I run the Montreal Less Wrong meetup, which for the last few months has started structuring the content of our meetups with varying degrees of success.

This was the first meetup that was posted to meetup.com in an effort to find some new members. There were about 12 of us, most of which were new and had never heard of Less Wrong before; although this was a bit more than I was expecting, the meetup was still a really good introduction to Less Wrong/rationality and was appreciated by all those that were present.

My strategy for the meetup was to show a concrete exercise that was useful and that gave a good idea what Less Wrong/rationality was about. This is a handout I composed for the meetup to explain the exercise we were going to be doing. It's a five-second-level breakdown of a few mental skills for changing your mind when you're in an argument; any feedback on the steps I listed is appreciated, as no one reviewed them before I used them. People found the handout to be useful, and it gave a good idea of what we would be trying to accomplish.

The meetup began by going around and introducing ourselves, and how we came to find the meetup. Some general remarks about the demographics:

• The attendees were 100% male. There were a few women who were going to attend, but cancelled at the last minute.
• Only two out of the 12 didn't have a background in science. The science backgrounds included math, biology, engineering and others.

After a quick overview of what rationality is, people wanted to go through the handout. We read through each of the skills, several of which sparked interesting discussions. Although the conversation went off on tangents often, the tangents were very productive as they served to explain what rationality is. The tangents often took the form of people discussing situations where they had noticed people reacting in the ways that are described in the handout, and how someone should think in such cases.

The exercise that is described on the second page of the handout was not successful. I had been trying to find beliefs that are not too controversial, but might still cause people to disagree with them. Feedback from the group indicated that I could have used more controversial beliefs (religion, spirituality, politics, etc) as the feelings evoked would have been more intense and easier to to notice; however, that might also have offended more people, so I'm not sure whether that would have been better or not. If I were to run this meetup again, I would rethink this exercise.

The meetup concluded with me giving a brief history of Less Wrong, and mentioning HPMOR and the sequences. I provided everyone with some links to relevant Less Wrong material and HPMOR in the discussion section of the meetup group afterwards.

Let me know if you have any questions or comments, any feedback is appreciated!

Suggestion: Like the other regular threads we have, I propose a new monthly Meetup Report Thread, where people will describe what happened during their meetups. There are a few meetups every month, so there will always be something to write about. Top-level comments could be the names of the meetups, and below them would be comments related to the specific meetup.

This would overcome some trivial inconvenience. First, writing a comment is easier than writing an article, at least psychologically. Second, comments are allowed to be short. If you only want to describe the meetup in one paragraph, posting an article feels like too much (and we have Discussion cluttered by meetups already), but writing a comment of that length is okay. So you don't have to decide to write a long text to report about the meetup. But if one person writes one paragraph, and another person writes another paragraph or two, then we gradually get some kind of report. People who keep meetup notes publicly outside of LW could use this to post a hyperlink or maybe a short summary.

Not sure how other people feel about it, but I would be more likely to write a comment about a meetup I participated in or organized, than a whole article.

I want to like that post, because the formatting is so much tidier than the formatting on my post, but I actually disagree with the first two points. I'm in favor of just rolling with the fact that "Bayesian evidence" isn't what we ordinarily mean by "evidence," as useful as the former is. Also, Eliezer's "I don't know" post misses the pragmatics of saying, "I don't know"; we say "I don't know" if we don't have any information the other person is going to care about (the other person usually won't care that there are 10-1000 apples in a tree outside).

The post What Bayesianism Taught Me is similar to this one; your post has some elements that that one doesn't have, and that one has a few that you don't have. Combining the two, you end up with quite a nice list.

I also thought of creating a 4th tree

4)Isn't terribly and obviously inconsistent with the laws of nature

so people could post things they don't actually think work. Is that a good idea?

I don't see how, because the barriers aren't clearly defined, they become irrelevant. There might not be a specific point where a mind is sentient or not, but that doesn't mean all living things are equally sentient (Fallacy of Grey).

I think Armstrong 4, rather than make his consideration for all living things uniform, would make himself smarter and try to find an alternate method to determine how much each living creature should be valued in his utility function.