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Meetup : West LA—How to Live on 22 Hours a Day
Discussion article for the meetup : West LA—How to Live on 22 Hours a Day
How to get in: Go to the Westside Tavern in the upstairs Wine Bar (all ages welcome), located inside the Westside Pavillion on the second floor, right by the movie theaters. The entrance sign says "Lounge".
Parking is free for 24 hours a day. Sorry, I mean three hours. Just three.
Discussion: Previously discussed on Less Wrong, How to Live on 24 Hours a Day, by Arnold Bennett, is a remarkable and short book from 1910 about how to make the most out of your time. Hustle and bustle have increased a tad since then, so it it is my goal to compress the book's 24-hour methodology into a paltry 22. Bennett gives you two hours with which to deviate from his programme—I am giving you two more.
Recommended reading:
- How to Live on 24 Hours a Day, by Arnold Bennett. I highly recommend reading this book, either before the meetup, so that you are prepared to discuss it, or after the meetup, when you've been sufficiently oiled for it. Either is fine, as I will prepare a summary.
No prior knowledge of or exposure to Less Wrong is necessary; this will be generally accessible. It's been a while, comrades; this will be our first meetup of 2014! Might I say, welcome back, returners, and welcome, new-folk!
Discussion article for the meetup : West LA—How to Live on 22 Hours a Day
Meetup : West LA—A Conversation About Conversations
Discussion article for the meetup : West LA—A Conversation About Conversations
How to get in: Go to the Westside Tavern in the upstairs Wine Bar (all ages welcome), located inside the Westside Pavillion on the second floor, right by the movie theaters. The entrance sign says "Lounge".
Parking is free for three hours, or for longer if you have ascended.
Discussion:
ＯＰＴＩＭＩＺＥ ＬＩＴＥＲＡＬＬＹ ＥＶＥＲＹＴＨＩＮＧ
—rejected t-shirt idea
We are going to talk about the way we talk about things. We are rationalists, and that means we make things, such as conversations, better than they are. When should we allow topics to drift? How do we determine who gets to speak, and when? How do we prevent useful technical discussions from decaying into talking about movies or the weather? What is the best topic? Why won't anyone listen to me? Where is everyone going? Come back!
Required reading:
Recommended reading:
- How to always have interesting conversations
- Having useful conversations
- How to have high-value conversations
- Wait Culture vs. Interrupt Culture
- A Human's Guide to Words
No prior knowledge of or exposure to Less Wrong is necessary; this will be generally accessible.
Discussion article for the meetup : West LA—A Conversation About Conversations
Meetup : West LA—In Apprehending Hard Stuff
Discussion article for the meetup : West LA—In Apprehending Hard Stuff
How to get in: Go to the Westside Tavern in the upstairs Wine Bar (all ages welcome), located inside the Westside Pavillion on the second floor, right by the movie theaters. The entrance sign says "Lounge".
Parking is free for three hours, or for longer if you worked long and hard to figure out how to get it for free for longer.
Discussion:
So8res's excellent post On Learning Difficult Things has inspired this meetup. Less Wrong is about learning brutal and unforgiving topics like what your brain is actually doing and what the objectively correct way to interpret evidence is and how to reason about reason
Since this is post is so great, you are all going to read it, and since not all of you are going to read it, I'm going to summarize it for you, and then we'll talk about maybe actually doing something involving the learning.
Recommended reading:
- On Learning Difficult Things
- How habits work and how you may control them
- shev's comment on learning to program
- Kirschner, P. A., Sweller, J., and Clark, R. E. (2006) Why minimal guidance during instruction does not work: an analysis of the failure of constructivist, discovery, problem-based, experiential, and inquiry-based teaching.
Non-recommended reading:
- I don't know, you can read The Art of Learning if you want, but be warned it's much more a book about how great it is to be Josh Waitzkin than it is a book designed to teach you how to learn.
No prior knowledge of or exposure to Less Wrong is necessary; this will be generally accessible. Do note that if you show up without exposure to Less Wrong, you will leave with exposure to Less Wrong. For this reason, do not show up if you do not wish to be exposed to Less Wrong. However, if you are reading this, you probably have been exposed to Less Wrong, and as such, it is too late for you, so you might as well show up.
Discussion article for the meetup : West LA—In Apprehending Hard Stuff
I think the best solution to this is an option for meetup posts to recur automatically at some frequency. My crude hack for the Austin meetup keeps us on the map, on the sidebar, and out of the discussion section- this should be something everyone can do easily.
A solution which does not put meetups on the map and on the Nearest Meetups sidebar strikes me as a strongly suboptimal solution. It's not obvious to me that we need a third reddit for meetups.
This does not work for meetup groups that have a different topic every time, like ours does. I'm going to ask the group whether they think this is a good idea, but membership is getting a bit poorer and it might still impact that.
Meetup : West LA—The Merits of Specificity
Discussion article for the meetup : West LA—The Merits of Specificity
How to get in: Go to the Westside Tavern in the upstairs Wine Bar (all ages welcome), located inside the Westside Pavillion on the second floor, right by the movie theaters. The entrance sign says "Lounge".
Parking is free for three hours, or for longer if you know the eight secrets of the coven.
Discussion:
Can you give a specific example of abstract argument being more useful than a specific example? How about an abstract argument that specific examples are more useful than abstract arguments? The ladder of abstraction, from abstract to concrete, superficially seems unrelated to but is quite entangled with the other well-known dichotomy, that between the general and the specific. This mess is our focus. It is obvious that both "sides" have their place, but what modes are best for what purposes?
Recommended Reading:
- Up and Down The Ladder of Abstraction
- Skill of the Week: Be Specific
- The Virtue of Narrowness
- Hug the Query
- Leaky Generalizations
- Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid
No prior knowledge of or exposure to Less Wrong is necessary; this will be generally accessible.
Discussion article for the meetup : West LA—The Merits of Specificity
Meetup : West LA—Inside the 5-Second Level
Discussion article for the meetup : West LA—Inside the 5-Second Level
How to get in: Go to the Westside Tavern in the upstairs Wine Bar (all ages welcome), located inside the Westside Pavillion on the second floor, right by the movie theaters. The entrance sign says "Lounge".
Parking is free for three hours, or for longer if you are good at improvising.
Discussion:
ED-209: You have 5 seconds to comply. —RoboCop
Of all generalized rationality skills, this is the most important. If you cannot think the right thought in the first five seconds upon encountering anything, inertia will almost certainly carry you where you do not want to be. So the question for discussion is: what are the generalized principles for turning abstract principles into thoughts at the 5-second level? And how do we apply those principles to themselves, so that we use them on the 5-second level?
Recommended Reading
- The 5-Second Level
- Problems vs. Tasks
- 5-Second Level Case Study: Value of information
- The PNG of Rationality
- 5-Second Skill: From First Principles
- How an Algorithm Feels from the Inside
Prior exposure to Less Wrong is not required. However, if you show up without prior exposure to Less Wrong, you will be vaporized within five seconds.
Discussion article for the meetup : West LA—Inside the 5-Second Level
Recommended reading:
- 0 and 1 Are Not Probabilities
- What Are Probabilities, Anyway?
- What a reduction of "probability" probably looks like
(Also, this meetup will be at 7pm, not 7am.)
Meetup : West LA—Talk Like a Pirate Day
Discussion article for the meetup : West LA—Talk Like a Pirate Day
How to get in: Go to the Westside Tavern in the upstairs Wine Bar (wee swashbucklers be welcome), in th' Westside Pavillion on the second floor, by the movie theaters. The sign thar say: "Lounge".
Parking is free for 3 hours, or longer if ye be a scurvy dog.
Discussion: Ahoy! This week be a special convening. In celerberation of the world-renowned Talk Like a Pirate Day, we'll be forgoin' the usual manner o'speech, and adoptin a manner more befittin a lawless captain or squire on the high seas of yestercentury. Arrr, thar be nothin ter tickle a man's fancy more'n pretendin toward adventure n romance n camaraderie and what have ye. That's why we be announcin this meetin', rather than keepin it below-decks, as 'twer, as we bin doin fer half th' meetups. (Yar.)
Recommended readins:
- Yo Ho Ho, and a Bottle of Rum
- What Shall We Do with a Drunken Sailor?
- An economic analysis of typical emotional transactions occurring in the moments before and during an impending death
- All for Me Grog
- Against Ninjas 1
- Against Ninjas 2
- Pyrats
- MooBeard
- Sailors' Language: A Collection of Sea-Terms and their Definitions
A priori exposure ter "Less Wrong" not even be recommended this time.
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A friend lent me this exact book recently, and while I followed the first chapter, I quickly gave up upon encountering the exercises, because I could not even do the first one. At all.
I don't think I am stupid, so I hope you're just underestimating the required mathematical thinking experience (if not actual background knowledge, none of which is assumed) required to get through this book. Mathematicians do so as a rule.