I think the Sequences got everything right

That is quite a bit of conjunction you've got going on there. Rather extraordinary if it is true, I've yet to see appropriately compelling evidence of this. Based on what evidence I do see I think the sequences, at least the ones I've read so far, are probably "mostly right", interesting and perhaps marginally useful to very peculiar kinds of people for ordering their lives.

I also think the sequences are badly-organized and you should just read them chronologically instead of trying to lump them into categories and sub-categories, but I digress.

I think I agree with this.

I stand by the sequences. When I first found them, I knew that they were/are the single most comprehensive treatment of epistemic thinking that I was going to encounter anywhere.

Typo: Next, let B be the event "X=??11", so P(B)=2 -2 ., and recall that A is the event "X=??11"., A should be X=111?

I'm coming. Wouldn't miss it for the world. I'm probably bringing my best friend along, who is a strong christian and consciously engages in self-delusion in order to avoid dark spots and stay productive. He can say some very useful things about personal finance, but mostly I just want to see what kind of effect this has on him.

This story is not true. Bannister broke 4:00 in May of 1954. The next person to do it was John Landy 46 days later. Bannister's training partner Chris Chataway did it the next year, as did another British runner. However, I think Bannister and Landy were the only two to do it in 1954. The first American to do it was Don Bowden in 1957.

I found a list for the US here Also a master list of many runners, but difficult to parse.

There were three runners close to the sub-four mile in the early 50's. The other two were Wes Santee and John Landy. They didn't race each other while trying to break 4:00 because Santee was American, Bannister British, Landy Australian.

According to Neil Bascomb's The Perfect Mile, the race to sub-4 was highly publicized, and most people believed that it could in fact be done. There are some quotes from Landy saying that 4:00 was an unbreakable wall, but I believe these were mostly comments from him in dejection after early failures to beat the mark.

Bannister also wrote a memoir about running sub-4. I do not remember the flea story from it. Google books doesn't return any hits in that book for the word "flea"

Wikipedia says:

The claim that a 4-minute mile was once thought to be impossible by informed observers was and is a widely propagated myth created by sportswriters and debunked by Bannister himself in his memoir, The Four Minute Mile (1955). The reason the myth took hold was that four minutes was a nice round number which was slightly better (1.4 seconds) than the world record for nine years, longer than it probably otherwise would have been because of the effect of World War II in interrupting athletic progress in the combatant countries. The Swedish runners Gunder Hägg and Arne Andersson, in a series of head-to-head races in the period 1942-45, had already lowered the world mile record by 5 seconds to the pre-Bannister record. (See Mile run world record progression.) What is still impressive to knowledgeable track fans is that Bannister ran a four-minute mile on very low-mileage training by modern standards.

The stuff about centuries of buildup and ancient Greece is absurd. In ancient Greece they did not use the mile to measure, and measurements and timekeeping were not accurate enough for this anyway. Wikipedia lists mile records only back to 1855.

When taming a baby elephant, its trainer will chain one of its legs to a post. When the elephant tries to run away, the chain and the post are strong enough to keep it in place. But when the elephant grows up, it is strong enough to break the chain or uproot the post. Yet the owner can still secure the elephant with the same chain and post, because the elephant has been conditioned to believe it cannot break free. It feels the tug of the chain and gives up — a kind of learned helplessness. The elephant acts as if it thinks the chain's limiting power is intrinsic to nature rather than dependent on a causal factor that held for years but holds no longer.

This is such an excellent allegory that I do need to ask whether there's a citation. I googled briefly and only found motivational texts and discussions of the morality of chaining elephants in circuses.

I've been pretty excited to meet other LessWrongians for a while. Most "rationalists" in my life are so on a strictly titular level, though many of them are otherwise bright. Since I'm in Camden county I'm more or less restricted to the Philly area and I'm glad meetups are starting again. The biggest problem is that I work out of town every weekend and probably won't be able to attend any of them unless I get enough notice to request time off. I'm serious about this and would gladly eschew work responsibilities for a LW workshop. Otherwise, what is the likelihood of a meetup being planned for a Tuesday or Wednesday?