We met up on the 18th, and Mezik, and I and a few friends who were interested spent the afternoon talking about spaceflight, and the likely hood of us living to be able to visit other planets. With only three of us there for the meetup not much happens, but we are planning another one for next month, and will keep holding them so they become a regular event on campus.

Edit: Removed my previous reply and reported on the events of the meetup.

My father, who is quite successful and I at the higher end of the rationality scale, was at one point very heavily involved with Landmark (he may still be, I've never brought it up). During the time I lived with him as a teenager, I often wouldn't see him most weeknights until 10 or 11 PM, because he was off doing some Landmark related activity or another.

I still don't know exactly what he got out of Landmark, aside from having met his wife there (which is certainly a big gain). After much pressure from him, I eventually went to a version of the Forum designed for teenagers. I can confirm novalis' claim about the lengths of the days. Ultimately, spending that weekend was a positive experience for me, though I remember very little detail about it. It did help me bond with my father at a time when our relationship was incredibly strained (as I suspect quite a lot of father and 15-year old son relationships are).

I don't know what to add beyond my anecdotal experiences; those are more than a decade removed at this point and detailed memory is largely obscured by a number of issues I had at that age. Still, I'll be happy to answer any questions I can about it.

I don't think words can convey just how happy seeing this post has made me.

I am also from Salt Lake City :)

Are you sure Diaspora should be marked Easy?

I tried to get a fairly intelligent, friend who's interested in science (generally, not necessarily any specific domains covered in the book) to read it and she gave up within about half an hour.

I (a layman, but well-acquainted with the set of singularitarian memes that the book draws from) found that trying to visualize the physics made my head hurt, even with the accompanying illustrative java applets at the author's website.

It also might be valuable to link to those (there are probably some for Permutation City as well, but I haven't checked since I haven't been able to track a copy of it down): http://www.gregegan.net/DIASPORA/DIASPORA.html

No; I never read it.

Or if she likes Twilight and the luminosity material in particular is likely to help her, my new Twilight fic.

My own attempts at easing my girlfriend gently in (with Alicorn's Luminosity sequence, which I think is about as gentle an introduction to some LW principles as you can get) was an unambiguous disaster;

I would be interested in hearing more details about your experience. I'll bet that a lot of people here are wondering how to go about doing the same thing with their significant others. Hearing about attempts that didn't work could help others find more success.

And before any of you pedants downvote me because "Less Wrong is not Craigslist", this is kind of like a year long Less Wrong meetup.

Similarly, my marriage to steven0461 is kind of like a lifetime LW meetup. Current posts that I have in the works: 1) Pictures from our Less Wrong Wedding; 2) How to manage finances in a Less Wrong marriage; 3) Family vacations the Less Wrong way; and 4) Why every Less Wrong couple should get a puppy.

Hello! I am 27, live in Salt Lake City (I suspect it's unnecessary here of all places, but I will reflexively add the caveat that I am not Mormon), and work in software QA. Came here from Overcoming Bias, which I've been reading since it's early days. At this point a lot of the higher level stuff is quite a bit over my head, but things like Alicorn's luminosity sequence and various anti-akrasia topics are pretty interesting to me.

Haruhi fanfiction by Eliezer? You, sir, just delivered Christmas a few days early.