All of andrewbreese's Comments + Replies

A lot of individuals' outcome variance comes out of how their particulars (mis)match their situations.

For each college seeker, I'd advise: Seize a school that feels like a good/promising cultural fit. (Which may not even exist, for a lot of us.)

0buybuydandavis
Connect with people in college with whom you fit. There will be some. Might be better to go to a school with a poor overall fit, as the outgroup solidarity will likely be stronger. You're not going to connect with everyone. Aim to connect with a bunch well.

"Do we have questions that are actually better answered with roughly-guessed numbers, rather than data from the nearest source of internet?"

INDEED. Wherever the best data is still data we've great reason to be suspicious of, for starters. (I can spoil whatever I want now that the meetup has occurred!)

I'd love to hear a report of what else y'all brainstormed for that question.

Then one day a salesman came along to the camp. He had a steam-powered drill and claimed it could out-drill any man. Well, they set up a contest then and there between John Henry and that there drill. The foreman ran that newfangled steam-drill. John Henry, he just pulled out two 20-pound hammers, one in each hand. They drilled and drilled, dust rising everywhere. The men were howling and cheering. At the end of 35 minutes, John Henry had drilled two seven foot holes - a total of fourteen feet, while the steam drill had only drilled one nine-foot hole.

fiddlemath held up his hammers in triumph!

1fiddlemath
Argh! Of course, no one at the meetup was confused about this. ;)

A++ venue selection!

I can bring a copy of The Virtue of Selfishness if anyone wants.

Great!

If somebody has quiet office conference space, that might be year-round optimal. (Like I did, but at the moment do not.) I trust LessWrongers can bring our own consumables & leave no trace.

Big vacant hotel lobby areas are also worth considering.

THAT had a tragic ending!

He became a lawyer.

Valuable -- likely vital -- cooperative know-how for hugely changing the world has been LOST to the sands of time. (94%) Likely examples include the Manhattan Project, the Apollo program, genuinely uplifting colonialism, building the pyramids without epic hardships or complaints.

Much of this know-how was even widely applied during the lifetimes of some now living. Our simple loss of such important knowledge flies in the face of deep assumptions in the water we all grew up in: progressivism, that knowledge is always increasing, that at least the best First... (read more)

1Multiheaded
I don't understand..By what plausible mechanism could such a disastrous loss of knowledge happen specifically NOW?
1NancyLebovitz
The good news is that some version of this knowledge keeps getting rediscovered. The bad news is that the knowledge seems to be mostly tacit and (so far) unteachable.
-1[anonymous]
Down voted because I think this is very plausible.

+1 for MADISON!

We should DEFINITELY do a meet-up here. 6hours+ round-trip is not a perfect substitute.

2orthonormal
I'll be moving to Madison in July, as well. It's excellent news to see a core of LWers there already!
3Kobayashi
Perhaps the two fearless leaders could be persuaded to roadtrip up to the Mad City on another day? :) (I'd like to meet them, and I'm not LW-enough to know what a LW meetup should be...) What say?