Houston Rationalists September Meetup
post by Willa (Eh_Yo_Lexa) · 2019-08-25T20:57:06.814Z · ? · GW · 2 commentsHeya! Come hangout with ~rationalsphere folks (people interested in LW/SSC/EA/ similar things, etc.) in person, enjoy some good conversation, and have fun!
Please invite friends and others you think would be interested in attending, this is a social meetup where we enjoy discussing interesting topics we don't often get to discuss IRL.
We are Houston Rationalists and we have social meetups on the third Sunday of each month (exception for holidays: we adjust our meetup day if the third Sunday is a holiday). Hope to see you there :)
I usually arrive 5-10 minutes early to the meetup and sit at one of the small tables in Cafe Brasil's entrance hall. Once a few people show up we typically go to the outdoor patio area in the back (after entering the cafe walk straight ahead, turn left, then turn right to go outside at the door before the bathrooms, look for the group of people + Houston Rationalists sign). If it's too hot or raining too hard then we typically will move to the main indoor room (take a right after entering the cafe) or occasionally will go to the smaller covered patio that's to the right of the main indoor room. I comment here and on our other platforms (facebook, discord, email, etc.) regarding our location during the meetup.
Cheers,
Willa
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comment by Willa (Eh_Yo_Lexa) · 2019-09-15T19:04:33.961Z · ? · GW
Hey! We're at Cafe Brasil in the big room to the right of the entrance hall after walking in. I'm in a green shirt and we have a Houston Rationalists sign. Come join us!
comment by Willa (Eh_Yo_Lexa) · 2019-08-25T21:07:37.166Z · ? · GW
Follow-up post for August meetup:
We discussed the ethics and practices of marketing and advertising industries, though admittedly we should have narrowed the questions we were concerned about instead of attempting to make large general claims.
We discussed the US's civic / political process and infrastructure, especially with regard to voting and civic engagement. We also discussed ideal forms of government and political regimes, though we mostly all had different views regarding what such ideal forms might look like. Twas fun :) What is the ideal civilization and how do we get there?
We discussed cybersecurity + free and open source software, especially how both of those things relate to US election security. Plus, we talked about the wannacry ransomware attack, cybersecurity + free and open source software more generally, and programming stuff more generally too.
We talked about Effective Altruism and received a really good overview of what EA does and is about from a member of Effective Altruism UH (https://eauh.wordpress.com/). We talked about cause areas and cause prioritization, common failure modes of charitable giving and charitable organizations, and more! Also discussed the possibility of a Houston-wide Effective Altruism group, though that's still very tentative, still, might we see such a group? Stay tuned for more updates next time!
And that's all for now. I didn't take very good notes this time, I was enjoying the discussions too much and didn't force myself to take notes. If you think I missed something, please comment about that and describe what we discussed!
Cheers, Willa