Minicamps on Rationality and Awesomeness: May 11-13, June 22-24, and July 21-28 | Hacker News Reader

Minicamps on Rationality and Awesomeness: May 11-13, June 22-24, and July 21-28

lesswrong.com

42 pointsrms19 comments

A friend of mine attended last year. He described it as "the most socially awkward people you've ever met telling you how to be less socially awkward".

that doesn't sound like the description at all...

It's possible that somebody is confusing this with an LW meetup, or possibly the Megacamp (that didn't work nearly as well as the one-week Minicamp which is why we aren't repeating it), or something else. Attendees of the previous Minicamp were nearly unanimous about how awesome it was, and they weren't socially awkward.

Well, those who publicly spoke about it were unanimous in its being awesome. SIAI isn't very open about stats for the remainder.

Also, I don't think a regular LW meetup would be described as involving "teaching people to be less socially awkward".

I've followed LessWrong, and I hadn't heard anything, until the GP, about it giving off such an aura of "the blind leading the blind".

I expect that Scott's friend generally had a great experience at the camp and made a somewhat flippant and self-deprecating comment that was appropriate in a social context, but wasn't Scott's friend's most important takeaway from the experience.

You can see all of the feedback to the survey question asking what about the camp could be improved here: http://lesswrong.com/lw/b98/minicamps_on_rationality_and_awe...

Who's Scott?

fuelfive

No, we took surveys and everyone except one person rated in the 9-10 range, I believe.

And then in a few months everyone promptly returned to their status quo ante minicamp ... or at least, the available results are observationally equivalent thereto.

Your statement is false as a matter of fact. We have a one-year life-outcomes followup study planned, but the preliminary indications don't fit with 'status quo', and there are plenty of participant comments on the LW thread which explicitly say otherwise. Stop making stuff up.

I think your friend should go back to watching sports and eating wings.

Some links on the relevance of rationality to entrepreneurship:

http://paulgraham.com/word.html (see the note at the end especially)

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3795517

A good one is Why Businessmen Need Philosophy

http://www.amazon.com/Why-Businessmen-Need-Philosophy-AtlasS...

Hm, I don't think rationality and objectivism are quite the same thing. I was thinking more along the lines of

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases

and

http://www.amazon.com/Thinking-Fast-Slow-Daniel-Kahneman/dp/...

Rationality =/= objectivism.

(At least, not in the context of LessWrong: http://lesswrong.com/lw/31/what_do_we_mean_by_rationality/ )

I went to the first one of these, and I can personally attest to it having been awesome.

Tell us more?

There are a bunch of testimonials in the comments of the Less Wrong thread.

I too went to one of the early ones. Highly recommended.

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