Damn, I missed it assuming all Meetups would be on Saturday ...

Would be nice to know if participants plan to attempt A Beginner's Guide to Irrational Behavior https://www.coursera.org/course/behavioralecon or Know Thyself https://www.coursera.org/course/knowthyself

To clarify on Google Car http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_driverless_car says that Sebastian Thrun was leading Stanford lab for the DARPA challenges few years ago. So yes Google does have a driverless car but as far as I can most if not all of the work regarding the actual driving was done before it was related to Google. Now regarding Google Maps and Street View it is probably mostly internal research but I don't think it can be considered related to driving. It is mostly indexing and searching (which is Google core business).

Regarding war and my doubts on peace, US DoD as #1 world employer http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_employers and China trailing behind.

Some resources mentioned during the meetup

• Thinking, Fast and Slow (1h video) http://research.microsoft.com/apps/video/dl.aspx?id=155752
• Toward Replacement Parts for the Brain, MIT Press 2005 http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?tid=10550&ttype=2
• A Brain Implant that Thinks, MIT Tech Review 2012 http://www.technologyreview.com/news/429204/a-brain-implant-that-thinks/
• Impact of caloric restriction on health and survival in rhesus monkeys from the NIA study, Nature 2012 http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v489/n7415/full/nature11432.html
• Activation of adult-born neurons facilitates learning and memory, Nature Neuroscience 2012 http://www.nature.com/neuro/journal/v15/n6/full/nn.3108.html
• Norbert Wiener http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norbert_Wiener (related to the bus stop)

For newcomers you can review what we did before on our wiki page http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Brussels_meetup_group

Potential materials for discussions :

• try http://www.quora.com/Politics/Is-there-a-website-to-prepare-meetings-that-would-provide-some-topics-and-some-points-for-each-participant-let-participants-upvote-and-downvote-until-some-time-before-the-meeting-and-then-the-team-would-work-with-priorities-assigned-by-those-votes with pen and paper
• building "trails" of LW articles for newcomers or not people who just want a "refresh" (if some are motivated I'll bring my laptop)
• Alzheimer as diabetes type 3 http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/sep/10/alzheimers-junk-food-catastrophic-effect
• AGI leader AMA http://www.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/zq56m/im_dr_ben_goertzel_artificial_general/
• Hacking EEG devices https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/usenixsecurity12/sec12-final56.pdf
• weekly collapse http://motherboard.vice.com/2012/9/10/we-are-now-one-year-and-counting-from-global-riots-complex-systems-theorists-say--2
• emotions/rationality http://lesswrong.com/lw/hp/feeling_rational/
• ReflectOns:Mental Prostheses for Self-Reflection http://www.media.mit.edu/events/2012/09/10/sajid-sadi-thesis-defense http://fluid.media.mit.edu/people/sajid/current/reflectons.html
• Zin-Side Out, the desire to conform to popular opinion http://blog.media.mit.edu/2012/07/zin-side-out.html
• la France des deconnectes http://fr.slideshare.net/slideshow/embed_code/14247437
• Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality: The Podcast http://www.hpmorpodcast.com
• Mapping The Next Three Decades of Health Technology http://www.fastcoexist.com/1680532/mapping-the-next-three-decades-of-health-technology
• Rosenhan experiment or "On being sane in insane places." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosenhan_experiment

Seems that the conclusion of http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/a3c/pooling_resources_for_valuable_actuarial/ were that it's not that useful at the individual scale...

Didn't know there was a Paris Meetup, great. I won't be able to participate but I shared it on http://forum.transhumanistes.com/t827-meetup-lesswrong-a-paris-le-1er-septembre#7773

AFAIK once the registration is open (15th of August) anybody can purchase a ticket.

I would like to discuss the bayesian framework and AGI in relation to acturial "science" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Actuarial_science . The idea came from browsing Yudkowsky's http://yudkowsky.net/rational/bayes with its "Fun fact" on finding priors. Actuaries overall rather than random folks on Kazaa seem to be some of the most interested (and probably well funded group) working on human behavior. Yes regarding physics, chemistry, etc it is not relevant yet, do we, as human beings in their daily life outside the research lab, have much affordance on those?

Let's make the work of actuaries more useful for ourselves (and yes eventually an AGI).

PS: we could also discuss

• http://lesswrong.com/lw/dvo/agi12_conference_in_oxford_in_december/
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EF8tdXwa-AE
• http://www.feasta.org/2012/06/17/trade-off-financial-system-supply-chain-cross-contagion-a-study-in-global-systemic-collapse/
• http://www.quickmeme.com/Scumbag-Brain/
• http://www.technologyreview.com/view/428729/mathematics-of-sudoku-leads-to-richter-scale-of/ related to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human-based_computation_game
• http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/08/software-runs-the-world-how-scared-should-we-be-that-so-much-is-bad/260846/
• http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2112614

explained in http://lesswrong.com/lw/dni/a_beginners_guide_to_irrational_behavior_free/