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Meetup : London diaspora meetup, 10/01/2016
Discussion article for the meetup : London diaspora meetup, 10/01/2016
Parts of LessWrong London have been feeling like the association with LW no longer really captures what we're about. Several of us have pretty much stopped reading the site. So we're doing an experimental rebrand as a diaspora meetup group.
The diaspora includes, but is not limited to: LessWrong, SlateStarCodex, parts of the Effective Altruism movement, the bit of tumblr that brands itself 'rationalist tumblrsphere'.
If you feel like you want to hang out with the sort of people who are involved with those things: welcome! You are invited. You do not need to think you are clever enough, or interesting enough, or similar enough to the rest of us, to attend. You are invited.
This meetup will be social discussion in a pub, with no set topic. If there's a topic you want to talk about, feel free to bring it.
There will be some way to identify us.
People start showing up around two, and there are almost always people around until after six, but feel free to come and go at whatever time.
Discussion article for the meetup : London diaspora meetup, 10/01/2016
Stupid questions thread, October 2015
This thread is for asking any questions that might seem obvious, tangential, silly or what-have-you. Don't be shy, everyone has holes in their knowledge, though the fewer and the smaller we can make them, the better.
Please be respectful of other people's admitting ignorance and don't mock them for it, as they're doing a noble thing.
To any future monthly posters of SQ threads, please remember to add the "stupid_questions" tag.
Bragging thread August 2015
Your job, should you choose to accept it, is to comment on this thread explaining the most awesome thing you've done this month. You may be as blatantly proud of yourself as you feel. You may unabashedly consider yourself the coolest freaking person ever because of that awesome thing you're dying to tell everyone about. This is the place to do just that.
Remember, however, that this isn't any kind of progress thread. Nor is it any kind of proposal thread. This thread is solely for people to talk about the awesome things they have done. Not "will do". Not "are working on". Have already done. This is to cultivate an environment of object level productivity rather than meta-productivity methods.
So, what's the coolest thing you've done this month?
Meetup : London meetup
Discussion article for the meetup : London meetup
The next LW London meetup will be on May 10th. Join us from 2pm to talk about the sorts of things that your other friends will look funny at you for talking about.
If the weather is nice, we'll be in Lincoln's Inn Fields. If not, we'll be in our usual Shakespeare's Head, just around the corner. If you have difficulty finding us, my number is 07792009646. (Coincidentally, that is still my number even if you don't have difficulty finding us.)
About London LessWrong:
We run this meetup approximately every other week; these days we tend to get in the region of 5-15 people in attendance. By default, meetups are just unstructured social discussion about whatever strikes our fancy: books we're reading, recent posts on LW/related blogs, logic puzzles, toilet usage statistics....
Sometimes we play The Resistance or other games. We usually finish around 7pm, give or take an hour, but people arrive and leave whenever suits them.
Related discussion happens on both our google group and our facebook group.
Discussion article for the meetup : London meetup
Group rationality diary, May 5th - 23rd
This is the public group rationality diary for May 5 - 23, 2015. It's a place to record and chat about it if you have done, or are actively doing, things like:
-
Established a useful new habit
-
Obtained new evidence that made you change your mind about some belief
-
Decided to behave in a different way in some set of situations
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Optimized some part of a common routine or cached behavior
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Consciously changed your emotions or affect with respect to something
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Consciously pursued new valuable information about something that could make a big difference in your life
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Learned something new about your beliefs, behavior, or life that surprised you
-
Tried doing any of the above and failed
Or anything else interesting which you want to share, so that other people can think about it, and perhaps be inspired to take action themselves. Try to include enough details so that everyone can use each other's experiences to learn about what tends to work out, and what doesn't tend to work out.
Archive of previous rationality diaries
Note to future posters: no one is in charge of posting these threads. If it's time for a new thread, and you want a new thread, just create it. It should run for about two weeks, finish on a saturday, and have the 'group_rationality_diary' tag.
Meetup : London meetup
Discussion article for the meetup : London meetup
The next LW London meetup will be on May 10th. Join us from 2pm to talk about the sorts of things that your other friends will look funny at you for talking about.
If the weather is nice, we'll be in Lincoln's Inn Fields. If not, we'll be in our usual Shakespeare's Head, just around the corner. If you have difficulty finding us, my number is 07792009646. (Coincidentally, that is still my number even if you don't have difficulty finding us.)
Update: The forecast is looking marginal to be outside, so to keep things simple, we'll be in the pub at least to begin with.
About London LessWrong:
We run this meetup approximately every other week; these days we tend to get in the region of 5-15 people in attendance. By default, meetups are just unstructured social discussion about whatever strikes our fancy: books we're reading, recent posts on LW/related blogs, logic puzzles, toilet usage statistics....
Sometimes we play The Resistance or other games. We usually finish around 7pm, give or take an hour, but people arrive and leave whenever suits them.
Related discussion happens on both our google group and our facebook group.
Discussion article for the meetup : London meetup
Cooperative conversational threading
(Cross-posted from my blog.)
Sometimes at LW meetups, I'll want to raise a topic for discussion. But we're currently already talking about something, so I'll wait for a lull in the current conversation. But it feels like the duration of lull needed before I can bring up something totally unrelated, is longer than the duration of lull before someone else will bring up something marginally related. And so we can go for a long time, with the topic frequently changing incidentally, but without me ever having a chance to change it deliberately.
Which is fine. I shouldn't expect people to want to talk about something just because I want to talk about it, and it's not as if I find the actual conversation boring. But it's not necessarily optimal. People might in fact want to talk about the same thing as me, and following the path of least resistance in a conversation is unlikely to result in the best possible conversation.
At the last meetup I had two topics that I wanted to raise, and realized that I had no way of raising them, which was a third topic worth raising. So when an interruption occured in the middle of someone's thought - a new person arrived, and we did the "hi, welcome, join us" thing - I jumped in. "Before you start again, I have three things I'd like to talk about at some point, but not now. Carry on." Then he started again, and when that topic was reasonably well-trodden, he prompted me to transition.
Then someone else said that he also had two things he wanted to talk about, and could I just list my topics and then he'd list his? (It turns out that no I couldn't. You can't dangle an interesting train of thought in front of the London LW group and expect them not to follow it. But we did manage to initially discuss them only briefly.)
This worked pretty well. Someone more conversationally assertive than me might have been able to take advantage of a less solid interruption than the one I used. Someone less assertive might not have been able to use that one.
What else could we do to solve this problem?
Someone suggested a hand signal: if you think of something that you'd like to raise for discussion later, make the signal. I don't think this is ideal, because it's not continuous. You make it once, and then it would be easy for people to forget, or just to not notice.
I think what I'm going to do is bring some poker chips to the next meetup. I'll put a bunch in the middle, and if you have a topic that you want to raise at some future point, you take one and put it in front of you. Then if a topic seems to be dying out, someone can say "<person>, what did you want to talk about?"
I guess this still needs at least one person assertive enough to do that. I imagine it would be difficult for me. But the person who wants to raise the topic doesn't need to be assertive, they just need to grab a poker chip. It's a fairly obvious gesture, so probably people will notice, and it's easy to just look and see for a reminder of whether anyone wants to raise anything. (Assuming the table isn't too messy, which might be a problem.)
I don't know how well this will work, but it seems worth experimenting.
(I'll also take a moment to advocate another conversation-signal that we adopted, via CFAR. If someone says something and you want to tell people that you agree with them, instead of saying that out loud, you can just raise your hands a little and wiggle your fingers. Reduces interruptions, gives positive feedback to the speaker, and it's kind of fun.)
Open Thread, Apr. 06 - Apr. 12, 2015
If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.
Notes for future OT posters:
1. Please add the 'open_thread' tag.
2. Check if there is an active Open Thread before posting a new one. (Immediately before; refresh the list-of-threads page before posting.)
3. Open Threads should be posted in Discussion, and not Main.
4. Open Threads should start on Monday, and end on Sunday.
[LINK] Interview with "Ex Machina" director Alex Garland
http://www.engadget.com/2015/04/01/ex-machina-alex-garland-interview/
The title says he "embraces the rise of superintelligent AI", but that isn't really supported by the text.
What struck me about this was that he seems to just take good habits of thought for granted.
I instinctively disagreed with this, but I didn't have the sort of armory to disagree with it on his terms, so I started reading as much as I could.
What other sorts of AI books have you read?
I pretty much would read everything I could. I tried to read people like Penrose, who were arguing against what I instinctively believed.
That's a good way to solidify your argument.
I don't want to dignify it from my point of view, because I can't stress enough I'm a real layman. So I can understand the principles of an argument, but when it comes to the actuality [...] I really don't understand it.
Being clear about these things is important. Otherwise, we're very quick to conflate stuff, and suddenly you'll be talking about the sentience of Siri. And Siri doesn't have any fucking sentience. AI is probably too broad of a term to be useful at the moment.
[Link] Eric S. Raymond - Me and Less Wrong
http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=6549
I’ve gotten questions from a couple of different quarters recently about my relationship to the the rationalist community around Less Wrong and related blogs. The one sentence answer is that I consider myself a fellow-traveler and ally of that culture, but not really part of it nor particularly wishing to be.
The rest of this post is a slightly longer development of that answer.
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