Meet Up: Urbana-Champaign: Reconstituting

[Charlie Steiner]

WHEN: 31 August 2014 02:00:00PM (-0500)

WHERE: 206 S. Cedar St, 61801

In the puddles and pools formed by the fall rains, meetup groups that seemed dead end their arid hibernation and emerge from the earth.

Come join us for the first meetup of the new school year. Board games and light discussion are likely. A starter topic: increasing exposure to positive black swans.

[Nick Desai]

Hi all,
I'm Nick Desai, a new CS student at U of I. I've been reading LW for a while (> 1 year), read most of the sequences, but haven't joined the community yet because of both akrasia and the sense that I didn't know nearly enough to productively participate in discussions. The intellectual atmosphere was a bit intimidating, and the loss aversion part of my brain preferred non-interaction to the potential status hit of saying something ignorant and/or stupid (yes, even though saying stupid things is the best way to find out which of the things you think are stupid.)

But I saw that there was a meetup happening and figured hey, if I'm going to be intimidated I may as well do so in person, and maybe I'll get to know the local LWers along the way. So this is my introduction and meetup RSVP.

(Er, actually, do we usually announce our attendance for these? I'm looking through the rest of the entries, and most of them have no replies. Does this group use a system outside Google Groups for checking who will be there?)

[jack....@gmail.com]

Hey Nick, looking forward to meeting you there. There is no system for saying who will attend. We just see how many people show up at the actual meetup. With the feeling of stupidity thing, you're touching on a point that CFAR instructors like to hammer on, which is that that feeling is like muscle pain. It shows you when you're growing stronger, and you can learn to steer toward it instead of away from it.

[Brad Deutsch]

I'll most likely be there (>80%), even though I've been slacking on my LW reading.

Hi Nick. The more I learn about rationality, the dumber I feel. Let's all feel dumb together!

B

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