My father, who is quite successful and I at the higher end of the rationality scale, was at one point very heavily involved with Landmark (he may still be, I've never brought it up). During the time I lived with him as a teenager, I often wouldn't see him most weeknights until 10 or 11 PM, because he was off doing some Landmark related activity or another.
I still don't know exactly what he got out of Landmark, aside from having met his wife there (which is certainly a big gain). After much pressure from him, I eventually went to a version of the Forum designed for teenagers. I can confirm novalis' claim about the lengths of the days. Ultimately, spending that weekend was a positive experience for me, though I remember very little detail about it. It did help me bond with my father at a time when our relationship was incredibly strained (as I suspect quite a lot of father and 15-year old son relationships are).
I don't know what to add beyond my anecdotal experiences; those are more than a decade removed at this point and detailed memory is largely obscured by a number of issues I had at that age. Still, I'll be happy to answer any questions I can about it.
Oh, hey there! Nice to know I'm not completely alone here.
Are you sure Diaspora should be marked Easy?
I tried to get a fairly intelligent, friend who's interested in science (generally, not necessarily any specific domains covered in the book) to read it and she gave up within about half an hour.
I (a layman, but well-acquainted with the set of singularitarian memes that the book draws from) found that trying to visualize the physics made my head hurt, even with the accompanying illustrative java applets at the author's website.
It also might be valuable to link to those (there are probably some for Permutation City as well, but I haven't checked since I haven't been able to track a copy of it down): http://www.gregegan.net/DIASPORA/DIASPORA.html
I know this is quite late to the party, but you really ought to. Add a dose of cynicism that would make Robin Hanson blush to your post and you'd have a good plot summary of it.
My girlfriend dislikes Twilight as much as I do, but I have some other friends that might be interested in that.
Well, she has had depression issues and was going through a pretty rough period -- our relationship was stressed (largely on account of it being long-distance at the time, with her in Colorado and me in Utah); she was under a lot of stress (finals in the senior year of her bachelor's degree, which is the reason for the previous long-distance); medical problems that, being an uninsured student, she really had no way to pay for; and we were scrambling to find an apartment and get everything ready for her imminent move to live with me. I had just recently read the Luminosity sequence, and the techniques in it seemed like something that anyone who wanted to be happier could at least give a shot and put to good use.
I linked her to http://lesswrong.com/lw/20l/ureshiku_naritai/, hoping that she could use it, and was told that she felt insulted by it, that it's against the way she operates, that sometimes she just wants to be miserable and that "fooling yourself into feeling 'more than a 2'" is just kidding yourself. She said she'd try not to outright ridicule the method but after reading it twice, she felt an intense sense of derision, and noted that she sometimes hates "the analytical approach".
I've also gone through pretty intense depressive episodes, and I know what it's like to feel helpless. What I don't understand is accepting that helpless feeling and just trying to deal with it. When I'm feeling that way I can't always muster the energy and initiative to actually do something about it, but I desperately want to feel different. It's certainly possible that she was not actually clinically depressed at the time, though she seemed like it to me. But even so, she was not happy, and I was trying to offer her a possible way to become happier.
While I don't think these are entirely serious (but if they are, that's pretty awesome too!), I'd definitely love to see some posts on interpersonal relationships from a rationalist perspective. My own attempts at easing my girlfriend gently in (with Alicorn's Luminosity sequence, which I think is about as gentle an introduction to some LW principles as you can get) was an unambiguous disaster; and this is with someone who expressed interest in increasing her rationality when we met.
Even if your story is not directly relevant, I'm sure there's useful information in there for anyone who would like to be able to have a happy relationship and think clearly at the same time.
(edited for formatting)
Hello! I am 27, live in Salt Lake City (I suspect it's unnecessary here of all places, but I will reflexively add the caveat that I am not Mormon), and work in software QA. Came here from Overcoming Bias, which I've been reading since it's early days. At this point a lot of the higher level stuff is quite a bit over my head, but things like Alicorn's luminosity sequence and various anti-akrasia topics are pretty interesting to me.
Haruhi fanfiction by Eliezer? You, sir, just delivered Christmas a few days early.
Would there be any interest in holding these further south? I'm in downtown SLC, without a car, but am otherwise interested.