I'm part of the swing and blues dance scene in the Baltimore/DC area. There are a lot of nerdy/intellectual types in this scene so there's really no shortage of finding intelligent people to talk to. And the people I know who fit that type isn't limited to Baltimore/DC; I travel around a lot for dancing (Las Vegas, Montreal, London, etc.) and a lot of the same type of people are in the scene internationally.

I've been doing this for about 10 years so I'm also somewhat well connected. There's almost always some dance party to go to on the weekend in some city that I can drive to.

I sort of understand Zendo but what's the point of playing dominion at a LW meetup?

Because it frequently conflicts with previous commitments and often, when I am free, it is playing board games, which I don't enjoy. No knock on those who do (including most of my friends) but I find them unbearably tedious.

I live in DC and am an instigator of things (mostly theatre outings, debate, etc). That makes it easy to pull someone into my social circle, since there's usually a movie night, play outing, Shakespeare reading I'm hosting withing the next three weeks to invite them too. (And wanting to be invited to that sort of thing is an excellent filter from my end to see that I will like them).

Typo:

Factors that cut against volunteering have social value

should be "having"

Ehh... As the other commenters are saying, it's unclear how it would promote rationality, or what its Ultimate Effect would be...

But I think you should do it anyway. I'd read it.

Only about 10 percent of new social programs in fields like education, criminology and social welfare demonstrate statistically significant benefits in RCTs

This is a higher rate than I'd expected. It implies that current policies in these three fields are not really thoroughly thought out, or at least not to the extent that I had expected. It seems that there is substantial room for improvement.

I would have expected perhaps one or two percent.

In my career coaching work, one of the things I try to teach is how to spot these patterns of which way a market is going. This has some classic signs, and I can give plenty of examples of other industries in which this same pattern took place.

Examples would be appreciated. But this seems to be a case of trying to time the market and the usual objection applies; if you can time the market to within a year you can make huge piles of money. One of the contributors on HN, lsc of prgrmr.com talks about how he was calling the property bubble in the Bay area for years before it popped, and how if he had just got in at the frothy height of the dotcom bubble like everyone else, he'd still be ahead now on property, very far ahead.

This is really frustrating because I feel like the culture is constantly spamming two contradictory memes. Lumifer even explicitly gave me both of them upthread.

1. Don't do something you don't truly enjoy, follow your dreams
2. Don't do something that isn't practical, whatever you do, don't end up working at McDonalds

But in my case (and probably a substantial majority of people) I honestly think that the venn diagram between one and two might have literally zero overlap. Like, isn't the whole point of a job that it isn't fun, and that's why they have to pay you to do it? I tried to compromise by double majoring in something I am genuinely passionate about (art) and something practical (comp sci), but I feel like this is still not enough somehow...? Sometimes I think the only winning move is to get lucky and be born the type of person who has a natural burning desire to become an engineer.