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Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: [Feedback please] New User's Guide to LessWrong, published by Ruby on April 25, 2023 on LessWrong.
The LessWrong team is currently thinking a lot about what happens with new users: both the bar of their contributions being accepted, how we deliver feedback and restriction of not good contributions, but also most importantly, how we get them onboarded onto the site
This is a draft of a document we'd present to new users to help them understand what LessWrong is about. I'm interested in early community feedback about whether I'm hitting the right notes here before investing a lot more in it.
This document also references another post that's something of more of a list of norms, akin to Basics of Rationalist Discourse, though (1) I haven't written that yet, (2) I'm much less certain about the shape or nature of it. I'll share a post or draft about that too soon.
This document is aimed at new users but may also be a useful reference for established users. It elaborates on the about page.
The Core of LessWrong: Rationality
LessWrong is an online forum and community that was built around the goal improving human reasoning and decision-making. The community believes there are ways of thinking, that if you figure them out and adopt them, you can become a person who systematically arrives at true beliefs and good decisions more of the time than someone who didn't adopt those ways of thinking. Around here, the short word for "systematically arriving at truth, etc." is rationality, and that's at the core of this site.
More than that, LessWrong community shares a culture that encodes a bunch of built up beliefs, opinions, concepts, and values about how to reason better. These give LessWrong a pretty distinctive style from the rest of Internet.
Some of the features that set LessWrong apart:
We treat beliefs as being about shaping your anticipations of what you'll observe
The goal of our conversations is to figure out what's true, not win arguments
people focus on what would change their mind
it's common to acknowledge when their someone they are debating has made a convincing point, or has even outright convinced them entirely
We are very Bayesian
Rather than treating belief as binary, we use probabilistic credences to express our certainty/uncertainty. Rather than say that is "extremely unlikely", we'd say "I think there's a 1% chance or lower of it happening".
We are interested in Bayesian evidence for a hypothesis, i.e. anything that seems more likely if the belief is true rather than false.
Philosophical Heritage: The Sequences
Between 2006 and 2009, Eliezer Yudkowsky spent two years writing a sequence of blog posts that shared his philosophy/beliefs/models about rationality (collectively those blog posts are called The Sequences). In 2009, Eliezer founded LessWrong as a community forum for the people who were attracted to his ideas and worldview.
While not everyone on the site agrees with everything Eliezer says, The Sequences (also known as Rationality: AI to Zombies) is the foundational cultural/values document of LessWrong. To understand LessWrong and participate well (and also for your own reasoning ability), we strongly encourage you to read the Sequences.
The original sequences were ~700 blog posts.
Rationality: A-Z was an edited and distilled version compiled in 2015 of ~400 posts.
Highlights from the Sequences is 50 top posts from the Sequences suggested a quick place to start
Topics other than Rationality
The eleventh virtue is scholarship. Study many sciences and absorb their power as your own. Each field that you consume makes you larger. If you swallow enough sciences the gaps between them will diminish and your knowledge will become a unified whole. If you are gluttonous you will become vaster than mountains. It is especially important to eat math and science wh...
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