Meetup : Vancouver!

Discussion article for the meetup : Vancouver!

WHEN: 20 September 2012 06:00:00PM (-0700)

WHERE: 2150 macdonald street, vancouver

TL;DR: We are awesome, come hang out on Thursday at 18:00 in a big brown house. I will present “Letting Go (sequence)”. Check out our mailing list.

I think I’m going to start posting our reports and meetups on here again.

What we’ve been doing:

We’ve been meeting reliably every Thursday at 18:00, tho our venue has moved around a bit. Every week, one or two people come in with presentations/discussion topics and lead the discussion on that for an hour or so.

Recently, we had a really good presentation from one of our member of how to make a lot of money, with a bunch of case studies of really rich and successful people that he knows, and what got them rich. That was a lot of fun, and has caused me to start trying to level up my hustle.

A week ago, I presented the practical basics of decision theory and probability theory, including intuitive formulations of Bayes Theorem and EU maximization, and the important implications and things to remember for going out into the world and being a rational agent. That was received quite well, and cleared up some confusion for some of us.

When we lack other stuff to talk about someone (usually me) reads a sequence and summarizes it to the group. That’s usually pretty fun, but not as fun as the big original content talks.

Another thing is that we’ve been making weekly specific commitments to our goals, and getting support and social pressure from the group to help complete them. That’s been useful, tho we are currently thinking of other ways to do that without taking up valuable meetup time (talking about each person’s goals takes a while).

There are about 10 of us, depending how you count. We’re all becoming good friends and it’s a lot of fun.

So What?

So you should come out and hang out with us because we are cool and productive and do lots of high-value rationality stuff. This week is our monthly super meetup where we try to get as many people out as possible. That means you, yes even you, should come out see what we’re about. If you are looking for an excuse to come out, this is it. If you think you have an excuse to not come out, it’s just your imagination.

This week we don’t yet have any big talks that anyone has put together, so I’ll be presenting the “Letting Go” sequence. Meetup is at 2150 macdonald street (on 6th in kits) on Thursday at 18:00. Check out the mailing list

(Thursday evening has been working well for all of us who show up, but I know at least one of you out there doesn’t like thursday. Please participate in the scheduling discussions. We want things to work for as many people as possible)