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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 efficiency and ruthlessness with which cults exploit these vulnerabilities. Our speaker will discuss the techniques that cults employ to recruit, retain, and persuade...
WHEN: 7:30PM, Monday, April 11, 2011 (Talk starts at 8PM sharp)
WHERE: Downstairs at Kells Irish Pub, 530 Jackson Street, San Francisco, CA 94133
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.
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 skepticism and atheism in letters to the editor of my campus newspaper. That is, I think maybe the point of this post is encouraging the sort of person who is now just reading LessWrong because it is shiny to go out and start doing things instead. The world changing will come later.
See chapter 3, "Commitment and Consistency" from Influence by Robert B. Cialdini or this post on the same by Anna Salamon and Steve Rayhawk.
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.
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 that had to be purchased for this transition. Every person in the office received a second monitor. The internal IT staff spent months on the transition, and a number of highly paid executives had to spend a not-insignificant amount of time deciding on the configuration of the final system. Additionally, another IT firm was contracted to set up some large portions of the system. While I was still there, the servers crashed and went down for a day and the office mostly halted, being unable to continue much of their work without access to their digital files. I witnessed frustrated staff vent some anger about the new system occasionally and support for it was mild at best.
Going paperless requires a very large commitment of resources up front and can significantly negatively impact productivity if everything doesn't go exactly as planned. And even if things do go well, at that.
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 are both useful for signalling in social situations.
Reddit - Its up/downvoting system teaches how to quickly decide whether or not something is interesting to you, and the ability to submit content to be judged by the crowds can train your ability to write short copy that will appeal to large audiences.
I feel like I'm stretching, but also like science fiction, video games, chess and poker are probably also stretches.
- 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).
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 rationality/support aspect, and some present desired more frequent and more specifically social meetups.
I admit that a rather large and disproportionate amount of front page posts are about meetups now, so here's a solution that I think may please everyone. Some designated meetup Super Organizer collects info on meetups planned for the next month, then publishes a monthly front page promoted post with info on all upcoming global meetups. Individual meetups could still be posted in the Discussion section so as to have their own threads, and obviate the need for a designated Super Organizer, instead being handled something like Open Threads where one is posted anew as necessary.
Edit: And as an added bonus, no one has to hack any code.
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 afterward by at least six people who were interested in discussing my presentation and learning more. At least four more told me that they appreciated my presentation later that day or weekend.
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.
This holds for me as well.
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.
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?
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 that only attempts to relieve the pain of being in Azkaban through patronus-presence are brought up (in the bit about bribes), not escape attempts. Perhaps it has to do with the "perfect crime" logic.
As to what the actual purpose was in this whole excursion, I have no idea.
I'm not sure intentional failure is the only explanation. It could be some weird bonding experience. Maybe Quirrel always dreamed of raiding wizarding prisons, pulling off bank heists, and taking over the world with his son. Chapter 55: "Adoption Papers"
I think from the duel that we can infer that Quirrel didn't expect to lose, even in a one-sided fight against a team of aurors. He was just playing games when it was one-on-one. Maybe he used the killing curse because he was (overly) confident that Harry was committed to trusting him completely with regards to this mission and didn't expect to be blocked.
Maybe chapter 55 will answer all of our questions. Ha. Haha.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.