A few notes about the site mechanics
A few notes about the community
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:
- Your Intuitions are Not Magic
- The Apologist and the Revolutionary
- How to Convince Me that 2 + 2 = 3
- Lawful Uncertainty
- The Planning Fallacy
- Scope Insensitivity
- The Allais Paradox (with two followups)
- We Change Our Minds Less Often Than We Think
- The Least Convenient Possible World
- The Third Alternative
- The Domain of Your Utility Function
- Newcomb's Problem and Regret of Rationality
- The True Prisoner's Dilemma
- The Tragedy of Group Selectionism
- Policy Debates Should Not Appear One-Sided
- That Alien Message
- The Worst Argument in the World
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.
Hi everyone, I’m The Articulator. (No ‘The’ in my username because I dislike using underscores in place of spaces)
I found LessWrong originally through RationalWiki, and more recently through Iceman’s excellent pony-fic about AI and transhumanism, Friendship is Optimal.
I’ve started reading the Sequences, and made some decent progress, though we’ll see how long I maintain my current rate.
I’ll be attending University this fall for Electrical Engineering, with a desire to focus in electronics.
Prior to LW, I have a year’s worth of Philosophy and Ethics classes, and a decent amount of derivation and introspection.
As a result, I’ve started forming a philosophical position, made up of a mishmash of formally learnt and self-derived concepts. I would be very grateful if anyone would take the time to analyze, and if possible, pick apart what I’ve come up with. After all, it’s only a belief worth holding if it stands up to rigorous debate.
(If this is the wrong place to do this, I apologize - it seemed slightly presumptuous to imply that my comment thread would be large enough to warrant a separate discussion article.)
I apologize in advance for a possible lack of precise terminology for already existing concepts. As I’ve said, I’m partially self-derived, and without knowing the name of an idea, it’s hard to check if it already exists. If you do spot such gaps in my knowledge, I would be grateful if you’d point them out. Though I understand correct terminology is nice, I'd appreciate it if you could judge my ideas regardless of how many fancy words I use to descrive them.
My thought process so far:
P: Naturalism is the only standard by which we can understand the world
P: One cannot derive ethical statements or imperatives from Naturalism, as, like all good science, it is only descriptive in nature
IC : We cannot derive ethical statements
IC: There is no intrinsic value
C: Nihilism is correct
However, assuming nihilism is correct, why don’t I just kill myself now? That’s down to the evolutionary instincts that need me alive to reproduce. Well, why not overcome those and kill myself? But now, we’re in a difficult situation – why, if nothing matters, am I so desperate to kill myself?
Nihilism is the total negation of the intrinsic and definitive value in anything. It’s like sticking a coefficient of zero onto all of your utility calculations. However, that includes the bad as well as the good. Why bother doing bad things just as much as doing good things?
My eventual realization came as a result of analyzing the level or order of concepts. Firstly, we have the lowest order, instinct, which we are only partially conscious of. Then, we have a middle order of conscious thought, wherein we utilize our sapience to optimize our instinctual aims. Finally, we have the first of a series of high order thought processes devoted to analyzing our thoughts. It struck me that only this order and above is concerned with my newfound existential crisis. When I allow my rationality to slip a bit, a few minutes later, I stop caring, and start eating or taking out my testosterone on small defenseless computer images. Essentially, it is only the meta-order processes which directly suffer as a result of nihilism, as they are the ones that have to deal with the results and implications.
Nihilism expects you to give up attempting to change things or apply ethics because those are seen as meaningful concepts. However, really, the way I see it, Nihilism is about simply the state of ‘going with the flow’, colloquially speaking. However, that’s intentionally vague. Consider: if your middle-order processes don’t care that you just realized nothing matters, what’ll happen? They’ll just keep doing what they’ve always done.
In other words, since humans compartmentalize, going with the flow is synonymous with turning off your meta-level thought processes as a goal-oriented drive, and purely operate on middle-level processes and below. That corresponds, for a Naturalist, with Utilitarianism.
Now, that’s not to say “turn off your meta-level cognition”, because otherwise, what am I doing here? What I’m doing right now is optimizing utility because I enjoy LessWrong and the types of discussions they have. I bother to optimize utility despite being a nihilist because it is easier, and less work, meta-level-wise, to give in to my middle-level desires than to fight them.
To define Nihilism, for me, now comes to the concept of passively maintaining the status quo, or more aptly, not attempting to change it. Why not wirehead? – because that state is no more desirable in a world with zero utility, but takes effort to reach. It’s going up a gradient which we can comfortably sit at the bottom of instead.
I fear I haven’t done the best job of explaining concisely, and I believe my original, purely mental, formulations were more elegant, so that’s a lesson on writing everything down learned. However, I hope some of you can see some flaws in this argument that I can’t, because at the moment, this explains just about everything I can think of in one way or another.
Thank you all in advance for any help given,
The Articulator (It’s kind of an ironic choice of name, present ineptitude considered.)
Welcome to LW!
There is a metaethics sequence, of which this post asks what you would do if morality didn't exist. This may be a good place to start looking, but I wouldn't be too discouraged if you don't find it terribly useful (as Eliezer and others see it as not as communicative as Eliezer wanted it to be).
The point I would focus on is that there's a difference between an ethical system that would compel any possible mind to follow it, and an ethical system in harmony with you and those around you. Figure out what you can get from ethics, and then seek ... (read more)