All of bisserlis's Comments + Replies

bisserlis-40

Son, you’re a body, son. That quick little scientific-prodigy’s mind she’s so proud of and won’t quit twittering about: son, it’s just neural spasms, those thoughts in your mind are just the sound of your head revving, and head is still just body, Jim. Commit this to memory. Head is body. Jim, brace yourself against my shoulders here for this hard news, at ten: you’re a machine a body an object, Jim, no less than this rutilant Montclair, this coil of hose here or that rake there for the front yard’s gravel or sweet Jesus this nasty fat spider flexing in its web over there up next to the rake-handle, see it?

Infinite Jest, page 159

Follow-up to the meeting tonight.

Here is the event that I will be at next week that everyone is welcome to attend.

Manufacturing Belief - Cult Recruitment, Retention and Persuasion

The general public assumes that cult members must be either incredibly stupid, or incredibly weak of mind, or both. In fact, cult members are completely normal. The methods that cults use to recruit and retain members are based on exploiting vulnerabilities in normal human psychology. The only thing distinguishing a cult from any other form of True Believerism is the incredible ef... (read more)

I've been putting off joining a Toastmasters group for a while, but if anyone wants to get together to go to one I'd be up for that.

I'm excited to see what you have planned, and would like to help in any way I can.

Along the lines of moshez's reply to you, I'd be super excited to run a San Francisco satellite.

0Mass_Driver
Awesome! Let me know if you want help / want to work together on that. :-)

I made a conceptual jump that I'm not sure this post (or its author) intended, but that left me with a better impression of it than most people seem to be expressing.

I agree that things actions like writing a letter to the editor may have a low rate of return in bringing new persons to the cause, but I believe that they serve very well at making people who are already pro-rational in name more likely to take greater actions at a later date. E.g., I didn't get involved in running the skeptic group at my university until well after I publicly supported skept... (read more)

Hey, I remember you mentioning this tonight, but I didn't get a chance to find out the details. I'm definitely interested though.

I commit to responding at length to this thread tomorrow when I have more time, but here is a little bit of my background and what I'm into now in case anyone wants to ask specific questions.

I ran my university's skeptic/atheist group for two years and ended up getting involved at the national level with the Center for Inquiry this past summer as an outreach intern at their headquarters. I moved out to the Bay Area specifically to get involved with pro-reason causes.

Here is a group that just started that I'm involved with: Reason for Reason.

0atucker
Looking forward to your input.

Here are some of my recollections about the costs associated with transitioning to a paperless office.

I was recently employed for a month and paid $13 an hour archiving documents for a medium-sized (~40 fulltime employees) office in a much larger company. The office was transitioning to paperless records, and the entire previous year's worth of printouts had to be scanned. There were three other people on my team. We each had a commercial scanner that the company had purchased new. The scanned documents were stored on multiply redundant company servers tha... (read more)

1Swimmer963 (Miranda Dixon-Luinenburg)
My workplace does things in a similar way, scanning in documents by hand without 'interpreting' them in any way. (The result is helpful; you can go on your computer and look at a patient's chart without having to physically go to their hospital campus; but it's also unhelpful in that you can't run a keyword search on anything in the charts, because they're saved as images as opposed to more search-friendly formats.) It looks messy and inefficient to ME that they're keeping both paper and digital records, but I'm sure the immediate cost of making a full transition would be enormous. Still, I can't imagine that offices in fifty years will still be using this half-and-half method. As technology advances, maybe the transition will get easier; parts of the transition process itself could be automated, with software automatically converting scanned images into searchable text files. Either way, I think the transition has to be made eventually. (But that's a personal opinion.)
bisserlis150

I tried to justify some of my hobbies to see if I could come up with anything that couldn't be called a "rationalist hobby" to determine if it's a useful designation or not.

  • Knitting - Trains your attention to fine detail. After you knit a pair of socks, whenever you wear knitted clothes you'll instinctively think, "I could make this. There are no great unknowable secrets in manufacturing, only time and labor."

  • Music Radio DJing - You learn how to speak fluently and without pause, and put together an entertaining set of music, which a

... (read more)
3David_Gerard
Building up a really huge record collection - you learn that this is not such a great idea when you have to move house. It's a subclass of this one.
2[anonymous]
I think DJ'ing and Reddit teach skills but not necessarily the skill of rationality. Knitting, especially when you design your own patterns, does teach you the ability to make things. It sometimes disturbs me how possible it is to go through an adult life without making anything, and how long I go without making anything. (I'm not just talking about handicrafts; I'm talking about the process of designing and producing an entire new thing, that you can call "yours." Writing a program is "making something.")
2Sniffnoy
Which quickly generalizes to any sort of physical making - woodworking, metalworking, etc.
0Normal_Anomaly
While these skills do help in some things, fluent speaking and making snap decisions are not really rationality skills in an epistemic sense. With luck, most any hobby can help you in an instrumental sense. Science fiction and video games are stretches, but I can see poker and probably chess. For what it's worth, I like and do the former two but not the latter.
  • Start a physical retail store. Michael Vassar thinks this is a great option in the Bay area.

Living in the Bay Area now, I was also mightily intrigued by that comment. I've taken some entrepreneurship courses and have some experience running organizations of relatable (I imagine) complexity, but no real idea where to begin, nor the resources to start a venture on my own. I'd love to talk more about this and possibly decide on a plan to do some intensive research though.

As an aside, if you're optimizing for free time and mobility I'm not sure starting any sort of business is the right way to go about that.

The term you're looking for is "bike messenger", I believe.

I actually did consider that, but I believe you have to provide your own bicycle.

My goals in searching for employment were 1) near zero commitment, 2) something that gets me out of the house, 3) the ability to have weekdays off when I want them. Joining a temp agency has worked out well for me. I work three weeks out of four, bring home enough to pay my startlingly low rent and expenses, and put about $600 a month into the bank (if I don't decide I need another wardrobe update).

0John_Maxwell
Where in the world are you?
0[anonymous]
This sounds like you want to be a "bicycle dispatch rider" (I hope, I found some meaningful translation). I had two friends working in that area, and their job description matched 100% to what you describe you want. However, you must be able to handle the street-stress. Sometimes I think they are suicidal in how they drive through the city.

I disagree.

Meetups bring out lurkers and infrequent posters, such as myself, and make LessWrong more than just some intellectual exercise online. At the last Berkeley meetup I was in a discussion that touched on the following two issues with the same group of people.

  • Most lurkers admit to not reading the discussion session, but number at least half of any meetup group. (Maybe, but doubtfully, this is Berkeley/SF Bay specific)

  • We were generally interested in some recent comments that had been made about the NYC meetups incorporating an instrumental ration

... (read more)

How do you approach the matter

I gave a fairly successful talk at the Center for Inquiry's Student Leadership Conference this last summer on Bayes' Theorem and cognitive biases that was really a trojan horse for introducing fellow young atheists to the idea of rationality as an actual area of study.

one-to-a-small-roomful, with the general public

There were about sixty student group leaders of college and highschool atheist organizations in attendance.

how far can you expect to get?

Quantifying "fairly successful", I was approached afterwar... (read more)

bisserlis300

Heavier than air flight? Yeah like that will work. Let me just get in my lead balloon.

I don't see much merit to this idea.

Publicly committing to attending to compensate for my natural tendency to forget.

Ditto. Again.

Edit: I have a friend who is interested in attending and would be able to make it on Friday as opposed to Saturday, as well.

0LucasSloan
Would Friday work better? Also, does anyone else have a preference between Friday and Saturday?

Yes. I tried and failed to run a student social/special interest group for a while, interspersed with low- to medium-quality leadership conferences on occasion. After a year (of the school variety, so nine months) of running weekly meetings and hosting lecture events I got to be pretty decent.

On a related note, one topic that came up particularly frequently that some of us bonded over was rarely or never contributing. So to anyone out there lurking, don't be afraid to come just because you don't post. You won't be alone.

I believe I will be able to attend.

We might be well-served by finding a new place to meet with more space or seating for the next meeting. The Starbucks got to be rather crowded last time.

Well, it didn't sit 20. We stood around and blocked traffic mostly.

Believe me, you can't keep me away.

My username for everything is the same as my username here, possibly with @gmail.com appended if necessary.

I too feel like I lack the wherewithal to write top-level LessWrong posts, but since this is a topic I too am interested in, perhaps we could collaborate and produce something worthy between us. If your issue is not being able to write clearly, I would gladly proofread and comment on drafts.

0NancyLebovitz
Part of what the Discussion section is for is a place to post drafts of potential top-level posts for discussion and criticism.

Wait. Isn't The Mankind Project the one that has been at the center of the... controversy surrounding the lawyer and the forced retreat? The articles I read on the issue made it sound like they used cult tactics and were variously disreputable. Would you care to share your experience?

0Cosmos
MKP's public image is determined almost entirely by their detractors, as they have no publicity team to put a more positive image out there or respond to these incidents. That incident in particular was about a business owner forcing his employees to join, I don't think that reflects on MKP itself. There have been other high-profile incidents in the news as well, I am sure you can Google them easily enough. My experience with them has been positive, everything is voluntary and opting out is completely respected. They certainly don't take a rationalist approach to things (which feels distasteful at times), but they do utilize proven psychological techniques and make real changes in mens' lives. I'm learning very useful tools from the organization, but other than that I have no particular connection or commitment to MKP. Obviously in a large, dispersed organization like this I am not getting a representative sample, but I have worked with three local communities now and have found the same in each one.

Shhh, if you're not careful, patronuses will be sentient next. Is it ethical to dismiss a sentient patronus?

Interesting. I'm not sure whether or not it's better at shielding, because we're told that people break in to Azkaban to shield the inmates so that they might have regular non-nightmare dreams, or just a half-day of patronus time. So we know that just one typical patronus is strong enough to protect people from the worst effects of a Dementor for 12 hours.

I don't think we know enough about the defenses of Azkaban to say at what point the typical rescue operation would fail. But when we're witnessing the aurors in the command center, I find it interesting t... (read more)

I'm still confused. I think because I assume that saving Bellatrix was definitely not the point of the trip, and whatever the real point was, it specifically has to do with Harry so Quirrel's patronus status is irrelevant with respect to the Azkaban trip. Couldn't Quirrel always have used an ally in the plot? They wouldn't even necessarily have to be willing or reliable on their own, or can't you summon a patronus under the imperius curse?

Now I feel like I did when reading the chapter on the final army battle. I think I'm an n-1 player.

3whpearson
I got the impression that Harry's patronus was special and strong for shielding against the Dementors, perhaps no others would have been strong enough to hide an escaped felon? Why hadn't more people been broken out? Okay if saving Bellatrix is not about saving Bellatrix, could whatever it was about have been done in a more controlled environment? Could Quirrell have hired some goons to play a part in some formative point of Harry's education/ensnarement rather than taking a teen into a live fire situation. What would have happened if Harry hadn't been able to cast Patronus? Could Quirrell have taught the lesson/ got a hold on Harry in a different way? If so why hadn't Quirrell got this hold as soon as he could have? It seemed that Harry's Patronus was the trigger for the Azkaban mission (Quirrell suggests it just after he finds out about it, why does Quirrell need to get the hold now). The only explanation that makes sense in the "azkaban is not about bellatrix" scenario is that Quirrell wanted it to fail all along... I see insufficient incentive for Quirrell for the positive outcome to offset the severe risk of it going wrong. I'm also confused. None of the explanations for what is going on make sense. Quirrell's motivation/identity seems the most under explained.

Wait, can you explain why lacking a patronus is evidence against Quirrel being a time-traveling Harry? He would have the same super-bright human patronus that Harry does, which would be a bit of a tip that he was Harry-from-the-future. So obviously he would pretend to not have one.

3Sniffnoy
Alternative idea: You only get one patronus. Harry's got hit by AK, so now he can't cast patronus anymore.
1whpearson
If he had a patronus he could have saved Bellatrix a long time ago, by himself or using a more reliable ally than Harry. He seemed to have been waiting for Harry, thus either he doesn't have a patronus or he needed Harry to do this task for some other unknown reason.

My track record with completing courses online and staying on task is terrible, whereas I'm fantastic about remembering to show up to things in person and I really learn well from experiencing things when physically present. If this were a class in Berkeley (relating back to the original point of this posting tangentially) I would definitely be there taking it.

Also, I like the term "rainbow art", but rainbows are linked with the indelibly good in my mind. What about "grey arts"? Or just tools?

I for one would absolutely love a rationalist Toastmasters. I haven't found a good fit with any of the existing groups in the Bay Area.

Do you know anything specifically about the formation of new Toastmasters groups?

A rationalist Toastmasters Speakers Bureau in the area could also be really cool and useful, by the way. I know of a number of groups who would love to host speakers on LW topics.

2Perplexed
I wonder whether a public speaking class could be taught over the internet. I know nothing about how this skill is taught, but I would guess that it is much like any other performance art. First you watch people doing it well, then a group leader shows you how to analyze good performance. Next you each try doing it yourself, and the leader guides the members of the group in critiquing each other. Rinse and repeat, for each specific skill or genre in this art form.
0MartinB
I never founded a group myself. But maybe can give a few pointers. First make sure you actually want to do that. Going to other groups as guest is free and easy, and you can check out if the structure of the Organization is something you like. Then you need a few like-minded people. There is a minimum number for new groups. Keep in mind that it is a training group for speaking in general. One does not practice to convince in a specific topic, but the speaking itself - which would classify it as a dark art, and maybe not even be what you look for. For the actual founding the easiest way is to contact another local group and ask for assistance. There is some paperwork, and then holding the regular meetings. Having a few experienced members is a really good way to get a new group going.

I live in the Bay Area now and have experience running outreach organizations. Specifically I ran a student secular group in New York for two years, and I've been involved on the national level with a large atheist organization. Some skills that I have from that are good for event planning and promotion, public relations, running social meetings, recruiting new members, that sort of thing.

Also, I can knit, which is very relaxing. You can also make awesome geek-chic cold weather gear.

1MichaelVassar
I hope you come to some of the occasion Bay Area Less Wrong meet-ups. We'll be moving them from Santa Clara to Berkeley fairly soon. I'd also be happy to discuss discuss atheist organizations via Skype.

I said I'd show up to the last one, then I forgot, but this time I'm writing it down on a sheet of paper tacked to the wall above my computer.

I'll be able to make it, and appreciate it being so close to public transportation.

I finally registered just to participate in this.

I'm living in Buffalo, NY for the summer if anyone is up for a meetup.