We Don't Drink Vodka (LW Moscow report)
And we don't have bears playing balalaikas. Well, I would like to tell you about Moscow rationality community after all, not about some B movie featuring crazy Russians. Moscow community have grown from 5 people on my first meetup to 17 on the last one. And I believe we have possibility to grow even more. Moscow is a big city and it must have many smart people who can start to study rationality. Our story began in May 2012, when I gathered the people for the first time. Spring meetup announcements hadn't attracted many new members, so we gathered, discussed our site with Russian translations of LessWrong Sequences and made some plans. Our first venue was one of the Subway restaurants in Moscow. The next milestone in our development was September meetup, when I started to use on-line form to collect information from potential members of our group. Or maybe for some other reason we had got new faces, and even recurring ones. I also told everyone than we should practice rationality skills doing some exercises. Of course we had a lot of theories and ideas to duscuss, but we had to be closer to the real world. That's why we started to practice our rationality skills. We have approximately 8-10 people on each meetup during this fall. Soon enough this practice yielded good results, new members became heroes and started to improve our ways of training and create new exercises. In January, 2013 one member of our group proposed big and comfortable office room, and we moved there. Our meetups suddenly became more organized and more new members appeared — this year we have 13 people on average. As for exercises, we practice calibration, tabooing, reframing, information value estimation and five minute debiasing. I will describe our versions of exercises below, and five minute debiasing you can find in the “How to Run a Successful Less Wrong Meetup” guidelines. Only a few people from our group can speak English well enough to come to CFAR workshops. I can't thank CFAR staf
How can I distinguish between reflective attention and common attention?