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
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* 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:
- 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.
I’m Taylor Smith. I’ve been lurking since early 2011. I recently finished a bachelor’s in philosophy but got sort of fed up with it near the end. Discovering the article on belief in belief is what first hooked me on LessWrong, as I’d already had to independently invent this idea to explain a lot of the silly things people around me seemed to be espousing without it actually affecting their behavior. I then devoured the Sequences. Finding LessWrong was like finding all the students and teachers I had hoped to have in the course of a philosophy degree, all in one place. It was like a light switching on. And it made me realize how little I’d actually learned thus far. I’m so grateful for this place.
Now I’m an artist – a writer and a musician.
A frequently-confirmed observation of mine is that art – be it a great sci-fi novel, a protest song, an anti-war film – works as a hack to help to change people’s minds who are resistant or unaccustomed to pure rational argument. This is true especially of ethical issues; works which go for the emotional gut-punch somehow make people change their minds. (I think there are a lot of overlapping reasons for this phenomenon, but one certainly is that a well-told story or convincing song provides an opportunity for empathy. It can also help people envision the real consequences of a mind-change in an environment of relative emotional safety.) This, even though of course the mere fact that someone who holds position X made a good piece of art about X doesn’t actually offer much real evidence for the truth of X. Thus, a perilous power. The negative word for the extreme end of this phenomenon is “propaganda.” Conversely, when folks end up agreeing with whatever a work of art brought them to believe, they praise it as “insightful” or some such. You can sort of understand why Plato was worried about having poets – those irrational, un-philosophic things – in his ideal city, swaying his people’s emotions and beliefs.
If I’m going to help save the world, though, I think I do it best through a) giving money to the efficient altruists and the smart people and b) trying to spread true ideas by being a really successful and popular creator.
But that means I have to be pretty damn certain what the true ideas are first, or I’m just spouting pretty, and pretty useless, nonsense.
So thank you, LessWrongers, for all caring about truth together.
I think art that spreads the "politics is the mind-killer" meme (which actually seems to be fairly novel outside LW: 1 2) could be a good use of art. Some existential risks, like nuclear weapons, seem likely to be controlled by world governments. The other day it occurred to me that world leaders are people too and are likely susceptible to the same biases as typical folk. If world leaders were less "Go us!" and more "Go humanity!", that could be Really Good.
Welcome to LW, by the way!