All of Slava Matyukhin's Comments + Replies

Nope.

We closed the physical space during COVID, then continued for a two years online in various forms, then after the Ukraine war started I left the country and the project was mostly dead since then. A few months ago we finally shut down all remaining chats and archived the website.

Sometimes I think that it'd be nice to do a final write-up/postmortem, but I'm not sure it'll actually happen.

Okay, SARS-CoV-2 is pretty different from SARS-2003 ("~76% amino acid identity in the spike protein"), this might be the reason it won't work. OTOH, I don't know how different HCoV-OC43 is from both SARS strains.

Two facts:

1. HCoV-OC43 (one of human coronaviruses causing common cold) can generate cross-reactive antibodies against SARS.
2. Immunity to HCoV-OC43 appears to wane appreciably within one year.

Here's the paper which mentions both of these facts. (The actual paper is not important, I expect these facts to be well-known to coronavirus researchers, if the paper itself is not terribly mistaken and if I haven't misread anything.)

Even if cross-immunity is mild, won't it make sense to intentionally infect people with HCoV-OC43? Downside seems quite small compared

Yes! We have an English club each Saturday at 5 PM.

Whoa, for some reason I thought that LTF fund is not relevant to us, but looks like I was wrong. Thank you!

For context: in the last few months I applied for two CEA grants.

1. Community Building grants (in December, outside of a funding round, so they warned me that the bar will be higher); they decided not to fund and asked to reapply. In the current Feb 2019 round there's a $150,000 budget cap, and since there'd be a risk of Kocherga competing against EA Russia team (which is separate from Kocherga), I decided not to reapply this time.
2. I also applied to th

Thanks! I wonder if there'd be legal issues because Kocherga is not a non-profit (non-profits in Russia can be politically complicated, as I've heard). But it's defnitely worth trying.

One more thing: unlike the other stuff, I feel like developing EA movement in Russia is more talent-constrained: it could be much more active if we had one enthusiastic person with managerial skills and ~10 hours/week on their hands. I'm not sure we have such a person in our community - maybe we do, maybe we don't.
(Sometimes I consider taking on this role myself, but right now that's impossible, since I'm juggling 3 or 4 different roles already.)

OTOH, I'm also not sure how much better things would be if we had more funding and coul... (read more)

We've tried to start a local EA movement early on and had a few meetups in 2016. Introductory talks got stale quite quickly, so we put together a core EA team, with Trello board and everything.

It wasn't very clear what we were supposed to do, though:

• We wanted to translate EA Handbook (and translated some parts of it), but there were some arguments against this (similar to this post which was released later).
• Those of us who believed that AI Safety is the one true cause mostly wanted to study math/CS, discuss utilitarianism issues and eventually re

Thank you!

I've applied to CFAR's workshop in Prague myself (and asked for financial aid, of course); they haven't contacted me yet.

I'll explain about EA in reply to this comment.

Thanks! I'm planning to write a separate post with more details on our community, activities and accumulated experiences; there's much more stuff I'd like to share which didn't fit in this one. It might take a few weeks, though, since my English writing is quite sluggish.

Thank you!

Yes, it'd be interesting to compare our experiences.

If you want to chat in a lower-latency channel, I'm @berekuk on Lesswrongers Slack (my preferred medium for chatting) or https://www.facebook.com/berekuk if you dislike Slack for some reason.

Thank you!

Well, we actually had various versions of a "discuss and challenge your beliefs" exercise for a long time. (Previous names: "Belief Investigation" and "Structuring".)

Here's how it goes: split participants into pairs, ask one person in each pair to declare any of their beliefs that they want to investigate (compare: reddit.com/r/changemyview) and then allow them to discuss it for a predetermined period of time with their partner.

We used this kind of activity on LW meetups a lot, because it's easy to organize, can give... (read more)

So, what happened?

This post is hidden from Main and the survey "is expired and no longer available", even though the post mentions that it should run for 10 more days. I wanted to share it with Russian LW community, will it be back in some form later?

Moscow

We expanded a lot since we opened our own rationality-aligned time club Kocherga in September 2015.

• General LW meetups every 3 weeks on Sundays with talks, discussions and games
• "Rationality for beginners" lectures every 3 weeks on Sundays
• (the third Sunday slot is reserved for EA meetups)
• Dojos on Fridays
• Sequences reading group started two weeks ago on Mondays
• Rationality-related games once a month
• CFAR-style weekend workshops (we ran 4 of these in 2016)

I really should write a separate post about all that's happened since 2013 when the... (read more)

For the Russian LessWrong slack chat we agreed on the following emoji semantics:

• :+1: means "I want to see more messages like this"
• :-1: means "I want to see less messages like this"
• :plus: means "I agree with a position expressed here"
• :minus: means "I disagree"
• :same: means "it's the same for me" and is used for impressions, subjective experiences and preferences, but without approval connotations
• :delta: means "I have changed my mind/updated"

We also have 25 custom :fallacy_*: emoji for point... (read more)

Donated $100.

Willpower group is our long-running project, coming to an end soon. People were working through Kelly McGonigal's "Willpower Instinct", one chapter per week. I guess I should write up about it.

Don't know much about terminal values exercise yet. I'll let its maker know that you're interested.

We all speak Russian, so the stream isn't going to be useful to the general lesswrong.com community, unfortunately.

There were 8 people at the last session. I expect to see a slight increase next time.

Topics included:

• general introductions;
• conjunction fallacy and planning fallacy (discussing in 2 subgroups);
• anthropic trillemma / permutation city argument;
• organizational issues;
• discussion about how to expand our local presence, including one practical case of "how to touch on rationality topics at a dentist conference".

I'm not sure how representative this list is, it was my first LW meetup.

I hope me or someone else will post more detailed reports for future sessions.