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!
I have the Irish equivalent of an MD; "Medical Bachelor, Bachelor of Surgery, Bachelor of the Art of Obstetrics". This unwieldy degree puts me in fairly decent company on Less Wrong.
I may be generalizing from a sample of one, but my impression is that medicine selects out rationalists for the following reasons:
(1) The human body is an incompletely understood highly complex system; the consequences of manipulating any of the components can generally not be predicted from an understanding of the overall system. Medicine therefore necessarily has to rely heavily on memorization (at least until we get algorithms that take care of the memorization)
(2) A large component of successful practice of medicine is the ability to play the socially expected part of a doctor.
(3) From a financial perspective, medical school is a junk investment after you consider the opportunity costs. Consider the years in training, the number of hours worked, the high stakes and high pressure, the possibility of being sued etc. For mainstream society, this idea sounds almost contrarian, so rationalists may be more likely to recognize it.
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My story may be relevant here: I was a middling medical student; I did well in those of the pre-clinical courses that did not rely too heavily on memorization, but barely scraped by in many of the clinical rotations. I never had any real passion for medicine, and this was certainly reflected in my performance.
When I worked as an intern physician, I realized that my map of the human body was insufficiently detailed to confidently make clinical decisions; I still wonder whether my classmates were better at absorbing knowledge that I had missed out on, or if they are just better at exuding confidence under uncertainty.
I now work in a very subspecialized area of medical research that is better aligned with rational thinking; I essentially try to apply modern ideas about causal inference to comparative effectiveness research and medical decision making. I was genuinely surprised to find that I could perform at the top level at Harvard, substantially outperforming people who were in a different league from me in terms of their performance in medical school. I am not sure whether this says something about the importance of being genuinely motivated, or if it is a matter of different cognitive personalities.
In retrospect, I am happy with where this path has taken me, but I can't help but wonder if there was a shorter path to get here. If I could talk to my 18-year old self, I certainly would have told him to stay far away from medicine.
Huh. My experience is somewhat similar to yours in the sense that I never was a big fan of memorization, and I'm glad that I could outsource some parts of the process to Anki. I also seem to outperform my peers in complex situations where ready made decision algorithms are not available, and outperformed them in the few courses in medschool that were not heavy on memorization. The complex situations obviously don't benefit from bayes too much, but they benefit from understanding the relevant cognitive biases.
The medical degree is a financial jackpot here i... (read more)