Admins: Draft posts are superficially identical actually-posted ones (while logged in). This is confusing, and alarming to new users (at least, it was to me) since it looks like something you meant to save as a draft has been published to the world by mistake. Can they be made to look clearly different -- e.g., lighter colour or "[DRAFT]" next to them or something? This applies both on the front page (and /new etc.) and in the recent posts list in the sidebar.

Trick to get free respect from rationalist types: passionately argue for some wrong position, then when someone corrects you, say "oh, I've changed my mind, you were right and I was wrong, mea culpa'.

Could we get polls, and an easy way to analyze the poll data? e.g. remove anonymous votes. Remove votes by people below a karma cutoff, etc.

I just stopped myself from commenting on a thread because I was worried for my itty bitty karma score. I'm new, so my karma score is tiny. I'm new enough to know that I might not know all the relevant context, so I stopped myself in case what I was going to say was too obvious.

I wish that newbies could have a protected period from being downvoted to the pits of negative karma if the new person is clearly giving an honest effort. But at the same time, downvoting trolls makes very good sense. I realize it's not practical to separate out new people from... (read more)

I have a question for Eliezer. I went back and reread your sequence on metaethics, and the amount of confusion in the comments struck me, so now I want to make sure that I understood you correctly. After rereading, my interpretation didn't change, but I'm still unsure. So, does this summarize your position accurately:

A simple mind has a bunch of terminal values (or maybe one) summarized in a utility function. Morality for it, or rather not morality, but the thing this mind has which is analogous to morality in humans (depending on how you define "... (read more)

Someone should do a post attempting to define what exactly "rationalism" is. Right now I see lots of discussion on how to build rationalist communities, whether rationalism always "wins," why you should be a rationalist, etc., but very little on what the content of this term is, and very little on how to be a rationalist. A newcomer could be excused for thinking that "rationalist" just means someone who goes around exhorting others to become rationalists. Maybe there's nothing wrong with that, though; perhaps rationalism, at its core, is simply reminding yourself and others to think hard about things at all times.

If it's not silly to comment with this: am I commenting too much? None of the comments on the first page of my profile are scored up, so looking at my high karma I guess I'm making a lot of comments, and they're not all hits. Should I cut back?

Maybe it would be nice if some people wrote a few "tutorial"-like or basic lesson-kind of posts aimed at people who are new to the whole "rationalist" thing, covering for example basic concepts in probability theory and statistics, decision theory, cognitive bias etc., thereby making LW more accessible to newcomers who want to get on the train but might have never been exposed to these topics before. These posts could be sorted under a special tag that could be linked to in the "About" section.

I don't suppose there's any easy way to change the name of an account once it's created? When I started this account, I pretty much expected to just read and vote, so I cloned my reddit s/n without much thought. In retrospect, I'd much rather have gone with my full name (Michael_Blume)

Admins: Can we have a link to the wiki in the LW sidebar, please?

Anyone care to comment on why they voted down on my post? At least 6 people did, and none of them left a comment.

Not all down votes need a comment why. But it would be useful for me and probably others in a similar situation when trying to figure out why people thought it was bad,

So after all these post about rationalists having problem cooperating, I am left wondering: Cooperate on what? Are there any existing projects to join? As a student I am not able to support by giving any large amounts of money, but I do have time to spare on a worthy cause.

We might want to link each open thread to past open threads. Of course, if everyone uses your openthread tag, this will be done automatically.

I have lowered testosterone via drugs then castration.

To what extent is Less Wrong a family site?

I mean, we're all adults, so it's not like you're going to see someone saying "well, use a @#$%ing ignorance prior, $%^&-head" or some such. Still, in the quote I just wrote, was it necessary to censor? When quoting off-site, is it necessary to censor? I'm aware that I'm probably not asking a question which already has an answer -- what guidelines do we want to establish here?

Personally I'm for "at writer's discretion, but expect to be voted down if it was unnecessary or gratuitous, and expect to bleed karma if it was abusive."

Silly self-obsessed stylistic question here:

Would anyone be willing to tell me whether I'm badly overusing italics and em-dashes in my writing?

Which was the first post on LW? Is there a way to browse all the titles posted since LW began?

The dieting discussion seems to have slipped from the intended purpose into a discussion of, well, dieting. I'm wondering if some of that discussion belongs over here, under "open thread" discussion, instead?

Also, am I the only person who has problems dieting because sometimes, for causes yet to be identified, hunger can trigger a migraine? I'll do anything to avoid migraines, including being fat. (Though today I started experimenting with the Shangri-La diet: if it works and doesn't trigger migraines, I would be delighted.)