Around the time I discovered LessWrong I coincidentally stumbled up Toastmasters public speaking clubs, and think the rationality community would be well served by supplementing directly organized LW meetups with piggybacking off TM meetings:
- less effort: pre-existing membership and organizational know-how without having to build from the ground up
- content: well-structured agenda with abundant content
- messaging: full-length speeches are excellent opportunity to spread rationality ideas to an open-minded audience
- practice: “table topics” (brief improvised speech games) exercises clear thinking under time pressure
- group dynamics: volunteer organizational duties via club leadership roles (president, VPs, treasury, etc)
- diversity: more opportunity to interact with non-rationalists, both as a challenge to engage and as an opportunity to instruct
Especially in areas where numbers are insufficient to reach critical mass to organize viable clubs, TM clubs could go a long way to fill the gap and even magnify the reach of the rationality community
If you want something like a Toastmasters club https://www.agoraspeakers.org/ is an alternative worth thinking about. It tries to be a more open-source alternative to the top-down heavy Toastmasters org structure.
“the rationality community would be well served by supplementing directly organized LW meetups with piggybacking off TM meetings:”.
What’s your initial reaction to the idea of a lesswrong toastmasters group?
Maybe the group would begin with regular toastmasters but also try to implement new ideas. Like for example, I imagine that in addition to public speaking a rationalist might want to work on their ability to communicate complicated stuff off the cuff. So for example there would be some interface. You would respond. The group would point out things you should optimize for in the future.
There might be a focus on things like
>quantifying results
>coming up with new techniques
>falsifying and recursively optimizing those techniques
Around the time I discovered LessWrong I coincidentally stumbled up Toastmasters public speaking clubs, and think the rationality community would be well served by supplementing directly organized LW meetups with piggybacking off TM meetings:
- less effort: pre-existing membership and organizational know-how without having to build from the ground up
- content: well-structured agenda with abundant content
- messaging: full-length speeches are excellent opportunity to spread rationality ideas to an open-minded audience
- practice: “table topics” (brief improvised speech games) exercises clear thinking under time pressure
- group dynamics: volunteer organizational duties via club leadership roles (president, VPs, treasury, etc)
- diversity: more opportunity to interact with non-rationalists, both as a challenge to engage and as an opportunity to instruct
Especially in areas where numbers are insufficient to reach critical mass to organize viable clubs, TM clubs could go a long way to fill the gap and even magnify the reach of the rationality community
If you want something like a Toastmasters club https://www.agoraspeakers.org/ is an alternative worth thinking about. It tries to be a more open-source alternative to the top-down heavy Toastmasters org structure.
“the rationality community would be well served by supplementing directly organized LW meetups with piggybacking off TM meetings:”.
What’s your initial reaction to the idea of a lesswrong toastmasters group?
Maybe the group would begin with regular toastmasters but also try to implement new ideas. Like for example, I imagine that in addition to public speaking a rationalist might want to work on their ability to communicate complicated stuff off the cuff. So for example there would be some interface. You would respond. The group would point out things you should optimize for in the future.
There might be a focus on things like
>quantifying results
>coming up with new techniques
>falsifying and recursively optimizing those techniques
Anyone have any thoughts on this?