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^[1] 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^[2]
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 bel

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ldegrado1@gmail.com

ldegrado1@gmail.com