Goals
What are the goals of the society?
- Have people at wellington learn about rationality
- I'm able to have more fun conversations as people are familiar with the concepts
- Lesser focus: share effective altruist ideas
What do I want the sessions to be like?
- People have fun
- Leave the sessions with interesting novel ideas
- Never more than 1 inferential step away from where everyone is at
- Doing games and exercises to make the lessons visceral
- Learning to spot rationality errors in real life and in ourselves.
Possible formulations for the sessions
- Start with some exercise or puzzle to illustrate a concept
- Read the sequence post on it
- Discussion
- Final exercise
Or
Have other people give different talks.
Chana Messinger: if the society were to be 10x cooler, what would that look like? Don't be afraid to have this be awesome if you want it to be. Also there's funding available.
Concepts
- Motivated cognition
- Map and territory
- Simple truth
What is the lesson plan?
Perhaps go through all the sequences. Just pick out the best couple each time.
Damn, good time for rationality society is bad time for sequence reading group.
Session Plans
I think I'm gonna have to reread the sequence and find posts that are particularly punchy, and think up an excercise to display them, and rise and repeat for each of the posts, and do that for the whole section. (not complaining)
- What do I mean by "rationality"?
- Excercise or puzzle:
- Understand people's goals?
- Go over what people think they mean by rationality
- No, will just get everyone confused
- Making beliefs pay rent in anticipated experience
Build a betting software and give people imaginary money in it to bet on.
The Simple Truth to start with?
Pre come up with questions before hand
If the structure is that we're learning and building on rationality concepts week to week by going through the sequences:
How to make it so that people can join midway through but aren't lost?
- Students teach other students
- I'll give each member a concept (eg. Bella be able to summarise The Simple Truth)
- Good: increases understanding of concept and feeling of responsibilty
- Bad: like homework, stressful, what if people don't care?
- Let them choose which concepts seem interesting that they'd like to summarise to newcomers
- Give people summaries of the sequences through email, or a link to what we learned last week for them to read
- Give a scheduling link for them to feel free to have a one on one with me where I catch them up (meet over dinner)
How far can we go before everyone who would want to come is already there?
Things to find out
- Ask on LessWrong and in some discords: has anyone else made summaries of the sequences already? The more the merrier.
- https://eagroups.slack.com/archives/C0LE6MFFB/p1625915439173100
- Anyone has tried to teach the sequences?
- Ask Daniel for his thoughts, him being a teacher and all.
People
These are all the people who offered to provide council for the project:
- Ashley Lin
- Has read the sequences
- Has summarised lots of them (can I see?)
- Chana Messinger
- Has read the sequences
- Has run courses at ESPR
- Ran similar group in her high school (atheist group)
- They were just there for community
- Pranay Mittal
- Jonas Vollmer
- Ran a similar group in his high school
- Had students giving talks to eachother
- Noah Lee
- Ray Amjad
- Kuhan Jeyapragasan
- Raj Thimmiah
- Sydney Von Arx
- Chris Lakin
People who are likely interested:
- Miriam Huerta
- Peter McIntyer
- Daniel Wang
- James Lin
- Kearney Capuano
Students
Students at wellington:
- Bella
- Kat
- Charlie
- Adam
- Ben
- Casey
- Celeste
Info
- How often do you want to meet?
- Meet time: Mondays 17:30-18:30(then go to dinner)
Times to put it
- Monday 17:30 - 18:30, Clashes with litsoc
- Tuesday 16:30 - 17:30, clashes with nothing (but no dinner), might clash with sport (clashes with mine probably)
- What will your venue be?
- Do you want to have refreshments?
- Yes, where to get them from?
- Who will lead the discussion? It’s often good to get members to take turns in doing this.
- Me, who else wants to co-lead?
- What kind of group will you be?
- Philosophy / Science / Rationality
- What are we reading: the sequences
What will we do if someone joins mid way and doesn't know what the hell we're talking about?
- Make it fun? Ask other members to summarise other members?
Email to send out
Introducing Wellington Rationality Society! Mondays, 17:30 to 18:30, in the Philosophy Department.
RatSoc is a place for learning how to be a more rational human being — how to systemically attain true beliefs and effectively achieve your goals in the real world. Through exercises, puzzles, reading and discussions, we'll find the answer to questions like:
- What is the point of trying to believe things that are true?
- How can I recognise when I'm lying to myself?
- How do I see through confusion and answer mysterious questions?
And many, many others, ranging from psychology, philosophy, economics to logic.
We will be reading sections of Rationality: from AI to Zombies (available free online at readthesequences.com) within the sessions.
Come along, no prior rationality training necessary!
I ask the fundamental question of rationality: Why do you believe what you believe? What do you think you know and how do you think you know it?
~ Harry Potter, Harry Potter and the Method of Rationality
- What is the point of making predictions?
- How can I systematically attain true beliefs?
I found this nice thing:
Resource Map - EA Local Groups - Google Sheets
And this: Holding your first EA meetup! - Google Docs
Reading group guide for EA groups - EA Forum (effectivealtruism.org)