Reading all these comments to glean the knowledge within is not adverse to my goals, I’d just prefer to read a guide or the results of a formal discussion group if it exists. I couldn’t find one. So, @XFrequentist: Is there a discussion group? If not, can we please start one?
If anyone else knows of relevant articles on LW, or another website or in a book, please link me stuff like this: http://lesswrong.com/lw/818/how_to_understand_people_better
My Goal: To start building one of these: http://lesswrong.com/lw/4ul/less_wrong_nyc_case_study_of_a_successful in Vanocuver, Canada.
That is to say, whether formal or informal, a community of rationalists and like-minded folk that is dynamic, diverse, proactive, and sex-balanced (the last quality is desired, but not as vital as the others).
Or, at least, getting to be friends with people who win at life and with whom I share values.
A friend and I realized that through networks like OKCupid (http://lesswrong.com/lw/2tw/love_and_rationality_less_wrongers_on_okcupid) or the Freethinkers Club at my university, we had access to more preferable samples of the population. The abilities to a) pick out these individuals and b) build effective social connections fuel my confidence and optimism that my plan might work.
However, I lack the skills. I can hold up a conversation, but I want to get better at making new friends quicker. I have never practiced PUA, NLP, social engineering, whatever. I don’t believe this plan will involve much invoking of the Dark Arts. This letter is directed at those who wish to guide or learn along with me, or those who otherwise care. Feel free to leave any suggestions.
This seems rather unnecessary, but I’m posting here so that other people have a reference to my intro to rationality, if they’re so inclined to read about it.
At the time of this posting I’m a 19 year-old male college student of middle class origins living in Vancouver, Canada, if that makes a difference. I was raised in a nonreligious home by politically centrist and humanist parents.
Having friends who were a bit nerdy and considered themselves rational in an irrational world, sane in an insane world, etc. they were very interested in a film called “Zeitgeist: Addendum” which confirmed their worldview at the time. I too watched the film and we were in awe of the Venus Project. http://www.thevenusproject.com http://zeitgeistmovie.com/
The Venus Project sees a bulk of humanity’s problems as the result of faulty human psychology being propogated by social stratification in a money economy. The creators of the Venus Project believe that by creating material abundance through the application of technology that the Law of Supply and Demand can be superceded and hence money no longer needs to exist. In a global society with no social stratification, a culture based upon values derived through use of the Scientific Method could then be propogated to prevent all future global-scale conflicts. I would describe it as post-scarcity technocratic marxism/anarcho-communism.
We got involved in an online community built around the Venus Project, with aims to participate in an intentional community of some sort. . Originally we thought the Zeitgeist Movement would be about reaching conclusion about how civilizations could reduce existential risk, and then using some form of mass media to get this message out. Ultimately, we found that the organizaiton was too focused on inert political activism, as well as the regional group being very autocratic. Around the same time, a friend of mine interested in Singulatariansim and transhumanism discovered LessWrong and got the rest of us interested. We no longer participate in any formal or public organizations, seeing them as mostly ineffective, instead just being a group of friends interested in the problematic lack of rationality in societies.
In other words, we found organizations that had a sound epistemic rationality, but without instrumental rationality, they became stagnant. To figure out how to effectively communicate rationality to others is as important a goal as learning about it myself.
We have switched to a more individualist and modest focus: just trying to understand the world and improve our own lives, moving onto something bigger in the long-run. We are doing this with much inspiration and influence from LessWrong.
In the near future I will read HP:MoR and the sequences and move on from there.