Insufficiently Awesome
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?
Yes, I'm aware of this. I didn't mis-parse his statement, I know what he meant, and what his example of a norm was supposed to provoke in me. It doesn't matter.
The subject matter of the posts that led to me posting this article and my memories apparently affect me more than I had thought they would, which in its own way shows that I am indeed an inferior rationalist. Truth is truth, and denying it does no one any good.
From now on I'll just concern myself with the local group here, or not, depending on what happens over the next few weeks. In any case, I can let this account lie fallow or delete it. Which would disrupt the chain of comments less?
edit - I do apologize for how you have ended up feeling, as that was an unintended consequence.