Kyle’s Comments (group member since Nov 29, 2014)

Kyle’s comments from the Effective Altruists group.

Hey Linchuan!

The monthly meetings have become idle as I haven't been organizing them, but we did actually read Doing Good Better the month after it was released. There wasn't much discussion, so if you'd like to get a group together and document the notes I strongly encourage it and would definitely participate!

Yay books! I'm getting myself a Kindle, so excited.

I'll be at EA global, but I'll make sure to ask participants about their thoughts!

To kick things off, I have a few articles.

Margaret Atwood discusses this a bit (mostly in the context of science fiction), especially in the first half of this article: http://www.theguardian.com/books/2011... and in her interview here: http://www.wired.com/2013/09/geeks-gu...

Another brief article describes the results of a study on the relationship between empathy and fiction, specifically literary fiction. http://www.theguardian.com/books/book...

This month will be somewhat unconventional in a couple ways: there will be no specific book, and we will be discussing fiction.

Effective Altruism is in many ways about optimization: what are the most effective ways to minimize suffering and maximize happiness in the world?

Why doesn't our bookshelf have many works of fiction? Is fiction mostly irrelevant to EA? How is fiction useful? This topic was requested but I could not find a book directly addressing the question, so we'll be sharing thoughts and resources here.

Please share:
- Articles/books about this topic
- Your own thoughts and experience with fiction
- Discussion!

We'll be reading and discussing Peter Singer's new book, The Most Good You Can Do. It's a short readable book, great for sharing with people new to EA.

If you've already read it or are looking for other similar material, check out the EA Handbook (http://effective-altruism.com/ea/hx/e...) or Nick Cooney's new book (http://www.nickcooney.com/)

As always, new folks are welcome!

Hope everyone has been enjoying their reading - I'm on my second read-through of the Charisma Myth. Really useful stuff!

For those of you in a time-crunch, artofmanliness.com has done a podcast and series of posts summarizing the book and its core concepts, found here: http://www.artofmanliness.com/2014/06...

I'm not 100% happy with their posts, but it is interesting to see them try to boil down her work, especially in the 'manliness' context.

This month we'll be reading The Charisma Myth, which has been recommended in book club discussions since our inception.

For those of you that like to read multiple books, discussion may also pull from "What Everybody is Saying", another short book that looks at the body language side of things. Thanks to Tara for the recommendation!

As we get closer to the discussion date, I'll probably be updating with summaries and secondary resources for those of you that don't have time for a full book.

I also really enjoyed the first few chapters, maybe that can be the focus of discussion! Given our recent reading of the Righteous Mind, I'm interested in the cross section between Baron's 'human thinking' framework and Haidt's 'human morals' framework. Baron is discussing how to think well about our goals, but can his framework help us make good goals?

Sweet - do you think you'll have enough time to read the chapters you'd like? The discussion date is still flexible (others feel free to let me know!)

This month we will be reading (parts of) Thinking and Deciding, by Jonathan Baron.

Unfortunately, this book is not available in Audiobook format (although maybe we didn't look hard enough). However, the book itself can be pretty dense and we don't expect everyone to make it through. Thus, we are encouraging people to select chapters to their liking, and share their thoughts with the group

Here's a chapter-by-chapter review from Lesswrong: http://lesswrong.com/lw/cb1/thinking_...

There also appear to be plenty of PDF copies of the book floating around the internet. But when in doubt, support your local bookstore (I think... should we support our local bookstores?).

Let us know in the discussion what sections you plan on reading! I'm also thinking of extending discussion to a select few Lesswrong posts, so do recommend any you think would be relevant.

Great discussion! Here are some of my notes:

Guns, Germs, and Steel: it's more important to be wide than tall (geographically). It is easier to spread technologies across the same latitude
- with domestication if you have a crop that adapts at a specific climate/latitude, then it's easier to spread
- Domestication was of critical strategic importance
Agriculture>population>technology
- rivers flowing mostly horizontally on the planet (trade/transport)

Collapse: it's mainly about forestation and soil health, which is negatively affected by the agricultural expansion outlined in GG&S, and plays a critical role in societal collapse (which small isolated/island societies have experienced, and our global society

Diamond is trying to get a large-vantage perspective which is necessarily not paying very close attention to the nuances of a specific century.

Q1: How do we read this book?
He isn't using evidence, just a bunch of stories. Is he proving something? How do we use that? Is it useful?

A1.1: He effectively shatters the bias/theory that europeans are somehow culturally/genetically superior. It was lucky geography - domesticated animals and wheat (more protein-rich source of carbs).

A1.2: We can use his research to cultivate our intuitions which can help us think about how to solve societal problems of today (e.g. sustainability and conflict resolution techniques of successful societies).

A1.3: It's useful to have examples - also a source for things to test, like if you have a grand theory then you can test it against these historical examples.

Q2: Any criticism with teeth? He seems to respond pretty well to things like Geographic Determinism and "shallowness"

A: Yet to be determined! Share your thoughts/criticisms

These summaries look pretty good: http://www.jareddiamond.org/Jared_Dia...

Collapse is a lot longer! I'm 2/3 of the way through. Upside: lots of stories about different societies. Downside: it's all basically the same message which could be summarized in a short article.

Sure! I didn't look too much into it besides a brief google search and a few conversations. Here's a relatively short article by NPR with links to other critiques:

http://www.npr.org/blogs/13.7/2013/01...

It seems that critics are concerned with his sweeping claims based on only a handful of concepts, so nothing new. Still I'm sure they will be a bit helpful.

Hello everyone - we're going to be trying something a little bit different this month for the book club. The top voted book was Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond. Some other folks mentioned Collapse by Diamond as an alternative.

So we're making the month about Jared Diamond and his (sometimes controversial) theories about the history and fate of our species. All books by him are welcome to the discussion, and critiques are encouraged :)

I look forward to discussion here and in the hangout (which will be at least 90 minutes)!

Rochelle wrote: "Michael Valentine Smith, founder of CFAR, recommended 'Your Money: The Missing Manual' by JD Roth to me. He said he had read a lot of information and recommended this as the best resource on person..."

That's great Rochelle! Could you add it to the Bookshelf with your comments? I expect it will come up in the next vote :)

I've been trying to use the Carnegie's techniques on his own book - i.e. to appreciate what value there may be :)

But yeah. It's hard to get past his more categorical statements.

I'm enjoying this as an audio book. Listening in small chunks and then practicing the principles over a few days is a great way to get hands-on experience with what the book is talking about. It's also a bit repetitive, so it's not too important to catch every sentence (also good for an audio book).

Thanks Matt!

I'm a few chapters into the book, and I'm struck by how categorically Carnegie rejects the idea of criticism as a useful tool.

He even goes so far as to give an example of a wife asking a husband for constructive criticism (how she can be a better wife). The husband 'wisely' tells her that she is perfect in his eyes.

What do others think? If I were defending Carnegie, I would say that he is rejecting criticism but endorsing positive reinforcement as a medium to achieve the same sort of behavior changes. However, I'm not sure about that defense.

Thanks William, we can definitely make use of that while we're talking!

I'll be posting the hangout link in the event in the next couple minutes.