Welcome to Less Wrong! (6th thread, July 2013)

KnaveOfAllTrades

30 Welcome to Less Wrong! (6th thread, July 2013)

26th Jul 2013

7 min read

30

If you've recently joined the Less Wrong community, please leave a comment here and introduce yourself. We'd love to know who you are, what you're doing, what you value, how you came to identify as an aspiring rationalist or how you found us. You can skip right to that if you like; the rest of this post consists of a few things you might find helpful. More can be found at the FAQ.

A few notes about the site mechanics

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However, it can feel really irritating to get downvoted, especially if one doesn't know why. It happens to all of us sometimes, and it's perfectly acceptable to ask for an explanation. (Sometimes it's the unwritten LW etiquette; we have different norms than other forums.) Take note when you're downvoted a lot on one topic, as it often means that several members of the community think you're missing an important point or making a mistake in reasoning— not just that they disagree with you! If you have any questions about karma or voting, please feel free to ask here.

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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.

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Alternatively, if you're still unsure where to submit a post, whether to submit it at all, would like some feedback before submitting, or want to gauge interest, you can ask / provide your draft / summarize your submission in the latest open comment thread. In fact, Open Threads are intended for anything 'worth saying, but not worth its own post', so please do dive in! Informally, there is also the unofficial Less Wrong IRC chat room, and you might also like to take a look at some of the other regular special threads; they're a great way to get involved with the community!

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* 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:

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!}

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30 Welcome to Less Wrong! (6th thread, July 2013)

by KnaveOfAllTrades

26th Jul 2013

7 min read

518

30

A few notes about the site mechanics

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.

A few notes about the community

A list of some posts that are pretty awesome

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!

_{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!}

Open Threads

Personal Blog

30

New Comment

Rendering 0/518 comments, sorted by

top scoring

(show more) Click to highlight new comments since: Today at 10:48 AM

Some comments are truncated due to high volume. (⌘F to expand all)Change truncation settings

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Regex12y160

Ekke Ekke Ekke Ekke Ptangya Zoooooooom Boing Ni!

I'll be going by Regex. I stumbled upon this site due to a side story from the MLP:FIM fanfiction Friendship is Optimal: http://www.fimfiction.net/story/62074/friendship-is-optimal which is a bit weird, but I guess I'm weird. Yes, I like small candy colored equines. Ponies are my lifeblood.

My life history in a nutshell: Highschool was spent mostly figuring out how terrible middleschool was and realizing my ability to control my environment. Learned basic coding, drawing, and organization skills. Found a path in life due to the launch of the Curiosity rover. Robots were cool. Installed Linux.

I am currently a college sophomore pursing mechanical engineering: I've been inspired to create robots. Despite going for a ME degree I have more computer knowledge. My preferred OS is Linux, but I'm not skilled enough with it yet to do much beyond what I can do with Windows.

I am quite interested in personal development, hence why I am here. A lot of the thought processes here seem to mirror my own far more than I've seen elsewhere, so there was kind of a "these are my people" moment. I have been lightly reading the site, but there is just so much I've been doing it in bits and pieces and digesting it as I read.

I am also an artist of sorts, but I can't do much beyond basic line art and sketching. Drawing from my imagination is much more difficult than copying something in front of me. I've had better luck with using programming to make patterns, but I like the ability to produce an arbitrary image by hand. Getting there.

I am very good at organizing information (depending on the need), but I often fail to actually progress beyond that point and do anything with the knowledge gained. This is paralleled with the fact that I have a habit of hording media rather than watching it.

I sing aloud to myself as I walk down the street. Whatever comes to mind. Very fun. I probably am a little inconsiderate of those around me when doing so, but I like to think I am adding a bit of mystery to their day. They'll ask "what was all that singing about?" and never know. I also like smashing piano keys in whatever order sounds pleasing at that moment. More fun.

I am interested in polyphasic sleep, and can currently fall asleep for a short nap basically whenever I please and reduce "core sleep" (aka the long 8 hour sleep block becomes a 4 hour block if I take 2-3 twenty to thirty minute naps during the day), but I didn't go all the way to remove the core sleep.

I consider myself "smarter than average," but now try very very hard not to judge people based on their intellect. I recall once uttering the statement "better to be intelligent than a skateboarder" (I was convinced one cannot be both) in middle school to someone who later became a friend of sorts. This was because I had (still have?) a bit of a superiority complex, but also because I failed to understand where he was coming from and I had (have?) a tendency to misrepresent others in my mind to a significant degree. I have no doubt that those tendencies still lurk out of view.

Regardless of how high or low I might compare to others I want to become better than I am.

I'll be around.

[anonymous]12y20

Hello and welcome to LessWrong!

Well you've certainly come to the right place if self-improvement and overcoming bias are what interest you. As Fluttershy pointed out, the Sequences are a great place to dive into the culture and conversation of LW. If you're looking for sequences specifically about self-improvement, check out Living Luminously and The Science of Winning at Life.

You aren't the only one here to try out habit changes and "life hacks," so feel free to share your personal improvements or experiments. We have quite a sizeable demographi... (read more)

3Fluttershy12y

Hi there Regex, Welcome to LessWrong! Yay! If you liked Iceman's Friendship is Optimal and other conversion bureau stories, you might enjoy Chatoyance's 27 Ounces and Caelum est Conterrens. As far as personal development goes, I feel like I personally learned a lot about how to make better predictions about the world from CFAR's Credence Game, though, um, you might prefer reading through the core sequences to playing the calibration game. I have been told that Mysterious Answers to Mysterious Questions is a good place to start reading through the sequences, though I personally read through most of the sequences in no particular order, as, at the time, that approach suited me more than a structured approach to reading the sequences would have. In any case, it is great to have a new friend join us; I hope you feel welcome here.

2Swimmer963 (Miranda Dixon-Luinenburg)12y

Welcome!

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