Recently, multiple suspicious user accounts were created on Less Wrong. These accounts don't post any content in the forum. Instead, they are used only to send private messages to the existing users.

Many users have received a copy of the same message, but different variants exist, too. Here are the examples I know about. If you have received a different variant, please post it in a comment below this article:

Hi good day. My boss is interested on donating to MIRI's project and he is wondering if he could send money through you and you donate to miri through your company and thus accelertaing the value created. He wants to use "match donations" as a way of donating thats why he is looking for people in companies like you. I want to discuss more about this so if you could see this message please give me a reply. Thank you!

I don't know yet about anyone who replied and got scammed, so this is all based on indirect evidence. If you got scammed, please tell me. If you are ashamed, I can publish your story anonymously. Your story could help other potential victims.

Most likely, the scheme is the following:

1. The scammer will send you money.
2. Then they will ask some of the money back because they changed their mind, or they mistakenly sent you more than they wanted, or their financial situation suddenly changed, or whatever.
3. After receiving the money from you, they will flag the original transaction as a fraud, so they get back the money they originally sent you, plus the money you sent them back. Then they disappear, or it will turn out they used a stolen identity, etc.

(Thanks to ChristianKl for explaining the system in the Open Thread.)

If you replied to the original message and now you are already in the middle of the process, please inform your bank as soon as possible! Even if the step 2 didn't happen yet, so you can still get out without losing money, warning your bank about the scammer could help other potential victims.

Warning: If you have already received a check or a payment confirmation, and someone is asking you to send the overpayment back quickly, do not send anything. The check or the payment confirmation is fake, and the goal is to make you send money before you find out. (Thanks to qsz for explaining.)

Accounts "The_Lion" and "The_Lion2" are banned now. Here is some background, mostly for the users who weren't here two years ago:

User "Eugine_Nier" was banned for retributive downvoting in July 2014. He keeps returning to the website using new accounts, such as "Azathoth123", "Voiceofra", "The_Lion", and he keeps repeating the behavior that got him banned originally.

The original ban was permanent. It will be enforced on all future known accounts of Eugine. (At random moments, because moderators sometimes feel too tired to play whack-a-mole.) This decision is not open to discussion.

Please note that the moderators of LW are the opposite of trigger-happy. Not counting spam, there is on average less than one account per year banned. I am writing this explicitly, to avoid possible misunderstanding among the new users. Just because you have read about someone being banned, it doesn't mean that you are now at risk.

Most of the time, LW discourse is regulated by the community voting on articles and comments. Stupid or offensive comments get downvoted; you lose some karma, then everyone moves on. In rare cases, moderators may remove specific content that goes against the rules. The account ban is only used in the extreme cases (plus for obvious spam accounts). Specifically, on LW people don't get banned for merely not understanding something or disagreeing with someone.

What does "retributive downvoting" mean? Imagine that in a discussion you write a comment that someone disagrees with. Then in a few hours you will find that your karma has dropped by hundreds of points, because someone went through your entire comment history and downvoted all comments you ever wrote on LW; most of them completely unrelated to the debate that "triggered" the downvoter.

Such behavior is damaging to the debate and the community. Unlike downvoting a specific comment, this kind of mass downvoting isn't used to correct a faux pas, but to drive a person away from the website. It has especially strong impact on new users, who don't know what is going on, so they may mistake it for a reaction of the whole community. But even in experienced users it creates an "ugh field" around certain topics known to invoke the reaction. Thus a single user has achieved disproportional control over the content and the user base of the website. This is not desired, and will be punished by the site owners and the moderators.

To avoid rules lawyering, there is no exact definition of how much downvoting breaks the rules. The rule of thumb is that you should upvote or downvote each comment based on the value of that specific comment. You shouldn't vote on the comments regardless of their content merely because they were written by a specific user.

During the following months my time and attention will be heavily occupied by some personal stuff, so I will be unable to function as a LW moderator. The new LW moderator is... NancyLebovitz!

From today, please direct all your complaints and investigation requests to Nancy. Please not everyone during the first week. That can be a bit frightening for a new moderator.

There are a few old requests I haven't completed yet. I will try to close everything during the following days, but if I don't do it till the end of January, then I will forward the unfinished cases to Nancy, too.

Long live the new moderator!

Discussion article for the meetup : Bratislava

Discussion article for the meetup : Bratislava

Discussion article for the meetup : Bratislava

Discussion article for the meetup : Bratislava

Discussion article for the meetup : Bratislava

Discussion article for the meetup : Bratislava

What are we doing to make this world a better (epistemically or instrumentally) place?

Some answers to this question are already written in Bragging Threads and other places, but I think they deserve a special emphasis. I think that many smart people are focused on improving themselves, which is a good thing in a long run, but sometimes the world needs some help right now. (Also, there is the failure mode of learning a lot about something, and then actually not applying that knowledge in real life.) Becoming stronger so you can create more good in the future is about the good you will create in the future; but what good are you creating right now?

Rules:

Top-level comments are the things you are doing right now (not merely planning to do once) to improve the world... or a part of the world... or your neighborhood... or simply any small part of the world other than only yourself.

Meta debates go under the "META" comment.

Discussion article for the meetup : Bratislava

Discussion article for the meetup : Bratislava

This is a thread to connect rationalists who are learning the same thing, so they can cooperate.

The "learning" doesn't necessarily mean "I am reading a textbook / learning an online course right now". It can be something you are interested in long-term, and still want to learn more.

Rules:

Top-level comments contain only the topic to learn. (Plus one comment for "meta" debate.) Only one topic per comment, for easier search. Try to find a reasonable level of specificity: too narrow topic means less people; too wide topic means more people who actually are interested in something different than you are.

Use the second-level comments if you are learning that topic. (Or if you are going to learn it now, not merely in the far future.) Technically, "me too" is okay in this thread, but providing more info is probably more useful. For example: What are you focusing on? What learning materials you use? What is your goal?

Third- and deeper-level comments, that's debate as usual.

Discussion article for the meetup : Bratislava

Discussion article for the meetup : Bratislava