The general plan for this month's meetup is to try to get more people unfamiliar with LW and x-rationality (particularly other HMC students) to come. I'm not sure to what extent this will be successful, but if it is, it would be nice to have some introductory talks about how rationality can have good practical benefits and help you achieve your goals.
I'd encourage people who are planning on coming to have some examples from their own lives of how rationality has been particularly useful.
I've reserved the Platt Conference Room (same place as the previous HMC LW meetings have been) from 2 to 8 on Sunday. Staying later than that wouldn't be a problem, and we can either get some food from one of the cafeterias around here or order takeout from somewhere.
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Being at Harvey Mudd, I'll definitely attend, though I doubt I can help anyone with transportation :)
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EDITED FRIDAY NIGHT: Note that we're getting close to the limit of the number of people the restaurant can handle, which is 24.
Six to eight of us from the Claremont colleges will be there.
When I took the test I got 50/50. My first thought was - "how lucky that I should happen to get, by chance, a result that so clearly reinforces my original beliefs".
How about doing a Bayesian analysis of the experiment?
Out of curiosity I did this for the first experiment (anticipating erotic images). He had 100 people in the experiment, 40 of them did 12 trials with erotic images, and 60 did 18 trials. So there were 1560 trials total.
You can get a likelihood by taking P(observed results | precognitive power is 53%)/P(observed results | precognitive power is 50%). This ends up being (.53^827 * .47^733) / (.5^1560) = ~17
So if you had prior odds 1:100 against people had precognitive power of 53%, then after seeing the results of the experiment you should have posterior odds of about 1:6 against. So you can see that this by itself is not earth-shattering evidence, but it is significant.
Try doing analyses for the other experiments if you're interested!
I really like the location idea, because of the potential to say "There are X other LW members within Y miles of you" or "There are Z other LW members in your metropolitan area." If you see "wow, there are 100 members in [City]? If only 10% of us show up, that's still a pretty nice group!" then you're much more likely to start / have an interest in a meetup than if you're just pinging empty space.
And, if you get people to join, seeing that number go up might be rather useful feedback.
Also, you don't even need people to manually enter their locations. IP addresses are usually enough to narrow your location down to a city or metropolitan area, and we wouldn't need much higher resolution than that.
Edit: Looks like I/we at Harvey Mudd don't really have a car (or person to drive it), so unless someone is going to be driving by Claremont, I don't think I'll be able to make it.
From a hacker news thread on the difficulty of finding or making food that's fast, cheap and healthy.
"Former poet laureate of the US, Charles Simic says, the secret to happiness begins with learning how to cook." -- pfarrell
Reply: "Well, I'm sure there's some economics laureate out there who says that the secret to efficiency begins with comparative advantage." -- Eliezer Yudkowsky
Errors fixed (I can only blame the usual slopiness of mathematicians, and apologise profusely).
Also, in the very beginning, "turning with probability p" should really be "going straight with probability p".
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I'll be attending, since it just so happens I'm in this corner of the world right now :)