If you've recently joined the Less Wrong community, please leave a comment here and introduce yourself. We'd love to know who you are, what you're doing, what you value, how you came to identify as a rationalist or how you found us. You can skip right to that if you like; the rest of this post consists of a few things you might find helpful. More can be found at the FAQ.
A few notes about the site mechanics
A few notes about the community
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* Normal_Anomaly
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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:
- Your Intuitions are Not Magic
- The Apologist and the Revolutionary
- How to Convince Me that 2 + 2 = 3
- Lawful Uncertainty
- The Planning Fallacy
- 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
- That Alien Message
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.
Hi, I'm Jess. I've just graduated from Oxford with a masters degree in Mathematics and Philosophy. I'm trying to decide what to do next with my life, and graduate study in cognitive science is currently top of my list. What I'm really interested in is the application of research in human rationality, decision making and its limitations to wider issues in society, public policy etc.
I'm taking some time to challenge my intuition that I want to go into research, though, as I'm slightly concerned that I'm taking the most obvious option not knowing what else to do. My methods for doing this at the moment are a) trying to think about reasons it might not be the best option (a "consider the opposite" type approach) and b) initiating conversations with as many people as possible doing things that interest me, and getting some work experience in different areas this year, to broaden my limited perspective. Any better/additional suggestions are more than welcome!
I'm about to start an internship with 80000 hours, doing a project on the role of cognitive bias in career choice. The aim is to collect together the existing research on biases and mitigation techniques and apply it in a practical and accessible way, identifying the biases that most commonly affect career choice and providing useful strategies for avoiding them. I was wondering if anyone here has a summary of the existing literature on cognitive bias mitigation, or any recommendations of particularly useful/important research? Equally if anyone has spent much time thinking about this, I'd love to hear about it.
I don't have a full summary on-hand, but if you just want to jumpstart your own search you might want to read Lukeprogs article on efficient scholarship and look into the keyword "debiasing".