Silas Barta

Time once again to share your favorite rationality-themed articles or rationality-adjacent media. What are the others missing out on? What would be worth a read or listen? Share your recommendations! *** The meetup is at Central Market, 4001 N. Lamar, in the cafe area. Look for the LW and SSC signs. People start arriving at […]

Time once again to work on our worldmodel-connectedness skills with Taboo! Taboo is a board game, but also a rationalist exercise that tests your worldmodel’s ability to maintain a deep understanding across domains. You are required to get others to say a target word, while also restricted from using certain related words from a “prohibited”

We’ve put it off for a while, but it’s finally time: We’ll practice the Double Crux technique of disagreement resolution. In this technique, you try to find some fact that, if you could be convinced of it, you’d change your mind (or at least would be a significant blow to you view). To make it

As you might know, I went to retreat this weekend for organizers of LW/ACX/rationality meetups and got to compare notes with our counterparts in cities all over the world. I’ll present what I learned, and we can share our thoughts on what the group is doing right, and what can still improve. *** The meetup

What would a rationalist meetup be without some discussion of the Trolley Problem (where you decide whether to divert a trolley to hit a bystander in order to protect more people on the track)? We’ll use this as a chance to explore its many variants, inspired by the Absurd Trolley Problems site. Note: I won’t

For this meetup, we’ll do another article for discussion: in this case, SSC’s A Failure, But Not of Prediction, from April 2020, which is a review of experts’  advice in the early stages of Covid, and what they got wrong, even their domain knowledge was solid. It expands into a discussion of how to make

With all the bad news coming in, is there anything going right? Don’t wait until November; use this chance to share what you’re thankful for right now. This is also your permission to give praise to others for what you appreciate about them. *** The meetup is at Central Market, 4001 N. Lamar, in the

In the spirit of previous meetups about rationalist Taboo, we’re going to try an alternate game with the same idea, of trying to communicate something with a limited vocabulary. The game is called Person Do Thing (instructions). Like with Taboo, you’re trying to get someone to say a target word, but instead of having a

This Saturday we’ll discuss prediction markets (where you bet on real-world events), with the discussion led by Stephen Grugett of Manifold Markets.  We’ll also be joined by his co-founder and brother, James Grugett. Prediction markets have long been advocated by rationalists as a means of getting accurate estimates of the probability of various events by