Discussion article for the meetup : Irvine Meetup Wednesday July 27

Discussion article for the meetup : Irvine Meetup Wednesday July 27

Discussion article for the meetup : Irvine Meetup Wednesday July 20

Discussion article for the meetup : Irvine Meetup Wednesday July 20

Discussion article for the meetup : Irvine Meetup Wednesday July 13

Discussion article for the meetup : Irvine Meetup Wednesday July 13

Discussion article for the meetup : Irvine Meetup Wednesday July 6

Discussion article for the meetup : Irvine Meetup Wednesday July 6

Discussion article for the meetup : Irvine Meetup Wednesday June 29

Discussion article for the meetup : Irvine Meetup Wednesday June 29

There are some adjustments to the weekly meetups in Irvine:

The meetup for June 15th is cancelled because the regular attendees are on vacation that week.

The following week, the meetup will be Tuesday June 21, instead of Wednesday. We expect special guests Alicorn and Yvain to attend.

Normal weekly meetups on Wednesdays will resume on June 29th.

All meetups are from 6:00 to 8:00¹ at the outdoor food court near the UCI Campus, at Campus and Bridge. Look for me with sign showing a diagram of a naive neural classifier of bleggs and rubes.

To see all scheduled meetups in Southern California, see the calendar. To get announcements by email, join the email group.

1. The end time is very soft. Once as we got up to leave around 11:20, someone remarked "This is how we do 6 to 8."

Southern California is about to have a lot more meetups. To get the ramp up started, there will be a meet up at this IHOP across the street from John Wayne Airport in Irvine, on Saturday May 21 from 2:00 to 8:00. We will likely be at the upstairs table, but just tell them you are with the Less Wrong meetup and they will point you in the right direction. This should become a monthly meetup, hopefully one of several monthly meetups held on different weekends of the month in different cities in Southern California.

We are also starting weekly meetups in Irvine. These will be Wednesday evenings from 6:00 to 8:00, starting May 18, at the outdoor food court near the UCI Campus, at Campus and Bridge. Look for me with sign showing a diagram of a naive neural classifier of bleggs and rubes.

Management noticed that certain software testers were 10 to 20 percent better at finding defects than their peers. By putting these people on the same team, they reasoned, they could form a group that would be 10 or 20 percent more effective and then put the team to work testing the most critical system components.

It didn't turn out that way.

The individuals who made up the team were not exceptionally intelligent or talented, but they all enjoyed testing software and were better than average at it. When these like minded individuals were assembled, they they spent their working hours, lunches and sometimes free time collaborating on how to better find software defects.

Soon the members of team were twice and then dozens of times more effective than their peers, and they began to view their jobs not as testing software, but as breaking software. Team members took a well-deserved pride in their abilities and began to cultivate an image of villainous destroyers. As a group, they began coming to work dressed in black and took to calling themselves "The Black Team."

From The Black Team. (Hat tip to Adam "ata" Atlas and Mike Blume.)

At a recent meetup, we tried having a structured discussion in which we would all choose to talk about a belief that influences our behavior, talk about something we protect, or talk about a mistake we once made and have corrected. And it seemed that people thought it would require exceptional bravery to choose to talk about one's mistake. Elsewhere on Less Wrong, people are concerned about retaining the ability to edit a comment expressing a position they later reconsider and think is wrong.

My first reaction to all of this is that we need a group norm so that it doesn't require bravery to admit a mistake, or to leave a record of previously held positions. My second reaction is that we do in fact have such a norm. Comments expressing a change in position, that accept counter arguments and refutations, get up voted. Old comments reflecting the old wrong position are generally not down voted for being wrong. The problem is not how we treat people that make mistakes, but that people have inaccurate anticipations of how we will react.

So, to everyone who is worried about this, I want to say: It's OK. You can admit your mistakes. You can make a mistake and change your mind. We, the community, will applaud your growth, celebrate your new strength, and leave your mistake in the past where it belongs.