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.

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A list of some posts that are pretty awesome

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_{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!}

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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

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top scoring

(show more) Click to highlight new comments since: Today at 2:06 PM

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Germaine10y20

Hi from San Diego, California. I'm an attorney with academic training in molecular biology (BS, MS, PhD). I have an intense interest in politics, specifically the cognitive biology/social science of politics. I'm currently reading The Rationalizing Voter by Lodge and Taber. I have read both of Tetlock's books, Haidt's Righteous Mind, Khaneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow, Thaler's Nudge, Achen and Bartels Democracy for Realists and a few others. I also took a college-level MOOC on cognitive biology and attendant analytic techniques (fMRI, etc) and one on the biology of decision making in economics.

Based on what I have taught myself over the last 6-7 years, I came up with a new "objective" political ideology or set of morals that I thought could be used to at least modestly displace or supplement standard "subjective" ideologies including liberalism, conservatism, capitalism, socialism, Christianity, anarchy, racism, nationalism and so on. The point of this was an attempt to build an intellectual framework that could help to at least partially rationalize politics, which I see as mostly incoherent/irrational from my "objective" public-interest oriented point of view.

I have tried to explain myself to both lay audiences (I'm currently a moderator at Harlen's Place, a politics site on Disqus https://disqus.com/home/channel/harlansplace/ ), but have failed. I confess that I'm becoming discouraged at the possibility of applying cognitive and social science to even slightly rationalize politics. What both Haidt and Lodge/Tabor have to say, makes me think that what I am trying is futile. I have tried contact about 50-60 academics, including Tetlock, Haidt, Bartels and Taber, but none have responded with any substance (one got very annoyed and chewed me out for wasting his time; http://www.overcomingbias.com/ ) - most don't respond at all. I get that -- everyone is busy and crackpots with new ideas are a dime a thousand.

Anyway, I stumbled across this site this morning while looking for some online content about the affect heuristic. I thought I would introduce myself and try to fit in, if I'm up to the standards here. My interest is in trying to open a dialog with one or more people who know this science better than myself so that I can get some feedback one whether what I am trying to do is a waste of time. As a novice, I suspect that I misunderstand the science and overestimate the limits of human rationality in politics in a society that lives under the US constitution (free speech).

My blog is here: http://dispol.blogspot.com/

ChristianKl10y20

First impressions from skim reading the blog:

Objective politics, defined as unbiased fact and reason in service to the public interest is described and defended. Biology-based objectivity, the last political frontier.

That points for me into the direction of objectivism with all it's problems. There are good reasons to be quite suspicious when someone claims that they don't have an ideology and there views are simply "objective".

What we need to do as a country is obvious.

To me saying something like that without bringing forward a specifi... (read more)

2Lumifer10y

Is a short summary of your ideology or set of morals available somewhere on the 'net?

See in context