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!
Hello, I'm Evan. I am 28.6!
HOW I FOUND LESSWRONG I first became aware of LessWrong through some obscure trail of internet breadcrumbs, the only one of which I remember involved a stop at gwern.net.
I seem to have chosen authors to read (in general, over my lifetime) mainly on the basis of how they express themselves, as opposed to the ideas they are expressing. If I had to guess why this is the case, I would imagine it has something to do with my intuition that quality of expression has something to do with the quality of the originating mind, the object-level ideas being express, somewhat less so.
When I first read the sequences, I came away very impressed with both the style of expression as well as the ideas being expressed. This lead me to lurk more on LW and I am happy to say I was pleasantly suprised that I wasn't just a fan of Eleizer and other sequence authors, but that the overall calibre of discussion on the site was unmatched in my experience of Internet commentors in general. In addition, the civility shown here is much higher, on the whole, than most corners of the Internet. So I stayed, and lurked, and recent articles have led in directions where I feel I have some useful ideas to contribute. So here I am.
ME: I've always identified as a rationalist, for as long as I can remember. I was raised in a household where the truth is valued. I fell victim to the conditioning and culture of the "Traditional Rationalist" until I took up the use of psychedelics, some very interesting philosophy of neuroscience courses, and Vipassana meditation all within a month of each other. This convergence of catastrophes sent me into a period of re-evaluation the fundamental foundations of my identity, epistemology, and many other things besides.
One of the first things that became clear was that Traditional Rationalism was not an adequate set of tools for dealing with reality; if anyone is interested perhaps I'll go into the specifics someday. Suffice it to say I ended up with a rather Bayesian perspective, combined with many tools for self-control and -actualization through an intensive study of meditation, martial arts, and yogicc techniques from around the world.
I am extremely interested in a 'Rationality Dojo.' As a practicing martial artist, I need no further explanation of how awesome that would be.
I hope to use my (now non-lurking) interactions with this community to temper my rationality, keep me honest, expand my social group to include more people who are explicitly rational, and hopefully help make the world a better place to live in.