Welcome to Less Wrong! (9th thread, May 2016)

Viliam

9 Welcome to Less Wrong! (9th thread, May 2016)

17th May 2016

7 min read

9

Hi, do you read the LessWrong website, but haven't commented yet (or not very much)? Are you a bit scared of the harsh community, or do you feel that questions which are new and interesting for you could be old and boring for the older members?

This is the place for the new members to become courageous and ask what they wanted to ask. Or just to say hi.

The older members are strongly encouraged to be gentle and patient (or just skip the entire discussion if they can't).

Newbies, welcome!

The long version:

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 an aspiring 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

To post your first comment, you must have carried out the e-mail confirmation: When you signed up to create your account, an e-mail was sent to the address you provided with a link that you need to follow to confirm your e-mail address. You must do this before you can post!

Less Wrong comments are threaded for easy following of multiple conversations. To respond to any comment, click the "Reply" link at the bottom of that comment's box. Within the comment box, links and formatting are achieved via Markdown syntax (you can click the "Help" link below the text box to bring up a primer).

You may have noticed that all the posts and comments on this site have buttons to vote them up or down, and all the users have "karma" scores which come from the sum of all their comments and posts. This immediate easy feedback mechanism helps keep arguments from turning into flamewars and helps make the best posts more visible; it's part of what makes discussions on Less Wrong look different from those anywhere else on the Internet.

However, it can feel really irritating to get downvoted, especially if one doesn't know why. It happens to all of us sometimes, and it's perfectly acceptable to ask for an explanation. (Sometimes it's the unwritten LW etiquette; we have different norms than other forums.) Take note when you're downvoted a lot on one topic, as it often means that several members of the community think you're missing an important point or making a mistake in reasoning— not just that they disagree with you! If you have any questions about karma or voting, please feel free to ask here.

Replies to your comments across the site, plus private messages from other users, will show up in your inbox. You can reach it via the little mail icon beneath your karma score on the upper right of most pages. When you have a new reply or message, it glows red. You can also click on any user's name to view all of their comments and posts.

All recent posts (from both Main and Discussion) are available here. At the same time, it's definitely worth your time commenting on old posts; veteran users look through the recent comments thread quite often (there's a separate recent comments thread for the Discussion section, for whatever reason), and a conversation begun anywhere will pick up contributors that way. There's also a succession of open comment threads for discussion of anything remotely related to rationality.

Discussions on Less Wrong tend to end differently than in most other forums; a surprising number end when one participant changes their mind, or when multiple people clarify their views enough and reach agreement. More commonly, though, people will just stop when they've better identified their deeper disagreements, or simply "tap out" of a discussion that's stopped being productive. (Seriously, you can just write "I'm tapping out of this thread.") This is absolutely OK, and it's one good way to avoid the flamewars that plague many sites.

EXTRA FEATURES:

There's actually more than meets the eye here: look near the top of the page for the "WIKI", "DISCUSSION" and "SEQUENCES" links.

LW WIKI: This is our attempt to make searching by topic feasible, as well as to store information like common abbreviations and idioms. It's a good place to look if someone's speaking Greek to you.

LW DISCUSSION: This is a forum just like the top-level one, with two key differences: in the top-level forum, posts require the author to have 20 karma in order to publish, and any upvotes or downvotes on the post are multiplied by 10. Thus there's a lot more informal dialogue in the Discussion section, including some of the more fun conversations here.

SEQUENCES: A huge corpus of material mostly written by Eliezer Yudkowsky in his days of blogging at Overcoming Bias, before Less Wrong was started. Much of the discussion here will casually depend on or refer to ideas brought up in those posts, so reading them can really help with present discussions. Besides which, they're pretty engrossing in my opinion. They are also available in a book form.

A few notes about the community

If you've come to Less Wrong to discuss a particular topic, this thread would be a great place to start the conversation. By commenting here, and checking the responses, you'll probably get a good read on what, if anything, has already been said here on that topic, what's widely understood and what you might still need to take some time explaining.

If your welcome comment starts a huge discussion, then please move to the next step and create a LW Discussion post to continue the conversation; we can fit many more welcomes onto each thread if fewer of them sprout 400+ comments. (To do this: click "Create new article" in the upper right corner next to your username, then write the article, then at the bottom take the menu "Post to" and change it from "Drafts" to "Less Wrong Discussion". Then click "Submit". When you edit a published post, clicking "Save and continue" does correctly update the post.)

If you want to write a post about a LW-relevant topic, awesome! I highly recommend you submit your first post to Less Wrong Discussion; don't worry, you can later promote it from there to the main page if it's well-received. (It's much better to get some feedback before every vote counts for 10 karma—honestly, you don't know what you don't know about the community norms here.)

Alternatively, if you're still unsure where to submit a post, whether to submit it at all, would like some feedback before submitting, or want to gauge interest, you can ask / provide your draft / summarize your submission in the latest open comment thread. In fact, Open Threads are intended for anything 'worth saying, but not worth its own post', so please do dive in! Informally, there is also the unofficial Less Wrong IRC chat room, and you might also like to take a look at some of the other regular special threads; they're a great way to get involved with the community!

If you'd like to connect with other LWers in real life, we have meetups in various parts of the world. Check the wiki page for places with regular meetups, or the upcoming (irregular) meetups page. There's also a Facebook group. If you have your own blog or other online presence, please feel free to link it.

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:

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!

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9 Welcome to Less Wrong! (9th thread, May 2016)

by Viliam

17th May 2016

7 min read

9

This is the place for the new members to become courageous and ask what they wanted to ask. Or just to say hi.

The older members are strongly encouraged to be gentle and patient (or just skip the entire discussion if they can't).

Newbies, welcome!

The long version:

A few notes about the site mechanics

EXTRA FEATURES:

There's actually more than meets the eye here: look near the top of the page for the "WIKI", "DISCUSSION" and "SEQUENCES" links.

A few notes about the community

A list of some posts that are pretty awesome

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!

Personal Blog

9

New Comment

Rendering 0/62 comments, sorted by

top scoring

(show more) Click to highlight new comments since: Today at 12:11 PM

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protostar10y110

I've been lurking for a very long time, more than six years I think. Lots of sentences come to mind when I think, "Why haven't I posted anything before?" Here are a few:

"LessWrong forum is just like any other forum" Well my sample size is low, but... I don't care what you tell yourselves; what I observe is people constantly talking past each other. And if, in reading an article or comment, a possible comment comes to mind; hot-on-its-heels is the thought that there isn't really any point in posting it, because the replies would all be of a type drawn from some annoying archetypes, like (A) I agree! But I have nothing to add. (B) You're wrong. Let me Proceed to Misrepresent in some way. (The Misrepresentation is "guaranteed" to be unclear because it insists on starting on its own terms and not mine). And if I yet start a good-natured chain of comments, suddenly I find myself talking about the other person's stuff and not the ideas that motivated my original comment. Which I probably wouldn't have commented on for its own sake. And as soon as a comment has one reply, people stop thinking about it as an entity in its own right. Don't you dare dismiss these thoughts so quickly!
"It's been done. Well, mostly." Eliezer wrote so many general, good, posts - where do I even find a topic sufficiently different that I'm not, for the most part, retreading the ground? Posts by other people are just completely different: instead of the post having a constructive logic of its own, references are given. The type of evidence given by the references is of a totally different sort. Instead of being about rationality, such posts seem to be about "random topic 101"? Ok this isn't very clear.
So few comments are intelligible. What are these people even arguing about? It's not clear! How can one comment on this in good faith? Note that the posts you observe are, therefore, more likely to come from people who are not stopped from posting by having unclear or absurd interpretations of parent comments.

Lesswrong seems like it should be a good place. The sequences are a fantastic foundation, but there's so little else! I'm subjectively pretty sure that E.Y. thinks Lesswrong is failing. Of course one may hope "for the frail shrub to start growing".

In the hope that some people read (and continue to read) this charitably, let me continue. Consider the following in the welcome thread itself.

" We'd love to know who you are, what you're doing, what you value, how you came to identify as an aspiring rationalist or how you found us. "

Err, what? Why on Earth should I immediately give you my life story? Or even, Do these questions make sense? "What I value?" On a rationalist forum you are expecting the English language to contain short sentences that encode a good meaning of "value"? Yeah, yeah, whatever. Taking a breath, --- ---. . . Why do you even want to know?

How about just, "you can post who you are, what you're doing ... found us here, if you want."

I should not have to post such things to get basic community acceptance. And you have no right to be so interested in someone who has, as yet, not contributed to lesswrong at all! Surely THAT is the measure of worth within the Lesswrong site. Questions about things not related to Lesswrong should be "expensive" to ask - at least requiring a personal comment.

Oh, I think I initially found lesswrong via Bostrom via looking at the self-sampling hypothesis? It's kind of hazy.

Viliam10y00

And as soon as a comment has one reply, people stop thinking about it as an entity in its own right.

Yeah, I know the feeling. Or when a comment or two below an article drag the whole discussion in a completely different direction. But as you say, it's "just like any other forum". How could this be prevented? Replying before reading other comments has a high risk of repeating what someone else said. Having the discipline to read the original comment again and try to see it with fresh eyes is difficult.

Instead of being about rationality, such

... (read more)

11gjm10y

I don't think anyone is suggesting that you "have to post such things to get basic community acceptance". Only that a thread in which newcomers do so might be a welcoming place, especially for newcomers who for whatever reason find LW intimidating. It seems clear that that isn't your situation; you are probably not the target audience for the proposal. (Which doesn't mean you wouldn't be welcome in a welcome/newbie thread. Just that you probably wouldn't get as much out of it as some other people.) And, er, welcome to Less Wrong :-).

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