with 'baseline' being the ability that our culture expects people to be at.
Careful - this is a chimera. That many cultural standards are plausible but not actually possible standards set by advertising to keep people spending money is a cliche because it was true first. So that's a phrase to taboo to dust. Do you have a detailed list?
Hm, you're right. For physical ability, how about what the military considers barely acceptable? I'm fairly sure those records will be easy to find.
For social ability, feeling at ease in common social situations, and the ability to handle a real conversation. Possibly also how to handle exotic bad situations like dealing with crisis victims, or suicidal people. I'm not sure whether basic dancing should go here or in the physical pile. Public speaking and debate might go here or in the strategy pile.
For strategy, game theory and anger management. I'm ...
Apologies for the wasted time spent reading and replying to this post. Please disregard it.
I've been feeling non-awesome for a long time. I don't know if anyone else here feels the same way, but I'm going to assume that at least a few people do. I want to correct this horrible deficiency.
We already have the LW meetups in a lot of places, monthly in some places and weekly in others. I've gone to a few, and they're interesting and I get to meet a lot of very smart people (and get intimidated by them)... but mostly all we've done is talk and sometimes go and eat at a restaurant. I want more than this!
We already talk, we need an action-based meetup. I want to propose another kind of meetup, the Insufficiently Awesome meetup. It should aim to make us good at baseline things like fitness, social skills, strategy, and reflexes, and to make us very good at specialized awesome things like master-level chess/go/shogi, public speaking, various sports, dancing, making music, making art.
I think this meetup should be daily, though not everyone would want to go every day. Nonetheless, we should have something happening every day that we're not spending talking. The goal shouldn't be just to be fit in different situations, but to instead become totally awesome.
Is there anyone else that feels the same? If so, what things do you think we need to learn for the baseline, and what things should we get very good at?