Rationality Meetups (session 3): Probability and Predictions
Kavárna U Vojtěcha, Šmeralova 292/12, Praha - Letná
Česky/English depending on attendees
Vojtěch Brynych
Join us for a series of six open-format meetings, taking place twice a month on Tuesdays from October to December. There’s no need to register in advance; you are welcome to join even if you can’t attend every session. The meetings will feature discussions based on required readings, focusing primarily on the works of Scott Alexander (author of the Astral Codex Ten blog). It’s an opportunity to deepen your understanding of key rationalist topics and explore them with others. English speakers welcome.
What’s the Goal?
The sessions are for both regular participants who want to catch up on classic texts and expand their knowledge, as well as for newcomers eager to dive into valuable rationalist literature.
The upcoming 3rd session: Probability and Predictions (October 29)
The third session will be led by Vojtěch Brynych. To give you an idea about the content, here is the intro of the chapter:
Nearly everyone is very very very overconfident. We know this from experiments where people answer true/false trivia questions, then are asked to state how confident they are in their answer. If people’s confidence was well-calibrated, someone who said they were 99% confident (ie only 1% chance they’re wrong) would get the question wrong only 1% of the time. In fact, people who say they are 99% confident get the question wrong about 20% of the time.
It gets worse. People who say there’s only a 1 in 100,000 chance they’re wrong? Wrong 15% of the time. One in a million? Wrong 5% of the time. They’re not just overconfident, they are fifty thousand times as confident as they should be.
You can see an overview of all the upcoming sessions as well as our other events here: https://www.efektivni-altruismus.cz/kalendar-akci/.
Not able to attend?
If you are interested in the topic but cannot attend due to time constraints, for example, leave us your contact details and we will get back to you with other opportunities (events, discussions, lectures, projects): https://forms.gle/jqVaFWPhcPZmiFFy8.