I don't think anyone is suggesting that you "have to post such things to get basic community acceptance". Only that a thread in which newcomers do so might be a welcoming place, especially for newcomers who for whatever reason find LW intimidating. It seems clear that that isn't your situation; you are probably not the target audience for the proposal.

(Which doesn't mean you wouldn't be welcome in a welcome/newbie thread. Just that you probably wouldn't get as much out of it as some other people.)

And, er, welcome to Less Wrong :-).

I know anecdotes are not a statistically significant form of argument, but perhaps they do convey emotional ramifications. With that in mind, I'd like to share a rather extreme anecdote explaining one aspect of what is wrong with political discourse where the people making the arguments are attacked, rather than the arguments themselves.

Years ago, I knew this girl - lets call her Alice. We were very good friends, but that changed. I don't know why for certain - I cannot read minds - but I think it started when I disagreed with one of her feminist opinions. I didn't say anything particularly offensive, I didn't say all feminists are 300 pound whales (which is not true) nor did I say that women should not be allowed to vote. She said that in the US, the only legal way for a woman to defend herself against rape was by sticking her fingers up her assailants nose, with the implication that the US legal system does not care whether women get raped. I disagreed, saying that there are reasons why Americans have so many guns, and the biggest one is self defence. I said that lethal force is allowed to defend against much lesser crimes such as trespass, at least in some states, and that I couldn't imagine that any US state would have such strong restrictions on self-defence.

There were a few similar cases where I disagreed with her arguments for clear logical reasons, never attacking her or anyone else. And I think this flipped a switch in her brain, from friend to enemy, because from then on whenever I opened my mouth she would ridicule me.

We still hung out, but only because we were in the same circle of friends. One day, I said "You know this new drug you guys are doing? I've looked it up, and wikipedia says its more addictive than heroin." Alice looked at me as if I was something she'd stepped in. "Don't be ridiculous" she sneered. I shrugged and wandered off.

I didn't hear from them for a few months, for various reasons, not least that I wanted some distance from her and from drugs. The next time I heard from them, it was a phone call explaining that Alice's boyfriend - a really nice guy who I had known for years - had fatally overdosed on the drug I had tried to warn them about, and that one of my other friends was probably going to prison for supply or even manslaughter.

In situations such as this, it is some comfort to know that at least I tried to help. I did what I could, but if people ridicule me I cannot force them to take me seriously. In my head it was the saddest 'I told you so' ever, although I obviously did not mention this to anyone else.

It would be an exaggeration to say that if Alice hadn't shouted me down then this guy would still be alive. I'm not great at convincing people of things at the best of times, and I think other friends of mine had tried to warn about the dangers too. But I think the probability (that if Alice hadn't shouted me down then this guy would still be alive) is nontrivial.

Perhaps I should have shouted Alice down, told her to stop being a &^%$%$$. But I've always tried to follow the advice that the best way to deal with conflict is to calmly walk away, if possible.

Maybe its crass to make a political point of this, but if there is a point, then point I am trying to make is that when people criticise social justice warfare it might not be because we hate 'justice' or because we are evil cis white men (tm), but its the warfare we object to, because a group of people at war with themselves over ideology is so much weaker in every way. Is it so much to ask that arguments are debated, rather then by ridiculing, censoring, silencing the people who make the arguments?

So I'd like to say that regardless of whether you are a progressive or conservative, communist or an-cap or neoreactionary, I will engage with your arguments rather than trying to attack you, and even if I disagree with your politics I will take non-political arguments seriously. I hope you do so too.

I've been lurking for a very long time, more than six years I think. Lots of sentences come to mind when I think, "Why haven't I posted anything before?" Here are a few:

1. "LessWrong forum is just like any other forum" Well my sample size is low, but... I don't care what you tell yourselves; what I observe is people constantly talking past each other. And if, in reading an article or comment, a possible comment comes to mind; hot-on-its-heels is the thought that there isn't really any point in posting it, because the replies would all be of a type drawn from some annoying archetypes, like (A) I agree! But I have nothing to add. (B) You're wrong. Let me Proceed to Misrepresent in some way. (The Misrepresentation is "guaranteed" to be unclear because it insists on starting on its own terms and not mine). And if I yet start a good-natured chain of comments, suddenly I find myself talking about the other person's stuff and not the ideas that motivated my original comment. Which I probably wouldn't have commented on for its own sake. And as soon as a comment has one reply, people stop thinking about it as an entity in its own right. Don't you dare dismiss these thoughts so quickly!

2. "It's been done. Well, mostly." Eliezer wrote so many general, good, posts - where do I even find a topic sufficiently different that I'm not, for the most part, retreading the ground? Posts by other people are just completely different: instead of the post having a constructive logic of its own, references are given. The type of evidence given by the references is of a totally different sort. Instead of being about rationality, such posts seem to be about "random topic 101"? Ok this isn't very clear.

3. So few comments are intelligible. What are these people even arguing about? It's not clear! How can one comment on this in good faith? Note that the posts you observe are, therefore, more likely to come from people who are not stopped from posting by having unclear or absurd interpretations of parent comments.

Lesswrong seems like it should be a good place. The sequences are a fantastic foundation, but there's so little else! I'm subjectively pretty sure that E.Y. thinks Lesswrong is failing. Of course one may hope "for the frail shrub to start growing".

In the hope that some people read (and continue to read) this charitably, let me continue. Consider the following in the welcome thread itself.

" 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. "

Err, what? Why on Earth should I immediately give you my life story? Or even, Do these questions make sense? "What I value?" On a rationalist forum you are expecting the English language to contain short sentences that encode a good meaning of "value"? Yeah, yeah, whatever. Taking a breath, --- ---. . . Why do you even want to know?

How about just, "you can post who you are, what you're doing ... found us here, if you want."

I should not have to post such things to get basic community acceptance. And you have no right to be so interested in someone who has, as yet, not contributed to lesswrong at all! Surely THAT is the measure of worth within the Lesswrong site. Questions about things not related to Lesswrong should be "expensive" to ask - at least requiring a personal comment.

Oh, I think I initially found lesswrong via Bostrom via looking at the self-sampling hypothesis? It's kind of hazy.