An apology

It helps to think of the karma scores on individual comments as having a 2 point margin of error, especially if they're less than a day old.

A post's score shortly after posting isn't necessarily very meaningful. I'm not sure anyone but the downvoter can answer why the one person who voted first happened to vote it down.

Yes, that is precisely what I wish to do -- but, as I said, that is also going to take some patience and help from others and I have certainly, if unintentionally, abused my welcome.

I wouldn't worry about having abused your welcome. In fact, give the biases of the kind of people who are attracted to this place it would be damn near impossible to do so irredeemably. They tend to have a character trait that makes them absolute suckers for humility and apology. They also suck at holding grudges. And I do mean suck. As in, probably to a fault. If someone with a grudge against you saw you arguing with someone else and the other guy was using fallacies all around they would come vigorously to your defense and may accidentally forget their grudge in the process. This is a negative only in as much as it sucks balls as a social-politics strategy.

There is also (obviously) still a lot that I don't understand -- for example, this post quickly acquired a downvote in addition to your comment and I don't get why.

It did? Crazy. Some people just vote poorly. ;) If in doubt wait till the post/comment has been up for a day and see if it stays negative. Sometimes these things reverse themselves. If the comment/post stays negative then it does mean something (for better or for worse).

I think that talking about karma causes one to get less of it. On reddit (where the commenting/karma algorithms come from) it's quite different: "I know this'll be downvoted, but..." is guaranteed a few upvotes.

Perhaps because you say here:

I'll cool it on the top level posts.

Then you posted this a day later.

I confess that this reply doesn't clarify the matter at all for me. I haven't the faintest what "structures" you're referring to that are so particular to this specific community. I'm looking forward to seeing more detail if you do write the top-level post that has been suggested.

Even just saying to a newbie, "I know that you don't recognize this as help because you don't get it yet but could you please trust me that it is intended as help" would probably convince many more people to just look again rather than bailing

That's a really good point. Humans are particularly bad at communicating over that kind of inferential distance (see post by that name for jargon or infer from context - kinda means what you are saying). People who have been thinking from within one culture for a long time will often not even understand what their words will mean to someone who has not. This applies to university courses too. Looking back it doesn't seem like I learned anything that wasn't bloody obvious... until I look at the people who didn't have equivalent training.

You, having recently understood the culture in question, are in a perfect place to inform others. And it is best to do it now, before you forget why what you now know wasn't always obvious. And you will forget, given time.

This reply, with a little tinkering to target it specifically to the desired effect, would make a good post and I can imagine people referring to it frequently. People may still take it as an insult and leave in disgust.... but some may not.

Not helping. I still have no idea whether you actually changed your mind about anything. You say you did, but you didn't give any specific detail (explicit statements about the beliefs you changed; I don't expect you should've changed your mind so soon, for that matter). The change that's obvious is that you snapped out of adversarial mode, which is great (and in long term sufficient to start learning), but is generally unrelated to changes in what you believe.

For example, people in crackpot hubs can well agree with each other on all the contradicting and meaningless woo they generate, thus starting to agree with the community is generally not a sure sign of changing your mind.

Thanks for the long reply. My first experience with the site was to make a couple of comments which seemed "rational" to me at the time but were painfully (although not surprisingly) stupid in hindsight. The community told me, in a way that I now recognize as being as polite as possible, that I was being an idiot. At first I resisted, but after I started to dig into the site a little, it became clear to me that they were 100% right, and I deleted those early comments out of tremendous embarrassment. I say all this because it sounds like it might basically be the same experience you had, except that I came around more quickly.

I agree with most of your thoughts about the abundance of confusing local jargon, acceptance of strawmen, etc. It also might as well be explicitly laid out that everyone is expected to read all the sequences before they'll be taken seriously. Which understandably seems really stupid and unfair the first time one bumps into it, but it might as well be stated.

I guess what confused me about your post was that the karma system and the way it's used here has always made sense to me, so I'm not sure what about it you weren't expecting. But then, that's exactly why it would be great for you to write up the quickstart guide: Most of us can't see the flaws and hurdles in the system (and therefore, can't guide others around them) because we're already used to it.

So good luck with this. I'd put it on the wiki, and when it becomes mature enough see to it that it gets linked to in any future "Welcome to Less Wrong" posts (which seem to be where newcomers making boneheaded comments like I did inevitably get directed).