Hi—I’m new here—some questions
Hello everyone,
I’m new here, although I’ve read Less Wrong and Overcoming Bias on and off for the last few years. Anyways, I’m InquilineKea (or Simfish), and I have a website at http://simfishthoughts.wordpress.com/. I think about everything, so I feel that this might be the perfect community for me. I do have some questions though—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. Are there any terms of service/rules? Or are things just governed by upvotes/downvotes? (much like reddit)
Anyways, I’m an astronomy/physics/math major at the University of Washington (I got in through an early entrance program) and I’m planning on applying to astrophysics grad school fairly soon. However, I’m also intensely interested in complex adaptive systems and data mining, especially as they relate to the social sciences. I’m especially interested in Consilience and in trying to find trends behind every academic field (in fact, I do want to get to a graduate level of education in every natural and social science there is). I’m demographics junkie who literally pours over all the charts and tables of every demographic statistic I can find, although it sometimes ends up hurting my grades. My favorite blogs are Gene Expression, FuturePundit/ParaPundit, and Overcoming Bias. Which I’m sure a lot of people here read.
I always think in terms of maximizing “utility” and maximizing “efficiency”. So this leads me to do many untraditional things. For one thing, I have attention deficit disorder, so I realize that I frequently have to take untraditional approaches. The Internet has always been a savior for me because I can always stop and continue later when I feel like I’m about to zone out (in fact, those with ADD have a highly inconsistent learning rate). I also have an Asperger’s Syndrome diagnosis, although I’ve recently tried to stop using it as an excuse for my behavior (in fact, I now only fit the bare minimum of “Aspie” criteria on the DSM IV, but I still think that it strongly influences my interests and behavior). I also consistently think of what’s most rational—which means that I have to respect the desires that evolution has given me. Sometimes, people think that maximizing “utility” means maximizing “self-interest”, but the amazing thing is that evolution has made people happier whenever they help others (for whatever reason), since “happiness” tends to asymptote with increased wealth/self-gratification/etc. So as a result, people are actually happiest when they’re socially interconnected. Although I sometimes bemoan this fact since I often feel that people don’t understand me (I’m trying to move beyond my neuroticism/anger stemming from a half-decade of social rejection, but it still affects me now). I also practice calorie restriction + vegetarianism, not just to maximize my chances of living longer, but also because I want to reduce the decline of fluid IQ with increasing age.
Due to my conditions, though, I’ve never felt like I was in any comfort zone, which has perhaps forced me to try every possible approach that might make my life easier. I often start out with irrational approaches, but end up taking the approach that I perceive as most rational for myself. Of course, the sustainability of the action matters too (I realize that it might be utility-maximizing for me to exercise, for example, but I don’t exercise right now because I can’t trust myself to be consistent with exercising, at least while I’m still in school).
Anyways, I can talk a lot more. I love to overanalyze things. 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 (although I don’t really have a place to post all my hypotheses, since I’ve been flamed many times for it [most people consider my posts tl;dr, and they also make fun of my autism]. And few people reply to my ideas precisely because I tend to study esoteric fields that they don’t care about, but also because I still haven’t found a forum where people actually respect ideas [even reddit and Physics Forums can be particularly cruel].)
Compared to most people, I tend to hit on correct ideas with lower accuracy (which inevitably results in people getting impatient with me/flaming me). But I do believe that it’s easiest for me to form the best ideas when I post them when undeveloped (that way, sometimes, my shame at being wrong can actually motivate me to correct my ideas more quickly—this is why I frequently edit after posting—I have problems with alertness, so the adrenaline rush from being wrong can actually motivate me to finish things in less time). I consider time as the most important resource in the world, as the amount of material I could possibly learn is definitely worth thousands of lifetimes. And eventually, I do hit on some good ideas. In a sense, it’s like generating variation and selecting the best results out of such variation (sort of like evolution, albeit less blind). This is why I’m also intensely interested in genetic algorithms and data mining, since they tend to operate through somewhat similar mechanisms (this is also why I love the fourth paradigm so much). I’m extremely extremely open about myself and share virtually everything I do (although I generally don’t share when I believe that such sharing could lead to social rejection, so this usually makes me keep to myself). But yes, I explore *many* ideas and *many* topics precisely because I want to find the topic that would maximize my talent/productivity (it’s hard due to my ADD, but it might result in a global maxima whereas others might stick with local maxima). Anyways, my only goal is to be interesting to other people (and to avoid taking on a job that might suppress my talents, so I really do want to go onto academia).
Of course, I will always have to find creative ways to make others feel happy. E.g. I can often come off as self-centered, and others will often have to be patient for me since I may not have the attention span to go through something in one go. But at the same time, I’m not in a comfortable situation, so if I find an opportunity I may never have again, I will recognize it for what it is and I’ll try to do everything I can to achieve it (which may require patience from other people, but I’ll really try not to disappoint them since I know the real consequences of it). In any case, I’m intensely interested in how people learn (and how people ideally learn), since my own difficulties with ADD have forced me to take untraditional routes (and in fact, there may be others who do best through the nontraditional route).
Anyways, I like this place precisely because it allows people to comment with the same username (so that we can track our old posts and those of people we’re interested in). I also have a facebook (http://www.facebook.com/simfish) and a google buzz profile (http://www.google.com/profiles/simfish). I generally keep everything about myself very public (to maximize the chances that some like-minded person might find me), although I may have to private them when I apply to grad schools. I’d really like to contribute to discussions, although I feel that I don’t have much to say right now, so I read more than comment.
My biggest irrationality is social anxiety/rejection anxiety because I’ve been flamed/rejected numerous times, so I’m scared of people. Other than that, though, I can be very rational.
So if you can relate, please comment. Or if you just want to share some ideas or add some comments. In any case, I do believe that rationality means acknowledging our human emotions (and in knowing that efficiency can be maximized when we do things in accordance to our emotions). Of course, these emotions can be corrected in many cases (I do think that anger is highly irrational in many cases, for example). I like the Internet a lot because it archives everything, so I can always revisit my old ideas simply by searching through them (whereas ideas communicated verbally cannot be searched, and easily get lost to the dust of memory).Anyways, a “search through someone’s old posts” feature is very useful here, since it makes it easier for people to identify similar minds (which can be important if people are very specialized)
I’m extremely impressed with how knowledgeable and interdisciplinary many of you are—I seem to know so much less than most of you, even though I seem to be far more interdisciplinary than everyone else I know.
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.
Okay good points there. Maybe we could make a feature for personal blogs on this site? (I know some forums let users have their own blogs on the forum). I know people can see each other’s blogs through blog URLs, but not a lot of people use those features.
I would guess that many people make use of that feature. I know I do. However, I don’t look at the blogs of everyone I run into here. Only the people who consistently impress me with their analysis, insight, and focus on topics that interest me.
Still though, what if I wanted to, say, ask a short question to the community? (or what if I wanted to ask multiple short questions?)
One question I’m especially dying to ask: How do people respond when they learn that you’re interested in being very rational? This question is especially important since many people think they’re more rational than they really are. And also since they might accuse self-labeled rationals as “arrogant”.
Another thing: I wish there was a way for lesswrong people to post links and discuss them (but aren’t prominent enough to be in the discussion session). We might be able to post links to several news articles a day (it’s a way to learn from each other, since we could get each other’s perspective on a particular link).
Short questions are fine. It’s the long rambling comments that will annoy people and earn you downvotes.
For multiple short questions, put them all in one thread.
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).
I get the feeling that rule was created as a way to explain/rationalize to people who post many cranky comments what they’re doing wrong without getting into big arguments attempting to explain to them what’s wrong with their posts.
In any case I’ve certainly had three or more posts in the recent comments (I tend to post in batches) without anyone complaining, or probably even noticing.
Anything wrong with that?
Sure LW is about becoming less wrong but I have a feeling that the tempo and mode of correction is somewhat incompatible with what would be needed to correct the above.
Me too.
The issue is surely the proportion of posts (especially on a given thread) one person is producing, and in the old days the denominator was much lower.
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:
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.
Hello, thanks very much for your post! I really appreciate it.
“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”
Ah yes, I definitely agree about that. Hence why I (and many others) am hesitant to post (the other thing is that no one seems to post in threads more than a month old, so there isn’t much I can post on). I know someone suggested the idea of subreddits some time ago, but we instead went with tags. But that just means that all the threads will go on a particular front page.
“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.”
Okay, very good points there. Yeah, I generally self-critique my own ideas (and frequently edit them without input). My main idea in putting everything online, in any case, was that someone (with time) could probably find me and email me (I’ve emailed other people who ended up not replying to my emails, so I ended up making everything public).
The “recent comments” feature (separate for discussion and main blog, but unfortunately not available for individual posts or comment threads) means that comments on old posts have a chance of being noticed.
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.
I somewhat disagree, but it depends on how much a “flood” we’re talking. Too many bad posts by a poster would be annoying and counterproductive because the poster would obviously not be taking the time to learn from their mistakes. However, the fastest way to become disabused of buggy thinking is to post it in public. That might annoy some who want to read only “high-quality” thoughts, but who cares? Those people can downvote and move along. A necessary prerequisite to becoming Less Wrong is to first be wrong, and to then realize that you are wrong. It seems to me that the discussion section is exactly the place where this process should occur.
Ah yes, good points there. Yeah, it really depends on the ratio of newcomers to oldcomers. Oldcomers get annoyed when they have to answer the same questions over and over again. Of course, they could just downvote and move along (in fact, it usually doesn’t cost much effort to do that). But for some reason, they get annoyed (it might even be irrational to get annoyed so easily, but lots of people believe that it’s hard not to get annoyed—and they often justify their annoyance).
And then the poster makes another post complaining about being downvoted. And when that one gets downvoted he accuses everyone of groupthink. Then it gets really nasty.
It my sound like I’m exaggerating, but this has already played out twice in the past two weeks.
why don’t we have an IRC channel or something anyway? or did I just miss it?
We do.
That would be useful—although it’s hard to use for thoughtful posts. Maybe we could just create an informal forum within the site? (one that doesn’t require or expect posts to fit an implicit standard).
I think this IS the informal forum. If it were much less formal than this I wouldn’t bother perusing the quantity of posts I’d expect to find there.
IRC isn’t for thoughtful posts, it’s for realtime discussion, and it’s pretty good at that. :)
We regularly have open threads, which kind of fit that purpose.
This discussion section is somewhat new, and aims at replacing / completing the open threads (which aren’t very user-friendly).
Hey, thanks for the welcome! I like your suggestion about the blog idea. Yeah, I generally don’t write this long—I just felt like I had to write this long for my intro post.
“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.”
Ah nice. I’ll look you up (although the same is true for me, at least while I’m still in undergrad).
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.
Good point there (I think it’s sort of a travesty that people can be hostile to newcomers—it seems to happen on every forum). How to find on a compromise—I don’t know, although I did make a few suggestions.
In this case, I don’t think they think they’re being hostile—I’ve seen a lot of talk about how to make the site more accessible to new people. They are, perhaps, trying to preserve the SNR or save the newbie from making obvious mistakes. But as the previous commenter noted, mistakes are a great way to learn.
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).
Oh nice, I’m happy to know that someone else here went to UW!
Yeah, I just have a lot of ideas so I’m afraid to flood the discussion forum (even one idea per day might do it). I do have a blog though (as mentioned above).
Also Shalmanese.
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?
Hey, I appreciate your post a lot. Yes, true, I agree on the additional motivation.
On exercise, it is true that exercising consistently might make me better at exercising consistently. But unfortunately (from all my other non-exercise habits), I know that I’m bad at maintaining a routine every day (especially in the light of lots of schoolwork) so I’ve figured out that I’m better off not trying for now (actually it seems that mid-life exercise is more important than early-life exercise for preventing sarcopenia/muscle wasting).
Taleb on the advantages of irregular eating and exercising.
Hmmm. This does seem based on self-experimentation, unfortunately. To which research is Taleb referring to?
I don’t know what his research sources are.
I find his evolutionary arguments plausible, though I think there may have been some long distance running (not at marathon pace) for transportation and/or cursorial hunting in ancestral environments.
His approach seems like a reasonable experiment—plausible, not especially dangerous. The idea that a regular schedule for food and exercise is better seems like an unexamined fairly modern assumption.
This is certainly interesting, but I’ll wait for more studies before I try any of this on myself, since parts of Taleb’s approach are a bit dangerous, including improper sleep duration and prolonged periods of physical inactivity. Risk-benefit analyses of fasting and infrequent intense exercise are also inconclusive at present.
I’m not sure if he meant prolonged periods of no exercise at all, or (as I suspect) prolonged periods of nothing more intense than long leisurely walks.
Hmmm. Good point. I’d still be careful with sleep duration, though.
Actually, this post explains what I’m attempting to express on the subject of exercise more eloquently than I do.
Ah. I understand that time management is a problem, but I wouldn’t give up just yet. Try exercising one day a week, then moving on to two, etc., as opposed to starting off exercising every day without fail (of course, even with an optimal exercise routine, rest days are still important). What I mean by practicing consistent exercise is starting from the bottom, not starting from the top. As a perfectionist I find this difficult, but it’s generally easier than starting with a perfect habit from scratch. Also, if you are bad at maintaining a regular routine, don’t forget to tsuyoku naritai.
I’m usually bad at maintaining routines as well, but have trained myself up to engaging in aerobic exercise approximately 4-5 times a week, mostly for the anxiety and depression-reducing effects, since the improvement in mental health more than makes up for the time used in exercising. Don’t forget to factor your own issues with anxiety into your aerobic exercise cost/benefit analysis. However, I currently don’t have time for anaerobic exercise, which is not as important but still useful. I have time management issues, myself.
Oh okay, good ideas (and nice references). Yeah, I should try that sometime.
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.
In general, upvotes indicate that somebody wants more of whatever it was, downvotes indicate somebody wants less of it. So if you’re not getting downvoted and nobody’s giving you flak, you’re fine.
Other than that, there’s not exactly an etiquette consensus. (Actually, even that much isn’t reliable; some people seem to use upvotes/downvotes to indicate agreement/disagreement instead. But they’re wrong.)
Editing history is annoying; I’d rather you not do it. Adding “EDIT: Oops; that was a major reasoning flaw” or whatever while leaving the original comment’s logic there to be read is AFAIC preferable.
Minimizing clutter is a local value, so pure “Thanks” comments probably won’t make you many friends, though it’s not a big deal either way.
The evidence suggests that LessWrongians especially want more jokes.
Yeah, and a lot more discussion of Harry Potter fanfic.
(shrug) Revealed preferences are what they are, not what we necessarily would like them to be.
Mostly agree. One note: Thanks comments that are thanking for information or arguments that causes an update of your pre-existing viewpoint are generally regarded as a good thing.
Agreed.
I would generalize this, though: signaling that I’ve willingly updated probability estimates based on new input is a (local) Good Thing, especially when it involves repudiating beliefs I previously held (rather than just marginal changes to my confidence level), whether I do it in thanks-comments or elsewhere.
Thanks.
The first; a top level post is the article itself. Unless it has been changed recently, making a top level post in the main section takes 20 karma, while making a top level post in the discussion section is something anyone can do.
Like TheOtherDave, I would prefer posts not be edited such that previous information was lost. You can write something like “EDIT: pointed out below that my argument is flawed because. of ” or “ETA: My argument is flawed because of , as made me aware of” at the end or beginning of your comment, or right before or after the section that is most adequate (use italics if you fear creating confusion between the edit and the rest of the post).
So long as you are editing your post in response to someone else, adding a small note of gratitude there seems most appropriate.
It is what you get when you click the “Add new article” button at the top right and well, yeah, it is an article itself. The privilege you need to post one is about 50 karma. Maybe 30. (Or, technically, be an SIAI donor and ask someone. But that happened only once and he was downvoted to oblivion.)
Make a post if you think you have something significant to say. This is the discussion section, not the main page so the standards aren’t particularly high.
Top level comment means the top level that’s a comment, so yes it is a reply to an article (as opposed to another comment). No particular privilege required AFAIK.