Open & Welcome Thread November 2021

Ruby

If it’s worth saying, but not worth its own post, here's a place to put it.

If you are new to LessWrong, here's the place to introduce yourself. Personal stories, anecdotes, or just general comments on how you found us and what you hope to get from the site and community are invited. This is also the place to discuss feature requests and other ideas you have for the site, if you don't want to write a full top-level post.

If you want to explore the community more, I recommend reading the Library, checking recent Curated posts, seeing if there are any meetups in your area, and checking out the Getting Started section of the LessWrong FAQ. If you want to orient to the content on the site, you can also check out the Concepts section.

The Open Thread tag is here. The Open Thread sequence is here.

If it’s worth saying, but not worth its own post, here's a place to put it.

The Open Thread tag is here. The Open Thread sequence is here.

Hi! I'm new here. I was introduced by a friend of mine, and reading some of these blog articles make me feel real sad about not having encountered all this earlier.

9Jon Garcia5y

Thanks. I think it's important not to forget the path I've taken. It's a major part of my identity even though I no longer endorse what were once my most cherished beliefs, and I feel that it helps connect me with the greater human experience. My parents and (ironically) my training in apologetics instilled in me a thirst for truth and an alertness toward logical fallacies that took me quite far from where I started in life. I guess that a greater emphasis on overcoming confirmation bias would have accelerated my truth-seeking journey a bit more. Unfortunately and surprisingly for a certain species of story-telling social primates, the truth is not necessarily what is believed and taught by the tribe. An idea is not true just because people devote lifetimes to defending it. And an idea is not false just because they spend lifetimes mocking it. The one thing that held me back the most, I think, is my rather strong deontological instinct. I always saw it as my moral duty to apply the full force of my rational mind to defending the Revealed Truth. I was willing to apply good epistemology to modify my beliefs arbitrarily far, as long as it did not violate the moral constraint that my worldview remain consistent with the holistic biblical narrative. Sometimes that meant radically rethinking religious doctrines in light of science (or conflicting scriptures), but more often it pushed me to rationalize scientific evidence to fit with my core beliefs. I always recognized that all things that are true are necessarily mutually consistent, that we all inhabit a single self-consistent Reality, and that the Truth must be the minimum-energy harmonization of all existing facts. However, it wasn't until I was willing to let go of the moral duty to retain the biblical narrative in my set of brute facts that the free energy of my worldview dropped dramatically. It was like a thousand high-tension cables binding all my beliefs to a single (misplaced) epistemological hub were all rel

3lsusr5y

Welcome! [...] One planet. A hundred billion souls. Four thousand years. Such small ambitions for an ultimate being of infinite power like Vishnu, Shiva or Yahweh. It seems more appropriately scoped for a minor deity.

Well, at the time I had assumed that Earth history was a special case, a small stage temporarily under quarantine from the rest of the universe where the problem of evil could play itself out. I hoped that God had created the rest of the universe to contain innumerable inhabited worlds, all of which would learn the lesson of just how good the Creator's system of justice is after contrasting against a world that He had allowed to take matters into its own hands. However, now that I'm out of that mindset, I realize that even a small Type-I ASI could easily do a much better job instilling such a lesson into all sentient minds than Yahweh has purportedly done (i.e., without all the blood sacrifices and genocides).