A few notes about the site mechanics
A few notes about the community
If English is not your first language, don't let that make you afraid to post or comment. You can get English help on Discussion- or Main-level posts by sending a PM to one of the following users (use the "send message" link on the upper right of their user page). Either put the text of the post in the PM, or just say that you'd like English help and you'll get a response with an email address.
* Normal_Anomaly
* Randaly
* shokwave
* Barry Cotter
A note for theists: you will find the Less Wrong community to be predominantly atheist, though not completely so, and most of us are genuinely respectful of religious people who keep the usual community norms. It's worth saying that we might think religion is off-topic in some places where you think it's on-topic, so be thoughtful about where and how you start explicitly talking about it; some of us are happy to talk about religion, some of us aren't interested. Bear in mind that many of us really, truly have given full consideration to theistic claims and found them to be false, so starting with the most common arguments is pretty likely just to annoy people. Anyhow, it's absolutely OK to mention that you're religious in your welcome post and to invite a discussion there.
A list of some posts that are pretty awesome
I recommend the major sequences to everybody, but I realize how daunting they look at first. So for purposes of immediate gratification, the following posts are particularly interesting/illuminating/provocative and don't require any previous reading:
- The Worst Argument in the World
- That Alien Message
- How to Convince Me that 2 + 2 = 3
- Lawful Uncertainty
- Your Intuitions are Not Magic
- The Planning Fallacy
- The Apologist and the Revolutionary
- Scope Insensitivity
- The Allais Paradox (with two followups)
- We Change Our Minds Less Often Than We Think
- The Least Convenient Possible World
- The Third Alternative
- The Domain of Your Utility Function
- Newcomb's Problem and Regret of Rationality
- The True Prisoner's Dilemma
- The Tragedy of Group Selectionism
- Policy Debates Should Not Appear One-Sided
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!
Once a post gets over 500 comments, the site stops showing them all by default. If this post has 500 comments and you have 20 karma, please do start the next welcome post; a new post is a good perennial way to encourage newcomers and lurkers to introduce themselves. (Step-by-step, foolproof instructions here; takes <180seconds.)
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, a big thank you to everyone that helped write this post via its predecessors!
The most interesting stories come from a power in Exalted called "Wise Choice". Basically, you give it a situation and a finite list of actions you could take and it tells you the one that will have the best outcome for you within the next month. It also requires a moderate expenditure of mana, so it can't be used over and over without cost. When I read what the charm did, I thought of Harry's time-experiment with prime numbers. It was immediately obvious that Wise Choice could factorize any number easily, although perhaps not cheaply if it has a large number of factors. From there, it also expanded to finding literally anything in the world either with one big question (if low on mana) or a quick series of smaller ones (if low on time) by dividing the world into a grid and either listing every square or doing a basic binary search via asking the power "Given that I'm going to keep divind the world in half and asking a similar question to this one, which half of the world should I focus on to get within 10 feet of Item/Person X's location at exactly 7PM tomorrow evening" I also figured out that you can beat the one month time limit by pre-committing to asking the same question in 27 days and having someone else promise to give you a reward if you state the same thing each month, with the caveat that you have to give it all back if you're proven wrong in the end or change your answer. This can be shown to work (assuming I haven't made a mistake) by taking a simple case of there being two boxes, one containing ten million dollars and the other being empty. By choosing a box now, it will be opened in six months and you will be given what is inside. Without the trick, Wise Choice looks forward one month, sees no difference and tells you "it doesn't matter". With the trick, Wise Choice looks forward a month, and tells you to say what it sees future you saying, even though it doesn't "understand" why. However, future you can see an additional month forward, and uses it to see future you+2, etc. Therefore, the first instance gives you the true box, even though it can't see to when the box opens.
Of course, it's possible that I've missed a possible case that makes those tricks invalid. I don't have access to an actual infinite-knowledge superpower to check my work, but I figure telling other people about it so they can see things I missed is almost as good.