Welcome to Less Wrong! (5th thread, March 2013)

orthonormal

37 Welcome to Less Wrong! (5th thread, March 2013)

1st Apr 2013

6 min read

37

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 fifth incarnation of the welcome thread; once a post gets over 500 comments, it stops showing them all by default, so we make a new one. Besides, a new post is a good perennial way to encourage newcomers and lurkers to introduce themselves.)

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 have 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 have 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!

Note from orthonormal: MBlume and other contributors wrote the original version of this welcome post, and I've edited it a fair bit. If there's anything I should add or update on this post (especially broken links), please send me a private message—I may not notice a comment on the post. Finally, once this gets past 500 comments, anyone is welcome to copy and edit this intro to start the next welcome thread.

Open ThreadsSite Meta

Personal Blog

37

New Comment

Rendering 0/1746 comments, sorted by

top scoring

(show more) Click to highlight new comments since: Today at 9:17 PM

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

Moderation Log

37 Welcome to Less Wrong! (5th thread, March 2013)

by orthonormal

1st Apr 2013

6 min read

1746

37

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

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 ThreadsSite Meta

Personal Blog

37

New Comment

Rendering 0/1746 comments, sorted by

top scoring

(show more) Click to highlight new comments since: Today at 9:17 PM

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

Moderation Log

More from orthonormal

Curated and popular this week

1746Comments

1746

Comment Permalink

jjvt13y110

Hi. I'm a computer science student in Oulu University (Finland).

I don't remember exactly how I got here, but I guess some of the first posts I read were about counterarguments to religious delial of evolution.

I have been intrested in rationality (along with sciense and technology) for a long time before I found lesswrong, but back then my view of rationality was mostly that it was the opposite of emotion. I still dislike emotions - I guess that it's because they are so often "immune to reflection" (ie. persistently "out of sync" with what I know to be the right thing to do). However, I'm aware that emotions do have some information value (worse than optimal, but better than nothing) and simply removing emotions from human neuroarchitechture without other changes might result something functionally closer to a rock than a superhuman...

I'm an atheist and don't believe in non-physical entities like souls, but I still believe in eternal life. This unorthodox view is because 1) I'm a (sort of) "modal realist": I believe that every logically possible world actually physically exists (it's the simplest answer I've found to the question "Why does anything exist at all?") and 2) I don't believe in identity distinct from physical mind state, ie. if a copy was made of my mind, I could not see any way of telling which of them was "me"/"original", even if one of them was implemented in completely different hardware and/or was separated by large distance/time from my previous position in space-time. The result is that as long as there is a logically possible "successor" mind-state to my current mind-state, "I" will continue to experience "being".

I'm intrested in politics, but I hope not to become mind-killed by it (or worse: already being mind-killed). If someone is intrested in knowing my political views and is not conserned of killing their mind, I put a short summary here in ROT13: V'z terravfu sne yrsg yvoreny/nanepuvfg, ntnvafg pbclevtug (nf vg pheeragyl vf) naq ntnvafg chavfuzragf. V unir nyfb (gbb znal gb erzrzore ng bapr be yvfg urer) bgure fznyyre aba-znvafgernz cbyvgvpny vqrnf.

I think I'm much better at epistemic rationality than instrumental rationality. I'm bad at getting things done. I'm a pessimist and usually think the bad side of things first, although I'm able to find the good side too if I deliberately search for it. I sometimes make a joke about it: "I'm a pessimist, therefore I'm - unfortunately - more likely than average to be correct."

I have asperger syndrome and I'm suffering from quite bad OCD. I hope to be able to improve my rationality so that one day I'll be able to write an article about "how rationality cured my OCD"...

I don't want to lie to anyone, but I don't think I'm morally required to say out loud everything I know. However because of many hidden assumptions in human language it is sometimes hard to find words that convey partial information, but not false information. Also in many social situations people are expected to lie and figuring out what to say without lying or causing unnecessary anger is non-trivial. For these reasons I can't clain to be a perfect non-liar, although I try to. Am I hypocritical in this? - I don't know.

I have problems at writing text, or to be more specific, figuring out what to write. I think of many different ways of converting my thoughts into text, but they all seem wrong in some way or another, so it takes a long time for me to write nothing and I likely give up. This applies to this post also - I started writing it for the previous welcome thread, and then gave up when the welcome thread started getting old and inactive. So I apologise if reply slowly or not at all. I hope that improving my rationality will help me in this problem also.

I've been lurking here for some years now and also had an account for a couple of years. I have several ideas for posts of my own. I don't know if I ever get to post them, but I at least want to get rid of the trivial inconvience of the karma barrier.

Because there seems to be very smart people here in much greater consentration than in my everyday life, I expect that there may be significant shifts in my views resulting from conversations with you (many changes have already happened just because of reading lesswrong); nothing in this message should be considered as permanet.

MugaSofer13y-20

ntnvafg chavfuzragf

Ner jr gnyxvat ntnvafg nal chavfuzrag urer, be whfg ivaqvpgvir chavfuzrag?

-1satt13y

Welcome! [...] I recently saw an answer that's even simpler: it's a wrong question! Edit: and now I take the time to find the relevant EY post, I see he already got halfway to that answer himself. Doesn't look like anyone's linked this paper in the comments there, actually.

2beoShaffer13y

Have you read Brain Lock?

See in context