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 LW!
Been lurking for about three years now- it’s time to at least introduce myself. Plus, I want to share a little about my current situation (work problems), and get some feedback on that. I’ll try and give a balanced take, but remember I’m talking about myself here…
First, for background, I’m 23, graduated about a year and a half ago with degrees in finance, accounting, and economics (I can sit still and take tests), and I also played basketball in college (one thing I can definitively say I’m good at is dribbling a basketball).
Brief Intellectual Journey
I didn’t care much about anything besides sports until I got to college. Freshmen year, I took a micro class and found it interesting, so I went online and discovered Marginal Revolution. I’ve been addicted to the internet ever since.
It started with the George Mason econ guys (Kling, Caplan, Roberts—that’s my bias), then I got interested in the psychology behind our beliefs and our actions (greatest hits being The Righteous Mind (Haidt), Thinking Fast and Slow (Kahneman), Mark Manson’s blog, Paul Graham’s blog). Somewhere during that time I stumbled across Lesswrong, SSC, HPMOR, and the rest of the rationality blogosphere, and it’s all just amazing. I love it but the downside is that I probably spend too much time reading instead of doing something more challenging.
The Big Three (EA, job/career, religion)
Right now, these three are overwhelming everything else, and I want to talk about them. First the easy one, religion. I am not religious, and that fact has caused me significant strife. I’ve lost an important relationship, become less close with my family (I’m in the closet- can’t bring myself to tell my mom), and generally feel kind of isolated because everyone I know seems to be religious and I struggle to look past that Important difference of opinion.
EA
I admire the EA movement and everyone involved. My base belief is that I do not need a lot of money to live on, and there are many people/causes that could make better use of the extra than me. I do have a high degree of uncertainty on what the best cause is, but I’ve simply been deferring those questions to GiveWell and I’m ok with that arrangement. So that’s the vision, but what about the execution?
Not great. While I did donate a pretty significant amount (for me) at the beginning of this year, I’ve stopped sending any money. The current problem is the uncertainty around where my income is going to come from in the future, as well as the overall unenjoyable experiences that all of my office type jobs have been to date. Those experiences make me want to save as much as possible, so I can be free to spend time how I want.
Let’s talk about my current job, and how utterly crazy it is. I don’t have anything lined up to do after this, but I don’t know how much longer I can hang on- it’s that bad. I try to stay upbeat about it but I know it’s only a matter of time (in my mind as of now, if I’m still working there in one month, I have failed).
I work at a small, boutique wealth management firm, and I have many objections with how this business works. It’s pretty simple- in my opinion, the incentive structure (how we are paid) is in direct conflict with actually giving good advice. And no one knows what they are paying us. And we don’t give good advice because that is harder to sell. And it doesn’t matter because there is money everywhere. And the industry is changing and we are not. And the work environment is mildly toxic. Ok, let me explain all of this more clearly.
Fees/Revenue- This is our emphasis- all team meetings come back to discussions of revenue. This part of our business is very easy to understand. We are paid based on our Assets Under Management (average fee is just over 1%- that means a $1,000 account would pay us $10/year, a $1,000,000 account would pay us $10,000/year). We are also paid commissions for selling insurance and annuity contracts.
My objections:
I would like to simply give financial advice, and charge a clear, transparent fee for those services, but because it wouldn’t be as profitable (you have any other theories?) we get this mess of a system.
This is getting long, so I’ll wrap up with some quick-hit ‘culture’ objections:
Qualifiers
Overall, we are not robbing them. We do provide value in that we are giving people some structure and guidance (most people need this- the behavioral aspect can make a huge impact). They came to us and agreed to the terms, so what the heck. But it just gets stupid when you could say instead of engaging with us, make these two clicks and save $20,000/year. That is wasteful, and I do not like waste.
Agree/Disagree? Am I crazy? Feedback is welcome.
Welcome!
So, presumably you're familiar with companies like Vanguard, Wealthfront, and Betterment, which are much more customer-aligned than the rest of the financial services industry. But part of that is spending much less attention on individual clients--and, consequently, employing considerably fewer people, and different sorts of people. (I would expect that Wealthfront needs more web programmers than economists, for example.) You might consider applying at those places, but my suspicion is you'll end up in another field entirely.