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.

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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.

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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:

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!}

On second thought, I might as well post my career deliberations here, and if it generates a lot of comments (I hope) then I'll move it to a new post as recommended. Not sure it's correct protocol to reply to my own comment, but I'll do it anyway.

So here's my career thoughts:

As I said, I'm currently working for a small company in a business development capacity. It's not really the type of work I enjoy, so I'm considering going back to school to follow my dream of becoming a researcher. However, I'm very concerned about the time commitment involved.

My current work allows me lots of wonderful free time to spend on family, friends, hobbies, and leisure activities. This kind of lifestyle is very important to me, and if becoming a researcher means giving it up then I'd rather stay where I am or look for a secondary alternative. Anything more than a standard 40-hour week is pretty much off-limits to me. (OK, maybe 45 hours if absolutely necessary, but definitely not more than that.) That includes all studying time, all online or offline networking time, and all other time related to study or work.

On the other hand, I'm willing to work hard and my current financial situation allows me to work for relatively low pay (30-40K, maybe even a drop less). Also, I'm willing to push off earning any money at all while I go back to school to earn my degree. I'm also willing to take out loans if necessary - and it'll probably be necessary, since I don't have more than a couple of introductory college classes under my belt.

The standard research career seems to involve getting a PhD and then moving into an academic position or joining an independent research institute. I've been told contradictory things about how much time commitment is required for academic jobs of this type. The general consensus on the internet seems to be that a research career is pretty much all-consuming and the work will take up at least 50-60 hours per week. Some of the academics I know concurred with this. They implied it might get more manageable at some point down the road, but that's a big might and a long way down the road.

Other academics told me that if I'm good about it it'll only be crazy for a year or two while getting my PhD, but after that it's much more manageable. That's not ideal for me, but I think I can handle 1-2 years of crazy schedule. Still others told me that if I'm really good about it and stand my ground, I'll probably be able to get away with doing a regular 40-hour workweek.

There seem to be a lot of LW PhDs - what's your opinion about this?

There are two other research alternatives I've considered:

(1) Teach the material to myself. This would allow me to set my own schedule and I wouldn't even have to take out loans to go to college. On the other hand, it might be very hard for me to get a job down the line, and I wouldn't even be getting the standard grad student stipend in the meantime.

(2) Switch to a part-time job and study the material by myself on the side. This might seem to be the best idea, but I'm concerned that it'll take me a really long time to study all the material I'm interested in, considering that I don't want to spend more than 40 hrs/wk on studying + working.

The particular research areas I'm interested in are as follows:

Rationality: I'm not sure how many research problems are left in this area, but from my readings to date I'd guess there's still definite room for improvement. Maybe I could get a job at CFAR or something like that.
Computational models of rationality: I'd love to be able to create software that can model and apply rational thinking and decision-making. I think that's basically data science or maybe AI research - correct me if I'm wrong. In any case I think it would be a smart career move for me to learn computer science & programming, just in case my financial situation isn't quite as good down the line and I need to have some good marketable skills (I have some now, but I think programming is more along the lines of what I'd enjoy doing).
Applying rationality to specific fields: There are numerous fields that I'm interested in where the research seems to be a real mess. Lots of poorly-done science, lots of faulty statistics, lots of extrapolating unsupported conclusions from inconclusive evidence. I'd love to be able to apply the principles of rationality and rigorous statistics to improve the level of knowledge in those fields. The fields I'm most interested in are positive psychology, social psychology, and educational psychology.
Applying rationality to policy issues: Maybe I could help policy makers (even if only on the local level) by applying rational thinking and decision making to help them create better policies. This would involve learning to influence (manipulate?) otherwise irrational people, and manipulation is something that I loathe, but I think the gains are probably worth it. In particular, I live in a wonderful, close-knit community that nevertheless has some serious poverty and education issues, so I'd love to be able to help solve those issues.

What do you think? Is there some way I can become a rationality researcher and still keep a 40-hour workweek?