Welcome to Less Wrong! (6th thread, July 2013)

KnaveOfAllTrades

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.

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.

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!

_{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!}

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!

_{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!}

Hello. I'm a typical geeky 20-something white male who's interested in science and technology. I'm a Bachelor in economics and business. Not a native English speaker.

From the time I was 12 I've spent most of my time surfing around the internet reading about interesting things and generally wasted my time and being alone. A few years ago I was really depressed and had a plan for suicide. Once in a while I've done something actually useful. That's my life in a nutshell.

I have always thought of myself as somewhat rational in the traditional sense when I'm not emotionally charged, but so do most of the people, I'd say. Who would be intentionally irrational?

When I first heard about LessWrong on 4chan/sci/ a few years ago, I heard only about negative things of it. I got the impression that this is basically some kind of daydreaming cult for people who are interested in the singularity and transhumanism. Like people just write about some things that sound kinda important and deep in a pop-science manner, but don't want to do anything more quantifiable or exact or something that's more difficult, like real science. I got the impression that it's not something you're supposed to take very seriously.

Okay, a few years go by, I start to be more interested in futurology and stuff. I stumble upon Luke Muehlhauser in his reddit AMA and the things he talked about in his AMA sounded kinda cool, something I've never really thought before and I read a few of his papers (Intelligence Explosion and Machine Ethics, Intelligence Explosion: Evidence and Import). After this I forget this thing again for a year until I read his book "Facing the intelligence explosion" in which he goes to lengths to talk about LessWrong so I decide to take a look.

So I read the sequence "How To Actually Change Your Mind" and there where some useful things to consider if I want to be neutral in the face of evidence and change my mind about things. This bayesian approach to rationality or whatever-it's-called sounds pretty reasonable and I think I want to learn more of it. In the meantime I read Eliezer Yudkowsky's HPMOR and "Cognitive Biases Potentially Affecting Judgement of Global Risk" and a few random LessWrong articles here and there. Sometimes Eliezer Yudkowsky sounds so full of himself, like he knows everything about everything, that's it's pretty annoying. His narcissism and self-proclaimed geniosity reminds me of Stephen Wolfram. But I like his optimism, he has really useful ideas to share about rationality and he's good at writing.

I also started to think, that if these people are trying to be so rational then why do so many of them hold seemingly irrational beliefs about some things without much quantifiable evidence. I mean, I have a gut feeling that the singularity will probably happen at some point if there isn't some societal collapse, but it's far from certain and may not happen the same way FAI advocates anticipate. The event is so far in the future and there are so many factors related to it, so I'm not sure how well you can predict how it happens and say meaningful things about it. Someone here made a good remark about it:

Furthermore, experts perform pretty badly when thinking about dynamic stimuli, thinking about behavior, and feedback and objective analysis are unavailable.

Predictions about existential risk reduction and the far future are firmly in the second category. So how can we trust our predictions about our impact on the far future?

I also agree with many of the points raised in this post. I think the work MIRI is doing might be useful and I'm not against it, but I wouldn't personally allocate my resources towards it at this point, at least not money. Karnofsky criticized that MIRI doesn't take into account many variables he has considered, but on top of that there must be even MORE variables MIRI hasn't taken into account.

There are many beliefs here that seem to be based on non-quantifiable hypotheses. You would think that if you took a bunch of rationalists who applied the methods of rationality correctly and were willing to change their minds about their beliefs, the likelihood that they had the same fringe-beliefs based on non-quantifiable evidence would be pretty small. Note: I don't know everything about the community here, this is just from the little time I've spent here.

I hope MIRI, transhumanism, cryonics, polyamory etc. are not inherently connected to LessWrong and its approach to rationality?

I still have a cautiously positive view about this community. Even though I dislike some of these fringe opinions, I'm still interested in decision theory and in this kind of approach to rationality, which I don't think is fringe at all and I'm willing to learn more about it. I'm kinda slow thinker and sometimes it feels when I'm around people that I'm less intelligent than others and it takes longer for me to process things than the people around me. By making good decisions I could minimize the impact of situations where my well-being depends wholly on quick thinking.

But I don't except very much practical success and most of all, I think of this as a form of entertainment ("epiphany porn" as you like to call it) and when I have more important things to do, I will probably set this thing aside.

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Welcome to Less Wrong! (6th thread, July 2013)

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A few notes about the site mechanics

A few notes about the community

A list of some posts that are pretty awesome

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Welcome to Less Wrong! (6th thread, July 2013)

30

A few notes about the site mechanics

A few notes about the community

A list of some posts that are pretty awesome

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