Advice needed: Less Wrong Meetup Lesson plan on Communication

[Goobahman]

Hi Everyone,

I host a fortnightly Less Wrong Meetup self improvement logic teaching thing with some close friends of mine, and next session I want to look at Communication.

I was wondering what you guys thought would be some good resources for this, not only from the Less Wrong catalogue, but even elsewhere.

Particular things I would like to do is:

* Empower us with the tools to recognize, call out and defeat logical fallacies and outrageous claims

* Examine the more instinctive behaviours in human interaction, and ourselves within that.

* Simple ways to improve our social skills in our daily lives.

Any contributions are hugely appreciated :)

[Barry_Cotter]

There are two books I strongly recommend, Influence, Cialdini and How to Win Friends and Influence People. These books can get people to listen to you. If you can’t do that it doesn’t matter how clear and eloquent your arguments are.

[lsparrish]

I have been lately noticing that communication is a very important rationalist skill. We rely more than we think we do on bouncing ideas off of others, and being able to do so with less confusion allows us to change our minds more effectively when we are wrong.

[Kaj_Sotala]

My Levels of Communication seems relevant.

[Goobahman]

Thanks Kaj, That’s some useful stuff.

Could you please direct me to your source, if you have one?

[Kaj_Sotala]

For that post, no particular one besides the Impro book I grabbed the status-loaded conversation from. The rest was mostly just put together from life experience.