(Thread A for January 2017 is here, this was created as a duplicate but it's too late to fix it now.)
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:
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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!
The first goal of any moral human is to reduce the likelihood of human extinction. I hope that clears up the issue.
I would rather obey some different ideological socio-economic-political construct/model, than accept all of humanity ought to die to avoid such a scenario. After all we are speaking of a very few humans in positions of power, making these decisions for everyone, and they seem biased towards maintaining their own privilege as if it is objectively necessary. It is not. Involuntary bias is inherent to hierarchy. It is a product of social apartheid. The alternative would be inclusion of "leadership" within the same social circumstances as the many. ie: inclusion in the communities they rule, rather than separation. Social norms in a given sub-culture, like that of the so called "elite", change circumstantially. The resulting values and attitudes are divergent from what the majority would consider appropriate.
I would propose that the inherent problem with hierarchy, is isolation from the macrocultural values of a population, which leads to a psychosocial bias including derision of those lower on the hierarchy than the rulers, and so the rulers become disconnected from collective rationality. Disconnected via involuntary bias.
This means the ruling "class" make decisions which suit themselves, rather than decisions which are of objective benefit to the continuation of the species.
You have made me feel bad with your "LOL", and I'm unsure if you have said this to make me feel poorly, or to make yourself feel better. Perhaps some of each?
I don't see it as self-evident.
If you assert that reducing the likelihood of human extinction overrides all and any other goals, you become vulnerable to what's locally known as Pascal's Mugging (basically, for an extremely high-value event you are forced to react to extremely low probabilities of it happening).
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