(This is the fifth incarnation of the welcome thread; once a post gets over 500 comments, it stops showing them all by default, so we make a new one. Besides, a new post is a good perennial way to encourage newcomers and lurkers to introduce themselves.)
A few notes about the site mechanics
Less Wrong
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You may have noticed that all the posts and comments on this site have buttons to vote them up or down, and all the users have "karma" scores which come from the sum of all their comments and posts. This immediate easy feedback mechanism helps keep arguments from turning into flamewars and helps make the best posts more visible; it's part of what makes discussions on Less Wrong look different from those anywhere else on the Internet.
However, it can feel really irritating to get downvoted, especially if one doesn't know why. It happens to all of us sometimes, and it's perfectly acceptable to ask for an explanation. (Sometimes it's the unwritten LW etiquette; we have different norms than other forums.) Take note when you're downvoted a lot on one topic, as it often means that several members of the community think you're missing an important point or making a mistake in reasoning— not just that they disagree with you! If you have any questions about karma or voting, please feel free to ask here.
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Discussions on Less Wrong tend to end differently than in most other forums; a surprising number end when one participant changes their mind, or when multiple people clarify their views enough and reach agreement. More commonly, though, people will just stop when they've better identified their deeper disagreements, or simply "tap out" of a discussion that's stopped being productive. (Seriously, you can just write "I'm tapping out of this thread.") This is absolutely OK, and it's one good way to avoid the flamewars that plague many sites.
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.
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.
LW DISCUSSION: This is a forum just like the top-level one, with two key differences: in the top-level forum, posts require the author to have 20 karma in order to publish, and any upvotes or downvotes on the post are multiplied by 10. Thus there's a lot more informal dialogue in the Discussion section, including some of the more fun conversations here.
SEQUENCES: A huge corpus of material mostly written by Eliezer Yudkowsky in his days of blogging at Overcoming Bias, before Less Wrong was started. Much of the discussion here will casually depend on or refer to ideas brought up in those posts, so reading them can really help with present discussions. Besides which, they're pretty engrossing in my opinion.
A few notes about the community
If you've come to Less Wrong to discuss a particular topic, this thread would be a great place to start the conversation. By commenting here, and checking the responses, you'll probably get a good read on what, if anything, has already been said here on that topic, what's widely understood and what you might still need to take some time explaining.
If your welcome comment starts a huge discussion, then please move to the next step and create a LW Discussion post to continue the conversation; we can fit many more welcomes onto each thread if fewer of them sprout 400+ comments. (To do this: click "Create new article" in the upper right corner next to your username, then write the article, then at the bottom take the menu "Post to" and change it from "Drafts" to "Less Wrong Discussion". Then click "Submit". When you edit a published post, clicking "Save and continue" does correctly update the post.)
If you want to write a post about a LW-relevant topic, awesome! I highly recommend you submit your first post to Less Wrong Discussion; don't worry, you can later promote it from there to the main page if it's well-received. (It's much better to get some feedback before every vote counts for 10 karma- honestly, you don't know what you don't know about the community norms here.)
If English is not your first language, don't let that make you afraid to post or comment. You can get English help on Discussion- or Main-level posts by sending a PM to one of the following users (use the "send message" link on the upper right of their user page). Either put the text of the post in the PM, or just say that you'd like English help and you'll get a response with an email address.
* Normal_Anomaly
* Randaly
* shokwave
* Barry Cotter
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:
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!
Note from orthonormal: MBlume and other contributors wrote the original version of this welcome post, and I've edited it a fair bit. 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, once this gets past 500 comments, anyone is welcome to copy and edit this intro to start the next welcome thread.
Hi, I'm Denise from Germany, I just turned 19 and study maths at university. Right now, I spend most of my time with that and caring for my 3-year-old daughter. I know LessWrong for almost two years now, but never got around to write. However, I'm more or less involved with parts of the LessWrong and the Effective Altruism community, most of them originally found me via Okcupid (I stated I was a LessWrongian), and from there, it expanded.
I grew up in a small village in the middle of nowhere in Germany, very isolated without any people to talk to. I skipped a grade and did extremely well at school, but was mostly very unhappy during my childhood/teen years. Though I had free internet access, I had almost no access to education until I was 15 years old (and pregnant, and no, that wasn't unplanned), because I had no idea what to look for. I dropped out of school then and prepared for the exams -when I had time (I was mostly busy with my child)- I needed to do to be allowed to attend university. In Germany that's extremely unusual and most people don't even know you can do it without going to school.
When I was 15, I discovered enviromentalism (during pregnancy, via people who share my parenting values) and feminism. Since then, I seriously cared about making the world „a better place“. I was already very nerdy in my special fields of interest then, though still very uneducated and lacking basic concepts. Thankfully, I found LessWrong when I was just 17 and became very taken with it. I started to question my beliefs, became a utilitarian, adopted a somewhat transhumanist mindset and the usual, but the breakthrough only came last year after I started spending time with people from the community. Since then I am totally focused. Most people who have met me this year or at the end of 2012 are very surprised by this, I noticed that a lot of people completely overestimate my past selves (which is somewhat relieving, though I still feel like everyone from the LW/EA who is usually quite taken with me overestimates me). Until the beginning of this year, I even considered enviromentalism the most important problem (which is completely ridiculous for me now). Well, I had been a serious enviromentalist for three years, then I talked half an hour with another LessWrongian about it, who explained to me why it isn't the most important problem, so I dropped it on the same day. After thinking about it myself and talking to several LW/EAs (e.g. 80,000hours) I decided it's the best thing for me to study maths (my minor will be in computer science). People always tell me I worry too much about my future and I am already at a very good position, being so driven, etc. but I often think I have lost so many years now and there is so much to read and so much I don't know and so little time. Especially considering that I lose about 70% of my time awake to caring for my daughter (which people do never take into account at all. They just have no idea. Before last October, it was even 90%). I often felt extremely incompetent and lazy because other people get so much done in comparison to me. Well, I do feel a bit better after actually thinking about how big my disadvantages are, but it's still quite bad. Several people have asked me to consider internships, etc., but I mostly still feel too incompetent, and the even bigger problem, too socially awkward.
Rationality was very helpful in the past with personal problems (e.g., I have a very static mindset, which hasn't really been a problem so far because I always was able to do things despite of it, without having to work for them, but now, doing my maths degree, it doesn't work as well as in the past) and has heavily reduced them, though enough still remain. My productivity has increased a lot. There are a lot of things to do waiting for me, I can't afford losing time to personal inconveniences. (Though anyway most of my time and energy goes into my child and there isn't really much I can do about that.)
I'm very happy that I found LessWrong and like-minded people. If you have reading recommendations, please tell me. I am familiar with all the basic material (the Sequences, of course, the EA stuff, the self-improvement stuff, Bostrom's work, Kahneman...). If you have any other advice, I would also love to hear it.