Towards a Bay Area Less Wrong Community

25 LucasSloan 18 March 2011 05:35AM

Follow up to: Less Wrong NYC

Tl;dr:  Two new regular weekly meetups in the Bay Area:  In the Berkeley Starbucks on Wednesdays at 7pm (host Lucas Sloan), and in Tortuga (in Mountain View) on Thursdays at 7pm (hosts Shannon Friedman and Divia Melwani).  New Google Group for the whole Bay Area, all welcome to join.

Hi everyone in the (San Fransisco) Bay Area.  I'm Lucas Sloan and I've been organizing LW meet ups in Berkeley for about 8 months now.  I think that we've accomplished great things in that time, the last week's had about 40 people show up, which is a number that was beyond my wildest dreams when I held my first meet up and 7 people showed up.  As good as things are, I've been spending a lot of time thinking how we can do even better in the future.  The main catalyst in my thinking has been the accounts I've been hearing over the last two months from people who've visited the New York Less Wrong group and the amazingly positive reactions people have had to their accomplishments.  Now that Cosmos has written a post describing what he sees as their successes, I think now is an excellent time to start a discussion about the future of the Bay Area Less Wrong group, and how to make it awesome.

The main thing that the New York group has that I want for the Bay Area group is a sense of being a close-knit community of like-minded friends.  At a Berkeley meet up we get into all sorts of very interesting conversations with our fellow rationalists, but I don't feel a personal connection with most of the people who come to meet-ups, even those people I've seen at many - I am friendly with everyone who comes to meet-ups, but I am not friends with everyone who comes.  I see two things that contribute to this problem (though I'm sure there are more) - size of meet-ups, and the frequency of meet ups.  The large size of meet ups makes it impossible to establish rapport with everyone, because there is no way to have a good conversation with 40 other people in 4 hours.  Even more insidious, the large size makes it hard to establish rapport with even a subset of the people who come to a meet up - the group of 40 splits into 10 groups of 4 and everyone keeps churning between conversations as their interest wanes and waxes.  The first meet up I held, with only 7 people, was socially fulfilling in a way that recent ones simply haven't been - everyone was participating in the same conversation, and everyone was getting to know everyone else.  As to the frequency of meet ups, it's hard to become friends with people you only interact with once a month - you can easily forget a person in a month, and the format encourages talking about high minded "rational" topics, not the personal small talk that forms the basis of friendship.

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26 March 2011 Southern California Meetup

4 jimmy 20 March 2011 06:29PM

Less Wrong Rationality and Mainstream Philosophy

106 lukeprog 20 March 2011 08:28PM

Part of the sequence: Rationality and Philosophy

Despite Yudkowsky's distaste for mainstream philosophy, Less Wrong is largely a philosophy blog. Major topics include epistemology, philosophy of language, free willmetaphysics, metaethics, normative ethics, machine ethicsaxiology, philosophy of mind, and more.

Moreover, standard Less Wrong positions on philosophical matters have been standard positions in a movement within mainstream philosophy for half a century. That movement is sometimes called "Quinean naturalism" after Harvard's W.V. Quine, who articulated the Less Wrong approach to philosophy in the 1960s. Quine was one of the most influential philosophers of the last 200 years, so I'm not talking about an obscure movement in philosophy.

Let us survey the connections. Quine thought that philosophy was continuous with science - and where it wasn't, it was bad philosophy. He embraced empiricism and reductionism. He rejected the notion of libertarian free will. He regarded postmodernism as sophistry. Like Wittgenstein and Yudkowsky, Quine didn't try to straightforwardly solve traditional Big Questions as much as he either dissolved those questions or reframed them such that they could be solved. He dismissed endless semantic arguments about the meaning of vague terms like knowledge. He rejected a priori knowledge. He rejected the notion of privileged philosophical insight: knowledge comes from ordinary knowledge, as best refined by science. Eliezer once said that philosophy should be about cognitive science, and Quine would agree. Quine famously wrote:

The stimulation of his sensory receptors is all the evidence anybody has had to go on, ultimately, in arriving at his picture of the world. Why not just see how this construction really proceeds? Why not settle for psychology?

But isn't this using science to justify science? Isn't that circular? Not quite, say Quine and Yudkowsky. It is merely "reflecting on your mind's degree of trustworthiness, using your current mind as opposed to something else." Luckily, the brain is the lens that sees its flaws. And thus, says Quine:

Epistemology, or something like it, simply falls into place as a chapter of psychology and hence of natural science.

Yudkowsky once wrote, "If there's any centralized repository of reductionist-grade naturalistic cognitive philosophy, I've never heard mention of it."

When I read that I thought: What? That's Quinean naturalism! That's Kornblith and Stich and Bickle and the Churchlands and Thagard and Metzinger and Northoff! There are hundreds of philosophers who do that!

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Tortuga Meetups Starting this Thursday

8 divia 21 March 2011 06:11PM

Shannon and I are going to be hosting South Bay Less Wrong meetups at the Tortuga community in Mountain View on Thursday nights starting at 7.  Come prepared to reveal something you're consistently irrational about.  We'll spend some time throwing ideas around and then hang out and mingle.  

Bringing paleo-friendly food is a bonus but not required.  

If you'd like to come, request an invitation from our google group, Tortuga Rationalists.