It's perfectly okay to comment on old threads. Threads that have seen no activity for months are frequently reactivated, and nobody objects.

In posting your thoughts, it would be better to leave comments on the old threads rather than make independent Discussion posts unless you have something unusually novel or insightful to say.

LW now has a discussion section that serves as a permanent open thread. The link is at the top right, next to the link to the wiki.

I used to post here on LessWrong and left for various reasons. Someone recognized my name earlier today from my activity here and I just so happened to have thought of LessWrong during a conversation I had with a friend of mine. The double hit was enough to make me curious.

So how's it going? I am just stopping by to say a quick, "Hello." It seems that Open Threads are no longer the way things work but I didn't notice anything else relevant in the Recent Posts. The community seems to be alive and thriving. Congratulations. :)

If I may extend your hypothetical frightened father metaphor: the man is worried that he is biologically designed to be an irresponsible father, but he is mistaken to worry that he will find out that he is biologically designed to be irresponsible. What he wants is to be responsible, not to think that he is responsible, so the mere fact of whether or not he knows some specific fact is not going to affect that.

Whatever the truth is, the hypothetical frightened father - and the very real frightened theists, such as yourself - already are living under whatever conditions actually hold. If the father is a responsible one, he already wins, whatever his biological predisposition was. If a theist is a good person, that theist already is a good person, whether God is real or not.

That is the first of two essential points. The second is this: if you would rather be good than not, then you are already on the right path, even if you can't see where you are going. Others have walked this way before, and escaped into clear air.

Why do you want more status?

Do you have ideas that you think are good but won't be heard unless you're more respected?

Experience can provide an excellent dummy check to make sure there isn't an obvious counter-argument or flaw in something that you are unable to see because you haven't seen it yet. There is much to be said from simply going out there and trying the theory; the results of trying are experience. When you can translate your experience into Bayesian terms you have succeeded.

I have no problem with deferring to someone who has more experience than I do as long as I trust their methodology. Once that trust is gone I start doubting the truth of their experience. I don't think their experience says what they think it says; they haven't translated it correctly.

Sometimes in an argument, an older opponent might claim that perhaps as I grow older, my opinions will change, or that I'll come around on the topic. Implicit in this claim is the assumption that age or quantity of experience is a proxy for legitimate authority. In and of itself, such "life experience" is necessary for an informed rational worldview, but it is not sufficient.

If there is a high rate of conversation as people grow older than it makes sense to predict that you will come around eventually. People here tell me the same thing about my religious beliefs. The consensus is that as I grow older in the Way of Bayes I will eventually identify as atheist. I don't think this implies the proxy that you mention. Quantity of experience isn't legitimate authority but if I (a) predict you will change and (b) predict that I am unable to exact the change but rather (c) the change will happen on your own accord sometime in the future than I have no reason to talk to you. Telling you my prediction is halting the conversation, but the real conversation halter is whatever is causing you not to switch now.

But really, in the end, I do agree with you. I ran out of time and had to cut this comment short. Sorry.

Posting nearby "famous" people amps up the karma action

This in itself strikes me as a sufficient incentive to aim at getting into the "Top contributors" list. My "return on time investement" for participating in LW is what I learn (often tangentially) from getting into interesting conversations. The lower my chance of being ignored, the higher my expected utility from any contribution to LW.

This analysis looks brilliant, but the impression is sort of spoiled by the fact that the prediction of karma gain failed. It is even close to self-referential paradoxes: comment reading "This comment will get X karma" should be upvoted because of its precise prediction when it actually has X karma, but upvoting makes the precision worse and may attract later downvotes.

The atoms of a screwdriver don't have tiny little XML tags inside describing their "objective" purpose. The designer had something in mind, yes, but that's not the same as what happens in the real world. If you forgot that the designer is a separate entity from the designed thing, you might think, "The purpose of the screwdriver is to drive screws" - as though this were an explicit property of the screwdriver itself, rather than a property of the designer's state of mind. You might be surprised that the screwdriver didn't reconfigure itself to the flat-head screw, since, after all, the screwdriver's purpose is to turn screws.

After someone points this out, the incorrect response is to start adding clauses:

The screwdriver's purpose is to turn Phillips-head screws.

Or:

The screwdriver's purpose is to turn screws designed to be turned by the screwdriver.

People are more likely to do this to something other than screwdrivers, obviously.

"The purpose of love is..."
"Eyebrows are there so that..."

It is easy to misinterpret the point of this post as claiming that the purpose assigned to an object is wrong or inadequate or hopelessly complex. That isn't what is being said.