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 discovered LessWrong maybe one or two years ago after reading about it on RationalWiki after searching online for a community of autodidacts (a Quora user recommended this place), and after googling Alfred Korzybski's phrase 'the map is not the territory'. I've been reading LessWrong intensively since I read my first page and first article. I thought I had developed a unique mindset, but was impressed to see that this community had discovered a lot of the same ideas and so many more. I left high school specifically so I could make sense of everything and figure what I should do if there's anything I should do. I now intend to take an online adult high school advanced functions course so I may study computer science in university. Besides computer science, I want to study neuroscience. I want to be a malware analyst and a neuroscientist. (Maybe one day I will work as a sort of sci-fi brain malware exorcist :P) But my actual skills lie in a formal understanding of persuasion, disagreement resolution, rhetoric, dialectics, communication, justification theory, and philosophy of argument. There should be an umbrella term for all this stuff; they are all closely related conceptually.
Other notable characteristics:
I also have a deep appreciation for worldbuilding, symbolism, personality psychology (which I have some serious opinions about), and cellular automata.
I made my own Game of Life ruleset using Golly.
I'd tell of my Big 5 and MBTI results but I hate those models. So instead, I'll tell just tell you that I'm argumentative but diplomatic and gently critical. I am bursting with self-esteem. I am enthusiastic because there is no excuse to permanently giving up and not because it will be easy to safely achieve perfection. I am always stressing the importance of consequentialism and always defending deontological-seeming choices on consequentialist grounds, just as any consequence-concerned consequentialist-identifier would. I have no idea what Hogwarts house I belong to.
I use all the major cultural hubs of the web, the most popular sites on which one may socialize, and those sites which are especially facilitative of internet friendships
I have internet friends of multitudinous backgrounds and persuasions and I would welcome more
I love going on long walks, in the day and in the night. My longest was ten hours! The empty suburban streets of the night can induce reflection and feelings of liberation like few other things can. I've had this habit since I was just 14.
I am compiling insights on task and resource management, aka insights on beating akrasia.
Ray Kurzweil saved me from suicide. I'm no longer as optimistic about the future as when I started reading his stuff, but I see there is a life-worthy chance for humanity to get better.
I would rather have many friends who are supposed to be my enemies than many enemies who are supposed to be my friends.
The bullet point immediately above this one is also my motto.