3 Topics Over Dinner

3 Topics Over Dinner is a dinner discussion group that meets on weekends. Links to articles or videos on the internet about 3 Topics, usually unrelated to one another, are posted on the event listing. Attendees read the articles (and other sources if they so wish) or watch the videos to be discussed over dinner. The idea is to be similar to a book club, only with far less reading. The idea is that this required reading / video viewing will be less than 3 hours.

We go to a different nationality restaurant every month, and always restaurants that will do separate checks for a large group, so everyone can pay with their own credit card and we don't have to figure out how to split the check. The restaurants are chosen to be quiet and nice, but not extremely exorbitant. A link to the menu of the restaurant, with prices listed, will always be provided on the announcement.

The restaurants chosen will always be in Manhattan, 77th St or further south.

RSVP's will be limited to have about 8 people at dinner, small enough that everyone can hear one another and we can conduct a single conversation.

The group has been going roughly once a month since 2008. It was formed on meetup.com and has shifted to Eventbrite.

Monthly Climate Science and Energy Engineering Dinner

A $5.00 deposit is required to RSVP. This deposit is refunded in cash ten minutes after the event starts. No-shows and latecomers forfeit their deposit.

The first topic is innate human nature. Traditionally, there is a big difference of opinion on the subject between the political left and right.

On the left, one view is that humans have no instincts, there is no "innate" human nature and all behavior is learned, and therefore if we perfect society, people will become perfect. The French philosopher Rousseau had a similar view, also popular on the left, that human nature is inherently very noble, but it is corrupted by our current society. This idealizes the "noble savage", though it's not clear that Rousseau ever met anyone from a pre-literate society, and the way he conducted his own life hardly reflects well on human nature. His vision led some anarchists to believe that just recklessly tearing down our civilization would easily emancipate a better world.

Conservatives are more likely to see "innate" human nature as being inevitably selfish and competitive, making the following things unavoidably necessary:

• a market-based economy to motivate people to do useful work
• law enforcement to prevent violence, theft, and other crimes
• a constitutional government with carefully-written checks and balances to avoid power corrupting the leaders

In the 1970's, Harvard professor E.O. Wilson introduced a theory, "Sociobiology" (now called "Evolutionary Psychology"), which held that humans had instincts that were evolved during prehistoric times, that fit right into the conservative view of human nature. The idea was immediately attacked by a group of university faculty and high school teachers in a petition, and the fight has gone on ever since. In 2003, the Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker published the book The Blank Slate, which defended Evolutionary Psychology, and criticized the notion of the "noble savage".

Now, some leftist intellectuals are arguing that the left would benefit from listening to evolutionary psychology.

Free speech is in very bad shape on college campuses. Most university faculty fear punishment for saying the wrong things, polls show that a large fraction of students approve of shouting down unpopular lectures, and, as a result, the ideas coming out of universities are losing credibility with the broader public.

Betsy Devos, the secretary of education during Trump's first term, supports ending the department of education. The article is paywalled, a pirated copy is here.

Here's a Brookings article on the purpose of the department of education.

The Heritage Foundation (where Project 2025 was written) has published the following statement about the educational goals we should pursue as a society. (This document might might even be part of Project 2025 itself). One wonders how this vision would be implemented in the absence of a Dept of Ed.