I wonder if there's something to this line of reasoning (there may not be):
There doesn't seem to be robust personal reasons why someone would not want to be a wirehead, but when reading some of the responses a bit of (poorly understood) Kant flashed through my mind.
While we could say something like 'X' should want to be a wirehead; we can't really say that the entire world should become wireheads as then there would be no one to change the batteries.
We have evolved certain behaviors that tend to express themselves as moral feelings when we feel driven to ...
London as well.
I'd come along to a meeting that took place in London centered around Less Wrong/ Overcoming Bias type topics.
To be honest, the more 'strongly' Transhumanist topics don't excite me too much, but I'd love a good conversation about rationality, ethics, the (non)meaning of life, etc...
I agree that a format based on a speaker and then discussion would lend itself to a more on-topic discussion. Alternatively, for some topics more than others, a 'book-club' type approach might work:
We could, for example, all read Mill or Bentham and then one could be designated...
I would love to hear a more detailed discussion of the problems with meta-analysis.
Very, very briefly (I'm preparing a very long blog post on this, but I want to post it when Dr Hickey, my uncle, releases his book on this, which won't be for a while yet) - meta-analysis is essentially a method for magnifying the biases of the analyst. When collating the papers, nobody is blinded to anything so it's very, very easy to remove papers that the people doing the analysis disagree with (approx 1% or fewer of papers that turn up in initial searches end up getting used in most meta-analyses, and these are hand-picked). On top of this, many of the... (read more)