Sugar Land (Houston area), not exactly day trip material but with sufficient notice I could make something.
Simulacra
Karma: 130
I’ve lurked OB/LW for quite some time now (about a year) and haven’t posted much for many of the same reasons as divia (intimidated by the quality, felt like I wasn’t familiar enough, etc) and have tried to get a few people that are interested in this kind of thing to follow along with me to little success. This post made me wonder why people I was so sure would care about rationality didn’t care to join the community here and further why I sit on the sidelines.
My first thoughts were that this group feels “cliquey”. There are a lot of in-phrases and technical jargon floating around, which to an outsider can be very intimidating.
On top of that every incorrect comment is completely and utterly destroyed by multiple people. I know and you know we’re dismantling ideas in an attempt to kick out biases and fallacies every time they appear, but to an outsider it looks/feels like an attack on all fronts. I think this stems from the separation of ideas from the self, which is really the first step on the road to rationality. Anyone who hasn’t made that step feels like they are being personally attacked, and it isn’t an easy step to make. Dislodging your ideas from your self-image is already required by the sciences, which may be part of the reason science-types are so well represented, but there are many fields where it isn’t necessary (or even beneficial). Consider business where defending your ideas like they were your life will get you ahead most of the time.
I know of no “fix” for any of these, but perhaps a section for beginners would be beneficial. Perhaps something similar to simple.wikipedia.com would work. The OB backlogs are useful, but there is something to be said for being able to discuss new topics and it just isn’t available for the older posts. How to implement such a thing without creating in/out groups I don’t know. Maybe just flagging submissions as beginner->advanced would be helpful (along with actually posting things for beginners). In any case, some more “back to basics” posts couldn’t hurt.
Later we can do a test that will determine how “rational” you are more or less, the problem is we don’t really have a good experimental definition of rationality. This survey will help see correlations and underlying characteristics of rational people (or at least people striving for rationality).
We don’t really know what to look for right now, so a broad set of questions will help us find out what is worth looking at in more depth. Which also means we can’t really know what we will get out of this, but hopefully we can find some strong indicator type questions for rational action.
For me it began as a bored student picking up a book on probability (specifically Randomness by Deborah Bennet) and discovering my understanding of probability was seriously wrong. Following that discovery and armed with my improved understanding I began to look at what other ideas and beliefs might be flawed. I started with those beliefs that were most likely to be based on probabilities and found that nearly everything I thought was true was affected by a single inaccuracy. My mind has burned with a single question ever since: “What else is polluting my mind?”
As for how I found OB; if I recall correctly I was reading up on AI and happened upon one of Eli’s posts. Fascinated, I jumped from post to post and found myself deep in rationalist territory. I found home.