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!
Welcome, Avi!
It looks like I downvoted three of your previous comments. Sorry about that (not really, it had to be done). Here is my reasoning, since you asked:
Your comment on AI avoiding destruction suggested that you neither read the previous discussion of the issue first, nor thought about it in any depth, just blurted out the first or second idea that you came up with.
Your retracted FTL question indicated that you didn't bother searching online for one of the most common questions ever asked about entanglement. Not until later, anyway. So the downvote worked as intended there.
Your comment on the vague quasi-philosophical concept of superdeterminism purported to provide some sort of a proof of it being not Turing-computable, yet did not discuss why the T.M. would not halt, only gave some poorly described thought experiment.
I am sorry you got a harsher-that-average welcome to this forum, I hope your comment quality improves after these few bumps to your ego.
Good for you. Note that the Quantum sequence is one of the harder and more controversial ones, consider alternative sources, like Scott Aaronson's semi-popular Quantum Computing Democritus, written by an expert in the field.
That's quite wise. If you write down what you want to say and then look back at it after you finish reading, you will likely find your original thoughts naive in retrospect. But a good exercise nonetheless.
If at some point you think that after a cursory reading of some post you found a hole in Eliezer's reasoning that had not been discussed in the comments, you are probably mistaken. Consider this post of mine as a warning.
Also note that as a self-identifying "Orthodox Jewish", you are bound to have compartmentalized a lot, and Eliezer's and Yvain's posts tend to vaporize these barriers quite spectacularly, so be warned, young Draco. Your original identity is not likely to remain intact, either.
With these caveats, have fun! :)
I read most of the posts offline in ebooks. That means I don't see the comments unless I then go online and look. Is there a set of ebooks that includes comments? (For all I know, most of my ideas have already been said and refuted.)
And is he perfect?