Meet'n'greet: Eat, drink, and be merry - and maybe play paranoid debating.
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Greetings new (and old) Aspiring Rationalists! Apologies for the label, but meetup.com insisted I pick one and this seemed minimally restrictive.
I very much look forward to meeting you all. In order to be immediately recognizable at the first meetup, I'll wear a shirt that summarizes my position on the supernatural mathematically.
Perusing lesswrong.com (http://lesswrong.com/about) before the meetup might be a good idea (though not at all necessary) to get an general idea of the sort of things we usually discuss and do.
Specific topics are broad, but the central theme is learning how to be more rational: epistemically, to reliably come to believe things that are in fact true; and instrumentally, to take actions that reliably bring about desired outcomes.
As you might imagine, this is really really hard - hence "Aspiring Rationalist".
However, it is a great deal of fun! As was once said (http://lesswrong.com/lw/25d/too_busy_to_think_about_life/1wxe), "Think of LessWrong as a hobbyist community, where the things we like to take apart to see how they're built, tinker with endlessly, and exult in learning more about...
...are our own minds."
See you soon!
Alex Demarsh