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, I'm Alex.
Every once in a while I come to LessWrong because I want to read more interesting things and have more interesting discussions on the Internet. I've found it a lot easier to spend time on Reddit (having removed all the drivel) and dredging through Quora to find actually insightful content (seriously, do they have any sort of actual organization system for me to find reading material?) in the past. LessWrong's discussions have seemed slightly inaccessible, so maybe posting an introduction like I'm supposed to will set in motion my figuring out how this community works.
I'm interested in a lot of things here, but especially physics and mathematics. I would use the word "metaphysics" but it's been appropriated for a lot of things that aren't actually meta-physics like I mean. Maybe I want "meta-mathematics"? Anyway, I'm really keen on the theory behind physical laws and on attempts at reformulating math and physics into more lucid and intuitive systems. Some of my reading material (I won't say research, but ... maybe I should say research) recently has been on geometric algebra, re-axiomizing set theory, foundations and interpretations of quantum mechanics, reformulations of relativity, quantum field theory's interpretation, things like that. I have a permanent distaste for spinors and all the math we don't try to justify with intuition when teaching physics, so I've spent a lot of my last few years studying those.
I was really intrigued by the articles/blog posts? on what proofs actually mean and causality a few months ago; that's when I started reading the site. I've spent the better part of the last year sifting through all kinds of math ideas related to reinterpretations or 'fundamental' insights, so I hope hanging around here can expose me to some more.
Oh, and I've spent a good amount of time on the Internet refuting crackpots who think they solved physics, so I, um, promise I'm not one.
I'm a programmer by trade and have a good interest in revolutionary (or just convenient) software projects and disruptive ideas and really naive, idealist world-changing ideas, which is fun.
I have read some of the sequences and such but - I guess I'm a rationalist at heart already, maybe because I've studied lots of logic and such, but a lot of it of the basic stuff seemed pretty apparent to me. I was already up to speed on Bayes and quantum mechanics, for example, and never considered anything other than atheism. And I already optimize and try to look at life in terms of expected payoffs and other very rational things like that. But, it's possible I've missed a lot of the material here - I find navigating the site to be pretty unintuitive.
I'm based in Seattle and I hope to go to the meetups if they... ever happen again. I mostly just like talking to smart people; I find it makes my brain work better - as if there's some sort of 'conversation mode' which hypercharges my creativity.
Oh, and I have a blog: http://ajkjk.com/blog/. I'm slightly terrified of linking it; it's the first time I've shown it to anyone but friends. It only has 6 posts so far. I've written a lot more but deleted/hid them until they're cleaned up.
Welcome. There are some e-reader format and pdf versions of the Sequences that may be easier to navigate.