Give your kid the Marshmallow test (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshmallow_test - you can do it at around 4 1/2 yrs old), and video-record it.

It's a good diagnostic indicator of how good she is at delaying gratification, and more importantly, you can watch her display coping strategies. You may already think you have a sense of how they'll do, but it can be surprising.

It's also fun, in a torment-your-child kind of way.

We have a core group of 11 regulars, plus some newcomers who may or may not become regulars. Having a decently-sized core group, means that we typically get newcomers from our pre-existing social networks (roommates, brothers, friends, etc), especially since we tend to hang out with other rationalist types anyways.

Our worry, in fact, is that we can't get too many new people involved at once, or it would change the dynamic so that we'd no longer be an explicitly LW group (i.e. if there were 2 new people for every LWer).

Something I've noticed is that the gender ratio at the meetups seem to be vastly better than the gender ratio on this site. (Latest big Yvain poll has 8% women, whereas our meetups always have about 33.3% women). I am very curious as to whether this trend is specific to our group, or whether this is true at meetups in general. I would be very appreciative if people responded with their own experiences with gender ratios at meetups.

Why I think this is: A recent survey showed that women were much more likely than men to find LW or HPMoR through social recommendations (such as friends). (Henceforth is anecdotal evidence) Also, from personal discussions, I've found that the women in our group have expressed a preference for learning about rationality in a social setting (such as the meetups) rather than reading a bunch of impersonal blog posts.

I think we are lucky in that our group has a handful of people who can at least fake extroversion. It seems important that there is at least one extroverted (or faux extroverted) person per meetup, to keep conversation going, keep people engaged, etc. From what it sounds like to me, meetups are much less smooth and more awkward when they lack this. I would also be interested in other people's experience either way with this.

In Toronto, our average attendance has shrunk a bit, at least partially due to some of our regulars being busy with school/work, and others dropping out of sight for no given reason. We also haven't done anything in particular to connect with other like-minded groups or recruit new attendees - we have seen some new faces now and again..

Generally, casual, no-stated-purpose get-togethers have had between 3 to over a dozen attendees. Well-attended meet-ups also included focused discussions (on, for example, nuclear power just after Fukushima), and games (Paranoid Debating, Gnomic, board games).

Our least well-attended meets were for indoor rock climbing.

Currently, we do alternating weeks of casual meets and Singularity-focused discussions, which is working well for us.

So far, we've been disaster-free.

The big difference between the two is that commuting is isolating whereas trains/subways put you around other human beings. Also, having to focus on other slow moving vehicles is mentally taxing with no obvious benefit. Being able to read, or sometimes nap, is liberating.

Oh, definitely, partner selection is not about finding "the one". I do have to say, though, that Dan Savage's outlook is much more "settley" than mine. I also think the .67 is way low, and I can't relate to what he says about "relationships built on lies" in that video.

Since you bring it up, my parents have a terrible marriage (though they are still together) and my husband's parents are divorced. His brother also divorced shortly after marrying. My brother had a shotgun wedding and then came close to divorce, but his marriage seems to be ok for now.

If someone wanted lifetime monogamy, and they got married at a somewhat young age to their first serious romantic partner, and they and their partner were very happy with the relationship for several years, up to and including the present day, what would you expect about this person regarding their relationship skills? Would you guess that they just lucked out, or that they are good at partner selection, or that they are good at relationship maintenance, or all/some/none of those?

If the person attributes their relationship success to very good partner selection skills, would you find that believable?

So you want to wirehead.

To be explicit about this, I don't have an opinion on whether I'd choose it, but I do find it attractive. Just repeating this because everyone seems to think I'm advocating it and so I probably didn't make this clear enough.

But your actual question:

Do you think you'll have access to that technology in your lifetime?

Basically, I think it's long here. The Tibetans in particular have developed some neat techniques that are still somewhat time-intensive to learn, but work reasonably well. The route (several specific forms of) meditation + basic hedonism seems like a decent implementation, especially because I already know most of the underlying techniques.

Also, MDMA and related drugs and basic implants already exist, though they're still fairly crude and hard to sustain. I'd expect the technology for "good enough" wireheading through direct stimulation to be available in at most 20 years, though probably not commercially.

Kinda, but -- playing along with the assumption we're all making, namely that he means what he says and isn't just having fun -- he makes the exact same mistake between steps 3 and 4 of his argument: he goes, explicitly, from "if you offered to replace one of my children with a better one I'd say no" to "I wouldn't want anything in my past to be different because then I'd have different children".

Changing something in his past wouldn't be like taking away the children he now has and giving him replacements. It would mean change what children he's always had.

He's failing to distinguish between (1) "I love my children and am very glad to have them and would be very upset if they were replaced by different children" and (2) "My children are in some absolute sense the best children there could possibly be, and if they'd been different I wouldn't love them and be so glad to have them". #1 is normal and reasonable and sensible and nice. #2 is batshit insane.

I think a similar error is behind some people's alarm at the idea that the existence of physical disabilities is a bad thing that people might try to do away with ("do you want to do away with my sister, who has this disability?").

And I think a slightly less similar error is behind the repugnance of Derek Parfit's "repugnant conclusion" (you can start with some natural assumptions about what makes the world a better place, and end up with the conclusion that our world is less good than an alternative with vastly more people, all of whom have lives that are just barely worth living -- but what "just barely worth living" means is not "if they were slightly worse the people whose lives they are would prefer to be dead" but "the world is better for their existence, but only just").

None of the above has anything much to do with regret, but I do also think there's something wrong with how Caplan is thinking about regret. But I think the mistake described above is the really big one.

I feel TV is inherently bad in some ways; one of my biggest concerns is that the way things are presented is artificial, designed to manipulate the viewer into thinking the way the creators of the show or commercial want him or her to think. Commercials are particularly bad.

Studies show (I don't have the links, but I bet Google will find them) that there's correlation between TV-watching time and propensity for violence and other bad behavior in children. I want to say it's correlated with poorer academic performance as well, but I'm not sure if this was included or not.