If you'd like to meet other LWers in real life, there's a meetup thread and a Facebook group. If you've your own blog or other online presence, please feel free to link it. If you're confused about any of the terms used on this site, you might want to pay a visit to the LW Wiki, or simply ask a question in this thread. Some of us have been having this conversation for a few years now, and we've developed a fairly specialized way of talking about some things. Don't worry -- you'll pick it up pretty quickly.
You may have noticed that all the posts and all the 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. Try not to take this too personally. Voting is used mainly to get the most useful comments up to the top of the page where people can see them. It may be difficult to contribute substantially to ongoing conversations when you've just gotten here, and you may even see some of your comments get voted down. Don't be discouraged by this; it happened to many of us. If you've any questions about karma or voting, please feel free to ask here.
If you've come to Less Wrong to teach us about a particular topic, this thread would be a great place to start the conversation, especially until you've worked up enough karma for a top level post. By posting 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.
A note for theists: you will find LW overtly atheist. We are happy to have you participating but please be aware that other commenters are likely to treat religion as an open-and-shut case. This isn't groupthink; we really, truly have given full consideration to theistic claims and found them to be false. If you'd like to know how we came to this conclusion you may find these related posts a good starting point.
A couple technical notes: when leaving comments, you may notice a 'help' link below and to the right of the text box. This will explain how to italicize, linkify, or quote bits of text. You'll also want to check your inbox, where you can always see whether people have left responses to your comments.
Welcome to Less Wrong, and we look forward to hearing from you throughout the site.
(Note from MBlume: though my name is at the top of this page, the wording in various parts of the welcome message owes a debt to other LWers who've helped me considerably in working the kinks out)
For the same reason that if I had a see-an-image-of-Grandpa button, and pushed it, I wouldn't count the fact that I saw him as evidence that he's somehow still alive, but if I saw him right now spontaneously, I would.
Imagine that you have a switch in your home which responds to your touch by turning on a lamp (this probably won't take much imagination). One day this lamp, which was off, suddenly and for no apparent reason turns on. Would you assign supernatural or mundane causes to this event?
Now this isn't absolute proof that the switch wasn't turned on by something otherworldly; perhaps it responds to both mundane and supernatural causes. But, well, if I may be blunt, Occam's Razor. If your best explanations are "the Hand of Zeus" and "Mittens, my cat," then ...
I assume much the same things about this as any other sense: it's there to give information about the world, but trickable. I mean, how tired you feel is a good measure of how long it's been since you've slept, but you can drink coffee and end up feeling more energetic than is merited. So if I want to be able to tell how much sleep I really need, I should avoid caffeine. That doesn't mean the existence of caffeine makes your subjective feelings of your own energy level arbitrary or worthless.
If you've recently joined the Less Wrong community, please leave a comment here and introduce yourself. We'd love to know who you are, what you're doing, or how you found us. Tell us how you came to identify as a rationalist, or describe what it is you value and work to achieve.
If you'd like to meet other LWers in real life, there's a meetup thread and a Facebook group. If you've your own blog or other online presence, please feel free to link it. If you're confused about any of the terms used on this site, you might want to pay a visit to the LW Wiki, or simply ask a question in this thread. Some of us have been having this conversation for a few years now, and we've developed a fairly specialized way of talking about some things. Don't worry -- you'll pick it up pretty quickly.
You may have noticed that all the posts and all the 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. Try not to take this too personally. Voting is used mainly to get the most useful comments up to the top of the page where people can see them. It may be difficult to contribute substantially to ongoing conversations when you've just gotten here, and you may even see some of your comments get voted down. Don't be discouraged by this; it happened to many of us. If you've any questions about karma or voting, please feel free to ask here.
If you've come to Less Wrong to teach us about a particular topic, this thread would be a great place to start the conversation, especially until you've worked up enough karma for a top level post. By posting 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.
A note for theists: you will find LW overtly atheist. We are happy to have you participating but please be aware that other commenters are likely to treat religion as an open-and-shut case. This isn't groupthink; we really, truly have given full consideration to theistic claims and found them to be false. If you'd like to know how we came to this conclusion you may find these related posts a good starting point.
A couple technical notes: when leaving comments, you may notice a 'help' link below and to the right of the text box. This will explain how to italicize, linkify, or quote bits of text. You'll also want to check your inbox, where you can always see whether people have left responses to your comments.
Welcome to Less Wrong, and we look forward to hearing from you throughout the site.
(Note from MBlume: though my name is at the top of this page, the wording in various parts of the welcome message owes a debt to other LWers who've helped me considerably in working the kinks out)