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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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.)

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* Normal_Anomaly
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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 2:34 PM

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CCC13y00

In what sense is the second horn of your dilemma an "arbitrary universe [coming] into existence with random (and suspiciously orderly) laws"? What does it mean to describe the universe as arbitrary and random while simultaneously acknowledging its orderliness? Do you simply mean "uncaused", because (a) that is not the only alternative to theism, and (b) I don't see why one would expect an uncaused universe (as opposed to a universe picked using a random selection process) not to have orderly laws.

What I mean is, not planned. If I toss a fair coin ten thousand times, I have an outcome (a string of heads and tails) that would be arbitrary and random. It is possible that this sequence will be an exactly alternating sequence of heads and tails (HTHTHTHTHTHT...) extending for all ten thousand tosses (a very orderly result); but if I were to actually observe such an orderly result, I would suspect that there is an intelligent agent controlling that result in some manner. (That is what I mean by 'suspiciously orderly' - it's orderly enough to suggest planning).

So Eliezer's question is, if P(orderliness | God) > P(orderliness | ~God), then why not also P(intelligent God | Metagod) > P(intelligent God | ~Metagod)? Your response is basically that P(intelligent God | God & orderliness) > P(~intelligent God | God & orderliness). How does this help?

Well, it makes sense that P(intelligent God | Metagod) > P(intelligent God | ~Metagod). And therefore P(Metagod | Metametagod) > P(Metagod | ~Metametagod), and so on to infinity; but an infinity of metagods and metametagods and so on is clearly an absurd result. The chain has to stop somewhere, and that 'somewhere' has to be with an intelligent being. Therefore, there has to be an intelligent being that can either exist without being created by an intelligent creator, or that can create itself in some sort of temporal loop. (As I understand it, the atheist viewpoint is that a human is an intelligent being that can exist without requiring an intelligent creator).

And my point was that P(intelligent God | ~Metagod) is non-zero. The chain can stop. P(Metagod | intelligent God) may be fairly high; but P(Metametagod | intelligent God) must be lower (since P(Metametagod | Metagod) < 1). If I go far enough along the chain, I expect to find that P(Metametametametametametametagod | intelligent God) is fairly low.

Does that help?

Juno_Watt13y00

but an infinity of metagods and metametagods and so on is clearly an absurd result.

That's not clear.. There is presumably something like that in Tegmark's level IV.

The chain has to stop somewhere, and that 'somewhere' has to be with an intelligent being.

You haven't established the 'has to' (p==1.0). You can always explain Order coming from Randomness by assuming enough randomness. Any finite string can be found with p>0.5 in a sufficiently long infinite string. Assuming huge amounts of unobserved randomness is not elegant, but neither is assu... (read more)

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