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!
Greetings, y’all. I’m very excited to take the plunge into the LW community proper. I spent the last six months plowing through the sequences and testing the limits of my friends’ patience when I tried to engage them in it. Besides looking for people to talk to, I am beginning to feel a profound restlessness at not doing anything with all the new ideas in my head. At 27, I’m not a “level 1 adult” yet. I don’t really have something to protect or a purpose I’m dedicated to. I hope that by being active in the community will at least get me in the habit of being active.
My name is Jacob, I was born in the Soviet Union and grew up in Israel. My parents are scientists, my dad is probably top 10 worldwide in his field. I grew up playing soccer and sitting at dinner with students and scientists from around the world, I hope I actually did realize even as a teenager how awesome it was. I did my Bar Mitzva at a reform synagogue but God was never really part of our family conversation, I don’t think that I’ve said a prayer and actually meant it since I was 12 or 13. There are just enough Russian-speaking math geeks in Israel to form a robust subculture and I was at the top of it: winning national competitions in math and getting drunk the next day on cheap vodka. I had a very strange four-year service in the IDF. I sweated blood for a degree in math and physics that got me a minimum-wage job in the Israeli desert, and then effortlessly breezed my way through a top 20 MBA in the US that suddenly made me a middle class New Yorker. I work an easy job that leaves me with plenty of energy at the end of the day to play sports, perform stand up, date, and improve my skills as a rationalist by considering my intellectual biases.
I stumbled on LW after reading an article about Roko’s #$&%!@ of all things, and the last few months were what I saw someone here describe as “epiphany porn”. Even before that, I read a lot on similar themes and took it all very seriously: “Fooled by Randomness” made me quit my job as a day-trader for a hedge fund and “Thinking Fast and Slow” changed my life in several ways, including the choice of car I bought. I’m very happy to start noticing changes in my brain after LW too. For example, I spent a lot of my time in the US arguing with anti-zionists. I just recently realized that the hypocrisy and stupidity I usually find arrayed against me has pushed me into a pro-Israel affective death spiral of my own, that I’m now trying to climb out of. In general, I argue less about politics now and don’t ever plan to vote anymore. I just went to my first OB-New York meetup and hung out at the solstice concert, I hope to become more and more engaged with LWers offline going forward.
The main result of my business school days are several entrepreneurial fantasies about “Moneyballing” things. One recent idea is to set up a personal philanthropy investment fund - people put in X% of their salary that can be used only for emergency or charity. This eliminates the psychological pain of giving money, increases giving, makes personal altruism much more focused and effective and saves on taxes. I also came up with a better matching algorithm for dating websites. Dating in general is at the very top of my interests. While a rigorous model of Bayesian dating seems as unattainable as quantum relativity, I do find that my open minded approach has gotten me in relationships that I didn’t even believe were an option a few years ago (that’s a discussion I’d love to get to on somewhere else on this site).
And finally: where I hope to end up. Perhaps even a year ago I imagined I could be perfectly satisfied living a content middle-class life with a decent job, good relationships and fun hobbies. I realized that the world doesn’t care too much that I was always the smartest person in the room as a teenager, and that I’d do well to dedicate myself to humility. Unfortunately, LW changed that. I see now that things are changing and going to change unpredictably, and that smart people occasionally do make a very non-humble impact. I’m not in a rush to plunge myself into some grand project (like FAI) just for the sake of it, but I do feel that my life is getting too comfortable for comfort. When the waves come, I want to have built a rad surfboard.
Wow, just... wow. \salutes**
Welcome, Jacob!