Welcome to Less Wrong! (July 2012)

Paul Crowley

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

Less Wrong comments are threaded for easy following of multiple conversations. To respond to any comment, click the "Reply" link at the bottom of that comment's box. Within the comment box, links and formatting are achieved via Markdown syntax (you can click the "Help" link below the text box to bring up a primer).

You may have noticed that all the posts and comments on this site have buttons to vote them up or down, and all the users have "karma" scores which come from the sum of all their comments and posts. This immediate easy feedback mechanism helps keep arguments from turning into flamewars and helps make the best posts more visible; it's part of what makes discussions on Less Wrong look different from those anywhere else on the Internet.

However, it can feel really irritating to get downvoted, especially if one doesn't know why. It happens to all of us sometimes, and it's perfectly acceptable to ask for an explanation. (Sometimes it's the unwritten LW etiquette; we have different norms than other forums.) Take note when you're downvoted a lot on one topic, as it often means that several members of the community think you're missing an important point or making a mistake in reasoning— not just that they disagree with you! If you've any questions about karma or voting, please feel free to ask here.

Replies to your comments across the site, plus private messages from other users, will show up in your inbox. You can reach it via the little mail icon beneath your karma score on the upper right of most pages. When you have a new reply or message, it glows red. You can also click on any user's name to view all of their comments and posts.

It's definitely worth your time commenting on old posts; veteran users look through the recent comments thread quite often (there's a separate recent comments thread for the Discussion section, for whatever reason), and a conversation begun anywhere will pick up contributors that way. There's also a succession of open comment threads for discussion of anything remotely related to rationality.

Discussions on Less Wrong tend to end differently than in most other forums; a surprising number end when one participant changes their mind, or when multiple people clarify their views enough and reach agreement. More commonly, though, people will just stop when they've better identified their deeper disagreements, or simply "tap out" of a discussion that's stopped being productive. (Seriously, you can just write "I'm tapping out of this thread.") This is absolutely OK, and it's one good way to avoid the flamewars that plague many sites.

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.)

If you'd like to connect with other LWers in real life, we have meetups in various parts of the world. Check the wiki page for places with regular meetups, or the upcoming (irregular) meetups page.

There's also a Facebook group. If you've your own blog or other online presence, please feel free to link it.

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:

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.

(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.

Apologies in advance for the novella. And any spelling errors that I don't catch (I'm typing in notepad, among other excuses).
It's always very nice when I come across something that reminds me that there are not only people in the world who can actually think rationally, but that many of them are way better at it than me.
I don't like mentioning this so early in any introduction, but my vision is terrible to the point of uselessness; I mostly just avoid calling myself "blind" because it internally feels like that would be giving up on the tiny power left in my right eye. I mention it now just because it will probably be relevant by the end of my rambling. (Feel free to skip to the last paragraph if you'd rather avoid all the backstory.)
I'm from northeast Arkansas. My parents were never really religious (I kinda internalized the ambient mythos of "God=good and fluffy cloud heaven, Satan=bad and fire and brimstone hell" just because it seemed to be the accepted way of things among all of my other relatives. TUrns out my dad identified himself as a Buddhist after one of our many trips to Disneyworld. ... they.... really like Disney. They have a dog named Disney.). They did emphasize the importance of education and individualism and all of those ideals from the late eighties and nineties that turned out to be counterproductive (though I'm having trouble finding the cracked.com articles that point this out in the most academically sound manner imaginable. (note: the previous statement was sarcastic)). So I tried to learn as much as I could in the general direction of science. Being that this was all done at public schools, and that a whole 0 of the more advanced science books I wanted were available in braille, this didn't get me very far.
I did my last two years of highschool at the Arkansas School of Mathematics and Science (which added "and the arts" when I got there, though before they'd actually added an art program), and somehow graduated without actually doing much science (I did a study of the effects of atmosphere on dreams for the year-and-a-half science project that everyone had to do, but forewent trying to organize an experiment and just wrote a terrible research paper). Then I got to college, and everything went to hell. I'd somehow managed to sneak around learning things like vectors, dot/cross products, and actual lab reports in highschool, and the experiments we did in gen physics never felt like experiments so much as demonstrations ("Behold: gravity still works!"). This is about where it became extremely clear to me that I simply could no longer make myself do things by force of will alone (and it became doubly clear that no one else seemed capable of understanding that I wasn't just "blowing off" everything). It took several semesters after that for me to realize that I had seriously missed out on some basic life things and that I actually needed friends (and that I needed to seriously reevaluate what qualified as friendship). They finally made me pick a new major, seeing as I'd kinda kept away from physics after the first semester ended in disaster. So I took the quickest way out, that being French, and now I'm still living with my parents, have about a dozen essays on Franco-african literature to write, and am about $30,000 in debt (that's only counting the loans in my name; my parents took the rest of the financial burden in their names).
So I mostly try to focus on creative endeavors, such as fiction and video games. Except the lack-of-vision thing makes that harder (I've been focusing on developing audio games for the past couple years, but it's virtually impossible to actually live off the tiny audio games market. Oh, but I could write pages on my observations there, and I rather want to, as I'm sure many of you could make some meaningful observations/analyses on some of those trends.).
... Well crap, I just wrote a few pages without actually getting to anything useful. I have serious need of better rationality skills than I'm currently applying: independence, dealing with emotional/cognative weirdness, finding ways to actually travel outside of my house (public transportation might as well not exist anywhere but the capital in Arkansas, and good sidewalks are hard to find), social issues, productivity issues, finding ways to get in physical activity, being unemployed with an apparent hiring bias against disabilities, financial ability, etc. The total money that I have to work with is less than $400, so I can't exactly sign up for cryonics or hire a driver to take me places. And this wall-o-text demonstrates my horrible disorganization rather well, I fear. (Hm, is there not a way to preview a comment before one posts it?)

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Welcome to Less Wrong! (July 2012)

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A few notes about the site mechanics

A few notes about the community

A list of some posts that are pretty awesome

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Welcome to Less Wrong! (July 2012)

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A few notes about the site mechanics

A few notes about the community

A list of some posts that are pretty awesome

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