Links & books of interest

[Roxolan]

Stuff discussed in recent meetups:

Curiosity's 7 minutes of terror, the challenges of landing Curiosity in the thin-but-still-annoying atmosphere of Mars.
Prediction Book, a website to share predictions like the ones we did on lake Vostok (possibly many more if we want to train ourselves).
15 minutes of moderate-intensity exercise increased the life expectancy of test subjects by 3 years, with diminishing returns beyond that (not that it's bad to exercise more). The study got a good deal of media attention.

Also, Gwern's Who wrote the Death Note script (LW discussion here) is a very interesting article. I read it after working on my Bayes game and testing Axel's, and suddenly I started seeing Bayes everywhere, down to my everyday decision-making. I don't know if it's what Yudkowsky meant by "Bayes is the secret to the universe" but it sure feels like unveiling a deep occult truth. (Fair warning: if you have similar anime tastes, Gwern's website is a tempting time sink.)

[Roxolan]

Everything I can remember from today's meetup:

Kickstarter, a major crowdfunding website.
Limitless, an ok movie about cognitive-enhancing drugs.
Eliezer Yudkowsky's OKCupid profile
Ian Bank's Culture series, transhumanist sf featuring a decent approximation of transhumanist heaven.
Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality and its podcast, a really good rationalist-fic by Yudkowsky that provides an introduction to much of the Sequences.
Friendship is Optimal, a My Little Pony rationalist-fic that I'll get around to reading once I've tried MLP and figured out what the fuss was all about.
An article on Schelling points, symbolic values that are useful when you have to make a somewhat arbitrary choice on a scale ("which people should lose the right to vote?")
A list of cryonics organisations worldwide. Neither of the European organisations look very trustworthy to me, unfortunately.
Dungeons & Discourse 1 and 2, a webcomic RPG that at least one group on LW has actually played.

I'm interested in the name of the other sf novel that was discussed, about a gradual slip into transhumanism.

[Roxolan]

Also Three Worlds Collide, another Yudkowsky story about the problems with dealing with alien aliens, who may have different core values. (As a very different take on the same topic, I recommend Peter Watt's Blindsight and Stanisław Lem's Solaris. Reading all three forever cured me of the tendency to imagine aliens as humans in disguise.)

[Daniel Molloy]

The story about the gradual slip into transhumanism would be The Gentle Seduction.

[Maël Brunet]

Thanks, lots of interesting stuff to dig into!
Makes me think, are any of you on Goodreads? It's a virtual library / social network for books (and comics) which I find quite useful to manage my book collection and list of books I want to read, but also to share recommendations with friends and compare favourite books. My profile if you want to add me http://www.goodreads.com/user/show/12437827-ma-lig

Mael

2013/3/17 Daniel Molloy <woo...@gmail.com>

The story about the gradual slip into transhumanism would be The Gentle Seduction.

On Saturday, 16 March 2013 21:24:54 UTC, Roxolan wrote:

Also Three Worlds Collide, another Yudkowsky story about the problems with dealing with alien aliens, who may have different core values. (As a very different take on the same topic, I recommend Peter Watt's Blindsight and Stanisław Lem's Solaris. Reading all three forever cured me of the tendency to imagine aliens as humans in disguise.)

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[Maël Brunet]

The story about the gradual slip into transhumanism would be The Gentle Seduction.

Just read it, made me think of another book on transhumanism (among other themes) I think some of you would enjoy, Permutation City by Greg Egan. As usual with Egan it's hard SF so it can be a bit hard to crack open (I certainly didn't understand all the technical stuff) but it explores some very interesting technological and philosophical ideas. Among which the concept of personal identity in a world where you can upload your consciousness and reprogram it extensively. In general I would very much recommend Egan's writing.

Mael

 

2013/3/18 Maël Brunet <maelb...@gmail.com>

[Roxolan]

Friendship is Optimal, a My Little Pony rationalist-fic that I'll get around to reading once I've tried MLP and figured out what the fuss was all about.

 Wow. That story has the most amazing mindfuck-to-chapter ratio. Thank you for getting me to read this, and I can only encourage others to do the same. (It does not require any MLP knowledge above background radiation. (I'm not sure which is creepier, watching MLP before or after reading FiO.))

I'm not on Goodreads, but it does look useful so I might give it a try in the near future.

[Daniel Molloy]

 Wow. That story has the most amazing mindfuck-to-chapter ratio. Thank you for getting me to read this, and I can only encourage others to do the same. (It does not require any MLP knowledge above background radiation. (I'm not sure which is creepier, watching MLP before or after reading FiO.))

Glad you liked it. Here's the sequel: http://www.fimfiction.net/story/69770/friendship-is-optimal-caelum-est-conterrens

Different author, same universe, with more focus on the philosophical aspects of uploading and being an upload. 

Incidentally, reading FiO was what first convinced me to watch MLP, and that is now one of my favourite shows. So if the possibility of becoming a brony frightens you, maybe you shouldn't read FiO. :P Otherwise, I highly recommend both. Regarding creepiness, I think reading FiO without being a fan of MLP is WAY creepier. That way you have the internal conflict of admiring what seems to be a utopia, but being creeped out by all the weird pony shit. That was my reaction when I first read it, but when re-reading after having watched MLP, my reaction was more like "man, living in Equestria would be AWESOME!".

Not on Goodreads, although it does sound like something I should investigate.

[Roxolan]

Yeah, I've been trying out some of the other FiO fics (meta-fanfics? fanficfanfics?). Nothing quite as good as the original, in part because it's much harder to keep people on their toes when they already know how CelestiAI behaves and how the story will inevitably end.

"The laws of this country, which I’ve studied my entire life, say that my daughter is less of a person because of something I did to her. I’m not going to upload until I can look her in the eye and tell her that she isn’t worth any less because she’s a pony, not in any single way."

...but they do have their moments.

I've also watched three MLP episodes since finishing the fic, so yeah. (In fairness, figuring out what the fuss was all about was already on my to-do list before I read FiO.)

[Maël Brunet]

Oh I forgot to link the Zack Weiner's strip I mentionned at the last meetup http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=2722 (one of the best webcomic out there imo along with xkcd)

Mael

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[Roxolan]

Stuff from last meetup:

• Wikipedia on Voxels, which are used in small ways in a handful of AAA games but are otherwise the realm of indie games, mostly because they require too much processing power. (As was mentioned, an Australian company claims to be working on a revolutionary voxel-based engine. It's probably a scam, but at least the parts of their video that aren't about their miracle software give a nice overview of the current state of gaming graphics.)
• Scott Aaronson's blog, with quantum computing stuff.
  
• An overview of transhumanism (which has a tl;dr at the end if necessary).
• The noncentral fallacy, aka "the good part of Nazism".
• Gattaca, a movie about eugenics.
  
• TVTropes, the trivia website that preys on human curiosity, exploits their brains to grow a few more paragraphs, and spits out their bones at 3 am.
• Reposting the Death Note article by request. It includes the way to calculate the worth of a piece of evidence, which seems important if we wanted to build a curious AI that wouldn't fall prey to TVTropes. Gwern's blog also has that Girl Scouts thing I mentioned and tons of interesting articles.
• The Standford Encyclopedia of Philosophy's article on free will. It's 10 pages long and I haven't read it yet, so I'm not settling the bet just now.
  
• The LessWrong Quantum Physics sequence. Though, as much as I feel I've learned from it, I have to quote Gwern here:

MWI: I think that LWers who were persuaded by Eliezer’s MWI writings are wrong to do so, as they are unfamiliar with even the rudiments of any alternatives interpretations and cannot judge in the matter; how many LWers have ever seriously looked at all the competing theories, or could even name many alternatives? (Collapse, MWI, uh…), much less could discuss why they dislike pilot waves or whatever. Lacking any real understanding, they ought to simply adopt the expert consensus, where MWI seems to have a plurality or bare majority of adherents (with the very weak confidence that implies).

I would like the information about the trekking trips and the upcoming science conference.

The poster I used at my university can be seen in the recruitment thread, and I can provide the .ai file if necessary, but I'm now of the opinion that future posters need to be much cleaner and eye-catching. (I'll probably post about the recruitment stuff we discussed last meetup soon.)

[Roxolan]

Requesting again info about the upcoming science conference we talked about two meetups ago. I wish I'd taken some notes.

[Daniel Molloy]

Oh man, I was sure I'd already sent info about that. I don't have time to write up a review of last year's one right now, so I'll just send the links. It's not taking place until summer 2014 anyway.

 

Last conference: http://esof2012.org/

 

Next conference: http://esof2014.org/

On Thu, May 30, 2013 at 7:27 PM, Roxolan <jacob...@gmail.com> wrote:

Requesting again info about the upcoming science conference we talked about two meetups ago. I wish I'd taken some notes.

[Fabien Benetou]

Bayes' Theorem in the 21st Century http://www.sciencemag.org/content/340/6137/1177

Agnotologie, Genèses de l’ignorance http://www.snd-sorbonne.org/activites/colloques-snd/agnotology/

[Roxolan]

Stuff discussed last meetup (14/12/2013):

I'm guessing the BBC light cone/time travel thing was an extract from this show? Youtube doesn't have it.
Any video/reading suggestions on that topic would be appreciated.

RedLetterMedia's extremely long review of Star Wars Episode I.
Belated Media (no relations) 's ideas to make Star Wars Episode I good.

Camp Quest, the secular scout-like youth group (which is a lot bigger than I thought)

There doesn't seem to be any good video of a Tattoo Noise Act concert (beyond the movie I worked for, which I doubt will ever be available on the internet), ones where the singer actually moves and the tattooist has to keep up as best he can.

That's all I wrote down. Huh, rather off-topic this month.

[Axel Glibert]

I remember what show it was! It was a special episode to go along with Doctor Who's 50th anniversary. Brian Cox talks about the real science behind time travel, the search for alien life and black holes:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=68cXSa8yI58

---

Date: Sat, 14 Dec 2013 08:46:31 -0800
From: jacob...@gmail.com
To: lesswrong...@googlegroups.com
Subject: [LW Brussels] Re: Links & books of interest

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[Roxolan]

Stuff mentioned in the January 2014 meetup:
(This is all I remembered to write down. Feel free to add to it.)
(Yes, there are some repeats from upthread. New members happened.)

Article: the LessWrong "About" page, which is a good starting point to the numerous LessWrong articles. If it's to your tastes, since each article links to other articles, you might end up losing some sleep.

Video: Julia Galef's Straw Vulcan video (trope identified by TV Tropes (warning: TV Tropes)). Transcript and discussion here, summary and more discussion here.

Podcast: Julia Galef also co-hosts the Rationally Speaking podcast (and is president of the Center For Applied Rationality).

Book: Manna: Two Visions of Humanity's Future, about the consequences of increased automation.

Fanfics:
Luminosity, a Twilight rational-fic by Alicorn. The rationality lessons are mostly in the beginning. I kept reading beyond that because I quite enjoyed the plot; YMMV.
Friendship is Optimal, a MLP-related fic by Iceman about a powerful artificial intelligence that is completely friendly but not quite the way we'd want it. I stand by my comment earlier in this thread: it has the most amazing mindfuck-to-chapter ratio.

Article: The noncentral fallacy - the worst argument in the world? by Yvain, about the problem of decrying all forms of "eugenics" (or of "cutting people up with knives").

Article: Marijuana: Much More Than You Wanted To Know, by Scott Alexander on his most excellent blog that you should probably subscribe to.

Articles: Newcomb's Paradox, as explained on Wikipedia and on the LessWrong Wiki. The former will tell you about the history of the problem with mainstream philosophers, while the later will link you to a number of LessWrong articles on the topic (in one of which Yudkowsky does his best to convince you to one-box).
Yudkowsky's Timeless Decision Theory is an attempt to "fix" decision theory so that it consistently gets the best outcome in Newcomb-like problems.
You may also be interested in some trickier Newcomb-like problems, including Parfit's Hitchhiker (also known as "Axel's Twilight bargain").

Articles: I wanted to link to a good LW article about Dutch booking and how people's incoherent preferences for certain small profits and uncertain large losses leaves them vulnerable to guaranteed losses, but it turns out my memory conflated a number of connected articles into one; they weren't that accessible in the first place, and some I couldn't even find again. So uh I'm just linking to this one and the most interested among you can do their own archive binge.

Articles: the LW Prisoner's Dilemma (with visible source code) Tournament and its results. Unfortunately, it's often quite hard to figure out what each program was attempting to do (even for programmers, since code obfuscation was part of the game). But the discussion in the first article will give you an idea of some strategies.

Article: We aren't the world, about cultural variance in the perception of optical illusions and the ultimatum game.

There are also a billion articles (LW and otherwise) about trolley problems and various other dilemmas. This sounds like a good topic for next meetup.

I want to turn some of our discussions into a few predictionbook predictions, but I'm out of time right now. The CFAR workshops that Axel and/or me may go to also deserve their own thread.

Ten status points to whoever can explain the whole Hiroshima/Nagasaki story to the rest of us by next month.

[Mathias Zaman]

I found an explanation as to why the US bombed two major cities instead of just bombing a couple of kilometers of the coast of Japan. It wasn't about forcing the Japanese to surrender. They already tried to surrender, several times. The terms weren't what the US was looking for, though, so they didn't accept them. 

The reason they dropped those bombs on those cities is to send a clear message to the international community (and probably mostly the USSR): We have these weapons and we're not afraid to use them.

I'll post a link to some sources tomorrow.

[Roxolan]

For posterity, and for Axel who missed it by minutes: the cake.

anyway, on to

Stuff mentioned in the February 2014 meetup

Article: Kaj Sotala's Bayesian video game dialogue system. His blog may also be of interest.
Incidentally, if you ever come across interesting articles about video game AI, please share them with me.

Facebook: When you're on someone's profile page, next to the Add Friend button is the Follow button, which will show that person's public posts on your feed. I follow a few people in the LW crowd that've definitely improved the quality of my facebook wall: Eliezer Yudkowsky, Kaj Sotala, Brienne Strohl and Katie Hartman. Google+ has a similar feature, on which I've heard Gwern also posts great stuff.

Job stuff: For people like me who know how to program but don't have a piece of paper to prove it, some companies offer certifications if you pass a single exam. Me, I plan to take the Oracle Java Programmer 1 exam. You cram a bit, pay the fee, call one of the many test centres in Brussels to choose the day of your exam (I understand it can be on short notice), pass the exam and you're done. Microsoft offers a similar deal for .NET programmers (and probably other things), and Cisco for network administrators.
If you have basic programming skills but not enough to pass such an exam, and you speak French, Bruxelles Formation offers courses to get you there. It's completely free for the unemployed, including the exam fee, but you do have to commit to a few months of full-time studying.

Article: Something to Protect explains how having a loved one in danger will help you to actually make rational choices.

Article: LW likes to talk about trolley problems; you'll find an number of minor articles about them. Least Convenient Possible World criticizes people's tendency to find escape routes without really solving the dilemmas; I implicitly used its technique to keep today's discussions on track (*cough*).
Also, did you know that 7.6% of professional philosophers choose not to divert the trolley in the first version of the problem? The one that's so easy it looks like a trick question? And a full 24.2% of them choose "Other", presumably because they haven't read the above article.

Article (repost from above): We aren't the world, about cultural variance in ultimatum game (and in the perception of optical illusions).

Next month I'll bring a boardgame that's all about handling unfair deals and ultimatums. Looking forward to trying it with LW folks.

Books: What I said about an Amazonian tribe (actually a Panamanian one) giving similar answers to trolley problems comes from Marc Hauser's Moral Minds: How Nature Designed Our Universal Sense of Right and Wrong. I only got it second-hand though: it's discussed in Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion, which says a few interesting things about evolution-grown morality in the process of proving it's not God-grown.

Organisation: Fabien talked about the Global Brain Institute and their model of humanity becoming as a single decision-making organism. (Haven't read it yet.)

Article: SlateStarCodex's excellent post about the Virtue of Silence, or why one should not try to convince other reasonable people not to vote. (VIRTUE OF SILENCE IS REALLY HARD! (Okay, I actually thought a bit more about that issue, and came to the conclusion that no, silence is not really a good thing in this case.)) Have I mentioned that SlateStarCodex is well worth subscribing to?

Fiction (repost from above): Three Worlds Collide, by Yudkowsky. A great story about meeting aliens with incompatible values. Eneasz has recently completed a quality audio version of it. If you're interested in the ideas behind the fiction, try the Metaethics sequence.

[Axel Glibert]

That looked like a great cake @_@
On the video game AI front, have you heard of the Berkeley Overmind?
http://overmind.cs.berkeley.edu/

---

Date: Sat, 8 Feb 2014 15:03:31 -0800

From: jacob...@gmail.com
To: lesswrong...@googlegroups.com
Subject: [LW Brussels] Re: Links & books of interest

[Fabien Benetou]

BBC Horizon: 2013-2014: How You Really Make Decisions

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b03wyr3c/Horizon_20132014_How_You_Really_Make_Decisions/

Horizon uncovers the truth about how you really make decisions.

Every day you make thousands of decisions, big and small, and behind all them is a powerful battle in your mind, pitting intuition against logic.

This conflict affects every aspect of your life - from what you eat to what you believe, and especially to how you spend your money.

And it turns out that the intuitive part of your mind is a lot more powerful than you may realise.

Torrent for those in the UK but who prefer to download and watch it later : http://eztv.it/ep/52432/horizon-2014-how-you-really-make-decisions-pdtv-x264-mvgroup/

To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to lesswrong-brussels+unsub...@googlegroups.com.

[Fabien Benetou]

The Science of Everyday Thinking

https://www.edx.org/course/uqx/uqx-think101x-science-everyday-thinking-1185

On Tuesday, January 22, 2013 2:58:43 AM UTC+1, Roxolan wrote:

[Roxolan]

March 2014 meetup

Less links than usual since we did so much practical stuff.

Articles: The Fermi estimates mini-presentation I made, and two of the problems we worked on, came from this LW article. The "maize in Mexico" problem was from this one. (The space shuttle one was my own.)

Video: I've been meaning to watch this video since forever. It's Brienne Strohl from LW teaching memory tricks, including the memory palace. (I, uh, still haven't watched it, but it comes much recommended.)

Game: We briefly talked about The Yawhg. It's got multiplayer, but apparently only locally. I'm probably going to acquire it (out of professional curiosity if nothing else), and maybe bring it to a meetup to try it together?


Here is all the info about the Berlin community meetup. Unfortunately it's now full, but it might be worth getting on the waiting list (or, if you're really motivated, make your own sleeping arrangements and sneak in).

[Roxolan]

Article: new research on a variant of the Ultimatum game got bewildering results.

[Maël Brunet]

Game: We briefly talked about The Yawhg. It's got multiplayer, but apparently only locally. I'm probably going to acquire it (out of professional curiosity if nothing else), and maybe bring it to a meetup to try it together?

I'm up for that!

Mael

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[Roxolan]

April 2014 meetup

Another quiet one because of boardgames. (If anyone's curious, I have a boardgamegeek account.)

Article: SlateStarCodex on the consequences of marijuana legalization. Also, SlateStarCodex on everything else. Still my favourite blog ever.

Article: Brienne Strohl on how advanced mnemonic techniques feel from the inside.

[Roxolan]

June 2014 meetup

If you're a French-speaking adult in Belgium and want to get yourself officially tested/helped for autism-related things, you're pretty much stuck to the Fondation SUSA. You need to fill out a very long form, and a couple of months later they'll put you on a waiting list that's more than a couple of months long. (I'm on that list.) Or you could hunt for a psychologist that's better than the one I tried.

Book: Legion by Brandon Sanderson. Urban fantasy about a man with useful multiple personalities.

Events: Skeptics in the Pub, a French group that meets monthly at La Fleur en Papier Doré for talks about skepticism-related topics and then some informal chat not unlike our own meetings. It turns out their next meeting is this Saturday evening: "L'avenir des cours philosophiques". Next season hasn't been announced yet but I will be doing a talk about how to actually change your mind in it (but it's, like, a year from now). They also have a facebook group.

For Axel: Oliver Habryka has shared his Google Drive folder for rationality teaching material. Here is a snapshot of how it looks now. HTH. I can't find the link again or figure out how to re-share it from my drive to get you the updating version.

Event: the Brussels Game Festival (whose website is in French only for some reason) is a long weekend of boardgame-related activities on the 15th to 17th of August. Not a whole lot of details about the program so far.



I've been asked to share the feeds I follow (with the invaluable help of Feedly). Here is it in OPML format if you just want to import the whole thing to a reader (warning: may not stay up forever). Or you could open it in Notepad++ or something and look through for things of interest. I don't feel like explaining them all right now.

On Facebook, I currently follow Eliezer Yudkowsky, Kaj Sotala (well, friended now), Brienne Strohl, Katie Hartman, Julia Galef, Michael Anissinov, and Luke Muelhauser. (And I've been told Gwern is great on Google+).

[Roxolan]

I've already plugged Slate Star Codex to death here, but it's given me a new excuse to mention it: there's an updated list of its best posts, and in the xkcd tradition, the author also made this fantastic map of the rationalist community - complete with functional links (and the occasional hidden alt-text). You know, if one archive binge isn't enough.

[Roxolan]

November 2014 meetup: Hell and existential risks

As usual, apologies for the duplicates. But what can I say? I keep meeting people who've never heard of SlateStarCodex!

Topic: Memory
Book: The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat is an easy read about people with various exotic mental disorders, including the (permanent) inability to form short-term memory that we talked about.
Movie: Memento is an excellent thriller about a man with this disorder trying to solve a murder anyway. If you like "puzzle" movies, you will love Memento.

Topic: Artificial intelligence
Wiki: the Paperclip Maximizer, the standard example for why a sufficiently intelligent AI is really scary even if it has boring goals.
Article: The Hidden Complexity of Wishes, or why this is not an easy problem (i.e. why you can't just tell the AI "make my company a lot of money" and expect anything like a good outcome).
Movie: Transcendance, the latest Hollywood blockbuster about an AI (technically an emulation). Probably not worth watching, but I'll probably end up watching anyway.
Article: That Alien Message, a piece of fiction intended to give you a visceral idea of what it means that an AI is much smarter than you (and why it probably doesn't need to conduct scientific experiments in its basement). (During the meetup, I misremembered its title as Einstein's Speed.)
Fanfiction (kind of): Friendship is Optimal, a story about a powerful artificial intelligence that is completely friendly but not quite the way we'd want it. I stand by my comment earlier in this thread: it has the most amazing mindfuck-to-chapter ratio.
Blog/articles: Robin Hanson is an economist, known for his work on prediction markets (and the related political system, Futarchy), and for being very cynical about politics and everything else. I mentioned his predictions of a future of countless human emulations fiercely competing for limited computing power, but I can't find the canonical article for this, so this io9 vulgarisation will have to do. (Historical note: LessWrong started out as a spin-off of his blog. He's the inspiration for the personality of Quirrel in Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality.)

Topic: Effective altruism
Blog: GiveWell is an organization that rates charities based on how much good they can do with your donations. You can blindly trust their top choices, or you can read page after page of meticulous research. They also write a blog about various effective altruism topics.
Charity: One of their recommendations is GiveDirectly, a charity that simply hands out cash to African villagers, which seems like it couldn't possibly work but does.
Blog: GiveWell recently launched a spin-off, GiveWell Labs, which will study less straightforward ways of donating money to do good: politics, scientific research, existential risk prevention, etc. I tentatively believe that if you want to donate money, and you have enough willpower, your best option is to save it all and wait for GiveWell Labs to figure things out.
Charity: But if you think existential risks will not wait for GiveWell Labs and you want to help fight them right now, your options are MIRI (the AI research institute that's behind LessWrong) or the Future of Humanity Institute (a broader and arguably more legitimate Oxford-backed research institute). Either works, since they're closely tied and support each other.
Charity: On a local level, HEALES is the largest anti-aging lobbying group in Europe, and they're based in Brussels.

Topic: LessWrong and the rationalist community
Blog: If you've never heard of LessWrong, their about page and their Sequences is a good place to start. Watch out for the time sink: it's full of fascinating articles that link to each other.
Fanfiction: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, a story that's partly about deconstructing the Harry Potter universe, partly about teaching rationality techniques as a friendly introduction to LessWrong, and partly just about being a good read. (Yudkowsky has recently started a series of articles about how to write intelligent characters.)
Blog: SlateStarCodex, literally* the best blog on the entire internet.
Article: Under various names, we talked a fair bit about Moloch, the race to the bottom of human civilization. This article is long and occasionally weird, but  worth the read.

And if you just want an overview of the whole rationalist/effective altruist/transhumanist/cryonicist/monarchist cluster, the "cluster of smart people willing to take weird ideas completely seriously", have a look at the Rationalist Community Map.

[Roxolan]

Simon Funk's After Life has a short bit about anterograde amnesia, when a man is about to suffer dangerous experimental brain surgery in chapter 1 (start with "I didn't want to wait."). The protagonist has just the right kind of attitude towards it, like I was talking about last meetup.

(The rest of the book is not awful, and it's certainly trying to tug my tribal heartstrings by name-dropping Memento and Alcor and paraphrasing the best bits of Dawkins, but it's no Permutation City.)

And hey, LessWrong got referenced by xkcd! We're internet famous now! ...For the basilisk. Fuck.