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
* 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.

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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 5:15 PM

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

Moderation Log

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Desrtopa13y20

Well, if your decision theory tells you you ought to be the sort of person who would pay up in a Counterfactual Mugging, because that gets you positive utility, then you could end up in with Omega coming and saying "I would have given you a million dollars if your decision theory said not to pay out in a counterfactual mugging, but since you would, you don't get anything."

When you know nothing about Omega, I don't think there's any positive expected utility in choosing to be the sort of person who would have positive expected utility in a Counterfactual Mugging scenario, because you have no reason to suspect it's more likely than the inverted scenario where being that sort of person will get you negative utility. The probability distribution is flat, so the utilities cancel out.

Say Omega comes to you with a Counterfactual Mugging on Day 1. On Day 0, would you want to be the sort of person who pays out in a Counterfactual Mugging? No, because the probabilities of it being useful or harmful cancel out. On Day 1, when given the dilemma, do you want to be the sort of person who pays out in a Counterfactual Mugging? No, because now it only costs you money and you get nothing out of it.

So there's no point in time where deciding "I should be the sort of person who pays out in a Counterfactual Mugging" has positive expected utility.

Reasoning this way means, of course, that you don't get the money in a situation where Omega would only pay you if it predicted you would pay up, but you do get the money in situations where Omega pays out only if you wouldn't pay out. The latter possibility seems less salient from the "before you do that-" standpoint of a person contemplating a Counterfactual Mugging, but there's no reason to assign it a lower probability before the fact. The best you can do is choose according to whatever has the highest expected utility at any given time.

Omega could also come and tell me "I decided that I would steal all your money if you hit the S key on your keyboard between 10:00-11:00 am on a Sunday, and you just did," but I don't let this influence my typing habits. You don't want to alter your decision theories or general behavior in advance of specific events that are no more probable than their inversions.

TheOtherDave13y00

So there's no point in time where deciding "I should be the sort of person who pays out in a Counterfactual Mugging" has positive expected utility.

Sure, I agree.

What I'm suggesting is that "I should be the sort of person who does the thing that has positive expected utility" causes me to pay out in a Counterfactual Mugging, and causes me to not pay out in a Counterfactual Antimugging, without requiring any prophecy. And that as far as I know, this is representative of the locally bandied-around solutions to decision-theory problems.... (read more)

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