RECENT AND UPCOMING MEETUP TOPICS

November 2019 Meetup: Going Critical – Phase Transitions in Social Behavior

1. On critical thresholds and cultural/scientific diffusion: https://www.meltingasphalt.com/interactive/going-critical/ 2. A second reference on critical thresholds (sorry for the self-reference but I’m rushing): https://science.sciencemag.org/content/360/6393/1116 3. Look up the definition of “phase transition” [possible cool topic for future meeting—things that hover near criticality..]

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September 2019 Meetup: Free Will

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):

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August 2019 Meetup: Field Trip: Depolarizing the Politics Within

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”).

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July 2019 Meetup: The Repugnant Conclusion

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

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June 2019 Meetup: Causation and Explanation: Monocausal vs. Polycausal Accounts

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/)

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May 2019 Meetup: Tradition vs. Modernity

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

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January 2019 Meetup: Modern Humans’ Quality of Life

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

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