2pm Orczy Park, north of the little lake.

Here are planned exact coordinates: https://w3w.co/drag.motels.runs

If the weather looks like rain, we'll meet at my apartment again, which is Ulloi 66/b/1, 6th floor, ring 27.

Either way, we will probably go out to grab food and/or drinks together somewhere at the end of the meeting.

This month we are going to read two of my favorite essays from Gwern. For those who are not familiar with him, Gwern writes interesting essays with huge amounts of references and examples, which he adds one by one to the document as he encounters new ones -- you should not feel obligated to read all of the examples, and should feel free, if interested, to skip forward to the next heading section in each essay.

He is also fairly well known for writing about the scaling hypothesis in AI, doing a lot of self experimentation (such as sleeping on a wooden pillow, or whether doing the dual N-back task regularly actually improved his cognition).

The first essay I'm going to suggest is Terrorism isn't about Terror, which makes the argument that generally the main functional purpose of terrorist groups is to be social clubs for their members, and everything else is a secondary output.

In so far as that is true, it also says things about the Less Wrong and (to a lesser extent, I think) Effective Altruism community -- acknowledging that the real reason any of us ever show up at these meetings is because it is fun to hang out and talk with similar nerds, are there ways to set up the conversations and meetings that lead to us actually being more rational / doing effective things in the world?

The second essay is One Man's Modus Ponens... which is an extended discussion/ series of examples about how if someone makes an argument that proves something is an absurd idea, someone else might accept the absurd idea and argue that the premises are what is mistaken. For one example to make this clearer, in the 1850s someone argued that slavery shouldn't be abolished, because it was similar the subordinate position of women, which everyone agreed was fine. Obviously today one would reverse the argument and say that the actually the subordination of women is bad because it is similar to slavery.

Anyways, I hope to see you all then, and that we'll have a great discussion!

Tim