I like your proposal. I note, in addition, that the best introduction is probably linking people to particular articles that you think they may find interesting, instead of the main page (which is what someone will find if you just tell them the name).
I'm not sure LW is a good entry point for people who are turned away by a few technical terms. Responding to unfamiliar scientific concepts with an immediate surge of curiosity is probably a trait I share with the majority of LW'ers. While it's not strictly a prequisite for learning rationality, it certainly is for starting in medias res.
The current approach is a good selector for dividing the chaff (well educated because that's what was expected, but no true intellectual curiosity) from the wheat (whom Deleuze would call thinkers-qua-thinkers).
HPMOR instead, maybe?
I think that if I didn't know anything about LessWrong, the first version would be the one that would be more likely to attract my attention. There are a lot of websites that make vague promises that reading them will improve your life. The first version at least gives examples of what exactly this website is about and how exactly it is supposed to be helpful. While the second sentence repels no one, it seems unlikely that it could pique anyone's curiosity. That might not matter when you personally recommend LW to someone, since your recommendation would presumably be enough to make them think that there is some content behind the vague introduction. It seems to me that we might even have an interesting situation when vague introduction might work better on people who were recommended to check out LessWrong by other people (since it wouldn't repel them), but I hypothesize that concrete introduction would be better for those who encountered LW accidentally, because while most people wouldn't read past introduction either way, it is the first version that seems to be the one that is likely to catch at least someone's attention.
By the way, I am not sure if having what is basically About page as a frontpage is the best way to introduce new readers to LW. Few blogs do that, most put the most recent posts on the frontpage instead. That makes them look less static.
On a related topic, someone just got really confused by the fact that the infobox at the top of Discussion says
You're looking at Less Wrong's discussion board. This includes all posts, including those that haven't been promoted to the front page yet. For more information, see About Less Wrong.
And then the person naturally assumed that an article that had actually been posted in Main could be found from browsing Discussion.
"Really? You can think hurricanes out of existence"? Because that's what people will think when you say you make major disasters less likely. "Rogue AI" is a very non-central example of "disaster".
How I see it, LessWrong is a community of people who try to avoid stupidity, including those kinds of stupidity that are very popular among highly intelligent people.
Now the problem is how to write it in a less offensive way. Also, how to write it so that outsiders will not interpret "avoiding stupidity" as "avoiding the people and opinions from the opposite tribe", because this is what most others websites would mean if they would choose such words.
Maybe the problem is that all catchy descriptions are already politicized.
This said, I a...
Disagreed.
The old introduction may be obscure, but at least it is informative. A visitor can follow the links, read 5 minutes about biases (if it is required) and then he gets some understanding of what this site is actually about. The new version is much more vague. Who would like to think more clearly, improve their lives and make major disasters less likely? Well, pretty much everybody.
I don't think that minor changes, like rephrasing introduction or adding disclaimers about criticisms to FAQ will have any noticeable effect. To attract significantly mo...
Fixing the description to not require a lot of background information won't help if you don't fix the content to also not require a lot of background information.
And honestly I'm not sure the site is right for somebody without a lot of background information. Some of the material here is way too persuasive without giving any implication of the existence of counterarguments or criticisms - for example, anytime Eliezer mentions the Stanford Prison Experiment anywhere. And the reinforcement system here encourages groupthink of the ugliest sort. (I am manip...
This is not directly related to the wording of the introduction, but to the accessibility of the homepage to new users.
I have been an avid lurker/reader of LW since the beginning. Over the past year or two, I have almost exclusively read the discussion forum due to it's high turnover rate and greater density of "bite-size" ideas that tend to require less time to process and understand than promoted posts.
Only recently I've realized that a noticeable part of the reason I immediately click "Discussion" after navigating to my http://lesswr...
If someone is going to turn away at the first sight an unknown term, then they have no chance in lasting here (I mean, imagine what'll happen when they see the Sequences).
I wonder what other negative responses we have had from friends we (tried to) introduce to LessWrong. And what can be learned from that.
I will start with one expererience: A friend which I tried to introduce was sceptical about the (hidden) agenda of LW. He pried what the purpose was and how well-founded the content was. His impression was one of superficiality. He found some physical and philosophical posts to be off the mark (being a well-read physicist). He didn't say cult, but I guess he suspected manipulation. And tried to locate the ends of that. We was interested in the topics themselves but the content just didn't match up.
"Less Wrong is a community for people who would like to think more clearly in order to improve their own and other people's lives, and to make major disasters less likely."
I wouldn't reference the major disasters, but I would reference some particular means by which we're trying to think more clearly.
...Less Wrong is a community for people who try to find and apply means to think more clearly (i.e., Less Wrong, get it?), with major areas of interest including cognitive biases, bayesian probability theory, causal inference, decision theory, mor
Data point: I started reading the Sequences because a blog which I was reading (which I do not remember the name of) linked to a post in the Fun Theory sequence, which i felt compelled to promptly read the entirety of.
I told an intelligent, well-educated friend about Less Wrong, so she googled, and got "Less Wrong is an online community for people who want to apply the discovery of biases like the conjunction fallacy, the affect heuristic, and scope insensitivity in order to fix their own thinking." and gave up immediately because she'd never heard of the biases.
Note that that's not the first sentence on the homepage. The first sentence on the homepage is
...In the past four decades, behavioral economists and cognitive psychologists have discovered many cogn
Possible improved introduction: "Less Wrong is a community for people who would like to think more clearly in order to improve their own and other people's lives, and to make major disasters less likely."
I like this.
Who has the power to edit the site?
I think changing "fix" to "improve" is a good idea. I also thing changing the first sentence to:
"Over the last four decades, cognitive psychologists and behavioral economists have discovered many cognitive biases human brains fall prey to when thinking and deciding."
improves the flow by spacing out the word "cognitive" would be a good idea. Footnoting behavioral economists is likely a good idea also as a lot of people are unfamiliar with that concept.
I must confess I don't like the term "rationalism" as it has Vulcan-Hollywood-Rationalism connotations. In the past, this term was often used to describe attitudes that are highly impractical and ideological. More in PDF On the "Oakeshottian scale" LW-Rationalism is far closer to the pragmatic attitude Oakaeshott endorses than to that type of quasi-rationalism he criticizes.
If I had a time machine I would probably try to talk Eliezer into choosing another name. What name that would be I am not so sure, perhaps Pragmatism - after all Pe...
Below is the current text (without links). I agree your sentence is helpful. Do you want to add it to the current page or replace the bias sentence?
...In the past four decades, behavioral economists and cognitive psychologists have discovered many cognitive biases human brains fall prey to when thinking and deciding.
Less Wrong is an online community for people who want to apply the discovery of biases like the conjunction fallacy, the affect heuristic, and scope insensitivity in order to fix their own thinking.
Bayesian reasoning offers a way to improve on
I agree with what you said about how we introduce ourselves.
As for your possible improvement, I don't know if everyone here cares about the latter two points. But it seems that a lot do, and I'm not sure whether the amount of people are over the "threshold" where it makes sense to generalize.
Anyway, I've always felt pretty strongly that at its core, the goals of rationality are really simple and straightforward, and that it's something everyone should be interested in. At it's core, rationality is just about:
1) Getting what you want.
2) Being righ...
Hmm. If you want people you know to get into LessWrong, don't undermine the value of your own enthusiasm. When I told my family about this site, I was all excited, like "I found this amazing new site, and I learned X, and they talk all about Y, which is so relevant to my life, and don't you hate when people do Z? Well they talk about that too!" Now my dad and little sister are hooked on the rationality ebook, even though they both generally read nothing more than fiction/fantasy. My little sister is fascinated by it despite still being a strong C...
I told an intelligent, well-educated friend about Less Wrong, so she googled, and got "Less Wrong is an online community for people who want to apply the discovery of biases like the conjunction fallacy, the affect heuristic, and scope insensitivity in order to fix their own thinking." and gave up immediately because she'd never heard of the biases.
While hers might not be the best possible attitude, I can't see that we win anything by driving people away with obscure language.
Possible improved introduction: "Less Wrong is a community for people who would like to think more clearly in order to improve their own and other people's lives, and to make major disasters less likely."