As one of the organizers of the philosophy group being discussed (Being and Becoming for reference) I read this post and comment section with great interest. We’ve been hosting these meetups every two weeks for 2+ years so it’s about time we get a heavyweight critique. First, I feel really terrible that you felt this terrible after an event I had a hand in organizing. Seriously. I sincerely hope you haven’t given up on the idea that ‘common folk’ can reason well, value holding true beliefs, and are deserving of admiration for attempting to understand themselves and the world better, even if they get there by different means than you do.
I don’t think it would be accurate to say that what you witnessed at our events proved your suspicions about the lack of intellectual rigour or interest in truth of the ‘common man’. At least not if you understood the purpose of our events. Let me explain and I hope you will see that all is not lost. In fact, I hope you will see why the fact that these events are still ongoing and sold out every time (sue me) is a good sign of this.
The purpose of our events is to get to a better grasp of the topic we are exploring that week. We usually talk about everyday things like friendship, anger, and grief, but also things like animal consciousness, bioethics, democracy, and AI. We craft handouts with questions that aim to get at these ideas. I’m not sure which session you attended, but I suspect that it would be more frustrating to wander into our session when the topics discussed are the last four topics I mentioned. I’ll admit that they don’t invite the most insightful commentary from people who have little background knowledge, but I’ve been surprised. Plus, when people don’t know a lot about a topic, they come to learn from others who do, in person, on a random Tuesday night. That’s awesome. On the other hand, I’d argue that one of the best ways to understand everyday experiential things like friendship, anger, and grief, is to talk about, well, our experiences of them. And yes, this includes vaguely philosophical sounding takes based on people’s experiences that are poorly phrased because, well, people are trying to process and codify really complex experiences and ideas into language having little training in it. And they often (myself included) fail. But sometimes, sometimes they say something that deeply resonates with someone else and then they go talk about it upstairs over a pint or two. This is what public philosophical discourse often looks like: It’s regular people making an earnest effort and engaging with complicated ideas. Valuing truth can look like different things.
I suspect that what went wrong is that when you thought about our community being a public philosophy group, you didn’t expect to have the kind of experience you had at our event. We don’t reward name or concept dropping, we don’t make people feel bad if they don’t express themselves cogently, and we encourage people who have a disagreement to talk it out later so that we can hear from more people who want to contribute something to the discussion. We do this intentionally because there are plenty of people who are curious and seek truth, but don’t feel welcome in (and don’t come back to) intellectual spaces where they’re made to feel inferior because they, like you pointed out, didn’t have the same affordances. We created this space to be a starting point for deeper exploration, but we’re also just a community for people who enjoy spending an evening with others talking about our experiences and ideas and hopefully learn a thing or two about how others make sense of the world. Are we allowed to call ourselves a public philosophy group? In so far as we’re trying to collectively understand our experiences and ideas through perspective-sharing and exchange (even if informal), I think so. We may not get to capital T truth in two hours, but people leave with some interesting threads that they can pull and follow. I should also mention that I know of at least one informal group that has formed out of ours that I consider to be more rigorous (members of that group still regularly show up to our events), and I was invited to a gathering this weekend from a similar initiative to talk about death.
I don’t expect our events will be enjoyable for everyone. But the probability of having a good and meaningful conversation at our events are almost certainly higher than at a sports bar. Once you see what’s happening here as a meaningful (but sometimes messy) engagement with ideas, I think you’ll regain some of that hope back. And I sincerely hope you do (and maybe come back, too).
Thanks so much for weighing in, and with much more grace and understanding than I realistically deserve.
First, I want to say that I am actually very sad that the good name of public philosophy groups is being dragged through the mud in the comment section here, because I genuinely mean all the good things I say about your organization. I found the events I attended to be excellently organized, warm and lively, and really good at doing exactly what you are aiming to do, which is to make philosophy less scary for the people out there who’ve always been a little interested in it but also find it a little intimidating and maybe struggle with impostor syndrome. I completely agree that people who have not done years of philosophy courses deserve to have interesting and thoughtful conversations, and your org does a really good job of facilitating them. I consider your work a stupendous act of public service, one I know I would personally flame out of doing in 2 weeks flat, and I’m genuinely happy whenever I see another substack update from you guys talking about the latest event! I truly have nothing but admiration for all of B&B’s organizers. Please don’t let any of the midwits here convince you that your mission or approach needs any changing at all!
I hope the above paragraph also makes it clear that I fully understand what B&B’s mission is, and I walked into your events with my eyes wide open (or something close to that. Maybe they were open but there were some scales on them or something like that? Anyways.) I just happened to have socialized exclusively in a very strong intellectual bubble in a university town for several years before this, and it was only because I was incredibly out of touch that I found myself dismayed at the lack of epistemic rigor on offer. There was literally no reason for me to have expected any amount of epistemic rigor!
And while I disavowed my sandcastle metaphor because I do think of intelligence as an important meta-skill that is much more important than the ability to build sandcastles, I was still acting like a muppet! If a black belt BJJ practitioner came to an introduction to grappling class and had a bad time, this literally says nothing about the quality of the class. That practitioner is just in the wrong place and to try to accomodate him would make the meetup worse for their actual goals (it is always worse when organizations have goals that are somewhat incompatible), and the black belt needs to go away attend meetups that are appropriate for them. I’ve read enough philosophy that it’s genuinely not enjoyable to me to hang out with the amateurs in the hopes that one of them surprises me with an insight every few sessions, but that’s on me, not on you, and certainly not on the attendees.
But to be frank, none of this gives me any hope back. To be more precise, I don’t want hope. I want to believe true things about the world, even when they are inconvenient and even when they hurt. And I want to obey Kant’s categorical imperative more than I am doing currently. And those things are currently at loggerheads, and this is just going to take me some amount of time and reading and thinking to work through.
To be honest, it’s not just the B&B events that led me to the conclusions that I did. I’m in my second decade of being an adult and having full control over my social interactions, I’ve done and continue to do a lot of the social things that people have recommended in the comments (talking to uber drivers and random people and attending classes about various things I am not good at and whatnot), and they don’t really help as much as the people advising them seem to think they would, and the bad experiences compound and drag me towards a conclusion that I don’t want to accept. I wrote up a B&B event because it was sort of hilariously bad for me in a way that brought all the little thoughts I was suppressing to light (which, again, you shouldn’t feel bad about at all!), partly to try to process the ugly amount of vitriol my body decides is acceptable when I’m in intellectual waters I consider inadequate, and partly because I thought it made for an amusing tale at my expense. I am boo boo the clown. I fully, completely admit that me turning evil is entirely a skill issue on my part and has nothing to do with the organizational capabilities of the B&B crew at all, nor the quality of the people who show up to them.
And while I don’t want to tell you how to run your organization, insofar as I keep turning evil when being dropped in your particular rainforest patch, I don’t think you should welcome me back to your events. I will not be able to faithfully adhere to your core values, and like you point out beginners can often become timid and self-conscious in the presence of people with a lot more skill than them, and that is the last thing I want. Everyone deserves a safe space to discuss meaningful topics, at whatever level is most comfortable to them.
Not in a sarcastic way, but because I’m ignorant (and almost everyone here will be) and would appreciate you drilling down:
We don’t reward name or concept dropping, we don’t make people feel bad if they don’t express themselves cogently, and we encourage people who have a disagreement to talk it out later so that we can hear from more people who want to contribute something to the discussion.
This all sounds rather wishy-washy to me, but I suspect it’s not the full story. Could you paint a picture explaining how your group is investigating things more deeply than just chatting with people at a party? (Again, I’m not presupposing the answe is that you’re bad; I’m just trying to get you to add details at the top of the comments section)
We don’t reward name or concept dropping, we don’t make people feel bad if they don’t express themselves cogently, and we encourage people who have a disagreement to talk it out later so that we can hear from more people who want to contribute something to the discussion.
Here are specific ways we go about this:
At the beginning of each cafe, we go through some house rules. One of them is not to name or concept drop without saying why that person is relevant to the current discussion or defining your terms. We even came up with a silly little gesture (**jazz hands**) to normalize asking people to define their terms. We’ve found that many good ideas can be conveyed without technical jargon and it increases the likelihood that people will follow the point being made.
It’s a bit harder to illustrate how we “don’t make people feel bad for not being cogent.” One way I think we do this is that we show appreciation for contributions that people make to the large-group discussion even if the way they expressed their idea was messy. We do this by either thanking them for their contribution, or, as co-moderators, pull out what we understood their point to be before inviting someone else to contribute. This comes from a recognition that, for the most part, people’s contributions are works in progress. They may be thinking or expressing an idea out loud for the first time in their life and it won’t always be pretty. Others who do manage to have persuasive arguments get their fair share of recognition (people will come up to them after and say that they really enjoyed their contribution).
Lastly, if person A makes a point and person B responds by disagreeing with everything person A said, we don’t go back to person A to counter. We invite them (in the house rules) to use the disagreement as a starting point for a conversation during the break or after the event. At any given moment, there are usually 3+ people who have indicated that they want to say something (hand up and eye-contact with moderator) and it’s usually not about the disagreement at hand. We have a limited amount of time (30 minutes in small group discussions and 20 minutes in large) and want to use the large-group discussions to surface as many different ideas that came up during the small groups as possible.
I want to make clear that I don’t claim that we scratch past the surface at our events. But that doesn’t mean that we’re not aiming for greater understanding. At every cafe, we distribute a handout with a list of questions that are meant to guide small groups of attendees in their investigation of a given topic. The goal of these questions isn’t to systematically get us to an answer about what is meant by love, morality, or what a fair justice system looks like. The goal is to get people to explore important questions together with others using the tools and knowledge that are currently at their disposal. There are certainly other, more efficient ways to learn about the world, but I’d argue that at least for some topics where lived experience is involved, exploring with others is better than exploring alone.
I have strong upvoted this because of how helpful I think it is to understanding the post (even for people who disagree with your methods, knowing what they are should be very helpful!)
I think those sound like awesome ways to facilitate high-quality conversation between many more people than otherwise. You need a way for beginners to get good, of course, but sometimes it’s hard to build those skills without some help. It almost sounds like your goal (getting lots of people involved and sharing ideas) is intentionally opposed to a discussion that’s solely among practiced debaters with extremely coherent arguments (and little room for disagreement, since “correct” thinkers shouldn’t diverge by much, presumably). That seems OK to me, but I’m not certain you’d agree.
I’m sure Sofia can give a better answer but I can give a rough summary of the events I went to.
One was a close reading of a passage from Descartes’s First Meditation, done as an exercise to practice identifying arguments and supporting claims being made in a text, and assessing validity. That was facilitated by a philosophy professor who provided a five page handout with step by step instructions on what you should do, and walked us through a suggested process that involved five different colours of highlighter marker. This was a great skill to teach, and I was blackpilled by how people seemed to struggle to parse Descartes even though the translation we worked with was a very accessible one (Moriarty for Oxford World’s Classics).
The second was a more social event, where we began with a short lecture by someone with experience on the subject matter, was provided a one-page handout with three sets of three curated discussion questions, and then alternated between small and large group discussions until we worked though all the discussion questions. One set was asking about our own personal experiences, one set was about a hypothetical scenario we were invited to think through, I forget if there was a theme to the third set. This was a really well facilitated event, and I was blackpilled by the cornucopia of bad takes on offer.
...I hope my unpleasant baby tree frog ways are becoming clearer. People keep saying that actually the other patches of rainforest are polluted garbage. No! I just need a problematically extensive selection of epistemic microbiota in my biome.
I am so curious now to hear examples of these bad takes. Maybe you could return to a meeting to act as an observer, learning more about how people get the things wrong that they get wrong?
lesswrong I think does a good job of giving good tools for rational thinking to those people already inclined towards it, or motivated to improve, but I don’t think the rationalist community is very good about how to spread its ideas past its own bubble.
As one of the organizers of the philosophy group being discussed (Being and Becoming for reference) I read this post and comment section with great interest. We’ve been hosting these meetups every two weeks for 2+ years so it’s about time we get a heavyweight critique. First, I feel really terrible that you felt this terrible after an event I had a hand in organizing. Seriously. I sincerely hope you haven’t given up on the idea that ‘common folk’ can reason well, value holding true beliefs, and are deserving of admiration for attempting to understand themselves and the world better, even if they get there by different means than you do.
I don’t think it would be accurate to say that what you witnessed at our events proved your suspicions about the lack of intellectual rigour or interest in truth of the ‘common man’. At least not if you understood the purpose of our events. Let me explain and I hope you will see that all is not lost. In fact, I hope you will see why the fact that these events are still ongoing and sold out every time (sue me) is a good sign of this.
The purpose of our events is to get to a better grasp of the topic we are exploring that week. We usually talk about everyday things like friendship, anger, and grief, but also things like animal consciousness, bioethics, democracy, and AI. We craft handouts with questions that aim to get at these ideas. I’m not sure which session you attended, but I suspect that it would be more frustrating to wander into our session when the topics discussed are the last four topics I mentioned. I’ll admit that they don’t invite the most insightful commentary from people who have little background knowledge, but I’ve been surprised. Plus, when people don’t know a lot about a topic, they come to learn from others who do, in person, on a random Tuesday night. That’s awesome. On the other hand, I’d argue that one of the best ways to understand everyday experiential things like friendship, anger, and grief, is to talk about, well, our experiences of them. And yes, this includes vaguely philosophical sounding takes based on people’s experiences that are poorly phrased because, well, people are trying to process and codify really complex experiences and ideas into language having little training in it. And they often (myself included) fail. But sometimes, sometimes they say something that deeply resonates with someone else and then they go talk about it upstairs over a pint or two. This is what public philosophical discourse often looks like: It’s regular people making an earnest effort and engaging with complicated ideas. Valuing truth can look like different things.
I suspect that what went wrong is that when you thought about our community being a public philosophy group, you didn’t expect to have the kind of experience you had at our event. We don’t reward name or concept dropping, we don’t make people feel bad if they don’t express themselves cogently, and we encourage people who have a disagreement to talk it out later so that we can hear from more people who want to contribute something to the discussion. We do this intentionally because there are plenty of people who are curious and seek truth, but don’t feel welcome in (and don’t come back to) intellectual spaces where they’re made to feel inferior because they, like you pointed out, didn’t have the same affordances. We created this space to be a starting point for deeper exploration, but we’re also just a community for people who enjoy spending an evening with others talking about our experiences and ideas and hopefully learn a thing or two about how others make sense of the world. Are we allowed to call ourselves a public philosophy group? In so far as we’re trying to collectively understand our experiences and ideas through perspective-sharing and exchange (even if informal), I think so. We may not get to capital T truth in two hours, but people leave with some interesting threads that they can pull and follow. I should also mention that I know of at least one informal group that has formed out of ours that I consider to be more rigorous (members of that group still regularly show up to our events), and I was invited to a gathering this weekend from a similar initiative to talk about death.
I don’t expect our events will be enjoyable for everyone. But the probability of having a good and meaningful conversation at our events are almost certainly higher than at a sports bar. Once you see what’s happening here as a meaningful (but sometimes messy) engagement with ideas, I think you’ll regain some of that hope back. And I sincerely hope you do (and maybe come back, too).
Hi Sofia,
Thanks so much for weighing in, and with much more grace and understanding than I realistically deserve.
First, I want to say that I am actually very sad that the good name of public philosophy groups is being dragged through the mud in the comment section here, because I genuinely mean all the good things I say about your organization. I found the events I attended to be excellently organized, warm and lively, and really good at doing exactly what you are aiming to do, which is to make philosophy less scary for the people out there who’ve always been a little interested in it but also find it a little intimidating and maybe struggle with impostor syndrome. I completely agree that people who have not done years of philosophy courses deserve to have interesting and thoughtful conversations, and your org does a really good job of facilitating them. I consider your work a stupendous act of public service, one I know I would personally flame out of doing in 2 weeks flat, and I’m genuinely happy whenever I see another substack update from you guys talking about the latest event! I truly have nothing but admiration for all of B&B’s organizers. Please don’t let any of the midwits here convince you that your mission or approach needs any changing at all!
I hope the above paragraph also makes it clear that I fully understand what B&B’s mission is, and I walked into your events with my eyes wide open (or something close to that. Maybe they were open but there were some scales on them or something like that? Anyways.) I just happened to have socialized exclusively in a very strong intellectual bubble in a university town for several years before this, and it was only because I was incredibly out of touch that I found myself dismayed at the lack of epistemic rigor on offer. There was literally no reason for me to have expected any amount of epistemic rigor!
And while I disavowed my sandcastle metaphor because I do think of intelligence as an important meta-skill that is much more important than the ability to build sandcastles, I was still acting like a muppet! If a black belt BJJ practitioner came to an introduction to grappling class and had a bad time, this literally says nothing about the quality of the class. That practitioner is just in the wrong place and to try to accomodate him would make the meetup worse for their actual goals (it is always worse when organizations have goals that are somewhat incompatible), and the black belt needs to go away attend meetups that are appropriate for them. I’ve read enough philosophy that it’s genuinely not enjoyable to me to hang out with the amateurs in the hopes that one of them surprises me with an insight every few sessions, but that’s on me, not on you, and certainly not on the attendees.
But to be frank, none of this gives me any hope back. To be more precise, I don’t want hope. I want to believe true things about the world, even when they are inconvenient and even when they hurt. And I want to obey Kant’s categorical imperative more than I am doing currently. And those things are currently at loggerheads, and this is just going to take me some amount of time and reading and thinking to work through.
To be honest, it’s not just the B&B events that led me to the conclusions that I did. I’m in my second decade of being an adult and having full control over my social interactions, I’ve done and continue to do a lot of the social things that people have recommended in the comments (talking to uber drivers and random people and attending classes about various things I am not good at and whatnot), and they don’t really help as much as the people advising them seem to think they would, and the bad experiences compound and drag me towards a conclusion that I don’t want to accept. I wrote up a B&B event because it was sort of hilariously bad for me in a way that brought all the little thoughts I was suppressing to light (which, again, you shouldn’t feel bad about at all!), partly to try to process the ugly amount of vitriol my body decides is acceptable when I’m in intellectual waters I consider inadequate, and partly because I thought it made for an amusing tale at my expense. I am boo boo the clown. I fully, completely admit that me turning evil is entirely a skill issue on my part and has nothing to do with the organizational capabilities of the B&B crew at all, nor the quality of the people who show up to them.
And while I don’t want to tell you how to run your organization, insofar as I keep turning evil when being dropped in your particular rainforest patch, I don’t think you should welcome me back to your events. I will not be able to faithfully adhere to your core values, and like you point out beginners can often become timid and self-conscious in the presence of people with a lot more skill than them, and that is the last thing I want. Everyone deserves a safe space to discuss meaningful topics, at whatever level is most comfortable to them.
Not in a sarcastic way, but because I’m ignorant (and almost everyone here will be) and would appreciate you drilling down:
This all sounds rather wishy-washy to me, but I suspect it’s not the full story. Could you paint a picture explaining how your group is investigating things more deeply than just chatting with people at a party? (Again, I’m not presupposing the answe is that you’re bad; I’m just trying to get you to add details at the top of the comments section)
Here are specific ways we go about this:
At the beginning of each cafe, we go through some house rules. One of them is not to name or concept drop without saying why that person is relevant to the current discussion or defining your terms. We even came up with a silly little gesture (**jazz hands**) to normalize asking people to define their terms. We’ve found that many good ideas can be conveyed without technical jargon and it increases the likelihood that people will follow the point being made.
It’s a bit harder to illustrate how we “don’t make people feel bad for not being cogent.” One way I think we do this is that we show appreciation for contributions that people make to the large-group discussion even if the way they expressed their idea was messy. We do this by either thanking them for their contribution, or, as co-moderators, pull out what we understood their point to be before inviting someone else to contribute. This comes from a recognition that, for the most part, people’s contributions are works in progress. They may be thinking or expressing an idea out loud for the first time in their life and it won’t always be pretty. Others who do manage to have persuasive arguments get their fair share of recognition (people will come up to them after and say that they really enjoyed their contribution).
Lastly, if person A makes a point and person B responds by disagreeing with everything person A said, we don’t go back to person A to counter. We invite them (in the house rules) to use the disagreement as a starting point for a conversation during the break or after the event. At any given moment, there are usually 3+ people who have indicated that they want to say something (hand up and eye-contact with moderator) and it’s usually not about the disagreement at hand. We have a limited amount of time (30 minutes in small group discussions and 20 minutes in large) and want to use the large-group discussions to surface as many different ideas that came up during the small groups as possible.
I want to make clear that I don’t claim that we scratch past the surface at our events. But that doesn’t mean that we’re not aiming for greater understanding. At every cafe, we distribute a handout with a list of questions that are meant to guide small groups of attendees in their investigation of a given topic. The goal of these questions isn’t to systematically get us to an answer about what is meant by love, morality, or what a fair justice system looks like. The goal is to get people to explore important questions together with others using the tools and knowledge that are currently at their disposal. There are certainly other, more efficient ways to learn about the world, but I’d argue that at least for some topics where lived experience is involved, exploring with others is better than exploring alone.
I have strong upvoted this because of how helpful I think it is to understanding the post (even for people who disagree with your methods, knowing what they are should be very helpful!)
I think those sound like awesome ways to facilitate high-quality conversation between many more people than otherwise. You need a way for beginners to get good, of course, but sometimes it’s hard to build those skills without some help. It almost sounds like your goal (getting lots of people involved and sharing ideas) is intentionally opposed to a discussion that’s solely among practiced debaters with extremely coherent arguments (and little room for disagreement, since “correct” thinkers shouldn’t diverge by much, presumably). That seems OK to me, but I’m not certain you’d agree.
I’m sure Sofia can give a better answer but I can give a rough summary of the events I went to.
One was a close reading of a passage from Descartes’s First Meditation, done as an exercise to practice identifying arguments and supporting claims being made in a text, and assessing validity. That was facilitated by a philosophy professor who provided a five page handout with step by step instructions on what you should do, and walked us through a suggested process that involved five different colours of highlighter marker. This was a great skill to teach, and I was blackpilled by how people seemed to struggle to parse Descartes even though the translation we worked with was a very accessible one (Moriarty for Oxford World’s Classics).
The second was a more social event, where we began with a short lecture by someone with experience on the subject matter, was provided a one-page handout with three sets of three curated discussion questions, and then alternated between small and large group discussions until we worked though all the discussion questions. One set was asking about our own personal experiences, one set was about a hypothetical scenario we were invited to think through, I forget if there was a theme to the third set. This was a really well facilitated event, and I was blackpilled by the cornucopia of bad takes on offer.
...I hope my unpleasant baby tree frog ways are becoming clearer. People keep saying that actually the other patches of rainforest are polluted garbage. No! I just need a problematically extensive selection of epistemic microbiota in my biome.
“cornucopia of bad takes on offer”
I am so curious now to hear examples of these bad takes. Maybe you could return to a meeting to act as an observer, learning more about how people get the things wrong that they get wrong?
lesswrong I think does a good job of giving good tools for rational thinking to those people already inclined towards it, or motivated to improve, but I don’t think the rationalist community is very good about how to spread its ideas past its own bubble.
Honestly sounds like an incredibly interesting event. I’m moving to Toronto this March / April, and would love to attend such events :)