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 from Paris, France.
As many of you, I first discovered all of this by HPMOR (actually, its French translation). I then read entirely Rationality, from AI to Zombie (because, honestly, reading things in order is SO MUCH easier than having 20 tabs open with 20 links I followed on the previous pages). I thought I would finish to read this blog, or at least the sequences, before posting, and then realized it may implies I would never post.
I'm a doctor in Fundamental Computer Science, an amateur writer (in French only), and an LGBT activist who goes into school in order to speak of LGBTphobia and sexism with 119 classes (and counting).
I can't tell right now exactly why I so much like the idea of rationality. I guess that it is unrelated to the fact that I wrote the article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rational_set recently . Its probably more related to the fact that I love the idea of being a robot, at least, being like I thought a robot was when I didn't know that robot are programmed by humans. I can rationalize it ... by hoping that, rationals methods would help me be more efficient in order to fight LGBTphobia (and probably more efficient to do research and publish, or to write more...) Even if, to tell the truth, I'm not yet convinced that studying rationality is a rational action in order to attains those goals. On the other hand, even if rationality may not be the BEST tool ever in order to attains those goal, I'm more confident in the advise I find here than in the advice of a random self-help book I could find in a shelve of my super market, because I assume some people indeed did research before giving those advise.