What a great idea. I would be interested in seeing if any fellow Mormons will be attending? I have been studying a lot of the work on Bayes by Tim McGrew and have been applying it to the claims of the Mormon church. With well adjusted priors the evidence seems pretty good! I recommend the influential work on Bayes done by Tim and Lydia McGrew.
I recommend the influential work on Bayes done by Tim and Lydia McGrew.
Past Less Wrong discussion did not paint a favorable picture of their 'Bayesian apologetics': arbitrarily restricted sets of hypotheses, abuse of dubious infinite-strength independence assumptions, etc.
r_claypool provided some good links in that thread that addressed those issues. Additionally Lydia and Tim McGrew have penned a number of posts and papers dealing with the issues you raise.
I actually think that the topic could prove fruitful at a gathering in Salt Lake. Apply Bayesian principles and also discuss topics such as "belief in belief" and "fake explanations" prior to engaging the topic of Bayesian Mormon Apologetics.
YES.
Meeting suggestion: I'm particularly in love with the idea of formalizing chavruta pairs/triplets for specific learning/winning-at-life goals. (Studying, Weight Loss, Poker....) I find I already have many insane rivals, who are very good at dragging me into anti-logic and then beating me with experience, but none that are actually interested in winning. And studying in a vaccuum usually leads to lots of unrelated open tabs on wikipedia, at least for me.
Actually, I think it would be beneficial to talk about social-based hacks in general. Go all meta on why we're doing meetups at all. We're making an explicit point of gathering socially, so clearly we think there is some value to it...
We can, but as this case study points out, social/unfocused discussions usually have poor attendance because hanging out is harder to justify than having a specific purpose. It would be fine for a first meeting, probably, but I'd expect most would find more important things to do the second or third time around if we're not doing anything obviously useful.
I'm not a Salt Lake City Resident, but I'm going to be skiing in Utah over my winter break. I'm going be returning home around New Years, but if the meetup is before then, I'd love to meet you people. Previously I tried to make a meet-up in Indianapolis, but there doesn't appear to be anybody within a 60-mile radius.
If you've seen my LW article on For-Profit Rationality Training, you know that Dan Nuffer and I are trying to put together a business aimed at helping people develop better instrumental rationality. As anyone who follows LW knows, if you want good ideas, you need to generate a lot of ideas. So... could I convince you all to participate in a business model brainstorming session with Dan and me, either as part of the meetup or immediately afterwards? What do you think?
Discussion article for the meetup : Any Salt Lake City residents who might be interested in a meetup?
WHEN: 29 December 2011 08:37:29PM (-0700)
WHERE: Salt Lake City, Utah
(This post has been edited to reflect the fact that several people have expressed interest.) As for the purpose of the meeting, I'd love to hear suggestions. I will think about it in the meantime, and also let the first meetup refine the direction of a potentially regular meetup. Just to clarify, the date and time listed are not for a planned meetup. It looks like there are already a healthy amount of people interested, when I count four others, so I find this very encouraging! To make this work, it would be helpful to create a mailing list, so I'll ask for emails later or will create a Meetup group. The idea is that about mid-January I'll clarify the purpose and gather availability in terms of day, time, and place, and we'll first meet in the last week of January. TO CLARIFY: the date is NOT a suggested a meetup. I will make a second announcement in mid-January.
Discussion article for the meetup : Any Salt Lake City residents who might be interested in a meetup?