Hi - I'm new here - some questions

Many of my hypotheses will be junk, but that's okay. As long as I can maximize the number of useful ideas that I can generate, I think I'll have done something.

Really bad thinking, IMHO. You should be trying to maximize (good_ideas - K * bad_ideas). Now I don't know for sure what is the best value to use for K. But I suspect that if you use a K < 1 in your objective function, none of your good ideas will be useful - because no one will bother reading them.

My advice would be to continue to use your blog as a dumping ground for unevaluated ideas and to use LessWrong for a different purpose. Use us for practice and experimentation in communication skills, argument construction, and other aspects of pedagogy. Send us only those of your ideas which you think are your really good ideas. And then try to craft your presentation so that everyone here who reads it really gets your idea on the first try.

Inevitably, you won't succeed as often as you hope. Sometimes we won't get your idea, and sometimes we will understand, but disagree. In either case, you will learn something from the feedback.

It is a lot of extra effort compared to your original proposal, but I think you will discover that the results are worth it.

One of the suggestions I've seen here that I see more wisdom in now than when I first heard it was "try to not have three or more of the most recent comments."

I come from forums; I'm generally the sole verbose libertarian on a board of verbose liberals. Generally, I will get into deep and long quote wars with several people; I'll respond to each person that posts, often before anyone else posts (so maybe a third to a half of the posts in a discussion thread I'm involved in might be by me, and a comparable fraction of the words written will be by me).

That's not what this site seems to be about. This site is about becoming less wrong, not winning arguments; learning to see the forest, not fighting over trees. I already took that sort of approach during arguments (I would welcome being shown to be wrong, admit I was wrong, and so on) but here feels different. There's much more benefit in waiting for the comments to come in, reading multiple of them at once, and contemplating them all together, rather than responding to each one individually and not connecting them. There's also just a benefit to adding more contemplation to your conversations- the other person will be around, and you don't have a blind post count here. If you want your karma to increase, you've got to convince more people to press the vote up button than the vote down button; and I'm genuinely surprised at which of my comments have had the highest karma, and how some posts I thought were gems were apparently rather unappreciated.

As mentioned elsewhere, the signal to noise ratio here matters. And so it's worthwhile to have an external throttle on your output until you're comfortable with your output. The vote up/down buttons are communication tools, and don't be afraid to use them instead of posting. Just don't go crazy (and don't vote someone down because they disagree with you, only if they disagree with you in an irrational or unedifying way).

Hello, and welcome.

You are correct in your observation that this section does not have a high rate of new posts. I'm not sure, but I think you are likely correct in your guess that a flood of new posts would not be appreciated. LessWrong doesn't have a very traditional forum structure, and I'm not sure that a place exists on this site yet that quite fits your posting style. I'm commenting here in part because that puts you in the same boat as me - my first comment on this site was the opinion that the avenues of participation in LW don't seem to fit how I like to express myself, and that probably other potential users were in the same situation. I think LW doesn't lend itself to conversation or stepwise refinement of ideas by a group, which is my best guess for how I would like to really engage with the ideas discussed here. That said, the site is changing and is itself open source, so this problem is tractable.

As to the more personal parts of your introduction, I think you sound like a great person to have a conversation with. I expect you may just find some people here who have enough in common with your informational omnivorousness and desire to think and make sense of things, and that this community will accept you and benefit from your input. The only point of criticism I (hesitantly) will offer is that the following excerpt is a bit worrisome:

I also have a massive number of posts on the Internet, although many of them are beyond embarrassing. In the end, though, I only look for people who are open to anything and completely non-judgmental (although some people may look for certain "signals" when they're looking for prospective contacts, to minimize the chances of meeting a contact with which one may fear wasting time on). Basically, my ideal model (for hypothesis generation) involves this: I try to type out some hypotheses, and then post them online, in hopes that someone might critique them. Many of my hypotheses will be junk, but that's okay. As long as I can maximize the number of useful ideas that I can generate, I think I'll have done something.

My only concern is that while your goal is good, the methods perhaps leave something to be desired. It may well be the fastest way for you to learn, but putting the burden of critique of a large flow of ideas onto others can be something of an imposition. Time certainly is a valuable resource, as you state, and remember that other people value their time too. What I hope LW can do for you is read and critique just as you wish, but that also you learn here some habits and skills of thinking that allow you to do more and more of this sort of critique of your own ideas as you have them. My time at LW (and OB, and many other places on the net) has been spent largely lurking, in a project of refining my own ability to reason and critique effectively and correctly, and I hope that it works out for you that way too.

I'll have to come back and read the latter half of this tomorrow. In the meantime, welcome!

This isn't really the best place for a flood of low-quality ideas, though I certainly see the point in producing that flood. It seems to me that you'd do best to get a blog (there are a few of us on livejournal, and accounts there are easy to set up) and post links here when you have something that seems particularly worthwhile. If the overall signal to noise ratio there isn't too bad, you'll probably wind up with some readers, too.

As to your neurotype - well, you might want to work on tightening your writing up a bit, but even when it comes to that I don't expect anyone will hassle you about it. There are more than a few auties here, myself included, and I think we have a handful of ADD folks as well.

Also, your description of the kind of people you like to chat with sounds a bit like me. I'm fairly easily findable by this handle on several major IM systems, though my plate's a bit full these days and I might not have much time or energy to share.

are we allowed to post anything in this part of the site? (like, could we treat this part like another forum, albeit an intellectually mature forum?) Or do we have to keep things formal? I tend to post a high number of threads, but there don't seem to be many threads here.

The discussion section does have a fairly low volume of posts, and I personally think that's a travesty. I've seen the attitude expressed more than a few times that newcomers to the site should shut up and lurk more because no one wants to see bad posts, but this seems to go completely against the mission of the site, which is obviously to become "less wrong." Bad posts can be extremely helpful when their flaws are pointed out and discussed, not only for the poster but for others who might harbor similar mistaken notions.

So I would say forget about being formal. Well-thought out posts are for the main site. I think a rapid-fire, informal format is quite appropriate for the discussion section, provided you actually care about engaging the ideas developed in the sequences and other top-level posts.

I am ADD and score relatively high on the autism spectrum. I'm a generalist and also have some rejection anxiety (social anxiety doesn't describe me, I like (and am good at) spending time with lots of people once I'm there; I just get anxious about seeing people beforehand). Interestingly, presently doctors won't diagnose ADHD and autism concurrently. Tangent: Has anyone read The ADHD-Autism Connection? Seems like in might be relevant to a lot of us.

Anyway, welcome! We tend to be really protective of our signal to noise ratio here so you're right to be cautious. A blog is probably a good idea for your really undeveloped thoughts but you can probably post some things here. Are your ideas about things that have already been discussed on here and on OB? Maybe reply to this comment with an example of the kind of thing you'd like to post.

I agree that you may way to consider your own blog, but the discussion forum is good for questions and for ideas you've thought through a bit and think others would be interested in.

I'm in Seattle too! I graduated from the UW not that long ago (chemical engineering).

Hi InquilineKea. I'm almost new to posting here myself, and am also a long-time lurker. I'm also a borderline Aspie and a generalist rather than a specialist, and my brother has been diagnosed with ADD, so I can likely relate to you more than the average person, though perhaps not more than the average user of this site. I'm also impressed with the levels of intelligence and rationality, usually superior to my own, that I encounter on Less Wrong, though I do wish that the site were more active. I've recently told some of my friends about Less Wrong (usually via HPatMoR), and I also plan on contributing more to this site myself. (I realize that I expressed my hope to contribute more this past summer in a post earlier this year, but now I do finally have the time to contribute. Let this comment serve as social pressure for additional motivation).

I'm curious about the specifics of your reasoning on exercise, InquilineKea. If you're afraid of exercising inconsistently, why not practice exercising consistently so as to get better at exercising consistently?

Sorry if I'm hijacking the thread, but I'm in much the same situation. New and don't know what I'm doing. And not getting much feedback other than a couple random upvotes for seemingly nothing.

(Well, at least I'm past asking how to insert a hyperlink).

One question bugged me for a while now: what's a "top level comment" and is it some kind of a privilege to make one? Is it the article itself, or a comment that's not a reply to a comment? (Since no one got mad at me yet, I either haven't made one, or nobody noticed).

Also: what's the etiquette on editing after someone's pointed out a flaw in my post? It reduces on verbal clutter if I just went back and edited, but might put the rest of the comments out of context. Especially if it's a major reasoning flaw that you can't just put in under "EDIT: "

And also: if I accepted someone's correction and edited, should I add to verbal clutter by posting "thanks," or do my actions (edit + upvote) give enough evidence to the fact that I'm thankful?

I'm still in the process or reading the entirety of LW, hopefully before the links turn back to green and I lose track of what I'd read and what I hadn't. I comment sometimes, but most of my idea flood stays back in MS Word, to ripen or to wither.

So how will I know if I'm doing something wrong?

Oh, and I operate by Croker's Rules, so just tell me.