regarding combustion. The alternative is to imagine that the stars are the dogs, upon which the earth is a flea, and we are mites upon it. Why does this matter? I suppose it is just one of those world-view things which I think dictates how people feel about their existence. "We live in a dead universe subject to laws external to our being" predicates a view which sees external authority as natural and dismisses the vitality within all points which manifest this 'life'. I think the metaphor for the universe is closely tied to the ethos of the culture, so I raised this question.

Thanks for your thoughtful reply.

Bugmaster14y10

I'm not sure what you mean by "self-directing". As I see it, "life" is yet another physical process, like "combustion" or "crystallization" or "nuclear fusion". Life is probably a more complex process than these other ones, but it's not categorically different from them. An amoeba's motion is directed, to be sure, but so is the motion of a falling rock.

0chaosmosis14y

I don't believe that even biological life is self-directing. Additionally, I don't understand how extending one's understanding of biological life to everything can even happen. If you expand the concept of life to include everything then the concept of life becomes meaningless. Personally, whether the universe is alive, or not, it's all the same to me. [...] When you say that this behavior is "constrained in the imagination", you're not trying to imply that we're controlling or maintaining those constraints with our thoughts in any way, are you? That doesn't make sense because I am not telekinetic. How would you know that what you're saying is even true, as opposed to some neat sounding thing that you made up with no evidence? What shows that your claims are true? [...] If this is just an abstract metaphor, I've been confused. If so, I would have liked you to label it differently. I don't understand why vitalism would make the universe seem like a better place to live. I'm also reluctant to label anything true for purposes other than its truth. Even if vitalism would make the universe seem like a better place to live, if our universe is not alive, then it doesn't make sense to believe in it. Belief is not a choice. If you acknowledge that the universe isn't alive then you lose the ability to believe that the universe is alive, unless you're okay with just blatantly contradicting yourself. [...] I don't understand why you think determinism is bad. I like it. It's useful, and seems true. You say that your view says that life is the source of the way things behave. Other than the label and the mysteriousness of its connotations, what distinguishes this from determinism? If it's not determinism, then aren't you just contending that randomness is the cause of all events? That seems unlikely to me, but even if it is the case, why would viewing people as controlled by "life" and mysterious randomness be a better worldview than determinism? I prefer predictability,

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