I'm not sure. It wasn't an event he had planned for.

ToK was my favorite class in high school, thanks to having an amazing teacher, one of two teachers in the school to complete a Ph. D. I've heard it said that, if you put Michael Vassar in an empt concrete room, he would soon start pontificating on the influence of the Enlightenment on putting people in empty rooms. I think the same is true of this guy.

We read parts of Man is the Measure and a 60s philosophy textbook , discussed the nature of causality, picked apart Max Weber's Verstehen argument, and reflected on the panopticon. We then did segments on each area of knowledge, with lively debates, discussions, and presentations.

It's still the case that ToK was subservient to our other classes. In March, the class turned into time to polish our Extended Essays (the 4000 word paper required of all candidates), some class time was spent starting a yearly tradition of painting the wall with the names of the candidates, and we had a party in place of a winter final.

I wanted to jump in and say that I liked ToK purely for the social bonding rather than the learning, and that the material covered was rather disjoint from LessWrong, but upon reflection, neither is true. My opinion on suburbia has been permanently altered from discussion of a documentary on Levittown, and it was in ToK that "utilon" became a regular part of my vocabulary. I actually became a reader of what was then Overcoming Bias while taking ToK, in part because I saw words like "ontology" and got the warm feelings from its association with ToK. I shared a few OB articles with my ToK teacher; he got a huge kick out of reading about phlogiston theory.

In summary: There are a lot of ways to make ToK good, and some of them don't look like LessWrong.

My tendency is to assume that the homeless man would steal the $1000 via violent means, whereas the hedge fund manager would steal the $1 million using nonviolent deception. In addition to a belief that violent crime is actually worse, there is also the bias that it is easier to visualize. A homeless man stealing $1000 looks like a man pointing a gun at a cashier. A hedge fund manager stealing $1 million looks like a guy at a computer with a spreadsheet open.

Of course, I work at a hedge fund manager right now, so I have additional biases.

In general I like this idea, although this feels a little weirder to me as a way to start a conversation with a random person I don't know. And not just in a "people don't normally talk like that" way, but a "people don't normally talk like that and therefore this guy smells fishy to me.... why is he suddenly talking to me about this guy he was interviewing?"

I'm curious how varying the "opener" will affect the responses. Here are a few off the top of my head:

Opener #1: "Hey, what would you think of someone who calls themselves a rationalist? I was interviewing this guy the other day, and I asked him what words he'd use to describe himself, and that was the first thing out of his mouth. I've never heard that response before, and don't know what to think."

Opener #2: "Hey, so, I met this guy the other day, and he was going on and on about how he was a huge rationalist. That's not really something I've seen anyone do. What would you make of someone like that?"

Opener #3: "So, I have a friend who's thinking about joining/starting a 'Rationality Club.' I don't really know what to say about that, other than that it sounds a bit [pause] unique. What kind of people would you expect at a 'Rationality club?'"

These are designed to do several things. First, by describing a specific incident, it puts them in near mode, and gets them to imagine what they'd actually think. Second, they have a livelier and more conversational phrasing, which should help in getting people to open up. Third, by distancing yourself from the label, it makes them free to not be polite to the word.

These are completely untested, though I might give them a try tonight.

Good luck with this! If you actually meant May, I might be able to come.

The Wayback Machine might have it.

Does the record of the debate still exist? For various reasons, I wouldn't spend time advocating eugenics, but I don't think there's much of a biological argument against it.

When I was 12, I, in my infinite wisdom, decided that eugenics was necessary to save humanity, and went online to debate my belief, where I was promptly defeated by a biologist who knew what he was talking about.

It took me a while to admit to being wrong, and I never did so publicly. Instead, I kept trying to patch the holes in my position, even as they were being exposed at an incredible rate.

Nonetheless, I regard this experience as formative in becoming a rationalist. "Planting the seed of rationality" may be successful, but you will often never have the satisfaction of knowing when it works.

Richard Feynman gives many examples in his famous essay "Cargo Cult Science": http://www.lhup.edu/~DSIMANEK/cargocul.htm .Significant discoveries have small p-values, so clearly, if you do something and run some numbers and a small value pops up, your experiment is significant, right?