See detailed description on http://www.meetup.com/LWBrussels/events/221990500/

This month we have TWO events:

• A standard LessWrong meetup at 1PM at La Fleur en Papier Doré (Rue des Alexiens 55). I've been a bit too busy to figure out a theme, sorry! But expect the usual friendly & intelligent conversation.

• A party for the conclusion of Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality! This will be at 6PM at Patterson's flat (Rue Notre Dame du Sommeil 24, 1000 Bruxelles). All are welcome, and we'll likely have a good mix of regulars and brand new faces. Food & drinks provided but extras will be appreciated. Costumes more than welcome. We're expecting 8-ish people. More details at the facebook page. Though not mandatory, if you announce your presence there it will make things simpler for me.

We will meet at 1 pm at "La Fleur en papier doré, close to the Brussels Central station. The meeting will be in English to facilitate both French and Dutch speaking members.

If you are coming for the first time, please consider filling out this one minute form to share your contact information.

The Brussels meetup group communicates through a Google Group.

Meetup announcements are also mirrored on meetup.com

This February, we will talk about the way we talk.

Yudkowsky has written quite a lot on that topic in the early days of LessWrong, collected into the sequence A human's guide to words (also available as a 5$ podcast). My personal favourite is the more practical Taboo Your Words. I have, on many occasions, attempted to resolve an apparent conflict by asking someone to replace a word with its definition and it never works because not enough people have read the damn article and the inferential distance is too damn big.

notices anger, snaps fingers

tugce also suggested the movie Is the Man Who Is Tall Happy?, an animated conversation between Michel Gondry and Noam Chomsky. I have to admit I know almost nothing of Chomsky. If anyone can recommend a good starting point, by next month I will feel very guilty about not having read it.

This meetup marks the third-year anniversary of LessWrong Brussels. There will be an item of soft sweet food made from a mixture of flour, fat, eggs, sugar, and other ingredients, baked and possibly iced or decorated.

We will meet at 1 pm at "La Fleur en papier doré, close to the Brussels Central station. The meeting will be in English to facilitate both French and Dutch speaking members.

If you are coming for the first time, please consider filling out this one minute form to share your contact information.

The Brussels meetup group communicates through a Google Group.

Meetup announcements are also mirrored on meetup.com

LessWrong has been a bit quiet of late, partly because some of its best would-be contributors have focused on their own blogs. (This doesn't bode well for the long-term health of the site, but I'm not quite ready to rename this group SlateStarCodex Brussels.)

Among the most interesting off-site developments is sort of a generalization of the ideas discussed in Ugh Fields and Noticing Confusion: an ongoing conversation on mindfulness and trainable mental habits. Most of it is on Brienne Strohl's Agenty Duck (though there's a good deal of less link-able spillover on Facebook), and brand-new The Mind's UI should be all about it.

It's the month of new year's resolutions, as good a time as any to discuss such concrete self-improvement techniques.

We will meet at 1 pm at "La Fleur en papier doré, close to the Brussels Central station. The meeting will be in English to facilitate both French and Dutch speaking members.

If you are coming for the first time, please consider filling out this one minute form to share your contact information.

The Brussels meetup group communicates through a Google Group.

Meetup announcements are also mirrored on meetup.com

t's Christmas season, so I thought of doing something about rational giving, but we've already talked your ears off about Effective Altruism last meetup. Instead, let's fight off seasonal depression with the Power of Friendship (and of Chemistry).

What makes you hope for your own future? How has your life improved recently, and what makes you expect it will improve again? What makes you hope for the future of humanity? Which recent scientific development brings us one step towards utopia?

This month, a meetup that will go better than expected.

We will meet at 1 pm at "La Fleur en papier doré, close to the Brussels Central station. The meeting will be in English to facilitate both French and Dutch speaking members.

If you are coming for the first time, please consider filling out this one minute form to share your contact information.

The Brussels meetup group communicates through a Google Group.

Meetup announcements are also mirrored on meetup.com

Hi all,

As on every second Saturday of the month, it's meetup time. It's approximately Halloween (eight days are nothing over the lifetime of a species!) so this month we'll be talking about rational horror.

Information-theoretic death. Mutually assured destruction. Von Neumann probes with deadly payloads. Super-intelligences with non-human values. Super-intelligences with slightly non-human values. Meta jokes about the current status of LessWrong Brussels. Moloch the incomprehensible prison. The heat death of the universe. We welcome relevant scientific news, science-fiction recommendations, transhumanist musings, and chilling heavenward curses.

We will meet at 1 pm at "La Fleur en papier doré, close to the Brussels Central station. The meeting will be in English to facilitate both French and Dutch speaking members.

If you are coming for the first time, please consider filling out this one minute form to share your contact information.

The Brussels meetup group communicates through a Google Group.

Meetup announcements are also mirrored on meetup.com