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
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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 5:02 PM

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

Moderation Log

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Squark13y20

In an infinite universe, the speed-of-light limit is not a problem. Surely it limits the speed of computing but any computation can be performed eventually.

wedrifid already replied better than I could; but I'd still like to add that "eventually" is a long time. For example, if the algorithm that you are computing is NP-complete, then you won't be able to grow your hardware quickly enough to make any practical difference. In addition, if our universe is not eternal (which it most likely is not), then it makes no sense to talk about an "infinite series of computations".

For algorithms with exponential complexity, you will have to wait for exponential time, yes. But eternity is enough time for everything. I think the universe is eternal. Even an asymptotically de Sitter region is eternal (but useless since it reaches thermodynamic equilibrium), however the universe contains other asymptotic regions. See http://arxiv.org/abs/1105.3796

Sorry, but I literally have no idea what this means. I don't think that infinity is "like a number but not quite" at all, so the analogy doesn't work for me.

A more formal definition is given in my comment http://lesswrong.com/lw/do9/welcome_to_less_wrong_july_2012/8kt7 . Less formally, infinity is "like a number but not quite" because many predicates into which a number can be meaningfully plugged in, also work for infinity. For example:

infinity > 5 infinity + 7 = infinity infinity + infinity = infinity infinity * 2 = infinity

However not all such expressions make sense:

infinity - infinity = ? infinity * 0 = ?

Formally, adding infinity to the field of real numbers doesn't yield a field (or even a ring).

Well, so far, we have observed one instance of "evolution", and thousands of instances of "no evolution". I'd say the evidence is against the "Law of Evolution" so far...

There is clearly at least one Great Filter somewhere between life creation (probably there is one exactly there) and appearance of civilization with moderately supermodern technology: it follows from Fermi's paradox. However it feels as though there is a small number of such Great Filters with nearly inevitable evolution between them. The real question is what is the expected number of instances of passing these Filters within the volume of a cosmological horizon. If this number is greater than 1 then the universe is more pro-evolution than what is anticipated from the anthropic principle alone. Fermi's paradox puts an upper bound on this number, but I think this bound is much greater than 1

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