My Week at Rationalist Summer Camp [Sequence Index]

After spending a week at geek summer camp (not that one!) in July 2012, I never got around to assembling the index post for all the blogging I did in response to the workshop.  But, at least I’m just sneaking in ahead of this year’s workshop.  I still think the best summary of CFAR’s workshops is the one I posted last year:

This is the kind of summer camp where, before you go, they send you and two close friends a detailed survey, so they have a baseline to assess the impact of the camp on you in a year when they do the follow up.  Squee!

Here’s what I ended up writing and learning.  It starts relatively object level, but, after the classes are over, I wade into some slightly more tangential questions.

1. Happy Birthday to Me! I’m off to Geek Summer Camp! – A brief explanation of CFAR and a link to one of my favorite Less Wrong thought experiments
2. Conceding a Point is not a Slippery Slope – Man, if I could magically change one attitude people had about arguments, it would probably be this
3. Play Along with Rationality Camp at Home! – A few games you can play (one of which I invented!) to check how confident you are in your beliefs
4. Markets in Everything! – In which my schemes in the predictive markets are derailed when I awaken the moral sensibilities of others at an inopportune moment
5. If only someone had said this to Stoic!Teenaged!Leah – One rationality class managed to shift how I thought about strong emotions
6. 7 Less Wrong Links – For that week’s Quick Takes, a quick tour through some of my favorite posts from Less Wrong
7. Which Voldemort is Scariest? – Contrasting Canon!Voldemort and HPMOR!Voldemort and thinking about the Tricky Dick Nixon ploy.
8. The Gift my Weirdo Debate Friends Gave Me – It was funny to be at a rationality workshop and notice where the practices were already popping up in my life, like the strange examples my debate friends used to stay relatively grounded while spelunking in metaphysics.
9. “Didn’t you ever break on the floor?” – A week of rationalist training, made me very proud and grateful to come out of a debate community where it was a virtue to admit you were wrong.