Petition: LW should introduce a dedicated off topic area

Why?

1) I want to discuss various topics with people who are both intelligent and rationalist, and i know of no other place where to do it.

2) If find that rationality is getting boring in itself. I need to use it on something.

3) As stated in this comment http://lesswrong.com/lw/btc/how_can_we_get_more_and_better_lw_contrarians/6e3p

the narrow set of topics might actually hurt LW by driving good rationalists away.

Following http://lesswrong.com/lw/bwo/logical_fallacy_poster/ some people complained about

• the sarcastic illustration
• the lack of references
• the weird categorization that should rather fit a Bayesian framework
• the simplistic or even wrong definitions
• and more

Yet this poster has ONE key difference with the ideal poster, it exists.

If it sparks criticisms that lead to a new, LessWrong compatible poster, then it is well worth the critics.

The obvious next step then is to make a poster that would allow to take into account such well founded suggestion and synthesize the LessWrong lessons visually.

In your opinion then what would be a good structure, e.g. a hierarchy of fallacies, and a design theme?

I laughed: SMBC comic.

Hello fellow readers.

I've been enjoying LW for a while now, and I can confidently say that many of the ideas on in this community have done much to better my life.

However, I live in some isolation from like-minded individuals. I lack social groups that aspire to the same values of rationality that I have come to treasure. My nearest meet-up is Melbourne, but that takes approximately a hour and a half to get to, and would require more time and money than I can reasonably afford at the moment.
I find it difficult to immerse myself and live out many of these ideas when I do not have the social support to back me.

Anyone have any tips for managing rationalist isolation?

I'm doing an undergraduate course on the Free Will Theorem, with three lecturers: a mathematician, a physicist, and David Chalmers as the philosopher. The course is a bit pointless, but the company is brilliant. Chalmers is a pretty smart guy. He studied computer science and math as an undergraduate, before "discovering that he could get paid for doing the kind of thinking he was doing for free already". He's friendly; I've been chatting with him after the classes.

So if anyone has any questions for him, if they seem interesting enough I could approach him with them.

Emails to him also work, of course, but discussion in person lets more understanding happen faster. For example, in a short discussion with him I understood his position on consciousness way better than I would have just from reading his papers on the topic.

Today's post, Joy in the Merely Real was originally published on 20 March 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

If you can't take joy in things that turn out to be explicable, you're going to set yourself up for eternal disappointment. Don't worry if quantum physics turns out to be normal.

Discuss the post here (rather than in the comments to the original post).

This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we'll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was Savanna Poets, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.

Sequence reruns are a community-driven effort. You can participate by re-reading the sequence post, discussing it here, posting the next day's sequence reruns post, or summarizing forthcoming articles on the wiki. Go here for more details, or to have meta discussions about the Rerunning the Sequences series.