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!
I am new to this site but judging from HPMOR and some articles I read here, I think I have come to the right place for some help.
I am working on the early stages of a project called WikiLogic which has many aims. Here are some that may interest LW readers specifically:
-Make skills such as logical thinking, argument construction and fallacy recognition accessible to the general public
-Provide a community created database of every argument ever made along with their issues and any existing solutions
-Highlight the dependencies between different fields in academic circles
The project requires knowledge of Bayes networks, linguistics and many more fields that I have little experience of although i am always learning. This is why I am looking for you guys to review the idea and let me know your thoughts. At this stage, unfiltered advise on any aspect of the project is welcome.
The general idea along with a short video can be found on the front page of the main site:
http://www.wikilogicfoundation.org/
Feel free to explore the site and wiki to get a better feel of what I am trying to do. Please forgive poorly written or unfinished parts of the site. It is early days and it seems unproductive to finish before I get feedback that may change its course...
Welcome!
I've seen these sorts of argument maps before.
https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Debate_tools http://en.arguman.org/
It seems there is some overlap with your list here
Generally what I've noticed about them is that they focus very hard on things like fallacies. One problem here is that some people are simply better debaters even though their ideas may be unsound. Because they can better follow the strict argument structure they 'win' debates, but actually remain incorrect.
For example: http://commonsenseatheism.com/?p=1437 He uses mostly the same argu... (read more)