Hey all—by some kind of emergent process, we have self-organized a topic for next meetup: Free Will. This is a VAST topic with a ton of writings. Any recommendations? Here are a few possibilities, H/T Shane with an addition by myself: a) Rationalist: Yukdowski (I’d grab the last few posts):

1. A Human’s Guide to Words: What are words, how are they useful, how can they be wrong, how can we avoid being wrong? Drawn from this sequence: https://www.lesswrong.com/s/SGB7Y5WERh4skwtnb 2. Inside/outside views : People are oftentimes bad at estimation. This can oftentimes be improved by reference class forecasting (“Outside view”).

1) What is an optimal course of action when you encounter a situation in which you have a good amount of epistemic uncertainty? We exist and act in the world, so we have to do something before we have all the information, right?  No Half-Speed https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FMkQtPvzsriQAow5q/the-correct-response-to-uncertainty-is-not-half-speed In this reading, how

1. Pragmatism versus principles (i.e. prioritizing the practical effects of choices/policies versus prioritizing fundamental principles, for example because of the negative long-term effects at the individual or societal level of violating said principles) 2. Mono-causal versus poly-causal accounts of a given phenomena: The Omnigenic Model As Metaphor For Life (https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/09/13/the-omnigenic-model-as-metaphor-for-life/)

When is it worth sacrificing “traditional” ways of doing things in the name of modernity, progress, clarity or efficiency? Possible readings — SSC’s review of Seeing Like A State discussing (often argued to be failed) modernist attempts at improving “legibility” by scrapping traditional ways of life. Chesterton’s Fence principle https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Chesterton%27s_Fence

Here are the two papers I mentioned yesterday. One describes the “Bayesian Truth Serum” (for subjective data) and one describes the “Surprisingly Popular Answer” solution to the wisdom of crowds problem. http://tiny.cc/surprisingly-popular http://tiny.cc/bayesian-truth-serum

Are fallacies entirely bad or can the be understood as weak evidence: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/YgNLfytckSyKTnDXN/fallacies-as-weak-bayesian-evidence We’ll be running through this list, or a similar one: http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Logical_fallacy

Political polarization! With a very specific question for us to answer, that seems to come up frequently: is it OK to punch a Nazi? But more pragmatically: what are the effects of punching a Nazi? This question is a stand-in for a more serious question about communication. Some people think

1. There feels like a recurring theme in SSC of trying to find meaningful ways to talk about modern humans’ quality of life in general. I’m sure there are more of his essays that address these issues, but here are a few: How bad are things? http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/12/24/how-bad-are-things/ Would we be

Instrumental/Applied rationality review. Review the first 4 posts from this sequence and review how to apply them. Discussion of what you’ve found useful from them. : https://www.lesswrong.com/s/qRxTKm7DAft%E2%80%A6/p/QzBuuNEqJGQFeWM4f https://www.lesswrong.com/s/qRxTKm7DAft%E2%80%A6/p/rFjhz5Ks685xHbMXW https://www.lesswrong.com/s/qRxTKm7DAft%E2%80%A6/p/vpvKEj7shuk8h5Eet https://www.lesswrong.com/s/qRxTKm7DAft%E2%80%A6/p/ESnzpoCJrAfwAzpMB