(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.)
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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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* 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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Comments (1750)
Hello, Less Wrong; I'm Laplante. I found this site through a TV Tropes link to Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality about this time last year. After I'd read through that as far as it had been updated (chapter 77?), I followed Yudkowsky's advice to check out the real science behind the story and ended up here. I mucked about for a few days before finding a link to yudkowsky.net, where I spent about a week trying learn what exactly Bayes was all about. I'm currently working my way through the sequences, just getting into the quantum physics sequence now.
I'm currently in the dangerous position of having withdrawn from college, and my productive time is spent between a part-time job and this site. I have no real desire to return to school, but I realize that entry into any sort of psychology/neuroscience/cognitive science field without a Bachelor's degree - preferably more - is near impossible.
I'm aware that Yudkowsky is doing quite well without a formal education, but I'd rather not use that as a general excuse to leave my studies behind entirely.
My goals for the future are to make my way through MIRI's recommended course list, and the dream is to do my own research in a related field. We'll see how it all pans out.
Hi, Laplante. Why do you want to enter psychology/neuroscience/cognitive science? I ask this as someone who is about to graduate with a double major in psychology/computer science and is almost certain to go into computer science as my career.
My standard advice to all newcomers is to skip the quantum sequence, at least on the first reading. Or at least stop where the many worlds musings start. The whole thing is way too verbose and controversial for the number of useful points it makes. Your time is much better spent reading about cognitive biases. If you want epistemology, try the new sequence.
Bad advice for technical readers. Mihaly Barasz (IMO gold medalist) got here via HPMOR but only became seriously interested in working for MIRI after reading the QM sequence.
Given those particular circumstances, can I ask that you stop with that particular bit of helpful advice?
QM Sequence is two parts:
(1) QM for beginners
(2) Philosophy-of-science on believing things when evidence is equipoise (or absent) - pick the simpler hypothesis.
I got part (1) from reading Dancing Wu-Li Masters, but I can clearly see the value to readers without that background. But teaching foundational science is separate from teaching Bayesian rationalism.
The philosophy of the second part is incredibly controversial. Much more than you acknowledge in the essays, or acknowledge now. Treating the other side of any unresolved philosophical controversy as if it is stupid, not merely wrong, is excessive and unjustified.
In short, the QM sequence would seriously benefit from the sort of philosophical background stuff that is included in your more recent essays. Including some more technical discussion of the opposing position.
If you learned quantum mechanics from that book, you may have seriously mislearned it. It's actually pretty decent describing everything up to but excluding quantum physics. When it comes to QM, however, the author sacrifices useful understanding in favor of mysticism.
Hrm? On a conceptual level, is there more to QM than the Uncertainty Principle and Wave-Particle Duality? DWLM mentions the competing interpretations, but choosing an interpretation is not strictly necessary to understand QM predictions.
For clarity, I consider the double-slit experimental results to be an expression of wave-particle duality.
I will admit that DWLM does a poor job of preventing billiard-ball QM theory ("Of course you can't tell momentum and velocity at the same time. The only way to check is to hit the particle with a proton, and that's going to change the results.").
That's a wrong understanding, but a less wrong understanding than "It's classical physics all the way down."
A deeper, more natural way to express both is "wavefunction reality," which also incorporates some of the more exotic effects that come from using complex numbers. (The Uncertainty Principle also should be called the "uncertainty consequence," since it's a simple derivation from how the position and momentum operators work on wavefunctions.)
(I haven't read DWLM, so I can't comment on its quality.)
Yes. Very yes. There are several different ways to get at that next conceptual level (matrix mechanics, the behavior of the Schrödinger equation, configuration spaces, Hamiltonian and Lagrangian mechanics, to name ones that I know at least a little about), but qualitative descriptions of the Uncertainty Principle, Schrödinger's Cat, Wave-Particle Duality, and the Measurement Problem do not get you to that level.
Rejoice—the reality of quantum mechanics is way more awesome than you think it is, and you can find out about it!
Let me rephrase: I'm sure there is more to cutting edge QM than that which I understand (or even have heard of). Is any of that necessary to engage with the philosophy-of-science questions raised by the end of the Sequence, such as Science Doesn't Trust Your Rationality?
From a writing point of view, some scientific controversy needed to be introduced to motivate the later discussion - and Eliezer choose QM. As examples go, it has advantages:
(1) QM is cutting edge - you can't just go to Wikipedia to figure out who won. EY could have written a Lamarckian / Darwinian evolution sequence with similar concluding essays, but indisputably knowing who was right would slant how the philosophy-of-science point would be interpreted.
(2) A non-expert should recognize that their intuitions are hopelessly misleading when dealing with QM, opening them to serious consideration of the new-to-them philosophy-of-science position EY articulates.
But let's not confuse the benefits of the motivating example with arguing that there is philosophy-of-science benefit in writing an understandable description of QM.
In other words, if the essays in the sequence after and including The Failures of Eld Science were omitted from the Sequence, it wouldn't belong on LessWrong.
Do you have a solid idea of how many technical readers get here via HPMOR but become disinterested in working for MIRI after reading the QM sequence? If not, isn't this potentially just the selection effect?
EY can rationally prefer the certain evidence of some Mihaly-Barasz-caliber researchers joining when exposed to the QM sequence
over
speculations whether the loss of Mihaly Barasz (had he not read the QM sequence) would be outweighed by even more / better technical readers becoming interested in joining MIRI, taking into account the selection effect.
Personally, I'd go with what has been proven/demonstrated to work as a high-quality attractor.
Yep. I also tend to ignore nontechnical folks along the lines of RationalWiki getting offended by my thinking that I know something they don't about MWI. Carl often hears about, anonymizes, and warns me when technical folks outside the community are offended by something I do. I can't recall hearing any warnings from Carl about the QM sequence offending technical people.
Bluntly, if shminux can't grasp the technical argument for MWI then I wouldn't expect him to understand what really high-class technical people might think of the QM sequence. Mihaly said the rest of the Sequences seemed interesting but lacked sufficient visible I-wouldn't-have-thought-of-that nature. This is very plausible to me - after all, the Sequences do indeed seem to me like the sort of thing somebody might just think up. I'm just kind of surprised the QM part worked, and it's possible that might be due to Mihaly having already taken standard QM so that he could clearly see the contrast between the explanation he got in college and the explanation on LW. It's a pity I'll probably never have time to write up TDT.
That sounds like reasonable evidence against the selection effect.
I strongly recommend against both the "advises newcomers to skip the QM sequence -> can't grasp technical argument for MWI" and "disagrees with MWI argument -> poor technical skill" inferences.
That inference isn't made. Eliezer has other information from which to reach that conclusion. In particular, he has several years worth of ranting and sniping from Shminux about his particular pet peeve. Even if you disagree with Eliezer's conclusion it is not correct to claim that Eliezer is making this particular inference.
Again, Eliezer has a large body of comments from which to reach the conclusion that Shminux has poor technical skill in the areas necessary for reasoning on that subject. The specific nature of the disagreement would be relevant, for example.
That very well could be, in which case my recommendation about that inference does not apply to Eliezer.
I will note that this comment suggests that Eliezer's model of shminux may be underdeveloped, and that caution in ascribing motives or beliefs to others is often wise.
It really doesn't. At best it suggests Eliezer could have been more careful in word selection regarding Shminux's particular agenda. 'About' rather than 'with' would be sufficient.
Shminux's and Eliezer?
I'm no IMO gold medalist (which really just means I'm giving you explicit permission to ignore the rest of my comment) but it seems to me that a standard understanding of QM is necessary to get anything out of the QM sequence.
Revealed preferences are rarely attractive.
Adds to "Things I won't actually get put on a T-shirt but sort of feel I ought to" list.
I have a phd in physics (so I have at least some technical skill in this area) and find the QM sequence's argument for many worlds unconvincing. You lead the reader toward a false dichotomy (Copenhagen or many worlds) in order to suggest that the low probability of copenhagen implies many worlds. This ignores a vast array of other interpretations.
Its also the sort of argument that seems very likely to sway someone with an intro class in college (one or two semesters of a Copenhagen based shut-up-and-calculate approach), precisely because having seen Copenhagen and nothing else they 'know just enough to be dangerous', as it were.
For me personally, the quantum sequence threw me into some doubt about the previous sequences I had read. If I have issues with the area I know the most about, how much should I trust the rest? Other's mileage may vary.
Actually, attempting to steelman the QM Sequence made me realize that the objective collapse models are almost certainly wrong, due to the way they deal with the EPR correlations. So the sequence has been quite useful to me.
On the other hand, it also made me realize that the naive MWI is also almost certainly wrong, as it requires uncountable worlds created in any finite instance of time (unless I totally misunderstand the MWI version of radioactive decay, or any emission process for that matter). It has other issues, as well. Hence my current leanings toward some version of RQM, which EY seems to dislike almost as much as his straw Copenhagen, though for different reasons.
Right, I've had a similar experience, and I heard it voiced by others.
As a result of re-examining EY's take on epistemology of truth, I ended up drifting from the realist position (map vs territory) to an instrumentalist position (models vs inputs&outputs), but this is a topic for another thread. I am quite happy with the sequences related to cognitive science, where, admittedly, I have zero formal expertise. But they seem to match what the actual experts in the field say.
I am on the fence with the free-will "dissolution", precisely because I know that I am not qualified to spot an error and there is little else out there in terms of confirming evidence or testable predictions.
I am quite skeptical about the dangers of AGI x-risk, mainly because it seems to extrapolate too far beyond what is known into the fog of the unknown future, though do I appreciate quite a few points made in the relevant sequences. Again, I am not qualified to judge their validity.
Is there actually any physicists that find QM sequence to be making such a strongly compelling case for MWI as EY says it does?
I know Mitchell Porter is likewise a physicist and he's not convinced at all either.
Mitchell Porter also advocates Quantum Monadology and various things about fundamental qualia. The difference in assumptions about how physics (and rational thought) works between Eliezer (and most of Eliezer's target audience) and Mitchell Porter is probably insurmountable.
How is that any more problematic than doing physics with real or complex numbers in the first place?
It means that EY's musings about the Eborians splitting into the world's of various thicknesses according to Born probabilities no longer make any sense. There is a continuum of worlds, all equally and infinitesimally thin, created every picosecond.
I defected from physics during my Master's, but this is basically the impression I had of the QM sequence as well.
As others noted, you seem to be falling prey to the selection bias. Do you have an estimate of how many "IMO gold medalists" gave up on MIRI because its founder, in defiance of everything he wrote before, confidently picks one untestable from a bunch and proclaims it to be the truth (with 100% certainty, no less, Bayes be damned), despite (or maybe due to) not even being an expert in the subject matter?
EDIT: My initial inclination was to simply comply with your request, probably because I grew up being taught deference to and respect for authority. Then it struck me as one of the most cultish things one could do.
Note that the original text was "gold," not "good".
I assume IMO is the International Mathematical Olympiad(1). Not that this in any way addresses or mitigates your point; just figured I'd point it out.
(1) If I've understood the wiki article, ~35 IMO gold medals are awarded every year.
Thanks, I fixed the typo.
Huh. I'd assumed it was short for "In My Opinion".
Yeah, that confused me on initial reading, though some googling clarified matters, and I inferred from the way shminux (mis)quoted that something similar might be going on there, which is why I mentioned it.
Again, you seem to be generalizing from a single example, unless you have more data points than just Mihaly.
Is this an April Fool's joke? He says nothing of the kind. The post which comes closest to this explicitly says that it could be wrong, but "the rational probability is pretty damned small." And counting the discovery of time-turners, he's named at least two conceivable pieces of evidence that could change that number.
What do you mean when you say you "just don't put nearly as much confidence in it as you do"?
Maybe it's a reference to the a priori nature of his arguments for MW? Or something? It's a strange claim to make, TBH.
The number of IMO gold medalists is sufficiently low, and the probability of any one of them having read the QM sequence is sufficiently small, that my own estimate would be less than one regardless of X.
(I don't have a good model of how much more likely an IMO gold medalist would be to have read the QM sequence than any other reference class, so I'm not massively confident.)
There's plenty of things roughly comparable to IMO in terms of selectivity (IMO gives what, ~35 golds a year?)... E.g. I'm #10th of all time on a popular programming contest site ( I'm dmytry ).
This discussion is really hilarious, especially the attempts to re-frame commoner orientated, qualitative and incomplete picture of QM - as something which technical people appreciate and non-technical people don't. (Don't you want to be one among the technies?) .
Selectivity, in the relevant sense, is more than just a question of how many people are granted something.
How many people are not on that site, but could rank highly if they chose to try? I'm guessing it's far more than the number of people who have never taken part in the IMO, but who could get a gold medal if they did.
(The IMO is more prestigious among mathematicians than topcoder is among programmers. And countries actively recruit their best mathematicians for the IMO. Nobody in the Finnish government thought it would be a good idea to convince and train Linus Torvalds to take part in an internet programming competition, so I doubt Linus Torvalds is on topcoder.)
There certainly are things as selective or more than the IMO (for example, the Fields medal), but I don't think topcoder is one of them, and I'm not convinced about "plenty". (Plenty for what purpose?)
I've tried to compare it more accurately.
It's very hard to evaluate selectivity. It's not just the raw number of people participating. It seems that large majority of serious ACM ICPC participants (both contestants and their coaches) are practising on Topcoder, and for the ICPC the best college CS students are recruited much the same as best highschool math students for IMO.
I don't know if Linus Torvalds would necessarily do great on this sort of thing - his talents are primarily within software design, and his persistence as the unifying force behind Linux. (And are you sure you'd recruit a 22 years old Linus Torvalds who just started writing a Unix clone?). It's also the case that 'programming contest' is a bit of misnomer - the winning is primarily about applied mathematics - just as 'computer science' is a misnomer.
In any case, its highly dubious that understanding of QM sequence is as selective as any contest. I get it fully that Copenhagen is clunky whereas MWI doesn't have the collapse, and that collapse fits in very badly. That's not at all the issue. However badly something fits, you can only throw it away when you figured out how to do without it. Also, commonly, the wavefunction, the collapse, and other internals, are seen as mechanisms of prediction which may, or may not, have anything to do with "how universe does it" (even if the question of "how universe does it" is meaningful, it may still be the case that internals of the theory have nothing to do with that, as the internals are massively based upon our convenience). And worse still, MWI is in many very important ways lacking.
Perhaps I'm reading a bit much into a throwaway phrase, but I suggest that time spent reading LessWrong (or any self-improvement blog, or any blog) is not, in fact, productive. Beware the superstimulus of insight porn! Unless you are actually using the insights gained here in a measureable way, I very strongly suggest you count LessWrong reading as faffing about, not as production. (And even if you do become more productive, observe that this is probably a one-time effect: Continued visits are unlikely to yield continual improvement, else gwern and Alicorn would long since have taken over the world.) By all means be inspired to do more work and smarter work, but do not allow the feeling of "I learned something today" to substitute for Actually Doing Things.
All that aside, welcome to LessWrong! We will make your faffing-about time much more interesting. BWAH-HAH-HAH!
Learning stuff can be pretty useful. Especially stuff extremely general in its application that isn't easy to just look up when you need it, like rationality. If the process of learning is enjoyable, so much the better.
I think you may have misinterpreted a critical part of the sentence:
'do not allow the FEELING of "I learned something today" to substitute for Actually Doing Things.'
Insight porn, so to speak, is that way because it makes you feel good, like you can Actually Do Things and like you have the tools to now Actually Do Things. But if you don't get up and Actually Do Things, you have only learned how to feel like you can Actually Do Things, which isn't nearly as useful as it sounds.
If you want to learn things/explore what you want to do with your life, take a few varied courses at Coursera.
Hi everyone. I have been lurking on this site for a long time, and somewhat recently have made an account, but I still feel pretty new here. I've read most of the sequences by now, and I feel that I've learned a lot from them. I have changed myself in some small ways as a result, most notably by donating small amounts to whatever charity I feel is most effective at doing good, with the intention that I will donate much more once I am capable of doing so.
I'm currently working on a Ph.D. in Mathematics right now, and I am also hoping that I can steer my research activities towards things that will do good. Still not sure exactly how to do this, though.
I also had the opportunity to attend my local Less Wrong meetup, and I have to say it was quite enjoyable! I am looking forward toward future interactions with my local community.
Welcome! I like your username.
EDIT: I know several people in this community who dropped out of math grad school, and most of them were happy with the decision. I'm choosing to graduate with a PhD in a useless field because I find myself in a situation where I can get one in exchange for a few months of work. I know someone who switched to algebraic statistics, which is a surprisingly useful field that involves algebraic geometry.
Thanks, it's just my name and last initial.
Ah, I thought it was a math-flavored pseudonym. Also, I added an addendum to my comment above.
What is their reasoning?
I can't speak for them, but I expect it's something like this: One can make more money, do more good, have a more fun career, and have more freedom in where one lives by dropping out than by going into academia. And having a PhD when hunting for non-academic jobs is not worth spending several years as a grad student doing what one feels is non-valuable work for little pay.
You'd have to speak to someone who successfully dropped out to get more details; and of course even if all their judgments are correct, they may not be correct for you.
I haven't looked at this issue in detail, but I seem to recall that not getting more education was one of the more common regrets among "Terman's geniuses", whoever those are. Link.
Hi Adele. Given what you write in your introduction, it's likely that you have already heard of this organization, but if this is not the case: you may want to check out 80,000 Hours. They provide evidence-based career advice for people that want to make a difference.
Thank you. I have been meaning to look into that more, so thanks for the reminder!
There are several people on LW (myself included) who continue to be in graduate school in mathematics. If you're interested in just talking math, there'll be an audience for that. I would personally be interested in more academic networking happening here--even if most people on LW will end up leaving mathematics as such.
Oh yeah, of course! I currently intend on getting my Ph.D. at least, although I am less certain about remaining in academia after that. I'm not sure LW is the place to talk about math that isn't of more general interest, but I am happy to talk more about it in PMs (I'm also a number theorist).
Hey everyone!
I'm ll, my real name is Lukas. I am a student at a technical university in the US and a hobbyist FOSS programmer.
I discovered Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality accidentally one night, and since then I've been completely hooked on it. After I caught up, I decided to check out the Less Wrong community. I've been lurking since then, reading the essays, comments, hanging out in the IRC channel.
Welcome to Less Wrong III!
Thank you!
I am definitely enjoying this community. I am a recent Reddit expat, too, so I will focus my internet browsing time here. I don't think I will miss Reddit at all.
If your Reddit time commitment was anything like that of other people I know, you should be able to blow through all the sequences in about a day or two : )
It's not III, it's lll.
It seems like my username is already sparking some controversies. It's three lowercase L letters.
My initial is LL, but I can't have a two letter username, so LLL, but I thought uppercase would be too much, so lll it is.
Damn sans-serif fonts...
If I were reading this in inconsolata, I'd have known that. Thanks.
We can just call him CL for short, to distinguish him from IIV.
Greetings, LessWrongers. I call myself Intrism; I'm a serial lurker, and I've been hiding under the cupboards for a few months already. As with many of my favorite online communities, I found this one multiple times, through Eliezer's website, TVTropes, and Methods of Rationality (twice), before it finally stuck. I am a student of computer science, and greatly enjoy the discipline. I've already read many of the sequences. While I can't say I've noticed an increase in rationality since I've started, I have made some significant progress on my akrasia, including recently starting on an interesting but unknown LW-inspired technique which I'll write up once I have a better idea of how well it's performing.
Thank you for introducing me to the term akrasia!
I made an account seven months ago, but I wasn't aware of the last welcome thread, so I guess I'll post on this one.
I'm not sure when I exactly "joined". My first contact with this community was passing familiarity with "Overcoming bias" as one of the blogs which sometimes got linked in the blogosphere I frequented in high school. As typical of my surfing habits in those days, I spent one or two sessions reading it for hours and then promptly forgot about all it. Second contact was a recommendation from another user on reddit to Lesswrong. Third contact was a few months later when my roommate recommended I read hpmor. I lurked for a short time, and made an account, and went to my first few meetups about two months ago. Meetups are fun, you meet lots of smart people, and I highly recommend it.
First impressions? I think this is the (for lack of a better word) most intellectual internet community that I am familiar with. Almost every post or comment is worth reading, and the site has got an addictive reddit-ish feel about it (which hampers my productivity somewhat, but que sera, sera.)
I've noticed that most of the opinions here tend to align precisely with my own, which is gratifying, because it's evidence that my thinking makes sense. However, it's also irritating, because it means I learn less and I have little to contribute. It's a little disconcerting for someone who thrives on discussion and is usually forced to play the role of the contrarian. Not that I'm complaining - it would be quite worrying if rationalists didn't tend to agree. Plus, it's really refreshing to have discussions where two people mutually try to figure out where the truth lies, rather than arguments where two people try to convince each other of something.
Biggest upside: Lesswrong has it's own, rationality/philosophy specific jargon, which is really helpful for communicating complicated ideas using very few words. In addition to introducing me to a few concepts I'd never even considered, I think the greatest benefit I got from reading this site is that I've got a better language to verbalize abstract concepts.
What I'd like to see: Expansion from the philosophical side into practical things, like scientific knowledge,, useful skills, etc. It's not often you get a community hub with such a high concentration of skills and knowledge, and I think it should be put to more use. (the rationalist-utilitarian charities lesswrong is loosely affiliated with is one good example of this being done successfully)
I noticed this as well, while first reading the sequences. I flew through blog posts, absorbing it all in, since it all either matched my own thoughts, or were so similar that it hardly took effort to comprehend. But I struggled to find anything original to say, which was part of why I initially didn't bother making an account - I didn't want to simply express agreement every time. (And now I notice that my second comment is precisely that.)
That's one of the things I've frequently benefited from in my thinking. I have found that the concepts behind keywords like dissolving the question, mysterious answers, map and territory, and the teacher's password can be applied in so many areas, and that having the arsenal to use them makes it much easier to think clearly about otherwise elusive concepts.
Hi folks, I'm Peter. I read a lot of blogs and saw enough articles on Overcoming Bias a few years ago that I was aware of Yudkowsky and some of his writing. I think I wandered from there to his personal site because I liked the writing and from there to Less Wrong, but it's long enough ago I don't really remember. I've read Yudkowsky's Sequences and found lots of good ideas or interesting new ways to explain things (though I bounced off QM as it assumed a level of knowledge in physics I don't have). They're annoyingly disorganized - I realize they were originally written as an interwoven hypertext, but for long material I prefer reading linear silos, then I can feel confident I've read everything without getting annoyed at seeing some things over and over. Being confused by their organization when nobody else seems to be also contributes to the feeling in my last paragraph below.
I signed up because I had a silly solution to a puzzle, but I've otherwise hesitated to get involved. I feel I've skipped across the surface of LessWrong; I subscribe to a feed that only has a couple posts per week and haven't seen anything better. I'm aware there are pages with voting, but I'm wary of the time sink of getting pulled into a community or being a filter rather than keeping up with curated content.
I'm also wary of a community so tightly focused around one guy. I have only good things to say about Yudkowsky or his writing, but a site where anyone is far and away the most active and influential writer sets off alarm bells. Despite the warning in the death spiral sequence, this community heavily revolves around him. Maybe every other time hundreds of people rally around one revelatory guy it's bad news and it's fine here because there are lots of arguments against things like revelation here, but things like the sequence reruns are really off-putting. It fits a well-trod antipattern; even if I can't see anything wrong in the middle of the story I know it ends badly. (Yes, I know, I'm not.)
Apply skepticism evenly? I mean, you don't have to do/participate in something just because a bunch of other people are doing it. TBH, I'd like to see a type of "sequence review" of stuff from other major writers on this site. It's useful in that I'll occasionally read one if I don't remember having read it before, so I can't knock it.
Yeah, it's a problem. I'd even go so far as to say that it's a cognitive hazard, not just a PR or recruitment difficulty: if you've got only one person at the clear top of a status hierarchy covering some domain, then halo effects can potentially lead to much worse consequences for that domain than if you have a number of people of relatively equal status who occasionally disagree. Of course there's also less potential for infighting, but that doesn't seem to outweigh the potential risks.
There was a long gap in substantive posts from EY before the epistemology sequence, and I'd hoped that a competitor might emerge from that vacuum. Instead the community seems to have branched; various people's personal blogs have grown in relative significance, but LW has stayed Eliezer's turf in practice. I haven't fully worked out the implications, but they don't seem entirely good, especially since most of the community's modes of social organization are outgrowths of LW.
I think a part of the problem with other people filling the "vacuum" left by Eliezer is that when he was writing the sequences it was a large amount of informal material. Since then we've established a lot of very formal norms for main-level posts; the "blog" is now about discussions with a lot of shared background rather than about trying to use a bunch of words to get some ideas out.
That is, most of the point of the sequences is laying out ground rules. There's no vacuum left over for anyone to fill, and LW isn't really a "blog" any more, so much as a community or discussion board.
And for me, personally, at least, a lot of the attraction of LW and the sequences is not that Eliezer did a bunch of original creative work, but that he verbalized and worked out a bit more detail on a variety of ideas that were already familiar, and then created a community where people have to accept that and are therefore trustworthy. What this "feels like on the inside" is that the community is here because they share MY ideas about epistemology or whatever, rather than because they share HIS ideas, even if he was the one to write them down.
Of course YMMV and none of this is a controlled experiment; I could be making up bad post hoc explanations.
Just to be clear, what you say does not contradict the argument you are responding to. You gave a good explanation for why EY has a big influence on the community. It still isn't clear that this is a good thing.
Yes, I'm not arguing that it is a good thing. I'm simply putting forward an explanation for why no one else has stepped in to "fill the vacuum" as some have hoped in other comments; I don't believe there is a vacuum to fill.
Also I meant to endorse the idea that Eliezer is like Pythagoras: someone who wrote down and canonized a set of knowledge already mostly present, which is at least LESS DANGEROUS than a group following a set of personal dogma.
Actually, I think that the sequences have a fair number of original ideas. They were enumerated about a year or so ago by Eliezer and Luke in separate posts.
I do remember that and I agree I oversimplified. I mostly mean that much of the basis of his ideas that aren't controversial here aren't controversial elsewhere either, they just aren't seen as his ideas elsewhere. This all makes it seem like Eliezer is more of a figurehead than I feel he actually is.
This seems to be a common problem. It certainly happened to me.
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Welcome!
The really valuable times are when you get to say those things to yourself - you're the only person you can force to listen :D
Aloha.
My name is Sandy and despite being a long time lurker, meetup organizer and CFAR minicamp alumnus, I've got a giant ugh field around getting involved in the online community. Frankly it's pretty intimidating and seems like a big barrier to entry - but this welcome thread is definitely a good start :)
IIRC, I was linked to Overcoming Bias through a programming pattern blog in the few months before LW came into existence, and subsequently spent the next three months of my life doing little else than reading the sequences. While it was highly fascinating and seemed good for my cognitive health, I never thought about applying it to /real life/.
Somehow I ended up at CFAR's January minicamp, and my life literally changed. After so many years, CFAR helped me finally internalize the idea that /rationalists should win/. I fully expect the workshop to be the most pivotal event in my entire life, and would wholeheartedly recommend it to absolutely anyone and everyone.
So here's to a new chapter. I'm going to get involved in this community or die trying.
PS: If anyone is in the Kitchener/Waterloo area, they should definitely come out to UW's SLC tonight at 8pm for our LW meetup. I can guarantee you won't be disappointed!
Hello everyone, I'm Franz. I don't actually remember how I happened upon this site, but I do know it was rotting in my unsorted bookmark folder for over a year before I actually decided to read any post. This I do regret.
Because of circumstances I am currently in Brazil and due to a lack of internet infrastructure, I have to read the downloadable versions of the sequences and won't be able to comment often. I do enjoying reading your insightful thoughts!
I was wondering if anyone has directly applied EY methods to their own life? For what reason and what were the results? I tend to be very unproductive with my time and incredibly guilty of procrastination, and was wondering what introspection tools and/or protocols others in similar positions have used to overcome these problems.
(I was also curious if a diagram of priors/reflection of a Bayesian-rationalist existed somewhere, as I am probably more of a visual learner)
An Intuitive Explanation of Bayes' Theorem has prior/posterior diagrams.
http://lesswrong.com/lw/3w3/how_to_beat_procrastination/ may be what you're looking for. The community is also fond of the pomodoro technique (i.e., work for 25 minutes, then take a break for 5 minutes, then repeat; use an actual timer for both parts), which I can vouch for personally, and the Getting Things Done method, which I haven't yet tried. beeminder is also great, but requires an internet connection, so it may not be what you need.
I can attest to Beeminder. If you're able to read and send emails daily, you can use it.
Welcome!
I have. Specifically, the How to Actually Change Your Mind sequence was very helpful to me in real life.
However, in spite of how some people feel about this site, for me, it is not about [only] EY. Lots of things from Less Wrong have affected my life outside of Less Wrong, specifically (quoting from an older draft of this comment, now, so that is why the flow may be weird here):
One of the most helpful posts I came upon here was "The Power of Pomodoros", which introduced me to the Pomodoro technique. See this PDF from the official website for a more detailed guide.
Another helpful thing I discovered via Less Wrong is the Less Wrong Study Hall. See "Co-Working Collaboration to Combat Akrasia" and "Programming the LW Study Hall". This is the current study hall (on Tinychat), but I think it will eventually be moved to somewhere else.
Less Wrong taught me about existential risk and efficient charity. This has produced a tangible change in what I do with my money.
lukeprog's The Science of Winning at Life sequence was also very helpful to me.
I could write more, but I've already spent too much time on this comment. Enjoy Less Wrong!
Hello, my name is Baeo. Last summer, while looking for information on Dual N-back, I came across gwern's FAQ on the subject. I noticed that he had been leaving a lot of links to LessWrong, but I didn't look too much into it at first. Eventually, after another blogger I follow recommended the sequences, I decided that they were at least worth looking into. I started to read the sequences and I was impressed with what I read. As it stands now, I've gotten through the core sequences but other work has sucked up enough of my time that my effort to get through the other sequences (Quantum Mechanics, etc) has stalled.
A few months ago, I began to attend the Berkeley LessWrong meetup. If you live in the area, stop by. It's usually a lot of fun. Participation in this motivated me to actually go through the trouble of creating a LessWrong account a few days ago. I've gotten one friend to start reading the LessWrong sequences and three or four friends to start reading HPMOR (it really is excellent for introducing people to the ideas).
As it stands now, I'm just a high school student, so I don't have too much choice over what I study, but an electrical engineering or CS degree with a lot of math and physics courses to supplement it seems to be a likely path for me once I go off to college. I've been programming in my spare time for 5 or so years now (functional programming for almost 2 years). I feel like I'm a pretty typical LessWrong user in most respects: atheist, libertarian leaning, INTx, sci-fi fan, etc. I don't have much else to say at the moment, except that I really have barely scratched the surface of the space of human knowledge and I would like to thank this site for quite a bit of what I've done.
Hey! My name is Vinney, I'm 28 years old and live in New York City.
To be exceedingly brief: I've been working through the sequences (quite slowly and sporadically) for the past year and a half. I've loved everything I've seen on LW so far and I expect to continue. I hope to ramp up my study this year and finally get through the rest of the sequences.
I'd like to become more active in discussions but feel like I should finish the sequences first so I don't wind up making some silly error in reasoning and committing it to a comment. Perhaps that isn't an ideal approach to the community discussions, but I suspect it may be common..
Welcome!
Do finish the sequences, but you won't be done then; you'll still make stupid mistakes. Best to start making them now, I think.
Thanks, I'll get started making stupid mistakes as quickly as I can! I'm sorry I wasn't able to make any here.
I'm a male senior in high school. I found this site in November or so, and started reading the sequences voraciously.
I feel like I might be a somewhat atypical LessWrong reader. For one, I'm on the young side. Also, if you saw me and talked to me, you would probably not guess that I was a "rationalist" from the way I act/dress but, I don't know, perhaps you might. When I first found this website, I was pretty sure I wanted to be an art major, now I'm pretty sure I want to be an art/comp sci double major and go into indie game development (correlation may or may not imply causation). I also love rap music (and not the "good" kind like Talib Kweli) and I read most of the sequences while listening to Lil Wayne, Lil B, Gucci Mane, Future, Young Jeezy, etc. I occasionally record my own terrible rap songs with my friends in my friend's basement. Before finding this site, the word "rational" had powerful negative affect around it. Science was far and away my least favorite subject in school. I have absolutely no interest at the moment in learning any science or anything about science, except for maybe neuroscience, and maybe metaphysics. I've always found the humanities more interesting, although I do enjoy some abstract math stuff. I'm somewhat of an emotional Luddite - whenever a new technology like Google Glass or something comes out I groan and I think about all the ways it's going to further detach people from reality. Transhumanism was disgusting to me before I found this site, while reading the sequences I started to buy into the philosophy, now a few months after reading the sequences for the first time I rationally know it is a very very good thing but still emotionally find it a little unappealing.
After finding this site, I have gone from having a vaguely confused worldview to completely "buying into" most of the philosophy espoused here and on on other sites in the rationalist-sphere such as Overcoming Bias, blogs of top contributors, etc. (I'm not a racist yet though), and constantly thinking throughout my day about things like utility functions, sunken cost fallacies, mind projection fallacy, etc. I feel like finding this website has immeasurably improved my life, which I know might be a weird thing to say, but I do think this is true. First of all, my thinking is so much clearer, and moral/philosophical/political questions that seemed like a paradox before now seem to have obvious solutions. More importantly, after being inspired by stuff like The Science of Winning at Life, I now spend several hours a day on self-improvement projects, which I never would have thought to do without first becoming a rationalist. This community also lead me to vipassana meditation, the practice of which I think has improved my life so far. I feel like this new focus on rational thinking and self improvement will only continue to pay dividends in the future, as it's only been a few months since I developed this new attitude towards life. It may be overly optimistic, but I really do see finding this site and becoming a rationalist as a major turning point in my life and I'm very grateful to Eliezer and co. for revealing to me the secrets of the universe.
lulz. You have my attention.
You sound like quite an intelligent and awesome person. (bad rap, art, rationality. only an interesting person could have such a nonstandard combination of interests. Boring people come prepackaged...)
Glad to have you around.
It's only a matter of time ;)
I remember that feeling. I'm more skeptical now, but I can't help but notice more awesomeness in my life due to LW. It really is quite cool isn't it?
This is the part that's been elusive to me. What kind of things are you doing? How do you knwo you are actually getting benefits and not just producing that "this is awesome" feeling which unfortunately often gets detached from realty?
keep your identity small.
Where do you live? Do you attend meetups?
Thank you :)
I guess essentially what I do is try to read self-help stuff. I try to spend half my "work time", so to speak, doing this, and half working on creative projects. I've read both books and assorted stuff on the internet. My goal for April is to read a predetermined list of six self-help books. I'm currently on track for this goal.
So far I've read
If meditation books count
I also have been keeping a diary, which is something I've wanted to get in the habit of all my life but have never been able to do. Every day, in addition to summarizing the day's events, I rate my happiness out of ten, my productivity out of ten, and speculate on how I can do better.
I've only been keeping the diary a month, which is too small of a sample size. However, during this time, I had three weeks off for spring break, and I told myself that I would work as much as I could on self-improvement and personal projects. I ended up not really getting that much done, unfortunately. However, I managed to put in a median of... probably about five hours every day, and more importantly, I was in a fantastic mood the whole break. It might even have been the best mood I've been in for an extended time in the last few years. In the past, every time I have had a break from school, I ended up in a depressed, lonely, lethargic state, where I surfed the internet for hours on end, in which I paradoxically want to go back to school knowing that as soon as I do, I'll want to go back on break. The fact that I avoided this state for the first time I can remember since middle school is a major improvement for me. Additionally, the fact that I have managed to keep up the habit of diary-writing and meditating for a month so far is an achievement, knowing my past.
Also, even though I found How to Talk to Anyone mostly useless (it's written in a very white-collar, "how to network with the big winners" mindset that doesn't apply to my life), the one major Obvious In Retrospect thing I got from it was that in general I should never complain or criticize anyone. I used to think I was charmingly cynical. Since finishing it about four days ago, I have applied this advice, and I think, although it's very hard to tell, that I have made a person who previously harbored dislike for me view me as a someone pleasant to be around. Only one data point, but still.
I will admit that it is very possible that I am merely cultivating the "this is awesome" feeling. However, if reading scientifically minded self-help books isn't the solution, then what could possibly be? Meditation, but then what if that turns out to be a sham too? Therefore, I feel like it's rational to at least try the tactics that seem to have the highest chance of success before concluding that self-improvement is hopeless. Plus, I enjoy doing it.
I live in Columbus, OH, but I go to boarding school in a rural area. I will probably go to college in St. Louis next year. If there's ever a meetup nearby me, I would love to go.
I think you need to talk to daenerys, IIRC, she runs the Ohio stuff.
Actually doing, for one, though it sounds like you're doing that too.
yet. Some day you will want to take over the world, and then you will need to talk to big winners.
I've had this problem, too (I've got so much free time, why is it all getting pissed away?). Have you tried beeminder? I cannot overstate how much that site is just conscientiousness in a can, so to speak.
Thanks for the list. A variety of evidence is making me want to check out the self-help community more closely.
I have yet to read a self-help book that doesn't emphatically state "If you do not take care to apply these principles as much as you can in your daily life, you will not gain anything from reading this book." So, yeah, I agree, and by "reading self-help" I mean "reading self-help and applying the knowledge".
I've seen it, and checked it out a little, but I can't think of any way to quantify the stuff that I have problems getting done. Also I wish there was an option to donate money to charity, but I guess they have to make money somehow.
Welcome to LessWrong!
Interesting. If I may; what is it about technology/futurism you find so unappealing?
Also, I have to ask: why the username?
I think it would take a very long response to truly answer this, unfortunately. A lot of it has to do with exposing myself in the past through friends, media, and my surroundings to hippie-ish memeplexes that sort of reinforce this view. (Right now I go to school on a dairy farm, for example). Also in the past I had extremely irrational views on a lot of issues, one of which was a form of neo-luddism, and that idea is still in my brain somewhere.
I find it amusing, I guess. I use it on a few sites. It does sort of clash with the writing style I'm using here, I'll admit.
I have yet to see this. Which major LW contributor is advocating racism, and where can I read about it?
I'm sorry, I can't really remember any specific links to discussions, and I don't really know exactly who believes in what ideas, but I feel like there are a lot of people here, and especially people who show up in the comments, who believe that certain races are inherently more or less intelligent/violent/whatever on average than others. I specifically remember nyan_sandwich saying that he believes this, calling himself a "proto-racist" but that's the only example I can recall.
The "reactionary" philosophy is discussed a lot here too, and I feel like most people who subscribe to this philosophy are racist. Mencius Moldbug is the biggest name in this, I believe. Also I've seen a lot of links to this site http://isteve.blogspot.com/ which seems to basically be arguing in favor of racism. This blog post http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/03/03/reactionary-philosophy-in-an-enormous-planet-sized-nutshell/ contains a discussion of these issues.
If someone were to correctly point out genetic differences between groups (let's assume correctness as a hypothetical), would that be - in your opinion - 1) racist and reprehensible, 2) racist but not reprehensible, or (in the hypothetical) 3) not racist?
Would your opinion differ if those genetic differences were relating to a) IQ, or b) lactose intolerance?
Yes to the second question, in that I would give the answer of 2 for A and 3 for B.
Racism has at least three definitions colloquially that I can think of
1: A belief that there is a meaningful way to categorize human beings into races, and that certain races have more or less desirable characteristics than others. This is the definition that Wikipedia uses. Not that many educated people are racist according to this definition, I think.
2: The tendency to jump to conclusions about people based on their skin color, which can manifest as a consequence of racism-1, or unconsciously believing in racism-1. Pretty much everyone is racist to some extent according to this definition.
3: Contempt or dislike of people based on their skin color, i.e. "I hate Asians". You could further divide this into consciously and unconsciously harboring these beliefs if you wanted.
In the sexism debate, these three definitions are sort of given separate names: "belief in differences between the sexes", "sexism", and "misogyny" respectively.
Racism-3 seems to be pretty clearly evil, and racism-2 causes lots of suffering, but racism-1 basically by definition cannot be evil if it is a true belief and you abide by the Litany of Tarski or whatever. But because they have the same name, it gets confusing.
Some people might object to calling racism-1 racism, and instead will decide to call it "human biodiversity" or "race realism". I think this is bullshit. Just fucking call it what it is. Own up to your beliefs.
(I am not racist-1, for the record.)
"What it fucking is" is a straw man. ie. "and that certain races have more or less desirable characteristics than others" is not what the people you are disparaging are likely to say, for all that it is vaguely related.
Seeing this exhortation used to try to shame people into accepting your caricature as their own position fills me with the same sort of disgust and contempt that you have for racism. Failure to "own up" and profess their actual beliefs is approximately the opposite of the failure mode they are engaging in (that of not keeping their mouth shut when socially expedient). In much the same way suicide bombers are not cowards.
According to Wikipedia, "racism is usually defined as views, practices and actions reflecting the belief that humanity is divided into distinct biological groups called races and that members of a certain race share certain attributes which make that group as a whole less desirable, more desirable, inferior or superior."
This definition appears to exactly match the beliefs of the people I am talking about. I guess it's all in how you define superior, inferior, more desirable, etc. But most of the discourse revolves around intelligence which is a pretty important trait and I don't think these people believe that black people, for example, have traits that make up for their supposed lack of intelligence, or that Asians have flaws that make up for their supposed above-average intelligence (and no, dick size doesn't count). In particular, these people seem to believe that an innate lack of intelligence is to blame for the fact that so many African countries are in total chaos and unless you believe in a soul or something, it's hard to imagine that a race physically incapable of sustaining civilization is not in some meaningful way "inferior".
If you hold a belief that is described with a name that has negative connotations, you have two options. You can either hide behind some sort of euphemism, or you can just come out and say "yes I do believe that, and I am proud of it". I think the second choice is much more noble, and if I were to adopt these beliefs, I would just go ahead and describe myself as a racist. It's not really a major issue though and I probably shouldn't have used the word "fucking" in my previous post.
But anyway, since the term is completely accurate, the only reason I can think of to not call the people I'm describing racists is because it might offend them, which is deeply ironic.
If they believed you, consistency bias might make them lean more toward racist-2 and racist-3. Or it might shame them into lowering their belief in the entire reactionary memeplex, which would be epistemically sub-optimal. It might lower their status, or even their earning ability if justified accusations of racism became associated with their offline identities. There's many ways leveraging emotionally loaded terms can have negative effects.
Well, if you think races are a real thing, then calling this belief race realism seems fairly clear, and helps distinguish your belief from type-3 racism. Human biodiversity implies something more like support for eugenics, to me, since you're saying that humans are diverse, not that race is a functional Schelling point.
Stripped of connotations, "race realism" to me implies the belief that empirical clusters exist within the space of human diversity and that they map to the traditional racial classifications, but not necessarily that those clusters affect intellectual or ethical dimensions to any significant degree. I'm not sure if there's an non-euphemistic value-neutral term for racism-1 in the ancestor's typology, but that isn't it.
(The first thing that comes to mind is "scientific racism", which I'd happily use for ideas like this in a 19th- or early 20th-century context, but I have qualms about using it in a present-day context.)
Ah, good point.
The one basically follows from the other, I think. This isn't a reactionary site by any means; the last poll showed single-digit support for the philosophy here, if it's fair to consider it a political philosophy exclusive with liberalism, libertarianism, and/or conservatism. However, neoreaction/Moldbuggery gets a less hostile reception here than it does on most non-reactionary sites, probably because it's an intensely contrarian philosophy and LW seems to have a cultural fondness for clever contrarians, and we have do have several vocal reactionaries among our commentariat. Among them, perhaps unfortunately, are most of the people talking about race.
It's also pretty hard to dissociate neoreaction from... let's say "certain hypotheses concerning race", since "racism" is too slippery and value-laden a term and most of the alternatives are too euphemistic. The reasons for this seem somewhat complicated, but I think we can trace a good chunk of them to just how much of a taboo race is among what Moldbug calls the Cathedral; if your basic theory is that there's this vast formless cultural force shaping what everyone can and can't talk about without being branded monstrous, it looks a little silly if that force's greatest bugbear turns out to be right after all.
(There do seem to be a few people who gravitate to neoreaction as an intellectual framework that justifies preexisting racism, but I don't think Moldbug -- or most of the neoreactionary commentators here -- fall into that category. I usually start favoring this theory when someone seems to be dwelling on race to the exclusion of even other facets of neoreaction.)
If it helps, the LW user I most consistently associate with the "certain races are inherently more or less intelligent/violent/whatever on average than others" (as gothgirl420666 says below) is Eugine Nier. A quick Google search ("site:http://lesswrong.com Eugine_Nier rac intelligence") turns up just about any proxy measure of intelligence, from SAT scores, to results of IQ tests, to crime rates, will correlate with race, for example.
That said, were someone to describe Eugine Nier or their positions as "racist," I suspect they would respond that "racist" means lots of different things to different people and is not a useful descriptor.
You and I both participated in a thread Eugine Nier about the dynamics involved in talking about race and sex differences two weeks ago - link although we didn't debate the issue itself. (I'm not sure so I'll ask - are we discouraged from debating so-called "mindkilling" topics here?)
anyway, I had assumed he was an outlier on lesswrong, and that most folks here would take an agnostic-leaning-not-racist stance in the issue.
I wonder if we can cram this question into the next demographic poll?
There is a strong local convention against discussing topics for which certain positions are strongly enough affiliated with tribal identities that the identity-signalling aspects of arguments for/against those positions can easily interfere with the evidence-exploring aspects of those arguments. (Colloquially, "mindkilling" topics. as you say.)
That said, there's also a strong local convention against refraining from discussing topics just because such identity-signalling aspects exist.
So mostly, the tradition is we argue about what the tradition is.
For my own part, I prefer to avoid partisan-political discussions (sometimes "Blue/Green discussions" colloquially) here, but I don't mind policy-political discussions. In the US, race is more typically the former than the latter.
I certainly agree that he's an outlier.
There are interpretations of this sentence I would agree with, and interpretations I would not agree with, and I would expect the exercise of disentangling the various interpretations to be difficult.
Analogous to "agnostic atheist". A person who, in absence of compelling evidence for or against the claim that racial differences in intelligence are genetic in origin, prefers to refrain from opining on the issue. If pressed for an answer such a person would guess that racial differences are probably not genetic, because they judge this to be the more parsimonious answer.
Well...on one hand, mindkilling, strong social pressure to signal non-racism, political undertones, potentially triggering topic for people on the receiving end of racism, etc.
On the other hand, working through this practical question is a great way to learn about a variety of topics which are of interest to this forum (factors which contribute to the traits we associate with intelligence, how we test intelligence, etc).
I suppose this is largely a question of how dispassionately people can handle this sort of issue. I think a early teenage version of me would probably have have gotten defensive at the allegation that my ethnic group was genetically inferior, but I think most people on Lesswrong seem to be able to maintain a level of abstraction that keeps things from getting heated. Although, I'm not sure that people could resist the temptation to debate, rather than to contribute relevant information and update accordingly.
Confirming: the question you're referring to is "are racial differences in intelligence genetic in origin?"
It would surprise me if the differential benefits to be gained from this, relative to instead exploring some other question with fewer mindkilling, signalling, blue/green, etc, aspects, was worth the differential costs.
confirmed.
and yes, I think you're right. Although in any study of intelligence, cultural differences will inevitably become involved, and someone is eventually going to bring up population-level genetic differences as a confounding factor. Preferably, it's kept as a side issue, rather than the main one.
Welcome! I'm unable to read while listening to music with words in it. I wonder how universal that is.
Pretty much the same here. I can only read when I tune out the lyrics. Well, not quite true, I can certainly read, but the content just doesn't register.
I know of at least three possible minds for this. Pretty sure we all assumed we were typical until talking about it.
Hi everyone,
I'm a PhD student in artificial intelligence/robotics, though my work is related to computational neuroscience, and I have strong interests in philosophy of mind, meta-ethics and the "meaning of life". Though I feel that I should treat finishing my PhD as a personal priority, I like to think about these things. As such, I've been working on an explanation for consciousness and a blueprint for artificial general intelligence, and trying to conceive of a set of weighted values that can be applied to scientifically observable/measurable/calculable quantities, both of which have some implications for an explanation of the "meaning" of life.
At the center of the value system I'm working on is a broad notion of "information". Though still at preliminary stages, I'm considering a hierarchy of weights for the value of different types of information, and trying to determine how bad this is as a utility function. At the moment, I consider the preservation and creation of all information valuable; at an everyday level I try to translate this into learning and creating new knowledge and searching for unique, meaningful experiences.
I've been aware of Less Wrong for years, though haven't quite mustered the motivation to read all of the sequences. Nevertheless, I've lurked here on and off over that time, and read lots of interesting discussions. I consider the ability to make rational decisions, and not be fooled by illogical arguments, important. Though without a definite set of values and goals, any action is simply shooting in the dark.
Yo. I've been around a couple years, posted a few times as "ZoneSeek," re-registered this year under my real name as part of a Radical Honesty thing.
Well... I'm an engineering student who intends to graduate in electronics. I became interested in AI when I started learning programming at the age of 12. I became fascinated with what I could make the computer do. And rather naively I tried for months and months to program something that was "intelligent" (and failed horribly of course). I set that project aside temporarily but never stopped thinking about it. Years later I discovered HPMoR and through it LessWrong and suddenly found a whole community of people interested in AI and similar things. That was also about the same time I became a full blown atheist. So while exploring this website, I felt like a kid in a candy store.
Once I graduate I really hope I can do some research in AI.
Hi everyone, I'm Chris. I'm a physics PhD student from Melbourne, Australia. I came to rationalism slowly over the years by having excellent conversations with like minded friends. I was raised a catholic and fully bought into the faith, but became an atheist in early high school when I realised that scientific explanations made more sense.
About a year ago I had a huge problem with the collapse postulate of quantum mechanics. It just didn't make sense and neither did anything anyone was telling me about it. This led me to discover that many worlds wasn't as crazy as it had been made out to be, and led me to this very community. My growth as a rationalist has made me distrust the consensus opinions of more and more groups, and realising that physicists could get something so wrong was the final nail in the coffin for my trust of the scientific establishment. Of course science is still the best way to figure things out, but as soon as opinions become politicised or tied to job prospects, I don't trust scientists as far as I can throw them. Related to this is my skepticism that climate change is a big deal.
I am frustrated more by the extent of unreason in educated circles than I am in uneducated circles, as people should know better. For example, utilitarian morality should be much more widespread in these circles than it is. But moral issues are often politicised, and you know what they say about politics here.
I'm pretty social and would love to meet more rationalist friends, but I have the perception that if I went to a meetup most people would be less extroverted than me, and it might not be much fun for me. Also since I do physics and am into heavy metal, my social circles at the moment are like 95% male, and it seems pretty silly to invest effort in developing a new social group unless it does something about that number, which I'm pretty sure less wrong meetups will not. So I'm probably not going to look into this, even though I enjoy the communities writings online.
Though I find the writing style to sometimes be a bit dense and not self contained (requiring reading a lot of past posts to make sense of.) I find myself preferring the writing style of a rationalist blog like slatestarcodex (or its previous incarnation), and if the same issue is being discussed in two places I'll generally read it there instead because I prefer the more casual writing style.
Welcome! What do you think of the Born probabilities?
I haven't gone through any of the supposed derivations, but I'm led to believe that the Born rule is convincingly derivable within many worlds. I have a book called "Many Worlds? Everett, quantum theory and reality", which contains such a derivation, I've been meaning to read it for a while and will get around to it some day. It claims:
Which I think is a nice angle to view it from. At any rate, the Born rule is a fairly natural result to have, since the probabilities are simply the vector product of the wavefunction with itself, which is how you normally define the sizes of vectors in vector spaces. So I'm expecting the argument in the book to be related to the criteria that mathematicians use to define inner products, and how those criteria map to assumptions about the universe (ie no preferred spatial direction, that sort of thing). Maybe if I understand it I'll post something here about it for those who are interested — I'm yet to see a blog-style summary of where the Born rule comes from.
At any rate it doesn't come from anywhere in the way we're taught quantum mechanics at uni, it's simply an axiom that one doesn't question. So any derivation, however assumption laden and weak would be an improvement over standard Copenhagen.
My experience at meetups has been pretty social. After all, meetups select for people outgoing enough to go out of the house in the first place. I'd encourage you to go once, if there's a convenient meetup around. The value of information is high; if the meetup sucks, that costs one afternoon, but if it's good, you gain a new group of friends.
Excellent point, I know that effect makes a huge difference in other contexts, so that resonates with me. Ok, well I'll give it a shot. There are no meetups near where I am in Germany at the moment, but I'll be back in Melbourne later in the year where there seems to be some regular stuff going on.
I found HPMOR nearly three years ago. Soon afterward, I finished the core sequences up through the QM sequence, read some of Eliezer's other posts, and other sequences and authors on LW. When I look back, I realize my thinking has been hugely influenced by what I have learned from this community. I cannot even begin to draw boundaries in my mind identifying what exactly came from LW; hopefully this means I have internalized the ideas and that I am actually using what I learned.
There is a story behind why I have now, after three years of lurking, finally created an account. I am currently a sophomore in high school. I have always been driven to learn by my curiosity and desire for truth and knowledge. But I am also a perfectionist and an overachiever. Somehow, in the last two years of high school, I began to latch onto academics as my “goal.” I started obsessing about ridiculous things - getting perfect scores on every assignment and test, guarding my perfect GPA, etc. It wasn't enough anymore that I understood the content without needing to study - I had to devote huge amounts of time and energy to achieve "perfection."
In March, over spring break, I returned to make some progress on my to-read list that had been piling up. I read Thinking, Fast and Slow; I finished the decision theory FAQ and Eliezer's most recent sequence on LW; and I read the FAQ on MIRI and several articles by Nick Bostrom and Eliezer on AI. When I returned to school, I found I had broken out of the destructive spiral around academics. I had no interest in chasing “perfection” in scores. Interestingly, my grades have hardly changed - the largest drop in any class was 2 percentage points. I have been far happier, curious about the world, and enthusiastic about my involvement in it. My drive to know the “why” behind things, and my interest in other topics (many of which are discussed on LW) have returned.
Now, mentally refreshed, I see opportunities everywhere; I am in the short period after making a huge mental change, during which it is easiest to start taking action. I have wanted to leave high school for quite some time now, but never took any action before. I just finished my application to Bard College at Simon’s Rock last week.
Ooh, good school, I went there, best of luck.
Hello, Less Wrong; I'm so glad I found you.
A few years ago a particularly fruitful wikiwalk got me to a list of cognitive biases (also fallacies). I read it voraciously, then followed the sources, found out about Kahneman and Tversky and all the research that followed. The world has never quite been the same.
Last week Twitter got me to this sad knee-jerk post on Slate, which in a few message-board-quality paragraphs completely missed the point of this thought experiment by Steve Landsburg, dealing with the interesting question of crimes in which the only harm to the victims is the pain from knowing that they happened. The discussion there, however, was refreshingly above average, and I'll be forever grateful to LessWronger "Henry", who posted a link to the worst argument in the world - which turned out to be a practical approach to a problem I had been thinking about and trying to condense into something useful in a discussion (I was going toward something like "'X-is-horrible-and-is-called-racism' turning into 'We-call-Y-racism-therefore-it's-horrible'").
Since then I've been looking around and it feels... feels like I've finally found my species after a lifetime among aliens. I have heartily agreed with everything I've seen Eliezer write (so far), which I suspect is almost as unusual to him as it is to me. It's simply relieving to see minds working properly. Looking around I've found that I'm not too far behind, but still find something to think and learn in nearly every post, which looks like the perfect spot to be. "Insight porn", somebody said here - that seems about right.
As for my "theme":
I'm Brazilian (btw, are there others here?), currently studying Law. Specifically, I've been trying to apply the heuristics and biases approach to research about day to day decision making by judges and juries. I mean to do empirical research after graduation if possible, but right now I'm attempting a review of the available literature. Research in Portuguese proved futile, but that was expected (sadly, it seems I wouldn't have a problem if searching for psychoanalysis...).
So I humbly ask: if you know of research about cognitive biases in a legal setting, would you kindly direct me to it?
Know that feeling. I wonder how common a reaction it is, actually ...
Maybe it's just that EY is very persuasive! I'm reminded of what was said about some other polymath (Arthur Koestler I think) that the critics were agreed that he was right on almost everything - except, of course, for the topic that the critic concerned was expert in, where he was completely wrong!
So my problem is, whether to just read the sequences, or to skim through all the responses as well. The latter takes an awful lot longer, but from what I've seen so far there's often a response from some expert in the field concerned that, at the least, puts the post into a whole different perspective.
I was thinking more of "finally, someone who isn't being stupid about this" rather than "well, I'm persuaded"; although, to be fair, they probably go together a good deal.
I recommend reading each post, then writing a draft response with your thoughts on the matter, then checking if anyone had already commented on it. If not, hit "Comment", for others to read. And for yourself, some time later.
After looking around a little more, I should clarify what I meant perhaps.
The part about agreeing with EY (so far) was about psychology, ethics, morality, epistemology, even the little of politics I saw. The "so far" is doing heavy work there, I've only been around for a week, and focusing first on the topics most immediately relevant to my work and studies. More importantly, I haven't touched the physics yet (which from what I've seen in this page is something I should have mentioned), and I'm not qualified to "take sides" if I had.
The paragraph was not prompted (only) by EY, but by my marvel at the quality of discussions here. No caveats there, this community has really impressed me. The way it works, not the conclusions, although they're certainly correlated.
I'm used to having to defend rationality in a very relevant portion of the discussions I have, before it's possible to move on to anything productive (of course, those tend not to move on at all). This is a breath of fresh air.
Well, hello. I'm a first-year physics PhD student in India. Found this place through Yvain's blog, which I found when I was linked there from a feminist blog. It's great fun, and I'm happy I found a place where I can discuss stuff with people without anyone regularly playing with words (or, more accurately, where it's acceptable to stop and define your words properly). So, one of my favourite things about this place is the fact that it's based on the map to territory idea of truth and beliefs; I've been using it to insult people ever since I read it.
The post says I should say why I identify as a rationalist; I wouldn't, personally, 'cause I never feel like being better at rationality is the point, and whatever you or I say the word means it stands to be misunderstood in this way. But as for why I'm interested in this place at all: better calibration, and the possibility of better communication.
Anyway, still going through the sequences (personally, I would prefer reading something more mathematical, but I can understand why these posts aren't). I have a whole tab group in firefox for LW right now, because it went too far out of hand.
As for special personal interests, I'm ridiculously scatterbrained, and so haven't garnered any non-trivial understanding of anything. One vaguely interesting thing I do enjoy doing is trying to charitably understand some mystical-looking stuff, like the Tao te Ching or Maya or art criticism (warning: my blog is a review blog, but you won't find much of this if you click through, as there I just use the conventions post-justification and modify them whenever). My methodology: ask what questions they were thinking about to posit the answers they did, and then think about the questions myself. Collect more information, and update. Maybe I'll even write about some of this once I have a better grasp of how to explicitly use the tools presented here.
Also, I have a question about Anki: is the web part defunct or something? I can't find anything there. Whatever I search for, I get a blank page. (I was going to post in that page, but this is more likely to be replied to.)
Oh, and can I latex in the comments?
Yup, but it's not super elegant! There's some info here.
Also, AnkiWeb.net works for me - but you need to use https:// for Anki 2 and http:// for Anki 1.
Hey Lesswrong.
This is a sockpuppet account I made for the purpose of making a post to Discussion and possibly Main, while obscuring my identity, which is important due to some NDAs I've signed with regards to the content of the post.
I am explicitly asking for +2 karma so that I can make the post.
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.
Have you read Brain Lock?
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.
Ner jr gnyxvat ntnvafg nal chavfuzrag urer, be whfg ivaqvpgvir chavfuzrag?
I've been browsing the site for at least a year. Found it through HP:MoR, which is absolutely amazing. I've been coming to the LessWrong study hall for a couple weeks now and have found it highly effective.
For the most part, I haven't really applied this at all. I ended up making a final break with Christianity, but the only significant difference is that I now say "Yay humanism!" instead of "Yay God!" I've used a few tricks here and there, like the Sunk Cost Fallacy, and the Planning Fallacy, but I still spent the majority of my time not thinking about things. Because thinking is hard.
Then I started trying again to figure out what I should do with my life. Now, the first time I tried this I spent less effort on the decision than I did on most papers I've written for class. Ended up signing a five-year contract with miserable results. Now I'm actually thinking. It is incredibly difficult, but I am convinced that it is worth it.
My current goals are to broaden my knowledge (I know a ton of information about classical music but almost nothing else) and sharpen my critical thinking skills.
I strongly agree with both of those statements.
Do you know what you'd like to do with the knowledge and skills you're acquiring, or is that still an open question?
Apparently I have just registered.
So, I have a question. What's an introduction do? What is it supposed to do? How would I be able to tell that I've introduced myself if I somehow accidentally willed myself to forget?
Well, I didn't introduce myself, but I guess it lets people know stuff about you without having to piece it together from your comments?
Hi everyone, I'm labachevskij. I'm a long time lurker on this site, attracted by (IIRC) Bayesian Decision Theory. I'm completing my PhD studies in Maths, but I have also been caught by HPMOR, which is proving a huge source of procrastination (I'm reading it again for the third time). I'm also on my way with the reading of the sequences.
Welcome labachevskij!
What part of Math are you focusing on?
I'm working on Partial Differential Equations in Fluid-dynamics, both deterministic and stochastic. I'm dealing mostly with turbulence models, right now. But I trained as a probabilist (and there's where my heart lies).
Are you into maths too?
Only for recreation purposes these days. Most recently I've been grappling with the various ways of formulating and manipulating infinitesimals. The need for them keeps cropping up when I explore various obscure decision theory problems and the implication of certain counterfactuals expressed in terms of subsets of an ultimate ensemble.
Sounds fun!
Hi,
i have been lurking around here mostly for (rational) self help. Some info about me.
Married. Work at India office of a top tier tech company. 26 y/o
between +2 and +2.5 SD IQ . crystallized >> fluid . Extremely introspective and self critical. ADHD / Mildly depressed most of my life. Have hated 'work' most of my life.
Zero visual working memory (One - Two items with training). Therefore struggling with programming computers and not enjoying it. Can write short programs and solve standard interview type questions. Can't build big functional pieces of software
Tried to self medicate two years back .Overdosed on modafinil + piracetam. in ER. 130+ heart rate for 8 hours. induced panic disorder. As of today, Stimulant use out of question therefore.
Familiar with mindfulness meditation and spiritual philosophy.
Its quite clear that i can't build large pieces of software. Unsure as to what productive use i can be with these attributes.
Thanks
Welcome!
What was your dosage?
immediate dose : 200 mg modafinil + 800 mg piracetam around 10 am.
OD symptoms within 2/3 hours.
there was probably significant drug buildup of modafinil over the prior week i guess. was taking mostly 200mg (once 400 mg) a day the preceeding week. so i am guessing 300-500 mg built up.
effectively then
500 - 700 mg modafinil + 800mg piracetam.
resulted in 170/90 BP + 130-150 HR + severe anxiety for around 8-9 hours. ER docs didn't know what to do. I refused to get admitted to ICU.
Subsided by 10pm night. instigated a panic disorder and a drug phobia
cured by 25mg sertraline for 6 months. panic free (more or less) since.
has left me vigilant about drug interactions and adverse drug effects.
Thanks!
That's fairly interesting. It seem to be often under-appreciated that IQ (and similar tests) fail to evaluate important aspects of cognition.
yes. cognitive ability is quite varied and i am highly stunted in the visuo spatial area.
could never read fiction (no characters visuals in my head). the lack of this faculty is also a major bottleneck in comprehension of technical material.
i like syntax / discrete math / logic etc, things which which depend more on verbal facility.
That depends on what your goal is. Making enough money to fund a relaxed and happy life? Making tremendous amounts of money? Job satisfaction? Something else entirely?
Hi,
I'm a final year Mathematics student at Cambridge coming from an IOI, IMO background. I've written software for a machine learning startup, a game dev startup and Google. I was recently interested in programming language theory esp. probabilistic and logic programming (some experiments here http://peteriserins.tumblr.com/archive).
I'm interested in many aspects of startups (including design) and hope to move into product management, management consulting or venture capital. I love trying to think rationally about business processes and have started to write about it at http://medium.com/@p_e .
I found out about LW from a friend and have since started reading the sequences. I hope to learn more about practical instrumental rationality, I am less interested in philosophy and the meta theory. So far I've learned more about practical application of mathematics from data science and consulting, but expect rationality to take it further and with more rigor.
Great meeting y'all
Welcome! You may want to consider participating in a CFAR workshop. I think it's 1000% as effective for learning instrumental rationality as reading Less Wrong. They're optimized for teaching practical skills, and they tend to attract entrepreneurs.
Also, I think you'd be a valuable addition to the community around CFAR, in addition to the online community around the Less Wrong website.
As someone who has done a CFAR workshop, and a lot of online rationality stuff (including, but not limited to reading ~90% of the sequences) I second this. I'll also add that do think having a strong theoretical background going in enhances the practical training.
Hello! I call myself Atomliner. I'm a 23 year old male Political Science major at Utah Valley University.
From 2009 to 2011, I was a missionary for the Mormon Church in northeastern Brazil. In the last month I was there, I was living with another missionary who I discovered to be a closet atheist. In trying to help him rediscover his faith, he had me read The God Delusion, which obliterated my own. I can't say that book was the only thing that enabled me to leave behind my irrational worldview, as I've always been very intellectually curious and resistant to authority. My mind had already been a powder keg long before Richard Dawkins arrived with the spark to light it.
Needless to say, I quickly embraced atheism and began to read everything I could about living without belief in God. I'm playing catch-up, trying to expand my mind as fast as I can to make up for the lost years I spent blinded by religious dogma. Just two years ago, for example, I believed homosexuality was an evil that threatened to destroy civilization, that humans came from another planet, and that the Lost Ten Tribes were living somewhere underground beneath the Arctic. Needless to say, my re-education process has been exhausting.
One ex-Mormon friend of mine introduced me to Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, which I read only a few chapters of, but I was intrigued by the concept of Bayes Theorem and followed a link here. Since then I've read From Skepticism to Technical Rationality and many of the Sequences. I'm hooked! I'm really liking what I find here. While I may not be a rationalist now, I would really like to be.
And that's my short story! I look forward to learning more from all of you and, hopefully, contributing in the future. :)
How many of your younger Mormon peers and friends do you think are secretly atheists?
I've only had two of my Mormon peers/friends/relatives reveal to me after knowing them for a substantial amount of time that they are atheists. Based on that, I would guess the percentage of active Latter-day Saints that are closet atheists is pretty low, around 1%-3%?
Be careful. There's a noted tendency to fill the void left by god with very god-like artificial intelligences, owners of the simulation we might be living in, and the like.
Welcome to LessWrong!
Good for you! You might want to watch out for assuming that everyone had a similar experience with religion; many theists will fin this very annoying and this seems to be a common mistake among people with your background-type.
Huh. I must say, I found the GD pretty terrible (despite reading it multiple times to be sure,) although I suppose that powder-keg aspect probably accounts for most of your conversion (deconversion?)
I'm curious, could you expand on what you found so convincing in The God Delusion?
I think we can all say that :)
What kind of theist are you, personal or more of the general theism (which includes deism) variety? Any holy textstring you believe has been divinely inspired?
About as Deist as you can be while still being technically Christian. I'd be inclined to say there's something in all major religions, simply for selection reasons, but the only thing I'd endorse as "divinely inspired" as such would be the New Testament? I guess? Even that is filtered by cultural context and such, obviously,.
If you can readily articulate your reasons for evaluating the New Testament differently from other scriptures, I'm interested. (It's possible that you've already done so, perhaps even in response to this question from me; feel free to point me at writeups elsewhere if you wish.)
Well, I mentioned I'm technically Christian (despite my deist leanings), right? I think the evidence in favor of Jesus being, well, the Son of God is good enough to over come my prior, although to be fair I have a significantly higher prior of such things than the LW norm, because theism. If Jesus was God, naturally anything that can be traced back to him is in some sense "divinely inspired" - so the Gospels, mostly. I'm less confident about the status of the rest of the NT, but again, probably miracles (albeit lower certainty than those of Jesus, I guess) so probably some level of Godly origin, at least for the parts that claim to have such an origin.
(nods) That answers my question. Thank you.
I am Mormon so I am curious where you got the beliefs that Homosexuality would destroy civilization, that humans came from another planet, that the Ten Tribes live underground beneath the Arctic? Those are not standard beliefs of Mormons (see for instance the LDS churches Mormonsandgays.org) and only one of those have I ever even encountered before (Ten Tribes beneath the Arctic) but I couldn't figure out where that belief comes from or why anyone would feel the need to believe it.
I also have to ask, the same as MugaSofer, could you explain how The God Delusion obliterated your faith? It seemed largely irrelevent to me.
Hello LW users, I use the alias Citizen 9-100 (nine one-hundred) but you may call me Nozz. This account will be shared between my sister and I, but we will sign it with the name of whoever is speaking. I would write more but I wrote a lot already but it didn't post due to a laptop error, so all I'll say for now is anything you'd like to know, feel free to ask, just make sure you clarify who your asking. BTW, for those interested, you may call my sister, any of the following, Sam, Sammy, Samantha, or any version of that :)
I don't recommend sharing an account. It will be confusing, and signatures are not customary here.