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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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.

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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:

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!}

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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

New Comment

Rendering 0/273 comments, sorted by

top scoring

(show more) Click to highlight new comments since: Today at 5:50 PM

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

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273Comments

273

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

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Alia1d10y20

I’ve found the Welcome thread!

Hi, I’m Alia and I live with my husband in San Jose, California. I found this site via SlateStarCodex and having read Rationality:From AI to Zombies I think this is a fascinating and useful set of concepts and that using this type of reasoning more often is something to aspire to. I want to do more Bayesian calculations so I get more of a feel for them.

I’m also a fundamentalist* Christian. I’m perfectly ready to discuss and defend these beliefs, but I wouldn’t always bring up these beliefs in threads. I’m not trying to deceive or trick anyone, I just don’t want to derail a thread that is actually about something else. I do think it’s possible to be both a rationalist and a Christian as to stay reasonably intellectually consistent.

*(a note on why I choose the identification fundamentalist. Not long after American Christians split into mainline and fundamentalist groups, the fundamentalists got a bunch of bad press focused on certain sub-groups that were anti-intellectual. The other fundamentalists dealt with this by splitting off and re-branding themselves as evangelical. I’m not anti-intellectual and generally in the group that would self identify as evangelical, but I’m choosing to stick with the fundamentalist label for three reasons. 1) I don’t think changing the label or re-branding is a good way to deal with negative affect attached to a word. At best it just avoids the issue rather than solving the problem. 2) I don’t believe in disavowing people because they are unpopular with third parties. While I dis-agree with the anti-intellectuals on some things, the agreement on common core beliefs that lead to the fundamentalist label in the beginning is still there. 3) I think the fundamentalist label provides more clarity. The evangelicals worked hard and successfully to avoid getting over identified with and sub-group or coincidental characteristic. But as a result the label evangelical stayed vague, Individuals and groups that are more in the mainline tradition sometimes call themselves or get called evangelical. On the other hand opponents who wanted to hang on to the negative affect kept calling anything from the original fundamentalist tradition ‘fundamentalist.’ So on the I think fundamentalist will convey the most accurate idea of where I’m coming from theologically.)

ChristianKl10y00

Do you believe that both Black and White people who live currently descend from one individual that lived around 6000 years ago?

0johnlawrenceaspden10y

Welcome Alia! You sure sound like one of us. Hope you like it here.

6gjm10y

Welcome! I applaud your decision to embrace hostile terminology. I don't think you should feel any obligation to bring up your religious beliefs all the time. If you're interested in the interactions between unashamedly traditionalist religion and rationalism, you might want to drop into the ongoing discussion of talking snakes. Most of it lately, though, has been discussion between people who agree that the story in question is almost certainly hopelessly wrong and disagree about exactly which bits of it offer most evidence against the religion(s) it's a part of, which you might find merely annoying... [EDITED to add: Aha, I see you've already found that. My apologies for not having noticed that you were already participating actively there.] Just out of curiosity (and you should feel free not to answer), how "typically fundamentalist" are your positions? E.g., are you a young-earth creationist, do you believe that a large fraction of the human race is likely to spend eternity in torment, do you believe in "verbal plenary inspiration" of the Christian scriptures, etc.? (Meta-note that in a better world would be unnecessary: it happens that one disgruntled LessWronger has taken to downvoting almost everything I post, sometimes several times by means of sockpuppets. I mention this only so that if you see this comment sitting there with a negative score you don't take it to mean that the LW community generally disapproves of my welcoming you or disagrees with what I said above.)

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