There are many famous historical examples of multiple people making the same discovery nearly simultaneously (calculus, natural selection, the telephone, etc.). Is this because inventions are inevitable and are “going to happen sometime soon” once all of the necessary pieces are in place? Or, do individual researchers shape the technological

The next monthly discussion meetup is Saturday, June 8 @ 2 PM (see below for location etc.). For this month, we’re going to try something different. We going to facilitate one-on-one discussions (note: not debates per se) with people that have (roughly) opposing views on particular issues. Essentially, we’ll poll

The next monthly discussion meetup is Saturday, May 4 @ 2 PM (see below for location etc.). For this meetup, we’ll be discussing the relationship between social media and mental health, with a focus on arguments by psychologist Jonathan Haidt (particularly from his new book) and some criticisms of his

For our April discussion meetup, we will discuss fertility. ​Robin Hanson has been blogging extensively about the topic​ and it has also entered the discourse. So, let’s talk about it! SUGGESTED READING As always, feel free to come even if you haven’t done the reading. This is just a starting

For our March discussion meetup, we’ll be diving into another topical Rationality subculture offshoot: the effective accelerationists (e/acc). A lot of this discourse is Twitter optimized, but there is a coherent techno-optimist ideology that is at odds with the more safety-conscious Berkeley rationality culture. We will discuss techno-optimism more broadly,

For our February discussion meetup, we’ll be hosting another round of lightning talks (and discussions). The lighting talks will be 5-10 minute presentations (plus additional time for discussion) presented by members of the Chicago Rationality community. The discussions will be less of a presentation and more of a short, participatory

Astral Codex Ten recently posted an explainer of Anthropic’s paper “Towards Monosemanticity: Decomposing Language Models with Dictionary Learning.” Since we haven’t had a discussion meetup specifically focused on AI in awhile, this seems like as good of a time as any! Since the content in the ACX explainer and the

We will be discussing “governing the commons.” We will talk about some of Elinor Ostrom’s classic work on how communities self-organize, and we’ll also look at a fun article on the perils of establishing shared social norms in a children’s game of four square. Here’s the suggested reading: Please feel

The next monthly discussion meetup is Saturday, November 4 @ 2 PM. For this meetup, we’ll be discussing degrowth, a proposal to move away from economic growth, in particular as measured by gross domestic product, as the central goal of a healthy economy and society. Some proponents of degrowth emphasize

The next monthly discussion meetup is Saturday, October 7 @ 2 PM. For this meetup, we’ll be doing ⚡️lightning discussions⚡️. We did lightning talks in May, and this seemed to go well! We are going to experiment with a more interactive and lower stakes version of this format. We’ll have