i’m not certain you’ve yet earned the right to conclude that trying to do it makes you worse! :P Considering the set of all things that might someday go well, I don’t think all such things will necessarily go well in the beginning, nor do i think they’ll necessarily go well after a Significant Deliberate Attempt to Make Them Go Well. (I could ofc be totally wrong here—for instance maybe you’ve had many experiences that lead you to believe ‘trying do this makes you worse’, but you focused on the meetup in your post for narrative purposes.)
I’ve only attended one philosophy meetup, but most people seemed to be attending recreationally, not with the goal of believing more true things. The philosophy department chair was in attendance, and he seemed mildly horrified throughout.
I feel like I have some understanding of the ways in which people who are not rat-or-rat-adjacent care about believing true things and doing good things, but mostly that comes from simply being friends with them. For instance, I’ve not heard a certain friend of mine express many beliefs probabilistically or make many explicit verbal allowances for the likelihood of their being wrong, and I wouldn’t even claim “generally believing true things” is something they care about without at least asking them first, but: they’re very good at challenging certain subsets of their beliefs about themselves. They keep their actions consistent with their beliefs about the personal safety of the people around them, they treat safety as a sacred value even if it’s very inconvenient—which no one does well, in my experience. To a degree that I’m not really capable of describing, they’re better at doing good things in challenging situations than I am. And I’m grateful to know them for many reasons that wouldn’t fall under the umbrella of “believing true things and doing good things”! But I don’t think they’ve ever attended a philosophy meetup, and if they have, I think they probably treated it as something mostly recreational.
i’m not certain you’ve yet earned the right to conclude that trying to do it makes you worse! :P Considering the set of all things that might someday go well, I don’t think all such things will necessarily go well in the beginning, nor do i think they’ll necessarily go well after a Significant Deliberate Attempt to Make Them Go Well. (I could ofc be totally wrong here—for instance maybe you’ve had many experiences that lead you to believe ‘trying do this makes you worse’, but you focused on the meetup in your post for narrative purposes.)
I’ve only attended one philosophy meetup, but most people seemed to be attending recreationally, not with the goal of believing more true things. The philosophy department chair was in attendance, and he seemed mildly horrified throughout.
I feel like I have some understanding of the ways in which people who are not rat-or-rat-adjacent care about believing true things and doing good things, but mostly that comes from simply being friends with them. For instance, I’ve not heard a certain friend of mine express many beliefs probabilistically or make many explicit verbal allowances for the likelihood of their being wrong, and I wouldn’t even claim “generally believing true things” is something they care about without at least asking them first, but: they’re very good at challenging certain subsets of their beliefs about themselves. They keep their actions consistent with their beliefs about the personal safety of the people around them, they treat safety as a sacred value even if it’s very inconvenient—which no one does well, in my experience. To a degree that I’m not really capable of describing, they’re better at doing good things in challenging situations than I am. And I’m grateful to know them for many reasons that wouldn’t fall under the umbrella of “believing true things and doing good things”! But I don’t think they’ve ever attended a philosophy meetup, and if they have, I think they probably treated it as something mostly recreational.