About

(Updated: October 27, 2024)

Meeting place for people who like to learn, discuss, think and improve their life. We organize presentations, workshops and social activities in Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany. Anyone is welcome!

If you enjoy reading LessWrong, SSC/ACX, WaitButWhy or simply can’t help but question, come to one of our meetups!

$Venn diagram: Rationality Freiburg is at the intersection of ‘Debating\nSociety’, ‘Philosophy Roundtable’ and ‘Self-Help\nGroup’$

Goals and core values

Strive for a group culture where everyone feels welcome, comfortable and safe
Have fun and enjoy each other’s company
Facilitate respectful discussions even on controversial topics
Improve our understanding of the world (epistemic rationality)
Learn and try out techniques and tools to improve our lives and reach our personal goals (instrumental rationality)

‘Rationality Freiburg’ group deep in discussion in the park

FAQ - Frequently Asked Questions

What is Rationality?

The art of thinking in ways that result in accurate beliefs and good decisions. Accurate beliefs means having mental models that correlate with reality and is usually called epistemic rationality. Making good decisions means making decisions that get you closer to your own personal goals and is usually called instrumental rationality.

Having more accurate beliefs and making better decisions is what we aspire to.

Rationality should not be confused with rationalism (the philosophical belief that reason and intellectual deduction are the primary source of knowledge, rather than sensory experience).

Is Rationality the rejection of emotions or are human emotions bad?

No. Emotions and gut feelings are an integral part of the human experience and in fact, vital for our survival. Having accurate beliefs (i.e. seeing the world as it really is) also implies seeing humans as they really are. Emotions and intuitions work very well in most situations, only in some cases they can mislead us. Recognizing those cases and then improving the result of your decisions is useful.

What do you do?

We have meetups every two weeks where we discuss interesting topics and do exercises or play games that are fun and sometimes teach us useful skills to better reach our personal goals. We also have a book club and a statistics study group.

Is this group affiliated with a political party or entity?

No.

Is this group a cult/sect?

No. But remember that every cause wants to be a cult, so we encourage you to always stay skeptical.

Contact

info@rationality-freiburg.de

You can also find us on meetup.com or LessWrong Community.

We have a Signal messenger group as well as a mailing list that you can join after coming to one of our meetups.

Credits

Site built with Hugo
Template Zen
Brain logo from flaticon.com (free with attribution)
German translations done with DeepL.com and adjusted manually
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