s/goggle/google, presumably

I would love to be there, but I'm pretty sure I'll be out of town this weekend. Is there any way we could reschedule? If not, I'm happy to wait for the next one as well.

The most important relic of early humans is the modern mind.

-Steven Pinker

The idea of educational videos on "stock market basics" for amateurs strikes me as about equally sensible as having educational videos for amateurs on abdominal surgery. Unless of course these videos limit themselves to explaining the concept of weak EMH, but somehow I doubt it.

Not to be annoying (as I often have questions like this as well), but I've found that Google is remarkably helpful in answering those questions. In fact, I tried two of the example questions and the answers seemed very reasonable to me:

http://www.google.com/search?q=how+to+deposit+a+check

http://www.google.com/search?q=how+to+buy+stocks

I also use Google's suggestions (ie, by typing into Google Instant or Firefox search bar) to help phrase my question in the most common way, or to provide alternative related questions that might be more what I mean. For example, when typing "how to buy stocks" it suggested:

"how to buy stocks with out a broker"

"how to buy stocks online"

"how to buy stocks for beginners"

I figured out the non-existence of Santa Claus when I was about 5, I don't remember how. Someone posing as Santa visited a relative's Christmas party I was at and gave the children gifts and the local news in my city tracks "Santa's current location" on the weather radar periodically on Christmas Eve, which kind of made it a pink goo moment for me. I was angry and confused, but mostly kept this to myself. From this experience I concluded that my parents were not completely reliable and that society has a significant disrespect for children, although I did not make much use of this information until years later. I summary of my thoughts on child deception can be found here.

I'll be in town from the 24th of November to December 4th and am happy to meet other Pittsburgh aspiring rationalists. Actually I think I met you once before... you work at Google and I drove you to the Green Day concert? Or maybe I'm thinking of someone else.

We had a good turn-out and some interesting discussion at the meet-up tonight. Pittsburgh is a vibrant tech/university center, and I think LW meet-ups should occur here regularly. It's been suggested that future discussions should loosely center on a pre-determined topic, and I agree that this is a good idea. I invite anyone interested in planning further Pittsburgh meetings to PM me here, email me at mattduing at gmail dot com, or post on this thread.