The following Slate Star Codex meetups are planned for the next week or so:
Berkeley, Sunday 4/17 at 2:00 PM at CFAR office, 2030 Addison, 7th floor, Berkeley
San Jose, Monday 4/18 at 7:00 PM at a private house, 3806 Williams Rd, San Jose
Googleplex, Tuesday 4/19 at 12:30 PM at Bigtable cafe in building 1900. Googlers can get more information at the internal slatestarcodex-discuss mailing list.
Stanford, Tuesday 4/19 at 5:30 PM at Tressider Food Court
Everyone is welcome to Berkeley, San Jose, and Stanford. Googleplex is limited to Google employees. Please feel free to come even if you don’t read this much, don’t comment, don’t understand everything, don’t agree with me about things, or don’t feel like you fit in with the normal demographic. During past meetups we’ve always appreciated having more diversity of different types of people attending.
I wish I lived in the Bay Area so I could come to this! Well, no I don’t really, for other reasons… but is there any hope of getting you up to the Seattle area for a day or two?
Maybe! I’ll have a lot more chances to travel when I finish residency.
You’re always invited to Oxford.
Atlanta would be good, too. 😛
Second Atlanta, though, we are more of a “if you are flying through Hartsfield Jackson, because everyone does”, than “there are many readers here” kind of situation.
You can expect at least two attendees in Seattle when that does happen.
Since there was some confusion last time, the Stanford meetup is to the east of the building labelled Tresidder Memorial Union on Google Maps. It will be somewhere near the bike racks pictured here, i.e., probably at some of the tables pictured here.
How long would you expect people to be around there? I’ll be at work in berkeley until 6.
I’ll definitely stay as late as anyone wants to continue the conversation, but I can’t speak for anyone else. If there are limits to how long we can hang out at Stanford and if people want to continue the conversation, you guys are all welcome to hang out at the rationalist house Tesseract, which is 10 minutes away in the direction of the Googleplex. We usually host LW meetups on Tuesdays, but it was cancelled this week because of the scheduling conflict.
At least until 8, I’d expect, though it may depend somewhat on how people get dinner.
Will definitely be coming to the Tressider one and I’ve been slowly infecting my friends with SSC as well. Also, cited I Can Tolerate Anything Except the Outgroup in an article for the undergrad political journal on Belgian ethnic politics: http://stanfordpolitics.com/2016/04/belgium-exist/
so, those of us who feel Scott Alexander rather than Eliezer Y is the rightful caliph are welcome right? even though Scott himself is more of a Eliezer supporter?
I can’t help but feel like we ought to drop the whole caliph metaphor. Like, I think we can mock people with a history of taking mockery poorly, or we can talk about rationality, but when we do both it just seems like it is tempting fate, ya know?
Also, since Caliph means successor (to The Prophet) whom is Eliezer the successor to?
E.T. Jaynes?
Can someone provide some details on the internal google SSC mailing list?
Also, what goes on at a SCC meetup? Does Scott give a speech, or do people just hover around him asking questions?
What details are you looking for?
No organized activity. Everyone just hangs out. I’m considering a dramatic reading from an interlude of Unsong, but I’ve never tried that before. I’ll probably see if anyone’s interested.
I think I’m in the right place, but how do I find you guys? I’m looking for someone with finely webbed fingers and a ten-foot aura, but all I see are tables of nerds that look like all the other tables of nerds.
You’re early. 5:30, not 3:30.
And I’m walking in from the train station now so tell us all what to look for
I imagine readers from Google created a mailing list to discuss slate star codex… I wish there were readers where I work as well. 🙂
For the Google meetup, I assume it’s okay for Googlers to bring guests in accordance with Google’s policies?
I am also interested in the answer to this question!
There were guests last time. It’s held in a lunch area at lunchtime, what are they gonna do?
If you’d like to organize one of these in Europe, we’re in Amsterdam and would love to meet you.
Is much happening in Amsterdam? I pass through not infrequently, would visit interesting people there 🙂
Please come to Singapore one day Scott. Many people want to meet you here!
Seconded!
Nobody ever does rationalist-type meetups in South Florida… I guess Florida just isn’t a very rational state.
iknowthatfeel.jpg
“Florida man hosts rationalist meetup, estimates 10% chance that anyone will show.”
“Florida Effective Altruists send 10,000 mosquito nets to Florida.”
“Florida rationalists somehow choose Pat Buchanan in Newcomb’s problem.”
“Florida transhumanists protest life extension research: ‘We moved out here to die, remember?'”
(At this point it would be traditional to throw in some jokes at the expense of my own homeland, to avoid sounding mean-spirited. However, there is nothing funny about Modesto, California. Modesto Man does not assault anyone with a live reptile, or lead the cops on a high-speed Segway chase, or cut off his hand for an insurance scam. Modesto Man eats Cream of Wheat for breakfast, without butter or sugar or even salt. Modesto Man proposed to his wife in the food court at Costco. Modesto Man goes to work every day not because he wants to, or because he needs the money, but because it doesn’t occur to him to do anything else. Modesto Man’s children play soccer, badly; the Modesto youth soccer league as a whole has a 0.71 win/loss ratio. The only Modesto Man who ever amounted to anything is George Lucas, who did it by getting out of Modesto.)
Scott Peterson’s pretty famous, and got famous before he left Modesto. (To quote Lonely Island: “Not better.”)
I’m not sure how an SSC reader ends up in Modesto, or how a Modesto reader ends up at SSC. It seems something has gone horribly wrong.
I mean, what would you do for entertainment? For any kind of nice first-run movie theater with IMAX and recliners and nice things, you’d have to travel to San Francisco or Riverbank, right? And fancy beers would be, what, some Mexican market on Seventh Street? A sandwich-and-beer restaurant near the courthouse? And what of art-house movie theaters, much less some sort of arts center complex downtown?
Or for science, to find anyone who worked on the Large Hadron Collider, you’d have to go to Stanford or UC Merced.
And while I suspect there will be a Modestan at the Berkeley meetup – I’d put a 75% probability on it – that guy is probably flouting Poe’s Law.
Strikes me as a bleak situation. If, in fact, your implausible account of a Modestan reading SSC is true.
Y’all know that the “Florida Man” phenomenon comes from Florida’s Open Government laws and the fact that it has the 3rd highest population, right?
It’s funnier to act like Florida is some kind of cultural sink for entertaining stupidity.
He’s not the hero Florida deserves. He’s the hero the rest of us need.
I’m in Tampa. *Shrug*
I’ll repeat a question that got asked in the open thread. Any chance of a SoCal meetup the next time you’re down here? I believe you have family in the area, and there are at least a few of us in the southern part of the state.
I’m jealous that Google has an internal SSC mailing list. $BIG_TECH_CORP (where I work) doesn’t.
Don’t worry, I never knew either, and when I checked today, it had like three posts.
Holler if you ever make it to nyc
I believe Scott has mentioned in the past that he tries to be in NYC every year for summer solstice festivities. The last NYC SSC meetups were in late June 2015, so you may not have long to wait.
Winter solstice; I don’t think the summer solstice is a thing yet.
You comin’ to the googleplex?! Hot damn! And here I thought I was going to miss it.
Truly, I must marvel at the majesty of my employer.
Are there meetups at Stanford regularly? I’m going to be starting school there next year and would love to go.
I’m a junior there who heard about SSC last year; there haven’t been any SSC meet ups since I started following. There is an Effective Altruism society that discusses related issues a lot, though.
Hi Elisha! I’m one of the organizers of Stanford EA. We currently have 2-3 meetups a week- a discussion meetup Sundays, a social meetup Thursdays, and occasional other meetups. (e.g. like this one, or we’re meeting Larissa MacFarquhar the next Tuesday). Our mailing list is here.
There’s also a weekly South Bay Lesswrong meetup at Tesseract, a group house a few minutes off campus. I’ve never actually been, but there’s significant overlap between our groups.
Feel free to email me if you want to talk; my Stanford email address is richard4.
…And of course the Google SSC meetup is two weeks before I start working there. Grumble.