Hello, and Welcome to ACX Everywhere 2023.
This podcast is a series of candid conversations between meetup attendees recorded at ACX meetups around the country in the fall of 2023. If you're new here, ACX stands for Astral Codex Ten, which is a rationalist blog written by Scott Alexander. Scott is a doctor on the US West Coast, currently working on new models for mental health care at Lorien Psychiatry.
Rationalism is...hard to define, so the following definition is taken from Astral Codex Ten (
https://www.astralcodexten.com/about): “the rationalist community” is a mostly-online subculture of people trying to work together to figure out how to distinguish truth from falsehood using insights from probability theory, cognitive science, and AI.
If you are interested finding out more about rationality in general, and you like podcasts, check out 'Rationally Speaking' with Julia Galef. (
http://rationallyspeakingpodcast.org/)
What is ACX and what is it about? Again, paraphrasing the ACX 'about' page, ACX started as (Scott's) personal blog, Slate Star Codex, and it grew out of "the rationalist community" mentioned above. In practice the articles on ACX tend to focus on reasoning, science, psychiatry, medicine, ethics, genetics, AI, economics, and politics, with some history and philosophy sprinkled over the top.
The amazing thing about ACX Meetups you get a chance to have amazing conversations, IRL, about those topics, with a great community of people. I have personally attended more than fifty ACX Meetups, and I have had phenomenal conversations at each.
I'm doing this podcast because it's hard to know what an ACX meetup is if you've never been to one, mostly because people don't believe you when you tell them about it. My hope is that these recordings make it easier for people to discover ACX, and hopefully get a sense of whether or not ACX might be for them.
A little about me, I'm Andrew Willsen, an ACX fan from Sacramento, CA. I'm a generalist who spent over twenty years working in high end restaurants, and currently I do independent research, systems theory consulting, and I make art. I see the facilitation of this podcast as both research and art rolled into one, and that's why I'm doing it.
If you’re interested in attending an ACX Meetup a list of Fall 2023 Meetups can be found here: (
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/meetups-everywhere-2023-times-and)
Thanks for checking out these conversations, I hope you find them as interesting as I do.
Cheers
