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!
Hi friends,
I'm Chris :D I've been lurking on and off for a few months now (after hearing about LW from some of my friends at uni, reading some SlateStarCodex, and devouring HPMOR in less than a week) and have decided it's about to take the plunge into the scary world of commenting. (It's a bit scary being a somewhat smart person among people who are much, much smarter)
My academic background: growing up in my family meant I picked up a lot of random stuff, but at uni I have been studying pure mathematics and a bit (pun intended) of computer science.
What motivates me: I'm very passionate about Raising the Sanity Waterline. If I learn - for the first time - something which I think is important, I get this sudden panic of "Why have I only learned this now?! Everyone should know this!". And I get very excited when I'm helping other people learn stuff I've learned.
Longer version of background: My parents have worked as Protestant Christian theological educators (i.e. training pastors and church leaders) in the Middle East since before I was born. They have always been very keen on learning as a lifelong project (a lot of my dad's work is applying evidence-based teaching research to theological education). So - somewhat like Harry Potter in HPMOR - our house has always been full of books. To add to that, I was privileged to get to meet a lot of people from very different worlds: from my Muslim close friends at school to some of my parents' suppporters in the US who have never gone far from their home state. This meant I encountered drastically different worldviews and cultural approaches to thinking, and often found it frustrating how poorly people understood each other. Thanks to my parents' influence, I also unconsciously gravitated towards people who were interested in how the world works.
Since leaving for Australia at 18 for study, I have spent much of my university life learning about things other than my specialisation, both from smart friends and from the internet. So this has meant I have changed my mind about quite a few things already.
I look forward to changing my mind about many more things, and learning completely new things!
The LW commentariat is indeed smart, but probably not as smart relative to you as you are suggesting.