Hot on the heels of October's meetup, I present to you the details for November's meetup!

Date: Friday, November 5th

Place: Don Tojo

Time: 6-9pm

Please comment to say if you're attending, and also to suggest activities.

There seems to be enough Melburnian Less Wrong visitors to justify having monthly meetups. Just the other day, I ran into some at my local restaurant, and the thread Where are we?  lists four (not including me). There's probably more out there. 

Details

Time: 6pm, Saturday 2nd October

Place: Don Tojo  

I'll be there with a Less Wrong sign.

List of people attending:

Patrick

toner

luminosity

Ppeach

wedrifid

Byron

Yurifury

ShardPhoenix

When I was in high school, one of the exercises we did was to take a newspaper column, and find all of the fallacies it employed. It was a fun thing to do, and is good awareness raising for critical thinking, but it probably wouldn't be enough to stave off being deceived by an artful propagandist unless I did it until it was reflexive. To catch the fallacy being, I usually have to read a sentence three or four times to see the underlying logic behind it and remember why the logic is invalid, when I'm confronted by something as fallacy ridden as an ad for the Love Calculator, I just give up in exhaustion. Worse, when I'm watching television, I can't even rewind to see what they said (I suspect the fallacy count is higher too).

To counter this, (and to further hone my fallacy finding skills), I've extended the fallacy finding exercise to work on video. Take a video from a genre that generally has a high fallacy per minute ratio (e.g. Campaign ads, political debates, speeches, regular ads, Oprah) and edit the video to play a klaxon sound whenever someone commits a logical fallacy or gets a fact wrong, followed by the name of the fallacy they committed flashing on screen.

EDIT: I've made one of these and uploaded it to Youtube. Thank you Eliezer and CannibalSmith for the encouragement. You can find other debates at CNN, and youtube lets you do annotations so no editing software is technically required. I'll be posting further videos to this post as I make/find them.

Reading Eliezer Yudkowsky's works have always inspired an insidious feeling in me, sort of a cross between righteousness, contempt, the fun you get from understanding something new and gravitas. It's a feeling that I have found to be pleasurable, or at least addictive enough to go through all of his OB posts,  and the feeling makes me less skeptical and more obedient than I normally would be. For instance, in an act of uncharacteristic generosity, I decided to make a charitable donation on Eliezer's advice.

Now this is probably a good idea, because the charity is probably going to help guys like me later on in life and of course it's the Right Thing to Do. But the bottom line is that I did something I normally wouldn't have because Eliezer told me to. My sociopathic selfishness was acting as canary in the mine of my psyche.

Now this could be because Eliezer has creepy mind control powers, but I get similar feelings when reading other people, such as George Orwell, Richard Stallman or Paul Graham. I even have a friend who can inspire that insidious feeling in me. So it's a personal problem, one that I'm not sure I want to remove, but I would like to understand it better.

There are probably buttons being pushed by the style and the sort of ideas in the work that help to create the feeling, and I'll probably try to go over an essay or two and dissect it. However, I'd like to know who and at what times, if anyone at all, I should let create such feelings in me. Can I trust anyone that much, even if they aren't aware that they're doing it?

I don't know if anyone else here has similar brain overrides, or if I'm just crazy, but it's possible that such brain overrides could be understood much more thoroughly and induced in more people.  So what are the ethics of mind control (for want of a better term) and how much effort should we put in to stopping such feelings from occuring?

Edit Mar 22: Decided to remove the cryonics example due to factual inaccuracies.