The first meeting of the rationality training group will be at one o'clock on Sunday April 5th, in room 145 of Harper Memorial Library at the University of Chicago.

My ideas for this group:

I would like to meet on a weekly basis to learn and practice both epistemic rationality (critical thinking and calibration: “what do you know and why do you think you know it?”) as well as CFAR-style instrumental rationality ("what do I need to do to win?"). We’ll start by working our way though the CFAR curriculum (circa January 2015) and some key parts of the LessWrong sequences, but I would like this group to evolve over time and we are not constrained to that material. Ultimately I’d love for this to turn into less a series of lessons, and more a “rationality dojo”: a place to practice what we know, consider ways to apply it better, and experiment with original techniques. If you have any interest in this at all, I recommend you come to this first meeting since I’ll explain what I’m thinking in more detail and we can collectively begin to decide what we want this group to be.

The topics of this first meeting will be “Why bother with rationality?” and using one’s inner simulator, which is fundamental to several CFAR techniques.

The suggested readings for this week are:

http://lesswrong.com/lw/go/why_truth_and/

http://lesswrong.com/lw/2p5/humans_are_not_automatically_strategic/

http://lesswrong.com/lw/8ma/how_rationality_can_make_your_life_more_awesome/

http://lesswrong.com/lw/nb/something_to_protect/

Each of these are pretty short. They shouldn’t take very long to read, but I’d like to to spend some time thinking about each one.

I’m sending this email, I’m posting to meetup.com, and I’m listing this event on LessWrong. If you have other ideas for how to publicize this event, let me know. Pass along this invite to anyone who you think might be interested in this.

If you have any questions for me, feel free to ask.