Thanks to everyone who attended!
For the next meetup we should probably think of discussion topics in advance. Risto asked about the concrete benefits of having read Less Wrong. At least I feel that I wasn't able to articulate a satisfactory answer, so that might be one topic for next time. Since most of us were quite young, another thing that comes to mind is optimal career or study choices.
Sounds good! Are there any specific topics to discuss, or maybe someone who would like to present something?
I didn't have any specific topics in mind when proposing the meetup. Since this is the first Helsinki meetup, I think it might be a good idea to start with something like rationalist origin stories to get the discussion started.
Riga reporting. Will the meetup be in English?
I wouldn't expect that having the meetup in English would be a problem for most of the prospective participants.
According to these statistics, Helsinki has the eighth largest population of LW-readers out of all the cities in the world. Even if that number is for some reason bloated compared to other cities in the list, I think it'd be a good idea to try and have a meet-up here. So, is anyone else from around Helsinki interested? A couple of answers in this thread should be enough for us to settle on a date (I prefer a weekend in March) and post an announcement on the front page.
Judging from the comments, I guess we can fix the date of the meet as Saturday 5th of March. Any suggestions for a place? I'd think a not-too-noisy cafe in the center would be ideal, but I don't really know the options to recommend any. Just to provide a default suggestion in case nobody has a preference, let's say we meet at Cafe Aalto.
According to these statistics, Helsinki has the eighth largest population of LW-readers out of all the cities in the world. Even if that number is for some reason bloated compared to other cities in the list, I think it'd be a good idea to try and have a meet-up here. So, is anyone else from around Helsinki interested? A couple of answers in this thread should be enough for us to settle on a date (I prefer a weekend in March) and post an announcement on the front page.
Especially, infinity is not mysterious.
It should be obvious that infinity (like all things) is not inherently mysterious, and equally obvious that it's mysterious (if not unknown) to most people.
Infinity is mysterious was intended as a paraphrase of Jaynes' chapter on "paradoxes" of probability theory, and I intended mysterious precisely in the sense of inherently mysterious. As far as I know, Jaynes didn't use the word mysterious himself. But he certainly claims that rules of reasoning about infinity (which he conveniently ignores) are not to be trusted and that they lead to paradoxes.
So I finally picked up a copy of Probability Theory: The Logic of Science, by E.T. Jaynes. It's pretty intimidating and technical, but I was surprised how much prose there is, which makes it surprisingly palatable. We should recommend this more here on Less Wrong.
Just remember that Jaynes was not a mathematician and many of his claims about pure mathematics (as opposed to computations and their applications) in the book are wrong. Especially, infinity is not mysterious.
Yep, except that I'm saying that virtually all fields have gone badly enough wrong for old books to be useful.
Do you have any specific examples in mind, or is this an expression of the general idea that the academia is mad?
My impression from reading the emails is that different standards are being applied to the AGW skeptics because of their conclusions rather than because of their methods. At the same time there is evidence of data massaging and dubious practices around their own methods in order to match their pre-conceived conclusions. The whole process does not look like the disinterested search for truth that is the scientific ideal.
My P(B|E) would be higher if I read emails that seemed to focus on methodological errors first rather than proceeding from the fact that a journal has published unwelcome conclusions to the proposal that the journal must be boycotted.
Would you expect to see evolutionary biologists discuss the methodological errors of creationist arguments in private correspondence?
(I don't think this is the place for this, since I don't think we're getting anywhere.)
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This post inspires me. I'll definitely keep this in mind when considering the next meetup in Helsinki.
(Unfortunately for organizing meetups, I'll be traveling until August. I hope my motivation won't have subsided when I come back.)