My boyfriend Dilip and I were there. Everything I knew about the Singularity was written by Eliezer or Robin Hanson and everything Dilip knew about the Singularity was stuff I'd told him in the few days preceding the Summit. Dilip was really impressed by Kurzweil's talk and went from being dismissive of the concept to wanting to learn more about it and considering it as a real possibility.

The Q&A after the talks were hit and miss- some of them were really interesting and others were the questioners monologuing.

We met a lot of cool people and skipped a bunch of talks due to conversations.

Dilip and I also got sold on doing a CFAR workshop.

After seeing Jaan's presentation, I decided to use Prezi for all my future presentations because the software makes your talk like a cartoon or a movie instead of an outline of words.

Jimmy's talk was by far the best of the Thiel 20 under 20 talks.

No topics were resolved. To the contrary, many topics were opened.

Does anyone else associate the description "cold and calculating" with intelligence? I was wondering if you could describe dumb animals that rape and kill each other as cold and calculating and decided not. To me this article is suggesting libertarians are more intelligent.

Disclosure: I would not describe myself as libertarian (maybe because I'm not particularly interested in politics) although I did donate money to Ron Paul once and have read some libertarian documents, whereas I would describe myself as "feminine."

What's the point of thinking you're going to fail, unless you're rationally considering giving up?

If I'm rationally considering also investing in a parachute while I'm learning to fly. Or maybe a safety net while I'm doing the trapeze.

What's the point of thinking you're going to fail, unless you're rationally considering giving up? If you're feeling down but aren't going to give up, then there's little benefit to feeling down and more of a cost because of its impact on motivation. Maybe people should try to feel positive except whenever something happens to make them stop and consider if they should quit. If they decide not to quit, they should make an effort to go back to feeling bullish.

Smarter people are more agreeable and moral because when they're disagreeable and evil we become enslaved by dark lords that we eventually have to overthrow, causing most of us to die.

We should also look for specific, teachable “gateway” skills that might allow more women to participate in LW.

I remember reading some story about how women did persistently worse in a particular organic chemistry course than men did, until they added a training session explicitly teaching mental rotation (there’s a gender gap in visual/spatial abilities), after which point test scores equalized because mentally rotating the molecules was no longer a barrier, and other skills could come into play. I can’t find the webpage, though (though there’s a bit of corroboration here), so take the story with a grain of salt.

Given the comments elsewhere in the thread about gender differences in expected agreeableness, and about women being discouraged by downvotes, it sounds like one plausible barrier concerns how to have heart in the face of criticism. Maybe someone should write a post or two on process/growth vs. trait models of ability, and how to have the former. Or on how to keep in mind that people are responding to your words, not your inner soul, and that there’s some system of rules that determines their responses that you can learn to hack. Or something along these lines. There are skills here, and they can be broken into small, learnable chunks. And probably many LW-ers could use a boost here; I know I’d like one.

Such posts could be linked to a welcome page for newcomers, with mention that some find LW difficult at first and later like it and that these posts might help the transition period, but without mention of gender.