Events

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

Since we haven’t done this in a while, let’s have another meetup where times in our lives where we were surprised — times we thought we had a solid model of the world and it turned out to predict the opposite of what really happened. It’s a great opportunity to review why your world model

Text Shlomo for the address. His phone number is 718-787-7707. He asks everyone bring games because he doesn’t have any. Official start time is 7pm. We hope to see you then!

With the larger attendance and variety of newcomers, let’s use this change to share activities for future Saturday meetups and other events. If there’s an activity we’re not doing, or not doing enough, make the case for it! Previous activities include: lightning talks, calibration practice with Wits and Wagers, Taboo-ing practice, favorite articles, discussion of specific articles,