Follow-up to the meeting tonight.
Here is the event that I will be at next week that everyone is welcome to attend.
Manufacturing Belief - Cult Recruitment, Retention and Persuasion
The general public assumes that cult members must be either incredibly stupid, or incredibly weak of mind, or both. In fact, cult members are completely normal. The methods that cults use to recruit and retain members are based on exploiting vulnerabilities in normal human psychology. The only thing distinguishing a cult from any other form of True Believerism is the incredible efficiency and ruthlessness with which cults exploit these vulnerabilities. Our speaker will discuss the techniques that cults employ to recruit, retain, and persuade...
WHEN: 7:30PM, Monday, April 11, 2011 (Talk starts at 8PM sharp)
WHERE: Downstairs at Kells Irish Pub, 530 Jackson Street, San Francisco, CA 94133
Announcing the creation of a third Bay Area LW meetup, San Francisco! The first meeting of the San Francisco group will be this coming Monday, April 4th, from 7:00-9:00 at Green Papaya near 4th and Mission. We'll be introducing ourselves, talking about what about rationality interests each of us, and having fun! Please join us! If you have urgent questions regarding this meetup (need directions, at the location but can't find the group, &c) please call Ben Isserlis at *edit: elided*.
If you've never been to a LessWrong meetup before and feel awkward just showing up, or if you... (read more)
I've been putting off joining a Toastmasters group for a while, but if anyone wants to get together to go to one I'd be up for that.
I'm excited to see what you have planned, and would like to help in any way I can.
Along the lines of moshez's reply to you, I'd be super excited to run a San Francisco satellite.
I made a conceptual jump that I'm not sure this post (or its author) intended, but that left me with a better impression of it than most people seem to be expressing.
I agree that things actions like writing a letter to the editor may have a low rate of return in bringing new persons to the cause, but I believe that they serve very well at making people who are already pro-rational in name more likely to take greater actions at a later date. E.g., I didn't get involved in running the skeptic group at my university until well after I publicly supported skepticism and atheism in letters to the editor of... (read more)
Hey, I remember you mentioning this tonight, but I didn't get a chance to find out the details. I'm definitely interested though.
I commit to responding at length to this thread tomorrow when I have more time, but here is a little bit of my background and what I'm into now in case anyone wants to ask specific questions.
I ran my university's skeptic/atheist group for two years and ended up getting involved at the national level with the Center for Inquiry this past summer as an outreach intern at their headquarters. I moved out to the Bay Area specifically to get involved with pro-reason causes.
Here is a group that just started that I'm involved with: Reason for Reason.
Here are some of my recollections about the costs associated with transitioning to a paperless office.
I was recently employed for a month and paid $13 an hour archiving documents for a medium-sized (~40 fulltime employees) office in a much larger company. The office was transitioning to paperless records, and the entire previous year's worth of printouts had to be scanned. There were three other people on my team. We each had a commercial scanner that the company had purchased new. The scanned documents were stored on multiply redundant company servers that had to be purchased for this transition. Every person in the office received a second monitor. The internal IT staff spent... (read more)
I tried to justify some of my hobbies to see if I could come up with anything that couldn't be called a "rationalist hobby" to determine if it's a useful designation or not.
Knitting - Trains your attention to fine detail. After you knit a pair of socks, whenever you wear knitted clothes you'll instinctively think, "I could make this. There are no great unknowable secrets in manufacturing, only time and labor."
Music Radio DJing - You learn how to speak fluently and without pause, and put together an entertaining set of music, which are both useful for signalling in social situations.
Reddit - Its up/downvoting system teaches how to quickly decide whether or not
- Start a physical retail store. Michael Vassar thinks this is a great option in the Bay area.
Living in the Bay Area now, I was also mightily intrigued by that comment. I've taken some entrepreneurship courses and have some experience running organizations of relatable (I imagine) complexity, but no real idea where to begin, nor the resources to start a venture on my own. I'd love to talk more about this and possibly decide on a plan to do some intensive research though.
As an aside, if you're optimizing for free time and mobility I'm not sure starting any sort of business is the right way to go about that.
Infinite Jest, page 159