Advice for future creators of tests: There are people who live outside the US. No one outside the US cares about the 3rd person to be the second dead uncle of the fourth president of the US.
For instance, a majority of tommccabe's quiz questions are highly US-specific.
The point here is that non-Americans will end up guessing almost all questions, making the whole exercise painful and useless.
The best calibration IMO exercises I was able to find (which also work for non-Americans) can be downloaded from the website of How to Measure Anything.
We'll discuss Peter Singer's new book about effective altruism. The book gives an overview of the EA movement, and some very nice personal stories of people who devote a significant part of their lives on doing good effectively.
You can buy the book on bol.com, amazon and probably in many other (web)shops.
New people are very welcome!
We'll make sure the discussion is interesting for people who haven't found the time to read the book.
Practical
Note that the location has been changed to the La Place. We have this Google Doc where anyone can make suggestions, also for the coming meetups. And feel free to join our facebook group as well.
Location: La Place at central station, top floor
If you have trouble finding us you can reach Sören at 0031684140766 or Imma (0031610524989).
There has been a little mixup! This topic will be on January 18th. The meetup on January 4th will be this one: http://www.meetup.com/LWEANL/events/218834861/. Imma is going to change it as soon as she has internet access, which will have to wait until the start of the new year.
If you could, please write something about which techniques you are going to use or point to the scourses. I tried, but didn´t find a lot of relevant material.
Hi efim!
I updated the description in the link on meetup.com that Imma gave. To give you some extra detail, we'll talk about: Which biases are hard/easy to correct? When does knowing about the existence of a bias help and when not? Which debiasing techniques are there (reversal test, consider the opposite, reference class forecasting...) and what are generally useful guidelines to stay rational? We'll run an experiment on confidence intervals and do a mini-RCT with a debiasing technique that hasn't been scientifically validated yet. I'll also share some links that I believe are useful to correct our decision-making errors.
Hope to see you there and sorry for the late reply!
I made an Anki deck of this post with the key 89ff552e6e8086a6.
Does anyone know how to search for Anki decks by their key? I was thinking the number at the end of a link (e.g. ankiweb.net/shared/info/1458237580) would work, but it doesn't contain letters.
The topic will be productivity as decided at the last meetup.
Yes there is research that supports that high glycemic index (GI) food such as sweets and white bread deteriorate willpower. The main mechanism that is made responsible for this is the drop in blood sugar a few hours after consumption. This post has some points on it: http://lesswrong.com/lw/cmc/book_summary_willpower_by_baumeister_tierney/
More info on this can be found in the book 'The Willpower Instinct' by Kelly Mcgonigal. She says the research most supports plant-based diets and low-GI diets. Evidence for the former is better.
Furthermore I think I've heard a few things about 'hyper rewards' such as pornography, drugs and sweet food generally reducing motivation. This makes sense since these rewards were not available in ancestral times. The brain responds to strong stimuli by downregulating the neural pathways required for motivation. This should be easy to google.
Please include the cityin the meetup title, so that it's easily identifiable on the sidebar.
Edited. My bad, thanks for pointing out.
Brainstorm
We would like to make our meetups more useful for the attendants. Therefore the meetup will start with a brainstorm to collect ideas and decide on how to proceed in future. We will talk about both the discussion meetups themselves and potential projects to work on. If you have any suggestions or ideas, this will be a great opportunity to have your say.
Ethics discussion
Should your driverless car kill you to save two other people? When is it ethical to hand out our decisions over to machines? We will discuss the following article: http://aeon.co/magazine/world-views/can-we-design-systems-to-automate-ethics/ To get most out of the discussion, you are recommended to read the article in advance. It's a nice stepping stone to topics like moral psychology and AI as well. Very relevant to this topic as well to rational ethics in general: this presentation by Harvard philosopher Joshua Greene on learning to use our moral brains: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_-vleKVkMec . When is our moral intuition correct, and when not? This one is an optional addition. Looking forward to meeting you again! New people will be warmly welcomed!
Practical
Mind that the time has changed to 2pm!
We will meet at Film Café Oscar, which is just around the corner from De Winkel van Sinkel. I will be holding a sign that says 'LW' on it. If you have trouble finding us you can reach me at 0684140766 or me Imma at 0610524989.
We have this Google Doc where anyone can make suggestions, also for the coming meetups.
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That would be another example of things which some EAs do, but which don't yet seem to percolate through to the public-facing parts of the movement. For example, valuing other EAs due to flow-though contradicts Singer's view, as far as I understand him:
I don't get your argument there. After all, you might e.g. value other EAs instrumentally because they help members of other species. That is, you intrinsically value an EA like anyone else, but you're inclined to help them more because that will translate into others being helped.