Welcome to Less Wrong! (8th thread, July 2015)

Sarunas

19 Welcome to Less Wrong! (8th thread, July 2015)

22nd Jul 2015

7 min read

19

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!

_{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!}

Open Threads

Personal Blog

19

New Comment

Rendering 0/273 comments, sorted by

top scoring

(show more) Click to highlight new comments since: Today at 3:26 AM

Some comments are truncated due to high volume. (⌘F to expand all)Change truncation settings

Moderation Log

19 Welcome to Less Wrong! (8th thread, July 2015)

by Sarunas

22nd Jul 2015

7 min read

273

19

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!}

Open Threads

Personal Blog

19

New Comment

Rendering 0/273 comments, sorted by

top scoring

(show more) Click to highlight new comments since: Today at 3:26 AM

Some comments are truncated due to high volume. (⌘F to expand all)Change truncation settings

Moderation Log

More from Sarunas

Curated and popular this week

273Comments

273

Comment Permalink

riparianx11y140

Hi, I'm Alexandra. I'm turning 18 tomorrow, and I'm slowly coming to the conclusion that I have GOT to be more rigorous in my self-improvement if I'm going to manage to reach my ambitions.

I'm not quite a new member- I've lurked a lot, and even made a post a while back that got a decent number of comments and karma.

I discovered Less Wrong through HPMOR. It was the first time I'd read a story with genuinely intelligent characters, and the things in it resonated a lot with me. This was a couple of years ago. I've spent a lot of time here and on the various other sites the rationalist community likes.

I'm mostly posting this now because I'd like to get more involved. I recently read an article that said the best way to increase competency at a subject is to join a community revolving around the subject. I live in OKC, where I've never even HEARD of another student of rationality. The closest I've gotten is introducing my boyfriend to HPMOR.

I'm a biology student at a community college near my living space. I'm very good at biology, english, philosophy, etc. I'm really, REALLY bad at chemistry/physics and math. I've done some basic research into what makes a person suck at mathematical things, but it's been frustratingly low on insights. Most of the time, it's resulted in "you need to practice! you need to learn mathematical thinking!" which is objectively true, but practically, a little more detail in what to do about it would be nice. Practice hasn't really seemed to help too much beyond working problems. Give me an equation and variables and I can do the math. But I can't EXPLAIN anything, or apply it to non-obvious problems involving it. This is seriously getting in the way of both my biology studies and my study of rationality. I took general chemistry 1 twice to get a low B. I'm in the first two weeks of general chemistry 2 and it takes ages to get what seems like basic concepts. When I discovered I magically had a B in College Algebra, I suspected the professor curved the grade without telling us. I withdrew from precalc after three weeks because I realized I couldn't cope.

I'm hoping to get into contact with some of the more mathematically inclined people here who are willing to help. I considered emailing a few of the higher-profile contributors to the community, but frankly, they're intimidating and the idea is very scary to my inner caveman worrying about being kicked out of the tribe.

I have some pretty lofty goals for my future research- I want to go into genetically modified organisms, and try to improve nutrition and caloric intake in parts of the world where that sort of thing is difficult to get. Reducing scarcity in our society seems like a good start to a general boost in the "goodness" of the world. But there is absolutely no way I can succeed at this if I can't get a good handle on math and chemistry. My skill at the lower levels of biology is only going to carry me so far.

I've probably rambled enough, so thanks if you took the time to read. If, for some strange reason, you feel a pull towards helping a struggling student get a grasp on abstract thinking, I urge you to give into the temptation because oh god I need the help.

[+]ChristianKl11y-70

3CCC11y

Hi, Alexandria! [...] Okay... I am one of those people who is really good at math. Of course, I cannot be certain, but I suspect that the trouble here might be that you failed to grasp some essential point way, way back at the early stages of your mathematical education. So, let's see how you handle a non-obvious problem. In answering this question, I'd like you to show me, as far as possible, your entire reasoning process, start to finish; the more information you can give, the more helpful my further responses can be. The question is as follows: John is on his way to an important meeting; he has to be there at noon. Before leaving home, he has calculated what his average speed has to be to arrive at his meeting on time. When he is exactly half-way to his destination, he calculates his average speed so far, and to his dismay he finds that it is half the value that it needs to be. How fast does John need to travel on the second half of his journey in order to reach his destination on time?

2[anonymous]11y

Hello, Alexandra. I also struggle with the math thing. My secret to success is practicing until I'm miserable, but these things also help: 1. Read layman books about mathematical history, theory, and research. It ignites enthusiasm. I recommend James Glieck's [sp?] book Chaos, and his book The Information. He has a talent for weaving compelling narratives around the science. 2. Learn a little bit of programming. While coding is frustrating in its own right, I find that it forces me to think mathematically. I can't leave steps out. I'm learning Python right now, and it's a good introductory language (I'm told). 3. Explain it to your cat. I'm only mostly kidding. I've found that tutoring lower-level math has helped my skills in calculus and statistics. Learning to walk through the problems in a coherent way, so that a moody sixth-grader can understand it, is tremendously helpful. I'd love to work together on exploring mathematical concepts. If you'd like to collaborate, hit me up sometime. Also: if you like HPMOR, you should read Luminosity. It is a rationality-driven version of Twilight that's actually really good.

See in context