Congratulations on running a year of meetups! That's not easy.
In the past I've had difficulty pinning down an appropriate meeting schedule. Was there discussion in your group over the meetup frequency? When you rebooted the group, was it explicitly as a weekly group? How well did the first few members know each other before the decision to meet weekly was made?
The No do-overs section reminded me of a recent conversation. A friend was giving me a lift home from a rationality meetup, we got off of the highway, and I told him to turn right. We should have turned left. Once we realised my mistake, I apologized. His response was something along the lines of "We've just been talking for the last three hours. Why do you believe I'd be averse to spending another five minutes with you?"
The feeling I had wasn't really that there was any badness to spending more time talking, but I knew that he was meeting someone else after dropping me off, and I didn't want to make him late. I dislike being late. I projected that feeling on to him.
No do-overs is also often felt when you forget people's names.
Also, I want to congratulate you for writing the exam. :)
"You could call it heroic responsibility, maybe," Harry Potter said. "Not like the usual sort. It means that whatever happens, no matter what, it's always your fault. Even if you tell Professor McGonagall, she's not responsible for what happens, you are. Following the school rules isn't an excuse, someone else being in charge isn't an excuse, even trying your best isn't an excuse. There just aren't any excuses, you've got to get the job done no matter what." -HPMOR Chapter 75
Reality doesn't grade on a curve.
One of the main reasons to have a community blog like Less Wrong is to create common knowledge. I see this kind of summary/highlight post as doing a similar kind of work to the canonization that Raemon write about in his Peer Review post.
Thank you.
The E and I in "high-E, low-I" are empiricism and inference?
This is very well written. The anecdote at the start especially. Thank you for sharing.
In Subduing Moloch, Teja suggests intentionally creating a channel for rationalists to have one-on-one conversations with each other. As a result, he and I have already had a video chat, and we've joined the LessWrong Slack in order to determine if that might be an appropriate venue to build this project.
I intend to book a conversation with you, and I will also consider creating a similar Calendly system for people to book time with me.
In her recent post about working remotely, Julia Evans mentions donut.ai as a slack plugin that randomly pairs members of a slack channel for discussions.
Do you see Skeptical Modernism as a new movement in philosophy, or can you point to a previous body of work on this subject?
Really appreciate the level of detail provided. My usual problems with "How To" type content are either "this is too specific, so I can't see how to generalise" or "this is overly broad, and I'm not able to generate my own specific examples." This post was very specific, so avoided the latter failure, and very long so that I got enough content from which to generalise.
Thank you!