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

SSC / Fundamental/non-Fundamental Value Differences sequence

#1. Meta discussion on a reading about the rationality community itself. see, e.g., this blogpost: https://srconstantin.github.io/2017/08/08/the-craft-is-not-the-community.html #2. Discussion on a reading of fairly general interest regarding rationality (e.g., https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yPLr2tnXbiFXkMWvk/an-equilibrium-of-no-free-energy among obviously many others) #3. Discussion of a more topical post, applying rationality to current events or concerns. (e.g., https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/09/06/acc-entry-should-childhood-vaccination-be-mandatory/ among