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We had some people who were in both, but no one who started out just coming to HPMOR and then joined discussion, to the best of my recollection. It's possible we could have done a better job of (a) actively cross-promoting (b) tying discussion topics in to HPMOR stuff.
LW discussion meetup (shotgun rules)
The outcome of the State of the Meetup Meetup was that people were mostly coming for social reasons and we probably didn't need to freak out about topics all the time.
We drafted and sorta-unilaterally instated the Shotgun Rules (flagrantly cribbed from the Bay Area Debian group.)
Relevant highlights:
- Anyone may call a meetup for the appointed day
- If the meetup is not called it does not happen
- If there is no designated topic we will just hang out and that is fine.
In practice, I think a meetup has been called by someone who wasn't an organizer of the previous group only once or twice, and we've almost always had a "topic" (sometimes a post from a rationality blog that someone found interesting, sometimes "play Zendo" or "do some other-optimizing"). We usually stay more or less "on topic" for 60-90 minutes, then digress at leisure.
A side benefit of the shotgun rules (though I have fairly strong evidence that new members of the mailing list categorically do not read them) is the opportunity for folks to get a sense of approximately how serious any given meetup can be expected to be (not very), and to signal for certain values (e.g. gender inclusive restrooms) without beating folks over the head with them.
LW discussion meetup (old-skool)
The old-skool LW discussion meetup was on alternate Thursday evenings, usually either at a coffee shop or our house. Often, the organizer/s would put a fair bit of time and thought into coming up with a topic, researching it, and fleshing out a discussion plan.
We had a few topics we felt okay about revisiting periodically:
- Calibration exercises
- Rationality Checklist
but all in all coming up with a new topic often enough that we thought people wouldn't get bored and leave got stressful, so in January 2016 we had a Future of the Meetup meeting.
HPMOR meetup
Sometime mid-HPMOR, we had a biweekly Saturday midday meetup group to discuss some number of chapters. We started at the beginning and would read (or not read) ?5? or so chapters per meetup until we ran out of new material, after which we met sporadically when there was a new chapter. If memory serves, we met for brunch a couple of times, then shifted to doing food truck food + hanging out a local brewery. After discussion these meetups would generally segue into at least a whole afternoon if not a whole day of hangouts.
At least once or twice, we got some folks who ardently insisted they'd never ever ever ever come to a LW meetup. We also occasionally got attendees from places outside the Triangle for whom it wasn't feasible to make the trip to our LW discussion meetup.
We talked about moving on to other rationality fic (Luminosity in particular) after HPMOR wrapped but that didn't happen for some reason (possibly it got cold before we got around to it, and the food truck+brewery combo is somewhat less enchanting in such weather.)
I rarely have a whole Saturday to devote to discussion, beer, ping pong, coffee, and Bullitron anymore, but I remember these with a lot of fondness.
Research Triangle [but we almost always meet in Durham], NC (aka RTLW)
3 sorta-distinct meetup styles; 1 currently active. I guess I will put them into their own comments below.
What does it take to be a programmer, not just to become one?
Making peace with the fact that there will never be a day when perfect code springs full formed from your head like a Greek goddes, and that what you are getting paid to do (assuming you're getting paid) is to be aggravated.
If the job is good, the aggravations are the kind that you get to have fun eliminating: clients with use cases the product team didn't think of, someone changed an API and didn't tell you, you need to build a new feature, etc. (If the job is bad, the aggravations are probably the same as any other bad job: meetings or mismanagement.)
Thanks for thinking this through.
A few questions:
Would there be a way for people who already maintain blogs elsewhere to cross-post to their LW subdomain? (Would this even be desirable?)
Do you envision LW2 continuing to include applied rationality type posts? Does that work with "everything should work towards Aumann agreement"?
users may not repeatedly bring up the same controversial discussion outside of their original context
How could we track this, other than relying on mods to be like "ugh, this poster again"?
professionally edited rationality journal
Woah. Is this really a thing that MIRI could (resources permitting) just like ... do?
Durham, NC party -- 1:00 PM EDT at Fullsteam, 726 Rigsbee Avenue, 27701.
WAIT. NO. I have a good guess as to why and have for a few months, and I have not been clear about my motives.
What I really want is for the downvoter to come out and say "I hold you in such contempt that I'm willing to skirt both LW policy and norms to deincentivize you from participating."
I actually considered posting something like that, but could not figure out how to say it without it coming across as flagrant snark. Well. shrug
The remark wasn't "jokily defensive", it's because for a while someone was serially downvoting everything I posted, and I wanted to know why.
I still want to know why!
I finally set my sights low enough that I got some things done at work! :p (Which is to say, I reduced them from "I have to write this thing I don't understand" to "I have to write part of this thing I don't understand" and finally to "Okay, I have to write ONE LINE of code today.")
Archive of meetup topics:
3/17/2016: Go (the game)
3/4/2016:
http://lesswrong.com/lw/2qc/rationality_power_tools/
https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Rationality_power_tools
1/22/2015:
http://mindingourway.com/steering-towards-forbidden-conversations
http://mindingourway.com/enjoying-the-feeling-of-agency
3/5/2015:
http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
5/21/2015 -- Gamification
http://lesswrong.com/lw/55i/failure_modes_sometimes_correspond_to_game/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lfBpsV1Hwqs
6/4/2015 -- Gamification, continued
6/18/2015 -- Three Worlds Collide
7/2/2015:
8/6/2015:
Will she be appearing on the moderator list?
I'm curious about the extent to which rationalists have a strong enough preference for dating within the rationality community that they exclude non-rationalist potential dates.
Or, in another framing, to what extent the preference for a rationalist date outweighs other considerations, to the extent that not dating a non-rationalist is preferable to dating a non-rationalist.
Hmm. It'd be my guess that this effect diminishes as the number of dates/length of relationship increases; what do you think?
women tend to have an easier time finding dates
I'm a little confused by what this implies. Are you observing that it's easier for women to initiate dating activities (plausible), or that women go on more dates than men (but while some women date each other, most don't)?
Yeah. For me I don't think so much in terms of "don't out yourself" (basically figuring this is impossible) as "will I be able to manage my relationship with this bystander with minimum future awkwardness" (which I have maybe unreasonably low priors for.)
(Also, not net negative; see above)
Trying to notice and update on how much brainpower is used by/distraction is caused by looming unmade decisions, even fairly trivial ones.
Argh. No, my current relationship(s) are pretty great overall, and I was so enthusiastic about demonstrating that I was realistic about the downsides that I didn't really think about the outcomes vs. experiences thing.
Sorry for the confusion; will (try to) edit for clarity.
The main negative aspect of my ongoing experience (20 months so far) has primarily been in increased awkwardness around acquaintances and family members. I'm predisposed to that anyway, and actually doing something nonconformy (and not really having much sense of how acquaintances and family members feel about it, even those who are aware of the relationship) has heightened the phenomenon.
It's definitely net positive overall, though. :)
edit: deobfuscation
How do you separate someone's mental health from desire to be in a poly relationship?
I'm fairly certain you didn't mean it, but this is pretty insulting.
Why would your partner be expected to have respected your wishes when if they had remained "monogamy" given that your partner did not respect your wishes when they were "don't date either of these two people"?
(In the interest of full disclosure, I don't have very high priors on nominal monogamy preventing people from cheating.)
Do you think this outcome would have been different if you had not agreed to a poly relationship?
In that case, do you also want information about monogamy outcomes?
Possibly in your deletion enthusiasm, you seem to have deleted the whole post! :p
Negative Polyamory outcomes?
3 [deleted]
The more people you add, the greater the risk of something like that happening.
I'd believe that, for example, any given relationship participant has some arbitrary likelihood of one-place defection, and the likelihoods stack proportional to the number of participants. But I'm not sure that any given participant is more likely to defect the more people they are also in a relationship with -- if defection is two-place, it seems like cooperation should be too.
Meta: are you interested in identifying "any negative outcomes in any poly relationships" or "negative outcomes that were caused by the poly-ness of a relationship"? I ask because "relationship crumbled due to mental health issues" seems orthogonal to "relationship is poly".
Offering a hypothesis for difference between meatspace and cyberspace behavior based on some informal observations (that isn't "everyone is awful on the internet", which may nevertheless be a better description of the problem).
Please justify your claim.
edit: in particular, in light of the average nerd's reliance on lots of non-nerd workers. (I did just envision a lot of infrastructure that incentivizes nerd support, which I admit I kind of like, but not, I'm afraid, for particularly well-thought-out reasons.)
Would you rephrase this, or expand upon it? I'm having a hard time coming up with an interpretation that isn't "nerd desires should be prioritized above most others' desires", which is both gross and seems difficult to support.
Here is a short list of things I do and some things I have heard suggested:
- Consume media created by members of disadvantaged groups
- Notice when members of disadvantaged groups are absent from a particular setting. Ask yourself or others why this might be the case, and whether this serves the desired objectives, or if there's even clarity on what the desired objectives are. (Example: holding a meeting on a college campus that lacks public parking.)
- If you attend professional conferences, ask organizers what they are doing to ensure all presentation proposals get fair consideration. (If you're so inclined, ask what they are doing to support diversity among presenters.)
- Update towards the belief that, regardless of your good intentions, members of disadvantaged groups may interpret certain things you say uncharitably. Avoid saying such things, or take pains to avoid offloading your discomfort onto them. For examples of things to watch out for, you may find it helpful to read Derailing for Dummies.
Some addenda:
- If you have experiences that you feel make you better able to empathize with members of a disadvantaged group, great! When you are with members of the disadvantaged group, do not bring up these experiences unless you are specifically asked.
- Do not claim to share an identity with members of the disadvantaged group unless explicitly and enthusiastically invited to do so. Even so, this dispensation is good only when you're among the people who extended it to you. (Example: a campus LGBTQA group whose members are persistently and vocally excited about the "and allies!" bit.)
- If you feel someone is stereotyping you unfairly, consider whether you are the target audience for this piece of media. Do not reply, with a possible exception being for when you are being named specifically (and not referred to by group identity.)
- Carefully consider the relative magnitude of a wrong you have suffered before airing righteous indignation, even as a group bonding activity.
For example, there is usually a strong emphasis on "male privilege", but very little emphasis on "rich privilege".
This is, in my estimation, a real problem for the sometimes disjunct groups of rationalists and social justice types alike, and one I haven't yet come up with a good solution for other than "talk about class a lot".
When in real life you see a suffering man, you usually don't see feminists running to him screaming "actually, I have it much worse!". But when you see a man writing about his suffering online, this is what often happens.
I wonder if this is because the set of visibly suffering men (e.g., most of the panhandlers I pass when driving anywhere in my town) doesn't overlap much with the set of men writing online about their suffering.
As a guideline, I don't think anyone should be generally jerky. And I am on board with mutual respect.
I probably should have said something more like "It isn't the responsibility of a marginalized community to abide by the expectations of its marginalizers in its own space." In particular, I see a need for spaces where people can express their own experiences without censorship or self-censorship or having to explain themselves.
By way of illustration: I used to be one of those people who ran around nontheist blogs insisting that anyone with complaints to level about Christians or Christianity be excruciatingly specific that not every Christians was a terrible person (or whatever). Then #NotAllMen happened, and lo, I was ashamed of myself, and stopped doing that.
Trying to do community by being welcoming and helpful, does have it's sense of cargo-culting
Er ... does it? I guess you can form community by deserting all the subjects on an island or something ...
edit: I just realized this sounds like I was trying to make a joke about cargo cultists living on islands, but what I actually meant was "well, how else would one form community, other than by being welcoming and helpful? I guess you could put a lot of people in a stressful situation together."
The closest analogy I can think of is that it's like being part of an enormous LARP with millions of participants and thousands of years of history.
This sounds to me like voluntarily divulging private information, which I tend to interpret as a strong indication that the divulger is inviting me into community with them.
Maybe unless the content of the depression talk along the lines of "I'm depressed there's no/not more community"?
For what it may be worth, I've historically been pretty cranky about badmouthing religion, and I don't remember anything triggering my "harumph" reaction. (Edit: I went to Solstice in NY.)
This said, my current model of reality is that the atheist community in the US is marginalized to some degree, and it isn't the responsibility of a marginalized community to abide by the expectations of its marginalizers.
haven't quite figured out the whole "community" thing
What would have been different if they had figured out the whole community thing?
Other than human immortality, do you remember specific cringeworthy quirks?
Realized that my interest in buying a house was giving me an ugh field around thinking about how I could give more.
Realized it's obviously more optimal to buy a house and give what I can than to keep not thinking about it and not giving what I can.
Well, yes -- I wouldn't have spent a bunch of time on a line of work that I didn't think would pan out.
But what I was getting at is the idea that the status quo is actually highly mutable.
Thanks! It was a lot of work and anxiety, but I still feel like I figured out a cheat code. :D
This hits on the particular question I failed to ask in this case, which was something like "Is there some particular bias I'd be exploiting for fun/profit/improvement?"
Which, of course, begs the question of whether it is rational to exploit biases instead of trying to mitigate them.
Also, my unstudied impression is that cutting out relationships which are important to the subject is the hallmark of cultism.
After having heard much about how great a gratitude journal is for one's life, I overcame my sense of impending hokeyness long enough to set up a Google form to journal in and an IFTTT recipe to remind me to do it.
In the interest of full disclosure, it comes to my attention that I did little if any work to figure out where the impression of hokeyness came from and whether it ought to be believed. :/
Why would I spend energy maintaining a relationship that has no apparent [positive] value?
About a year and a half ago, I lost my fun-but-low-skill receptionist job. Deciding I was tired of being poor and having no marketable skills, I began to teach myself to program, which involved a bunch of Coursera courses, an internship, and a TAship at an intensive code school. Tomorrow will mark a month at my first Real Job as a programmer (indeed, the first Real Job of my life.)
The process has involved the acquisition of non-computer skills, too. In particular, I've gotten better at estimating my own competence, accounting for the planning fallacy, asking for help, doing distasteful tasks, and calmly articulating differences of opinion (and corrections of fact).
It was in the Received Text, so, no particular reason AFAIK. It seems like the bullet points cover both kinds?