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!
Well, I pulled the trigger yesterday. While it felt great to actually speak my mind and have a real discussion regarding all of these issues (it was actually pretty amazing- no yelling or anyone getting upset- there was actual discourse), I will now be jobless in a month, and I really don’t know the answer to what’s next.
I’m debating between staying in my current area which would be a finance/accounting/operations type of role or just scrapping that whole path and try to go the programming route (close to zero expertise as of now). I’ve spent a lot of time working towards different credentials (CPA being the main one) so it’s hard to walk away from that even though I don’t think I’m learning anything all that useful.
I’ve never met anyone from these communities (Lesswrong/EA), but I spend a lot of time here, so yeah I would definitely be open to talking with anyone here about general strategy (I’ve read all of 80000 hours) or specific opportunities if someone stumbles across this and has an idea. I will use more conventional methods as well, but I wanted to at least put this out there.
You may want to post your question in an Open Thread. Maybe it would be more strategic to skip the current one which already contains over 200 comments, and wait for the new one to appear on Wednesday 19th; so more people will see it. Better than here in a thread that started three weeks ago.
I know almost nothing about the situation in "finance/accounting/operations type of role". I have mostly been a programmer, so now my availability bias screams at me that "everyone is a programmer, and everything outside of IT is super rare", which ... (read more)