When: Wednesday, October 2, 6:30 PM
Where: The Territory (house), 5238 11th Ave NE, Seattle.
Why: I’ll be in Seattle as part of the Meetups Everywhere tour
Who: Anyone who wants. Please feel free to come even if you feel awkward about it, even if you’re not “the typical SSC reader”, even if you’re worried people won’t like you, etc.
How: For more info, contact orborde[at]gmail or see the Facebook event.
Seattle Anxiety Specialists are a therapy practice helping people overcome anxiety and related mental health issues (eg GAD, OCD, PTSD) through evidence based interventions and self-exploration. Check out their free anti-anxiety guide here
.
The Effective Altruism newsletter provides monthly updates on the highest-impact ways to do good and help others.
Jane Street is a quantitative trading firm with a focus on technology and collaborative problem solving. We're always hiring talented programmers, traders, and researchers and have internships and fulltime positions in New York, London, and Hong Kong. No background in finance required.
MealSquares is a "nutritionally complete" food that contains a balanced diet worth of nutrients in a few tasty easily measurable units. Think Soylent, except zero preparation, made with natural ingredients, and looks/tastes a lot like an ordinary scone.
The COVID-19 Forecasting Project at the University of Oxford is making advanced pandemic simulations of 150+ countries available to the public, and also offer pro-bono forecasting services to decision-makers.
Giving What We Can is a charitable movement promoting giving some of your money to the developing world or other worthy causes. If you're interested in this, consider taking their Pledge as a formal and public declaration of intent.
AISafety.com hosts a Skype reading group Wednesdays at 19:45 UTC, reading new and old articles on different aspects of AI Safety. We start with a presentation of a summary of the article, and then discuss in a friendly atmosphere.
B4X is a free and open source developer tool that allows users to write apps for Android, iOS, and more.
Norwegian founders with an international team on a mission to offer the equivalent of a Norwegian social safety net globally available as a membership. Currently offering travel medical insurance for nomads, and global health insurance for remote teams.
Support Slate Star Codex on Patreon. I have a day job and SSC gets free hosting, so don't feel pressured to contribute. But extra cash helps pay for contest prizes, meetup expenses, and me spending extra time blogging instead of working.
Dr. Laura Baur is a psychiatrist with interests in literature review, reproductive psychiatry, and relational psychotherapy; see her website for more. Note that due to conflict of interest she doesn't treat people in the NYC rationalist social scene.
Metaculus is a platform for generating crowd-sourced predictions about the future, especially science and technology. If you're interested in testing yourself and contributing to their project, check out their questions page
Substack is a blogging site that helps writers earn money and readers discover articles they'll like.
80,000 Hours researches different problems and professions to help you figure out how to do as much good as possible. Their free career guide show you how to choose a career that's fulfilling and maximises your contribution to solving the world's most pressing problems.
Beeminder's an evidence-based willpower augmention tool that collects quantifiable data about your life, then helps you organize it into commitment mechanisms so you can keep resolutions. They've also got a blog about what they're doing here
Altruisto is a browser extension so that when you shop online, a portion of the money you pay goes to effective charities (no extra cost to you). Just install an extension and when you buy something, people in poverty will get medicines, bed nets, or financial aid.
Darn! I’m in Seattle for a brief business trip, but my flight leaves at 7:20 tonight. I should have checked the meetups everywhere schedule and stayed an extra night!
I had a great time, some of the regular discord users met up as well. I was genuinely surprised at how large the turnout was (and how awesome The Territory was). I was Connor and I hope I didn’t offend anybody or overtalk. Really appreciate everyone I met.
Over 100 people showed up! If you missed it or want to come again we have weekly dinners at The Territory on Mondays at 7pm (normally more like 10-15 people than 100+).
Awesome event, as always! I do have a question about people’s recollection, though, and would love to get Scott’s thoughts on one amazing phenomena I noticed:
There were apparently over 100 people in attendance who we can assume are usually very interested in both evidence-supported arguments and fact-checking, especially during a disagreement, and yet during the entire six hours I was there I never saw anyone looking at their phone during a conversation
By mutual silent accord, we all just…didn’t do that.
Not during disagreements.
Not when someone wondered out loud about an totally checkable fact.
Not when someone would reference a specific essay or article and someone else would say, “Oh, what was that? I’d like to read it, too.”
We all just stopped doing the check-your-super-computer-in-your-pocket thing that we almost certainly do in our day-to-day lives.
As far as I’m aware, avoiding the use of a phone to look something up wasn’t a posted house rule, or anything like that, and was never directly addressed.
Does this phenomena occur at other meetups? Any speculation as to why?
(As for me, I’m Christina, I have long, dark curls to my waist and was wearing a black dress, red sweater, and striped socks, stayed pretty late talking and talking and talking. )
I remember fact-checking “number of android devices” in the world with a quick phone-google. I suspect it might have something to do with charitability. There wasn’t that much CW-type discussion, so a lot of people were just being given the benefit of the doubt. I see a good reason for why we do this too. People who are steeped in a culture war have a huge list of “dishonest/untrue claims typically made by outgroup”, and when nobody pattern matches it to “obvious lies I’ve heard a thousand times” it winds up just being taken in good faith. “Nobody fact checking others” is a decent sign that nobody has said anything egregiously wrong – at least until things get extremely technical.