Events

Per the ACX announcement, our Spring megameetup is coming up! Date: Saturday, May 30th Time: 12pm-5pm Location: Brewtorium at 6015 Dillard Cir A, Austin, TX 78752 See full event details and RSVP here. Appetizers will be provided.

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

As a way to better get to know each other, we’ll split into groups of 3 and construct Venn Diagrams of the members of that group: where they overlap, and what is unique about each person. Then we’ll rotate groups and share what we learned. *** The meetup is at Central Market, 4001 N. Lamar,

Like with previous years, instead of the cafe meetup, we’ll go to Eeyore’s Birthday, a longtime Austin tradition where folks congregate in Pease Park (sic) for live music, drum circles, and generally just being hippies (Wikipedia page). Please join us! Time: 11am-8pm Location: Pease Park, 1100 Kingsbury St Be advised: 1) It is not possible to park on

Time again to discuss health and wellness! Share your disproportionately effective advice, and loop us in on where the conventional advice is wrong. Edit: we’re in the upstairs patio area. *** The meetup is at Central Market, 4001 N. Lamar, in the cafe area. Look for the LW and SSC signs. People start arriving at

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,

The proof that …999 = -1 seemed merely academic, until they started having computers represent negative numbers that way. The Gale-Shapley algorithm for the Stable Marriage Problem was obscure, until they started using it to match medical students to residencies. What are other cases where knowledge in one domain had surprising applications in another one?

At this meetup, we’ll discuss the Orthogonality Thesis, that any level of intelligence is compatible with any kind of goal i.e. there could exist a “Clippy” superintelligence that only cares about making paperclips. See the link for background on the topic, and the contrast with “inevitabilist” theses which argue e.g. “It doesn’t matter what kind

This week’s topic will be the Anthropic Principle: what can you expect to be true, conditional on you existing at all? Check out this LessWrong article for interesting applications of the concept, and see LessWrong’s knowledge base on the topic. *** The meetup is at Central Market, 4001 N. Lamar, in the cafe area. Look