do i get some sort of prize for getting no less than a half dozen members of the less wrong dot corn commentariat to earnestly recommend that i yeet myself into a sports bar

I admit I am somewhat daunted by the basket of worms that this definition entails. daunted further by the question of if the worms in question are suffering

...I hope my unpleasant baby tree frog ways are becoming clearer. People keep saying that actually the other patches of rainforest are polluted garbage. No! I just need a problematically extensive selection of epistemic microbiota in my biome.

I'm sure Sofia can give a better answer but I can give a rough summary of the events I went to.

One was a close reading of a passage from Descartes's First Meditation, done as an exercise to practice identifying arguments and supporting claims being made in a text, and assessing validity. That was facilitated by a philosophy professor who provided a five page handout with step by step instructions on what you should do, and walked us through a suggested process that involved five different colours of highlighter marker. This was a great skill to teach, and I was blackpilled by how people seemed to struggle to parse Descartes even though the translation we worked with was a very accessible one (Moriarty for Oxford World's Classics).

The second was a more social event, where we began with a short lecture by someone with experience on the subject matter, was provided a one-page handout with three sets of three curated discussion questions, and then alternated between small and large group discussions until we worked though all the discussion questions. One set was asking about our own personal experiences, one set was about a hypothetical scenario we were invited to think through, I forget if there was a theme to the third set. This was a really well facilitated event, and I was blackpilled by the cornucopia of bad takes on offer.

Hi Sofia,

Thanks so much for weighing in, and with much more grace and understanding than I realistically deserve.

First, I want to say that I am actually very sad that the good name of public philosophy groups is being dragged through the mud in the comment section here, because I genuinely mean all the good things I say about your organization.  I found the events I attended to be excellently organized, warm and lively, and really good at doing exactly what you are aiming to do, which is to make philosophy less scary for the people out there who've always been a little interested in it but also find it a little intimidating and maybe struggle with impostor syndrome. I completely agree that people who have not done years of philosophy courses deserve to have interesting and thoughtful conversations, and your org does a really good job of facilitating them. I consider your work a stupendous act of public service, one I know I would personally flame out of doing in 2 weeks flat, and I'm genuinely happy whenever I see another substack update from you guys talking about the latest event! I truly have nothing but admiration for all of B&B's organizers. Please don't let any of the midwits here convince you that your mission or approach needs any changing at all!

I hope the above paragraph also makes it clear that I fully understand what B&B's mission is, and I walked into your events with my eyes wide open (or something close to that. Maybe they were open but there were some scales on them or something like that? Anyways.) I just happened to have socialized exclusively in a very strong intellectual bubble in a university town for several years before this, and it was only because I was incredibly out of touch that I found myself dismayed at the lack of epistemic rigor on offer. There was literally no reason for me to have expected any amount of epistemic rigor!

And while I disavowed my sandcastle metaphor because I do think of intelligence as an important meta-skill that is much more important than the ability to build sandcastles, I was still acting like a muppet! If a black belt BJJ practitioner came to an introduction to grappling class and had a bad time, this literally says nothing about the quality of the class. That practitioner is just in the wrong place and to try to accomodate him would make the meetup worse for their actual goals (it is always worse when organizations have goals that are somewhat incompatible), and the black belt needs to go away attend meetups that are appropriate for them. I've read enough philosophy that it's genuinely not enjoyable to me to hang out with the amateurs in the hopes that one of them surprises me with an insight every few sessions, but that's on me, not on you, and certainly not on the attendees.

But to be frank, none of this gives me any hope back. To be more precise, I don't want hope. I want to believe true things about the world, even when they are inconvenient and even when they hurt. And I want to obey Kant's categorical imperative more than I am doing currently. And those things are currently at loggerheads, and this is just going to take me some amount of time and reading and thinking to work through.

To be honest, it's not just the B&B events that led me to the conclusions that I did. I'm in my second decade of being an adult and having full control over my social interactions, I've done and continue to do a lot of the social things that people have recommended in the comments (talking to uber drivers and random people and attending classes about various things I am not good at and whatnot), and they don't really help as much as the people advising them seem to think they would, and the bad experiences compound and drag me towards a conclusion that I don't want to accept. I wrote up a B&B event because it was sort of hilariously bad for me in a way that brought all the little thoughts I was suppressing to light (which, again, you shouldn't feel bad about at all!), partly to try to process the ugly amount of vitriol my body decides is acceptable when I'm in intellectual waters I consider inadequate, and partly because I thought it made for an amusing tale at my expense. I am boo boo the clown. I fully, completely admit that me turning evil is entirely a skill issue on my part and has nothing to do with the organizational capabilities of the B&B crew at all, nor the quality of the people who show up to them.

And while I don't want to tell you how to run your organization, insofar as I keep turning evil when being dropped in your particular rainforest patch, I don't think you should welcome me back to your events. I will not be able to faithfully adhere to your core values, and like you point out beginners can often become timid and self-conscious in the presence of people with a lot more skill than them, and that is the last thing I want. Everyone deserves a safe space to discuss meaningful topics, at whatever level is most comfortable to them.

i do not want to treat other people as if they are dogs. sorry if i'm being obtuse.

thank you for your comment! i agree that it would be bad to write the bottom line first when it comes to epistemics. that's essentially what i tried to do with the cope and that evidently didn't work.

however, i do feel like there is a misrepresentation of what is actually going on in the post somewhat, which i am happy to take the blame for as an artifact of my writing being unclear. your comment frames this as an epistemic problem, but i am not fighting a cartoony battle to stop myself from believing in elitism, that ship has long sailed.

i'm trying to figure out what to do about the contempt. it turns out that when i am around people i find intellectually unserious, i deny them personhood and i act in an incredibly shitty way. my worldview says this is bad and i am sure you agree; my nervous system becomes suffused with hatred and does it anyway.

this feels like a different breed of problem.

yeah, i might acclimatize to worse waters faster if i i'm not in the habit of rolling my own weekly rationality meetups which are precisely the social environment that i enjoy most.

but as mentioned in a prev comment, if the end result of that is me turning evil when i try to interact with normal folks, that seems worth trying to address.

(uh, flagging that i'm not entirely following the thesis of your comment, but i'm responding to the last line of it.)

thank you for going into so much detail, i appreciate it! will triangulate some bars that fit this profile and try to organize a pub crawl or something 🫡

not a bad instinct, the only non-rationalist non-work convention i went to last year was dashcon 2, and that was great. still suffered some amount of psychic damage from the requisite amount of code switching and ambient poor epistemic hygiene, but there was enough novelty on offer to make up for it, and i ended up finding some really interesting folks to hang out with :)

it's not a pure solution in that what i'd like to do is to increase the % of people i feel like i can talk to, and so being like "oh yeah and at this several hundred person convention i found one or two people i click with" is like... sort of consolation prize shaped?