Well, we actually had various versions of a “discuss and challenge your beliefs” exercise for a long time. (Previous names: “Belief Investigation” and “Structuring”.)
Here’s how it goes: split participants into pairs, ask one person in each pair to declare any of their beliefs that they want to investigate (compare: reddit.com/r/changemyview) and then allow them to discuss it for a predetermined period of time with their partner.
We used this kind of activity on LW meetups a lot, because it’s easy to organize, can give you valuable updates and can be repeated for pretty much unlimited number of times without losing value.
Then last year two people from the community who were interested in Street Epistemology proposed to run SE as a regular meetup, expanding on these discussions a lot more and turning it into an actual craft. You can find plenty of information about SE on its website (check out The Complete SE Guide), but basically it’s a set of best practices for how to investigate a belief in a dialogue.
SE seems very aligned with LW values. They talk a lot about “doxastic openness” (being open to revising your own beliefs), probabilities (“On a scale from zero to one hundred, how confident are you that your belief is true?”), etc. People at Kocherga meetups also often incorporate Double Crux technique in these discussions.
SE’s traditional discussion topics usually include religion and pseudo-science (although you can take anything as a topic), and they refer to logical fallacies more often than LW, so they are conceptually related to the classical skeptics and critical thinking communities. Which means SE is often more approachable than LW and Sequences, and SE meetups are currently our largest event, drawing ~20 visitors consistently every week.
Well, we actually had various versions of a “discuss and challenge your beliefs” exercise for a long time. (Previous names: “Belief Investigation” and “Structuring”.)
Here’s how it goes: split participants into pairs, ask one person in each pair to declare any of their beliefs that they want to investigate (compare: reddit.com/r/changemyview) and then allow them to discuss it for a predetermined period of time with their partner.
We used this kind of activity on LW meetups a lot, because it’s easy to organize, can give you valuable updates and can be repeated for pretty much unlimited number of times without losing value.
Then last year two people from the community who were interested in Street Epistemology proposed to run SE as a regular meetup, expanding on these discussions a lot more and turning it into an actual craft. You can find plenty of information about SE on its website (check out The Complete SE Guide), but basically it’s a set of best practices for how to investigate a belief in a dialogue.
SE seems very aligned with LW values. They talk a lot about “doxastic openness” (being open to revising your own beliefs), probabilities (“On a scale from zero to one hundred, how confident are you that your belief is true?”), etc. People at Kocherga meetups also often incorporate Double Crux technique in these discussions.
SE’s traditional discussion topics usually include religion and pseudo-science (although you can take anything as a topic), and they refer to logical fallacies more often than LW, so they are conceptually related to the classical skeptics and critical thinking communities. Which means SE is often more approachable than LW and Sequences, and SE meetups are currently our largest event, drawing ~20 visitors consistently every week.