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.

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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.

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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 9:24 PM

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Bugmaster13y30

Why is that ?

As far as I understand, if anything like objective morality existed, it would be a property of our physical reality, similar to fluid dynamics or the electromagnetic spectrum or the inverse square law that governs many physical interactions. The same laws of physics that will not allow you to fly to Mars on a balloon will not allow you to perform certain immoral actions (at least, not without suffering some severe and mathematically predictable consequences).

This is pretty much the only way I could imagine anything like an "objective morality" existing at all, and I personally find it very unlikely that it does, in fact, exist.

But our inability to suspend our human values when making those observations doesn't prevent us from acquiring that knowledge.

Not this specific knowledge, no. But it does prevent us (or, at the very least, hinder us) from acquiring knowledge about our values. I never claimed that suspension of values is required to gain any knowledge at all; such a claim would be far too strong.

just the capacity to recognize the necessary structures and carry out its task.

And how would it know which structures are necessary, and how to carry out its task upon them ?

We can imagine the consequences of not having our core values...

Can we really ? I'm not sure I can. Sure, I can talk about Pebblesorters or Babyeaters or whatever, but these fictional entities are still very similar to us, and therefore relateable. Even when I think about Clippy, I'm not really imagining an agent who only values paperclips; instead, I am imagining an agent who values paperclips as much as I value the things that I personally value. Sure, I can talk about Clippy in the abstract, but I can't imagine what it would like to be Clippy.

If you could remove your core values, as in the thought experiment above, would you want to?

It's a good question; I honestly don't know. However, if I did have an ability to instantiate a copy of me with the altered core values, and step through it in a debugger, I'd probably do it.

TheOtherDave13y10

The same laws of physics that will not allow you to fly to Mars on a balloon will not allow you to perform certain immoral actions (at least, not without suffering some severe and mathematically predictable consequences). This is pretty much the only way I could imagine anything like an "objective morality" existing at all, and I personally find it very unlikely that it does, in fact, exist.

When I try to imagine this, I conclude that I would not use the word "morality" to refer to the thing that we're talking about... I would simply ... (read more)

0Desrtopa13y

Well, that's a different conception of "morality" than I had in mind, and I have to say I doubt that exists as well. But if severe consequences did result, why would an agent like Clippy care except insofar as those consequences affected the expected number of paperclips? It might be useful for it to know, in order to determine how many paperclips to expect from a certain course of action, but then it would just act according to whatever led to the most paperclips. Any sort of negative consequences in its view would have to be framed in terms of a reduction in paperclips. [...] Well, in the prior thought experiment, we know about our values because we've decoded the human brain. Clippy, on the other hand, knows about its values because it knows what part of its code does what. It doesn't need to suspend its paperclipping value in order to know what part of its code results in its valuing paperclips. It doesn't need to suspend its values in order to gain knowledge about its values because that's something it already knows about. [...] Even knowing that it would likely alter your core values? Ghandi doesn't want to leave control of his morality up to Murder Ghandi. Clippy doesn't care about anything in the long run except creating paperclips. For Clippy, the decision to give an instantiation of itself with altered core values the power to edit its own source code would implicitly have to be "In order to maximize expected paperclips, I- give this instantiation with altered core values the power to edit my code." Why would this result in more expected paperclips than editing its source code without going through an instantiation with altered values?

-8PrawnOfFate13y

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