FB Event

Woop! Woop! This past Saturday, gallant taggers brought our immense first tagging campaign to a close. The archives have been swept and every post with over 25 karma has been given at least one tag. To date, 15,440 tags have been applied to 8,022 posts.

See the full celebration post here.

While this is only the beginning for tagging, what a beginning it is! We think this deserves some celebration. We're preparing a two-part event:

Part 1: Oliver Habryka and Jason Crawford discuss Intellectual Progress

https://us02web.zoom.us/j/82547847213

Back in 2017, when the future of LessWrong was in doubt, Habryka led the revival efforts, pulling together a team and creating LessWrong 2.0. Central to Habryka's vision of LessWrong was that it would accelerate intellectual progress on the important problems facing humanity. Intellectual progress here simply meaning progress on building knowledge and understanding.

For several years, Jason has been seeking to answer the question of which factors have led to human progress in general: how did we go from living at the mercy of nature with merely stone tools and fire to buildings, electricity, medicine, legal systems, etc? Jason's research, and info about the broader Progress Studies movement, can be found at his blog, Roots of Progress (with many pieces crossposted to LessWrong).  

Of course, the history of human progress, in general, is tightly woven with humanity's intellectual progress. When our understanding of the world increased, so did our ability to shape it (for better or worse). 

To celebrate the new tagging system (itself designed with the goal of intellectual progress) we've decided to have Habryka and Jason chat about questions such as:

• What historical factors were important for intellectual progress?
• What conditions are most important to create now in order to get intellectual progress?

Starting at 12:00 PDT, Habryka and Jason will chat on Zoom for ~1 hour, including some Q&A

Part 2: Party in Rational Woods (our Topia location)

https://topia.io/rational-woods (feel free to check it out now)

Following the talk, we will migrate to a social environment that more easily allows people to strike up small group conversations. Raemon has created the marvelous Rational Woods on the Topia platform. You can check it out now for social hangouts. There are some neat features, so make sure to click on things.

This section will begin following the main talk and will last for several hours, so long as people are having a good time. Conceivably, we could play Breakfast is Served or Person Do Thing with LessWrong tags if there's enough enthusiasm. Not sure if that'll work well or not.

Also, I hope everyone can treat our top taggers as VIPs at the party. They deserve it. Three cheers for them!

The Details

When: Sunday, 30th August, 12:00PM PDT / 3:00PM EDT / 7:00PM UTC

Where: 

• Zoom: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/82547847213 
• Topia: https://topia.io/rational-woods

FB Event: https://www.facebook.com/events/2827544884191033/