A few notes about the site mechanics
A few notes about the community
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* Normal_Anomaly
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A note for theists: you will find the Less Wrong community to be predominantly atheist, though not completely so, and most of us are genuinely respectful of religious people who keep the usual community norms. It's worth saying that we might think religion is off-topic in some places where you think it's on-topic, so be thoughtful about where and how you start explicitly talking about it; some of us are happy to talk about religion, some of us aren't interested. Bear in mind that many of us really, truly have given full consideration to theistic claims and found them to be false, so starting with the most common arguments is pretty likely just to annoy people. Anyhow, it's absolutely OK to mention that you're religious in your welcome post and to invite a discussion there.
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:
- The Worst Argument in the World
- That Alien Message
- How to Convince Me that 2 + 2 = 3
- Lawful Uncertainty
- Your Intuitions are Not Magic
- The Planning Fallacy
- The Apologist and the Revolutionary
- Scope Insensitivity
- The Allais Paradox (with two followups)
- We Change Our Minds Less Often Than We Think
- The Least Convenient Possible World
- The Third Alternative
- The Domain of Your Utility Function
- Newcomb's Problem and Regret of Rationality
- The True Prisoner's Dilemma
- The Tragedy of Group Selectionism
- Policy Debates Should Not Appear One-Sided
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!
Sure, there's a lot of variance involved. But there are more and less safe driving habits, too, and I'll bet the variance is about as high. The point isn't to demonstrate that one practice is under all conditions more or less safe than another, it's to compare their average dangers as they're actually practiced. And that clearly favors driving. It's a profoundly bad idea to look at a set of statistics like this and say "oh, the ones that look inconvenient to me were probably doing something unsafe, they don't count".
On the other hand, these statistics don't take health benefits from being physically active into account, which could potentially give ammunition for a much stronger critique -- though given ike's comments, I'm not sure it'd be a valid critique in the context of Jewish law.
I bet less. Yes, you can practice defensive driving, but if you're on the road in the traffic there is only so much you can do to avoid the idiot who is both in a hurry and needs to send that text message right now. You don't have much control over external factors. But in swimming you often do -- it's pretty hard to drown if you are swimming in a pool with others watching.
Yes. Therefore if you know you practice in way that's different from the average, the probabilities change for you.