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

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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.

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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.)

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* 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.

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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 7:58 PM

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Desrtopa13y20

But I wans't saying that. I am arguing that moral claims truth values, that aren;t indexed to individuals or socieities. That epistemic claim can be justified by appeal to an ontoogy including Moral Objects, but that is not how I am justifying it: my argument is based on rationality, as I have said many times.

I don't understand, can you rephrase this?

We have standards by which we jusdge the truth values of mathematical claims, and they are inside us too, and that doens't stop mathematics being objective. Relativism requires that truthvalues are indexed to us, that there is one truth for me and another for thee. Being located in us, or being operated by us are not sufficient criteria for being indexed to us.

The standards by which we judge the truth of mathematical claims are not just inside us. One object plus another object will continue to equal two objects whether or not there are any living beings to make that judgment. Math is not something we've created within ourselves, but something we've discovered and observed.

If our mathematical models ever stop being able to predict in advance the behavior of the universe, then we will have rather more reason to doubt that the math inside us is different from the math outside of us.

What evidence do we have that this is the case for morality?

Provide evidence that ethics is a whole separate modue, and not part of general reasoning ability.

My assertion is that, if we judge ethics as a rational system, innate values are among the axioms that the system is predicated on. You cannot prove the axioms of a system within that system, and an ethical system predicated on premises like "happiness is good" will not itself be able to prove the goodness of happiness.

While we could suppose that the axioms which our ethical systems are predicated on are objectively true, we have considerable reason to believe that we would have developed these axioms for adaptive reasons, even if there were no sense in which objective moral axioms exist, and we do not have evidence which suggests that objective, independently existing true moral axioms do exist.

Please explain why moral intuitions don't work that way.

People can be induced to strongly support opposing responses to the same moral dilemma, just by rephrasing it differently to trigger different heuristics. Our moral intuitions are incoherent.

Please provide some foundations for somethng that aren;t unjustofied by anything more foundationa.

I don't think I understand this, can you rephrase it?

You can select one at random. obviously.

I do not recall any creditable attempts, which places me in a disadvantaged position with respect to locating them. You're the one claiming that they're there at all, that's why I'm asking you to do it.

No, philosophers don't regularly accuse each other of being incpompetent..just of being wrong. There's a difference.

Philosophers don't usually accuse each other of being incompetent in their publications, because it's not conducive to getting other philosophers to regard their arguments dispassionately, and that sort of open accusation is generally frowned upon in academic circles whether one believes it or not. They do regularly accuse each other of being comprehensively wrong for their entire careers. In my personal conversations with philosophers (and I never considered myself to have really taken a class, or attended a lecture by a visitor, if I didn't speak with the person teaching it on a personal basis to probe their thoughts beyond the curriculum,) I observed a whole lot of frustration with philosophers who they think just don't get their arguments. It's unsurprising that people would tend to become so frustrated participating in a field that basically amounts to long running arguments extended over decades or centuries. Imagine the conversation we're having now going on for eighty years, and neither of us has changed our minds. If you didn't find my arguments convincing, and I hadn't budged in all that time, don't you'd think you'd start to suspect that I was particularly thick?

You are inferring a lot from one example.

I'm using an example illustrative of my experience.

[+]PrawnOfFate13y-50

0Nornagest13y

Sounds to me like PrawnOfFate is saying that any sufficiently rational cognitive system will converge on a certain set of ethical goals as a consequence of its structure, i.e. that (human-style) ethics is a property that reliably emerges in anything capable of reason. I'd say the existence of sociopathy among humans provides a pretty good counterargument to this (sociopaths can be pretty good at accomplishing their goals, so the pathology doesn't seem to be indicative of a flawed rationality), but at least the argument doesn't rely on counting fundamental particles of morality or something.

See in context