As announced previously by email, we’ll elect a new committee for deciding member bans at this Saturday’s meetup. To reiterate the rules: 1) You may vote as long as you are willing to serve on the committee (or served on this past one). 2) We will use approval voting, so vote for everyone whom you trust to be on the committee, […]

It’s the 10-year anniversary of the reading of the final chapter of Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, a fan-fic that took the world by storm and put LessWrong on the map. Share with your fellow rationalists how it affected you! Table of Contents *** The meetup is at Central Market, 4001 N. Lamar,

This time we’ll share stories of when we were surprised by something that happened. As you know, a test of your skill as a rationalist is whether you can avoid being surprised by actual events. And with each story, we’ll discuss: 1) What model led to this being a surprise? 2) Was that a good

It hasn’t been long since we did this topic, but I figured we’d do it again what with upcoming festivities and all the visitors that will be descending on the area. Share your recommendations about what you like in the Austin area! *** The meetup is at Central Market, 4001 N. Lamar, in the cafe area. Look

This week’s topic will be “interestingly wrong ideas”, which means “ideas you now regard as wrong, but which you benefited in some way from learning about”. Here is an example from the LessWrong site. To further stimulate your thinking, here are other examples I have from my own life. 1) An article by Douglas Hofstadter

Often times it doesn’t even occur to you that certain things are even an option, even though it’s obvious, at least in hindsight. You can hire a coach on the skill you need! You can buy advertisements! You can ask for help on far more things than you may have thought! We’ll use this meetup

We’re overdue for a session of sharing what we’re working on, where we support each other in our goals and achievements. So at this meetup, we will once again share what we’re working on and use the chance to provide each other with encouragement and advice. Are you building something?  Working toward a fitness goal? Changing careers? Developing a skill? Share what you’re doing! (How does this differ from Group Debugging? The focus is

With recent market gyrations around DeepSeek and nVidia, now is a good a time as any to talk about investment, and how your views on AI relate to it. Is there a way you plan to capture the upside? Are there occupations and investments to avoid? Do you have a hedge against nearer-term crises? Discuss

It’s time once again for calibration practice! Using a series of numerical estimate questions about the real world, see if you can set a 75% confidence interval on the answers such that the correct answer is your interval 75% of the time, no more, no less. As in previous practices, we’ll draw questions from the