London Meetup on 2011/​1/​2

[Alexandros]

On Sunday, January 2nd 2011 there will be a meetup the London area. As with previous meetups, the venue is Shakespeare’s Head. The meeting will start at 14:00.

In order to keep us organised for 2011, I’m putting together a mailing list for LWers around the London area. If you’d like to be added to the list, please send me your e-mail address via private message.

[David_Gerard]

Homework!

Prompted by Anna asking what rationality techniques or areas LessWrong had yet to cover.

Need at least a few paragraphs for the discussion forums on the following.

• ciphergoth:

• How to think for more than 20 seconds

  • Prompted by Dawkins video in which he laments only being able to think coherently for about a minute at a time.

  • Methods: talking to oneself (my girlfriend kicks me when I wake her mumbling to myself at 5am); scribbling notes; mindmaps?

• What LessWrong is to me (his elevator speech on the subject)

  • prompt: he kept coming out with bits of it

• Andrei (cev)

• How to teach rationality to eight year olds

  • Andrei’s day job is teaching said eight year olds.

  • Cooking to teach science? - try something, see what happens, keep notes, predict things—very practical results

• David Gerard

• poison memes

  • find at least one coherent chunk in my tens of kilobytes of notes

• Quickly estimating a belief’s credit rating: is it likely to be able to pay its rent?

  • I have no idea how to actually do this, so ideas are welcomed

  • prompt: a philosopher (a Ben?) gave a philosophical question on morality, it struck me as “that’s either very profound or complete rubbish” and I came out with something about it not having a good credit rating

• How to ask the right question

  • prompt: how to think for 20 seconds … most of the work is asking the question, which takes me days to months. This is an area ripe for exploration.

Did anyone else present come out with something that struck you as very interesting that you or they should write up?

Edit: markdown is such a PITA. Is there a proper way to do lists with sub-lists? Edit 2: ah, space in front per level, that’s got it.

[taryneast]

Cooking to teach science?

ooh—awesome. I’ve actually already been thinking about how to teach basic Cooking-chemistry. I’ve already got quite a list of ideas..

I’ve also got some for Garden Biology, Bathtub Physics and several other sciences.

[wedrifid]

Edit: markdown is such a PITA. Is there a proper way to do lists with sub-lists?

A space before the asterices that you wish to make into the nested list. Probably looks better if one of the levels is of a different kind. The lesswrong stylesheet does not appear to include different bullet point formatting based on nest level.

For example:

 1. One
     * One sub
 2. Two
 3. Three

[David_Gerard]

Yep, space in front per level. Thank you!

[gwern]

If in doubt in Markdown, it’s worth consulting either http://​​daringfireball.net/​​projects/​​markdown/​​syntax#list or http://​​johnmacfarlane.net/​​pandoc/​​README.html#nested-lists

[wedrifid]

Or do as I did:

[Paul Crowley]

Your TODO list needs less writing and more reading...

[David_Gerard]

Undoubtedly.

• Alternate Pratchetts and sequences.

(I’ve been rereading the entire Discworld series in order. I am shocked to realise what a startlingly intelligent and clueful man Terry Pratchett is, and his rationalist heroes are pretty amazing too: yer Granny Weatherwax and Havelock Vetinari. Even Vimes, as he slowly, painfully learns to think. Pratchett doesn’t give much of how they do what they do to make them required reading, but noting that they are in fact rationalist heroes is IMO useful.)

[wedrifid]

• sf

  • sdf

[Paul Crowley]

fanTASTIC meetup! We had around a dozen people I think, and it lasted ’till just before 11pm. Can’t wait to do it again!

[taryneast]

Yes, that was an awesome meetup. It was great to meet everyone, and there was lots of interesting discussion.

Perhaps we should pick a regular date for the next one.

The first Sunday of the month?

[Paul Crowley]

Monthly might be slightly too often—how about the first Sunday of every other month? So the next one would be in March, Sunday 2010-03-06 14:00, same place?

[Kevin]

What’s wrong with monthly?

[Paul Crowley]

Meetups are usually far less busy than that, and that’s been on a slow and irregular schedule. If it’s too frequent, people feel less pressure to go to any particular one, and so we don’t get enough people. If the numbers look good for a meetup every other month, we could think about moving to monthly.

[taryneast]

Sounds good.

@Kevin: We could always have an unofficial meetup for those who just can’t stay away for a whole month ;)

[David_Gerard]

Oh good Lord. So who was left by the end?

(I noticed the time at 5:30pm and again at 7:30pm. The latter, I realised it was time to get home!)

[David_Gerard]

Where in the pub? (Tables down back good if possible.) Got a sign or something? (Is there a suitable logo? What does Bayes-Tan dress like?)

[Paul Crowley]

In the past I’ve put up a little paper Less Wrong sign with a picture of a paperclip on it...

[Alexandros]

Something like this?

[Paul Crowley]

Oh I love it! That should be the official LessWrong paperclip!

[timtyler]

You could make two paperclips with that much metal.

[sfb]

Are you very interested in making more paperclips, Mr Tyler? Or should I say, Mr Tiler?

[David_Gerard]

It’s a pretty maximised paperclip!

[David_Gerard]

That’s an excellent paperclip. Where did you find it?

[Alexandros]

Google Images, though apparently it’s an art piece

[taryneast]

Ok, I’m clearly too new here… it’s a paperclip because of: http://​​wiki.lesswrong.com/​​wiki/​​Paperclip_maximizer ???

[Will_Sawin]

Not too new to find the right answer. That’s correct.

[Larks]

I’ll be there.

[Paul Crowley]

I’ll be there!

[AnnaSalamon]

I’ll be there.

[AnnaSalamon]

Currently on my way to London (on a bus that has wifi!). Hope to see all you there.