As an attendee, my personal data might be relevant:
I have gained practice deliberately acquiring new habits and soliciting useful feedback. Before camp I had no specific plans for self-improvement other than "work harder", and now I actually keep track of what works and what doesn't. For instance, I am deliberately improving my public speaking skills by giving talks on Minicamp material once a week to a limited audience. I would place a bet that the "alternate universe me" who instead attended Inspirational Retreat X (IRX) would not have had lasting effects nearly a year later.
I am deliberately extending my network of contacts. Speaking to new people was a skill that I didn't... (read more)
There will certainly be more meetups! My current plan is to hold something biweekly, but I need to see what the spread of visitors is before I commit to a specific time/place. Thanks for letting me know you're interested!
I've already met another LWer since I moved here a month ago, but I'm pretty excited to meet more!
I'll be hosting a meetup at the Panera Bread meeting room on Oct. 22nd in State College! We'll be introducing ourselves, playing rationality games, and discussing what comes to mind. I was exposed to a lot of cool things at the Mini-camp in San Francisco this summer, and I'm eager to spread them around!
This meetup is mostly structured around getting to know each other, but future ones will have discussions about the sequences and current research results as well as more games and many other topics. Hope to see you there!
It might just be a browser/connection/processor speed problem on my end. Thanks for checking!
Until that sort of feature is implemented, what about footnote links to the content while having text (no link) to the references? Also helpful would be a "return to where this number is in the text" function. I anticipate this solution taking less time while being less robust.
Here's an example. The body text footnote numbers link to the bottom, and a return arrow links you back to the citation. Major problem on the linked website is that the page seems to have to reload. I don't know of any way to make citations such as these without the process being time-intensive unless you write your own citation manager or contact the linked-to blogger.
I'm not sure that heavy sarcasm like this is constructive. While I thought it was funny, I think it encourages the audience to automatically disregard and deride the subject. In my experience, heavy sarcasm tends to both make the subject angry and reinforce the subject's (erroneous?) beliefs.
My own sarcastic responses (about political or otherwise weighty matters) typically just polarize the group I'm in, making the new in-group like me and the new out-group dislike me.
That's really cool! This will really help with my journey through the sequences. Thank you!
I really like this method! It certainly seems to be far more useful than my current "wait, I just realized that I don't know as much about this subject as I think I do, and therefore I need to stop talking", which really really hurts the flow of conversation. Thanks!
For me, I tend to apply this sort of reasoning when I'm first encountering an author. If I read blatantly false statements from someone who I have no knowledge of, I've noticed that I'm very likely to put the book/article aside. If I have any experience with the author, however, I've noticed that I read sections that I disagree with very carefully, often several times.
I suspect that I'm applying the halo effect to the articles from authors I like, and anything I dislike becomes jarring and therefore much more interesting. It's been beneficial, though. I feel like I've learned much more from passages I disagree with, but this could also be from having spent more time on them than other sections. Does anyone with speed reading/material retention experience notice the same effect?
Concreteness Game The object of this game is to train players to generate examples for explaining concepts quickly. The game requires at least two people, but may work better with groups of three or four.
To play, one of the players (Asker) names a concept to be explained, such as "How do you traverse a linked nodal network", "Explain the law of Conservation of Energy", or "What constitutes good financial advice?"
The other player (Generator) then tries to explain the concept/skill/other by using a nearby object to assist. The Generator should relate the example back to the original query and explain how the example demonstrates the experimental predictions that the concept makes (see Extended... (read 797 more words →)