The First Glimmerings Of A Session Schedule
Since our last newsletter, we’ve had more than thirty people fill out the application form to attend Fluidity Forum. We sent acceptances to quite a few of them, and several of them registered. (If we haven’t responded to your application with a decision yet, thanks for your patience!)
The Supporter tier is now sold out, which made it possible to reserve our main venue, as I said in the last installation of this newsletter! (I say “main” venue, because eventually I plan to also rent the picnic shelter in the park next door.) Thank you to everyone in the Supporter tier!
The Early Bird tier is now on sale, so the price for a membership has gone up by $20. There will be a few more price jumps. But we now have enough to rent our first AirBnB! More about that soon.
Some Session Proposals
I'm excited about the talks being proposed in the applications! Here are a few of them from our Supporters:
Meditation from Cold Start to Complete Mastery: a Manual of Global Wayfinding Meditation
By Mark Lippmann
A presentation or workshop on @meditationstuff’s meditation system.
Rationality And Relevance Realization
By Anna Riedl
Anna Riedl’s work connects the current academic rationality discourse, particularly the second great rationality debate, with Vervaeke's relevance realization and Chapman's metarationality, which she has both converged on from a different angle.
Here is the preprint, and you can get a taste here:
Making Sense Of Statistics
By Joe Cecil
How we make this abstract formal theory "work" in practice, and in what sense it is that it works. Informal theories of statistics explain it as a way of approximating unobservable true parameters of distributions, but when examined in detail this view falls apart. Zooming in on a given statistic reveals a more nebulous picture. On the flip side there is a question of how or whether theory applies. These issues seem critical, because statistics are important to many of our modern institutions.
(Post|Meta)rational Computer Programming
By Joshua Brule
Computer programming seems like the quintessential rational activity:
tell computers exactly what to do via programs written in formal
language. In comparison, meta- or post-rational computer programming
might look more like interactive 'play' than 'problem solving', e.g.
live coding is centered on writing source code in an improvised and
interactive way to create a (musical) performance.
A survey — with some demos — of how computer programming can be a
very different experience than what most software engineers do today:
A brief, incomplete and possibly misleading history of computer
science, and why certain historical decisions no longer make sense.Underrated approaches to computer programming you can explore today.
Speculative approaches for future computer programming.
Moving Meditation
By Richard Bruns
A participatory workshop. We will practice the basics of walking meditation and other types of mindful movement, and learn several drills and concepts from Tai Chi and martial arts.
Welfare Economics: A Very Useful Myth
by Richard Bruns
In this talk, I discuss how much of economics is completely fake, and also amazingly useful. 'Welfare' is a myth that somebody made up, but so are other things we really care about, like 'Liberty' and 'Natural Rights'. I will discuss the philosophical foundations of good cost-benefit analysis, teach the basics of VSL and QALY, discuss how to improve the methodology to cover more aspects of human flourishing, and show you how to do your own surveys to estimate the QALY scores of your abstract sacred values.
I've Read Four Books By Bob Kegan. How Come I'm Not Four Books More Developed?
By V. Govind Manian
Why is it so hard to attain Full Kegan? I'll introduce a number of structural problems -- broken feedback loops; many results, but hardly any methods; scaling apprenticeships; structuring "holding environments"; the very notion of stages; and more -- along with my initial experiments with trying to solve these problems.
I'm giving this talk because I'd like to hear if these problems resonate with you and to benefit from your creativity! You might enjoy this talk if you've been inspired and/or frustrated by stage theories from the likes of Bob Kegan, Bruce, Tift, or Ken Wilbur; found your own personal progress to be harder than it needs to be; or think that tinyurl.com/adpw-index is your kind of fun.
Landscape Of Cognitive And Perceptual Experience
By Alex Ellis
A workshop or discussion group on what I tentatively call the "landscape of cognitive and perceptual experience" and how it affects the ways we communicate and empathize with one another. This is a not-quite-thesis I have, and I want to workshop it with folks.
I haven't written directly about this, but this thread may give a glimpse of what I mean:
I'd *love* to survey and collect anecdotes from attendees on this.
Key words: aphantasia, synesthesia, inner monologue, optical (and other sensory) illusions, philosophy of language, private language argument, Wittgenstein, neuroscience
Workshop - Taking The Orange Pill: Bitcoin As A Civilizing Egregore In Opposition To Moloch
By David McFadzean
Wait, Bitcoin is Game~B? (always has been).
Thought Strewn All Around Us
By Collin Lysford
Our environments do some of our thinking for us. What we think of as "thinking" is more like "pointing."
Now Is A Good Time To Apply, If You’re Ready
Want to be at Fluidity Forum this year so you can participate in these sessions? If you haven’t applied yet, here’s a link to do so.
(Special thanks to Alex Ellis for pointing out I forgot to direct the forms on the site to a page to confirm your submission was successful. I fixed that!)
You don’t have to give a talk. Other attendees are creating things as diverse as homemade citrus fruit preserves, a video feedback setup, a tea bar, or a seasonal affective disorder lighting system of awesome power. If you have interesting physical stuff that you’ve made, we would probably welcome it in the exhibit space. We have musicians proposing performances and facilitating music workshops. Someone proposed getting together a game of Mafia or Werewolf to get practice at detecting deception. It’s somewhat open-ended.
Sharp-eyed readers will note that I said we already have more than thirty applicants, but I also said in a previous newsletter that we plan to have about forty-ish attendees for our inaugural year. There are about twenty applicants who didn’t register after we sent them invitations. Which is fine, but we might have to eventually go to some of them and say “Fluidity Forum is sold out and we need to put you on a wait list, sorry!” (Rest assured, you’ll get an email from us well before that happens.)
I’m so excited about how this is shaping up!
-Matt A