Weekly LW Meetups: Atlanta, Austin, Berlin, Brussels, Cambridge MA, Cincinnati, Durham, Vancouver, Washington DC

0 FrankAdamek 26 April 2013 07:11PM

This summary was posted to LW Main on April 19th. The following week's summary is here.

There are upcoming irregularly scheduled Less Wrong meetups in:

The following meetups take place in cities with regularly scheduled meetups, but involve a change in time or location, special meeting content, or simply a helpful reminder about the meetup:

Locations with regularly scheduled meetups: Austin, Berkeley, Cambridge, MA, Cambridge UK, Madison WI, Melbourne, Mountain View, New York, Ohio, Oxford, Portland, Salt Lake City, Seattle, Toronto, Waterloo, and West Los Angeles. There's also a 24/7 online study hall for coworking LWers.

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Weekly LW Meetups: Atlanta, London, Moscow, Vienna

0 FrankAdamek 19 April 2013 03:14PM

This summary was posted to LW main on April 12th. The following week's summary is here.

There are upcoming irregularly scheduled Less Wrong meetups in:

The following meetups take place in cities with regularly scheduled meetups, but involve a change in time or location, special meeting content, or simply a helpful reminder about the meetup:

  • None this week!

Locations with regularly scheduled meetups: Austin, Berkeley, Cambridge, MA, Cambridge UK, Madison WI, Melbourne, Mountain View, New York, Ohio, Oxford, Portland, Salt Lake City, Seattle, Toronto, Waterloo, and West Los Angeles.

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A corpus of our community's knowledge

8 infotropism 18 March 2009 08:18PM

The purpose of this site is to help building a rationalist community, and helping individuals to fulfill their potential in that domain.

We have a lot of discussions going on, and a lot of material is being, and going to be, generated. At some point it may become difficult for any single individual to follow all of it. Even taking the karma system into account, interesting contributions may be missed by any particular individual. Furthermore, the sum of what would be elaborated upon here would not be as concise or even easily available as it could be wished to be.

To the point : would it be a good idea to try to summarize the most important, relevant ideas upon which we will be building our edifice ? So that a future student of rationality can come upon a concise, easy to digest introduction to our results and ideas, so that less active members can still manage to follow this ongoing process too ?

If so, how would we proceed ? What is being discussed here may not have the quality we'd expect of, say, a scientific publication, though I think that such a quality would be necessary, if even sufficient, for what would eventually become our own corpus of knowledge. How would we elaborate, layer upon layer of work and discussions ? A starting point would be to refer to, or summarize the relevant, existing scientific results that we would lay our base upon. We'd then move on to summarizing our most important achievements, however that word is to be taken, seamlessly upon that foundation.

Any thought on how or whether to organize this?

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Comments for "Rationality"

2 Eliezer_Yudkowsky 16 March 2009 10:34PM

I wrote an Admin page for "What do we mean by 'Rationality'?" since this has risen to the status of a FAQ.  Comments can go here.

Comments (38)

Wanted: Python open source volunteers

13 Eliezer_Yudkowsky 11 March 2009 04:59AM

Less Wrong is a fork of the open Reddit codebase, written in Python.  Less Wrong's code is online at Github (look in r2/r2 for the meat), the issues tracker is at code.google.com.  See Contributing to Less Wrong for a gentle introduction to getting started.

According to Reddit's blog, we are the coolest use of reddit source code they've seen!  But we've still got a long way to go before we're as cool as we want to be.

If anyone out there is fluent in Python and willing to donate a noticeable amount of time to a good cause, an extra hand or two might help us implement many Less Wrong features a lot sooner.

The Reddit codebase does not have unit tests or a whole lot of documentation.  Contributors need to be able to wade through Reddit's code to grok it, and write unit tests for what they do (or better yet, write unit tests for existing code).

Items on the issues tracker marked "Contributions-Welcome" are those that look relatively easy to contribute.  Items marked "Contributions-LeaveItToUs" are those that look big and complicated, or that Tricycle (the main developers) have strong opinions about how to design and implement.  You could hack the big ones, but the developers might need to spend time talking to you - so please don't step up unless you're fluent in Python, have the necessary time, and are serious about it.

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That You'd Tell All Your Friends

8 Eliezer_Yudkowsky 01 March 2009 12:04PM

Followup to:  The Most Frequently Useful Thing

What's the number one thing that goes into a book on rationality, which would make you buy a copy of that book for a friend?  We can, of course, talk about all the ways that the rationality of the Distant World At Large needs to be improved.  But in this case - I think the more useful data might be the Near question, "With respect to the people I actually know, what do I want to see in that book, so that I can give the book to them to explain it?"

(And again, please think of your own answer-component before reading others' comments.)

Comments (46)

Slow down a little... maybe?

-4 Eliezer_Yudkowsky 07 March 2009 01:34AM

I think that three posts a day over and above Yudkowsky and/or Hanson posts might be enough.  Where anything that gets voted to 0 or below doesn't count, nor do quick links.

Say you differently, readers?  I'm just trying to space things out so we don't get overloaded with everything, all at once... if it turns out that people just have more to say than this, sustainably in the long term, then we can raise the posting speed.

Comments (21)

Posting now enabled

4 Eliezer_Yudkowsky 05 March 2009 03:56PM

Posting is now enabled with a minimum karma required of 20 - that is, you must have gotten at least 20 upvotes on your comments in order to publish a post.  Or an adminstrator such as myself or Robin (by default you should bother me) can temporarily bless you with posting ability - in the long run this shouldn't happen much.

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The Most Frequently Useful Thing

11 Eliezer_Yudkowsky 28 February 2009 06:43PM

Followup to:  The Most Important Thing You Learned

What's the most frequently useful thing you've learned on OB - not the most memorable or most valuable, but the thing you use most often?  What influences your behavior, factors in more than one decision?  Please give a concrete example if you can.  This isn't limited to archetypally "mundane" activities: if your daily life involves difficult research or arguing with philosophers, go ahead and describe that too.

Comments (51)

Recommended Rationalist Resources

5 MichaelHoward 05 March 2009 08:23PM

I thought Recommended Rationalist Reading was very useful and interesting. Now we have voting and threading it seems a good time to comprehensively gather opinions on online material.

Please suggest high-quality links related to or useful for improving rationality. It could be a blog, a forum, a great essay, a reference site, an e-book, anything clickable. Anyone interested can then check out what looks promising and report back.

[edit]
There seems to be confusion... The post's for online material, not physical books. We already have Recommended Rationalist Reading, but as that hasn't got threading and voting, if people think it's a good idea I (or someone else) can do a seperate post for books [metaedit] ...not happening, is against blog guidelines. [/metaedit]

Looks like we're getting lots of suggestions, so please don't forget to vote on them so busier readers have an idea which ones are worth more investigating!
[/edit]

Contributors - if making multiple suggestions, please give each their own comment so we can vote on them separately. Click 'Help' for how to do links.

Voters - for top level comments containing suggestions (as oppose to comments replying to suggestions) please vote on the quality of the resource, not anything else in the comment. If you feel strongly about the comment quality, just post a sub-comment.

Here's 3 to get started:

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