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, everyone!
LW came to my attention not so long ago, and I've been commited to reading it since that moment about a month ago. I am a 20-year old linguist from Moscow, finishing my bachelor's. Due to my age, I've been pondering with usual questions of life for the past few years, searching for my path, my philosophy, essentially, a best way to live for me.
I studied a lot of religions, philosophies, and they all seemed really flat, essentially because of the reasons stated in some articles here. I came close to something resembling a nice way to live after I read "Atlas shrugged", but something about it bothered me, and after thorough analysis of this philosophy I decided to take some good things from it and move on, as I did a lot of times before.
I found this gem of a site through reddit and roko's basilisk (is it okay if I say it here? I heard discussion was banned). I am deeply into the whole idea of rationality and nearly all ideas that are presented on this site, but something really bothers me here, too.
The thing is that it is implied that altruism and rationality go hand in hand; maybe I missed some important articles that could explain me, why?
Let's imagine a hypothetical scenario: there is a guy, Steve, who really does not feel anything when he helps other people nor when does other "good" things generally; he does this only because his philosophy or religion tells them to. Say this guy was introduced to ideas of rationality and thus he is no longer bound by his philosophy/religion. And if Steve also does not feel bad about other people suffering (or even takes pleasure in it?)?
What i wanted to say is that rationality is a gun that can point both ways: and it is a good thing that LessWrong "sells" this gun with a safety mechanism (if it is such "safety mechanism". Once again, maybe I missed something really critical that explains why altruism and "being good" is the most rational strategy).
In other ways, Steve does not really care about humanity; he cares about his well-being and will utilize all knowledge he got just to meet his ends ( people are different, aren't they? and ends are different, too).
Or even another, average rationalist Jack estimated that his own net gain will be significantly bigger if he hurts or kills someone (considering his emotions and feelings about overall humanity net gain, and all other possible factors). That means he must carry on? Or is it a taboo here? Or maybe it is a problem of this site's demographics and nobody even considered this scenario (which fact I really doubt).
I feel that i dive too deep into metaphors, but i am not yet a good writer. I hope you understood my thought and can make me less wrong. :)
edit: fixed formatting
Welcome, Ozyrus.
This is moral philosophy you're getting into, so I don't think that there's a community-wide consensus. LessWrong is big, and I've read more of the stuff about psychology and philosophy of language than anything else, rather than the stuff on moral philosophy, but I'll take a swing at this.
... (read more)