Meetup : Marin & SF Less Wrong Make Things Go Boom
Discussion article for the meetup : Marin & SF Less Wrong Make Things Go Boom
Happy Independence Day! San Francisco’s Less Wrong group is having a meetup tomorrow, Tuesday July 5th, at our usual spot at Mel’s Diner, starting at 7 pm sharp. This week, we are being joined by the better part of Marin County’s 6 LW’ers, and I’d really like to show them a good time. I will bring fireworks to dinner that we can all set off together in as public a place as people have risk-tolerance for. In honor of the national holiday, this week’s discussion theme will be “When (if ever) does it make sense to sacrifice yourself for a greater cause?” Note that we will try hard not to debate any -particular- cause for too long; the goal is not so much as to find The Answer To Politics as it is to find general heuristics that can help us evaluate political claims.
UPDATE—The meetup attracted 4 people, and we all had a nice time. Planning for another joint SF-Marin meetup is in the works, this time hopefully with a bit more notice to everyone so that more of those who want to can attend. Photos of BOOM are available here.
I’m a little concerned about the topic; self-sacrifice seems to be a tempting thing to signal sometimes in conversations, but to have bad consequences on peoples’ longer-term psychology if they do. What did you think of Luke’s “How to avoid failure modes in thinking about goals” (or something similar to that) session at minicamp?
Will that or similar content be presented?
(For those who weren’t there: the session was aimed at avoiding fanaticism and similar failure modes, partly by thinking about oneself as a coalition and being open to trades between different motives, and partly by noticing the difficulties with many standard simple-sounding moral theories, including simple aggregative utilitarianism.)
Hi Anna. I’m not out to preach self-sacrifice. Speaking of ‘avoiding failure modes,’ I currently have 0 ‘yes’ rsvps and 3 ‘no’ rsvps. Non-attendance seems to be a graver source of risk to the San Francisco meetups than poorly presented topics. That said, if you or Luke send me the notes, I’ll be sure to review them just in case anyone shows up.