Currently, there is a way for filtering LW content to view only submissions from people on one's friends list (http://lesswrong.com/r/friends/).

This only displays original posts, though. I would like to see this extended to comments as well.

Provide separate discussion areas (subreddits?) for geographic subcommunities.

Google Groups and Meetup.com are currently used for this purpose by some, but this is not the most elegant solution. It sprawls LW content beyond the main site, requires learning how to use different interfaces, and puts us at the mercy of outside companies. The possibility of karma would also encourage more discussion among these groups.

I have observed similar behavior in others. Only I called it 'blackboxing', for lack of a better word. I think this might actually be a slightly better term than 'learned blankness', so I hereby submit it for consideration. It's borrowed from the software engineering idea of a black box abstraction.

People tend to create conceptual black boxes around certain processes, which they are remarkably reluctant to look within and explore, even when something does go wrong. This is what seems to have happened with the dishwasher incident. The dishwasher was treated as a black box. Its input was dirty dishes, its output was clean ones. When it malfunctioned, it was hard to see it as anything else. The black box was broken.

Of course, engineers and programmers often go out of their way to design highly opaque black boxes, so it's not surprising that we fall victim to this behavior. This is often said to be done in the name of simplicity (the 'user' is treated as an inept, lazy moron), but I think an additional, more surreptitious reason, is to keep profit margins high. Throwing out a broken dishwasher and buying a new one is far more profitable to a manufacturer than making it easy for the users to pick it apart and fix it themselves.

The open source movement is one of the few prominent exceptions to this that I know of.

If noise proves to be a problem, would anyone be up for experimenting with alternate venues for future meetups? I really liked the quiet atmosphere that we had at our last meeting (until that second party showed up, anyway). But that may have been a fluke.

From what I've seen so far, pubs don't seem to be overly conducive to rational discussion, though I am aware that some people have expressed their preference for them. If nothing else, we could compromise and alternate the venue every two weeks, between a pub and something slightly less noisy.

Unfortunately I have no suggestions, since meatspace is not my specialty.

It doesn't take much context to guess at the original meaning- Oscar Wilde was a pretty cynical individual. Given that data point what do you think it means?

That seems like a good idea, but I'm pretty sure that Oscar Wilde didn't at all intend the quote to mean that. Rationality quotes is not an excuse for quote mining and proof-texting.

It has no obvious connection to rationality.

A true friend stabs you in the front.

—Oscar Wilde

A domain-specific interpretation of the same concept:

"The real hero of programming is the one who writes negative code."

—Douglas McIlroy

A true friend stabs you in the front.

—Oscar Wilde