Review about the Rationality Meetup in Vienna on 23.08.2014
People who were there: Marko Thiel, Monika, Andreas, Matthias Brandner, Viliam Búr, Ivan, Manuel Moertelmaier, Pascal, Anna Leptikon, Marianna, Adelheid Gfrast, Jana and Austin Franzoni
We did the "open microphone" idea again and had our first meetup at Andreas' and Moni's place - thank you again for organizing it and all the food and drinks :)
Our (official) topics on Saturday were:
"money creation" by Andreas
"time" by Lea
"remembering and experiencing self" (Kahnemann) by Andreas
"money and happiness" by Matthias
We still have this open mic topics open:
absolute morality, antitheism, Esperanto, motivation hacker
We defined this topics for a full meetup in the future:
"Superintelligence" (Marko Thiel)
maybe Motivation Hacker? (Moni & me)
introduction and current research about happiness (me)
I collected this feedback ideas (from me and other people) during and after the meetup:
defining "homework" for the next meetup to have a better base for upcoming topics (like reading specific articles)
trying more settings in one meetup so it "feels like doing more" (for example going for a walk, changing sitting positions et cetera - we had the idea because of "remembering vs experiencing self")
before starting a specific discussion about a topic first thinking about which level of thinking is the best/most important one
after each topic or 30 "open mic" minutes -> thinking what this new information means for myself/how I can use it
If you had an interesting Less Wrong meetup recently, but don't have the time to write up a big report to post to Discussion, feel free to write a comment here. Even if it's just a couple lines about what you did and how people felt about it, it might encourage some people to attend meetups or start meetups in their area.
If you have the time, you can also describe what types of exercises you did, what worked and what didn't. This could help inspire meetups to try new things and improve themselves in various ways.
If you're inspired by what's posted below and want to organize a meetup, check out this page for some resources to get started! You can also check FrankAdamek's weekly post on meetups for the week.
Previous Meetup Report Thread: February 2014
Guidelines: Please post the meetup reports as top-level comments, and debate the specific meetup below its comment. Anything else goes under the "Meta" top-level comment. The title of this thread should be interpreted as "up to and including September 2014", which means feel free to post reports of meetups that happened in August, July, June, etc.