What makes Less Wrong awesome?

The epistemic hygiene is a huge factor for me. It is quite difficult to find a community that is nearly this active while retaining such high standards for content. Most of the online communities I've been involved with had a small pocket of individuals with relatively high standards, but I've never found such a degree of uniform quality as I've found here.

Hello, my name is Kevin. I am a very new Lesswrong joiner. I am by no means as smart as all of you guys, I would say Im your average Joe. I stumbled onto lesswrong while researching the singularity about 7 months ago and i have until this very post simply been reading all te discussions and post. I havent got around to reading all the sequences yet, for reasons im embarresed about. I cant understand half of the stuff I read on this site. So when I do, i devot probably three hours a day at this site because I have to google alot of words, or I will get lost in the conversation. The reason I think lesswrong is awesome is because to me its really fun, I never went to college and I really dont know if i would be welcomed here by the most of you, but I'll take my chances.

I quickly lost motivation to keep writing for my own site in part because the comments on my LW posts were of much higher quality than the comments on my posts for my own site.

It's handy to discuss things with people who (mostly) share a large amount of method and background knowledge. You can start conversations at a fairly high level, instead of having to explain over and over again the basics of probability theory or what truth is.

What makes Less Wrong awesome? Its members.

People who believe that a small group is going to take over the universe to save it by making the seed of an artificial general intelligence, that is undergoing explosive recursive self-improvement, extrapolate the coherent volition of humanity, while acausally trading with other superhuman intelligences across the multiverse.

Do you really need more awesomeness?! Don't tell your doctor!

Well, Less Wrong is awesome if only for statements like this:

I bet there's at least one up-arrow-sized hypergalactic civilization folded into a halting Turing machine with 15 states, or something like that. [...] It might perhaps be more limited than this in mere practice, if it's just running on a laptop computer or something.

And that only scratches the surface! There are...

• ...hamsters wearing skirts materializing in midair.
• ...baby-eating aliens.
• ...muggers who use their powers from outside the Matrix.
• ...3^^^3 people getting dust specks in their eyes.

Once you grasp the full scope of Less Wrong, statements that would otherwise seem extraordinary begin to pale in comparison:

Whoever knowingly chooses to save one life, when they could have saved two - to say nothing of a thousand lives, or a world - they have damned themselves as thoroughly as any murderer.

What makes Less Wrong awesome is that it shows how the most extraordinary beliefs are actually hold by atheist rationalists:

If you don't sign up your kids for cryonics then you are a lousy parent.

Nowhere but here can you find similar ideas:

According to the article, the AGI was almost completed, and the main reason his effort failed was that the company ran out of money due to the bursting of the bubble. Together with the anthropic principle, this seems to imply that Ben is the person responsible for the stock market crash of 2000.

or

I previously suggested that we discount each individual using something like the length of its address in the multiverse.

or

For example, you can convince everyone that quantum immortality works by killing them along with yourself. (This shouldn't pose any risk if you've already convinced yourself :-) Paul Almond has proposed that this can solve the Fermi paradox: we don't see alien civilizations because they have learned to solve complex computational problems by civilization-level quantum suicide, and thus disappeared from our view.

Because of Less Wrong, I am signed up for cryonics. In particular Eliezer's writings informed me that cryonics is available and affordable, from organizations that take it seriously.

The original reason I'm here is because Eliezer is an engaging essayist. I started reading the sequences and didn't stop until I was finished.

I've since noticed that I'm disappointed in other internet forums; they seem now muddled and sluggish-thinking by comparison. I don't know if I've become spoiled, or if I've justifiedly altered my rationality set-point, or if I'm becoming a narrow-minded crank. But LW seems to me to have that magic balance of intelligent people saying intelligent things, together with the ideas being presented in a clear, accessible fashion.

The atmosphere of cooperative truth-seeking, where it feels like ideas are taken seriously, there is a genuine effort to understand what others are saying, and frequent engagement with the least convenient world.

Also, awesome users like Eneasz for the HPMoR podcast, AdeleneDawner and PeerInfinity for the actually useful horoscopes, Vladimir Nesov and others for maintaining the wiki, Alicorn for her pony illustrations, jb55 and OneWhoFrogs for ebook versions of the sequences, BrandonReinhart for the examination of SIAI finances, and of course anyone who posts regularly. Since many of these kudos are for recent projects, I've sure I've left a lot out.

One thing that makes Less Wrong awesome for me is that it's helped me seriously reduce my politics habit. I have a lot of posts on the xkcd forums, and politics (and economics) is a major recurring theme of those posts. Once I started thinking strategically about my involvement in politics, I found the following question useful: what is the optimal level of effort to put into politics (i.e. where marginal benefit equals marginal cost)?

The result, of course, is that I should put almost zero effort into politics. I still focus heavily on economics, human psychology, and systems design because those are professionally relevant for me, but I try to avoid discussions that are essentially debates on identities, not math or facts.

I've noticed a number of benefits from this- I have more available time, I have happier hobbies (when I do get into political discussions these days, I will notice the physiological residue of anger, which I generally try to avoid), I don't waste money on political donations.

Offtopic: After glancing over the post title, I misread your nickname as Will_Awesome :)

On-Topic: What's awesome about LW for me? Thanks to LW, I now enjoy long stretches of very productive time, with little to no akrasia. So, my answer is Instrumental Rationality.

(I also suspect that LW has subconsciously improved my epistemic rationality as well, as I keep noticing nice little benefits here and there, but I've yet to bring this to the conscious level.)

I like Less Wrong because it is an easily accessible, rich source of original content on matters of interest to me - ethics, morality, rational decision making and general philosophy. Let me elaborate:

Easily accessible - most of Less Wrong is on a level which for me strikes a a sweet spot of being easy to understand and interesting

Rich - The topics here are valuable and manifold

Original content - importantly, the material on the site is for most part original writing (cf Hacker News)

I'd recommend striving to develop the "rich, original content" by cherishing dissent and controversy, provided these are well presented.

True creativity happens on the border of order and chaos (Italian proverb).

Where else on the internet are people willing to change their minds?

The idea and practice of instrumental rationality is the most important thing I've gained from the site. I used to be the typical smart, atheistic contrarian, who didn't see any point in trying particularly hard socially; now I'm consciously pursuing many promising avenues for improving my life and social skills, to aid in attaining my goals.

I've read for a while now, because LW is interesting. But I recently had a little bit of one-on-one interaction with AnnaSalamon, lukeprog and Carl_Shulman, and they're also just great people to interact with personally.

It seems that at least some of the people here are just plain really great people (in addition to being interesting).