A few months ago I suggested contra dancing as a fun activity to do after a meetup. One person scoffed, “I don’t think Less Wrong is a likely place to find people who like social dancing!”
We took a poll. 4 of the 6 people present had tried and liked contra dancing (and a fifth recently got hooked).
It’s not, but then LW group members can’t be presumed rational. What sort of synchronized group movement or synchronized group voice or both would bypass the Cthulhulian-horror-of-conformity filters?
N-player rock-paper-scissors variants. They generally involve everybody standing in a circle facing inward shaking their fists three times and chanting in unison, and looking back I feel like they do have a community-building effect. But they bypass the filter because they’re competitive, and are presumably appealing to LW people because they involve memorizing a large ruleset and then trying to game it.
You wouldn’t necessarily even need any hacking—just have lots of computers / dance mats side by side, and start the same song at the same time in all of them.
I’d have a hard time presuming anyone to be completely rational. But I’d have an even harder time understanding why I shouldn’t point that out to someone who (presumably; due to them being here and all) wants to be more rational.
About your second point: I’m probably a bad choice for identifying your conformity filters due to the rather big amount of time I’ve spent at salsa and tango courses. Time which takes gargantuan proportions when contrasted to the awfully little time I’ve spent in Cthulhulian sects.
I definitely dance. I met my wife doing ballroom dancing. I picked up social dancing after breaking up with a long-term girlfriend because I knew I’d fare better if I were to make a bunch of friends and have a new hobby that wasn’t moping or being lonely.
While I love the idea I think you’re missing the problem that most of our in-group view themselves as people who don’t dance.
A few months ago I suggested contra dancing as a fun activity to do after a meetup. One person scoffed, “I don’t think Less Wrong is a likely place to find people who like social dancing!”
We took a poll. 4 of the 6 people present had tried and liked contra dancing (and a fifth recently got hooked).
How is that rational?
It’s not, but then LW group members can’t be presumed rational. What sort of synchronized group movement or synchronized group voice or both would bypass the Cthulhulian-horror-of-conformity filters?
N-player rock-paper-scissors variants. They generally involve everybody standing in a circle facing inward shaking their fists three times and chanting in unison, and looking back I feel like they do have a community-building effect. But they bypass the filter because they’re competitive, and are presumably appealing to LW people because they involve memorizing a large ruleset and then trying to game it.
In a similar group of my acquaintance, DDR (Dance Dance Revolution, not the former East Germany) serves this role fairly well, albeit only pairwise.
I imagine yoga can work this way for people who don’t also have a horror of the reference class they file yoga in.
How hard would it be to hack pydance to synchronize multiple computers? A few Raspberry Pis, a few monitors… mass DDR-off!
You wouldn’t necessarily even need any hacking—just have lots of computers / dance mats side by side, and start the same song at the same time in all of them.
Which actually sounds rather awesome.
You’ve just invented Geek Line Dancing.
Large-pattern juggling. Takes a lot of practice from everybody, though—well more than most social dance.
Something sufficiently geeky.
for example
I’d have a hard time presuming anyone to be completely rational. But I’d have an even harder time understanding why I shouldn’t point that out to someone who (presumably; due to them being here and all) wants to be more rational.
About your second point: I’m probably a bad choice for identifying your conformity filters due to the rather big amount of time I’ve spent at salsa and tango courses. Time which takes gargantuan proportions when contrasted to the awfully little time I’ve spent in Cthulhulian sects.
The minister’s cat might play this role, although people do get kind of frustrated with it.
You might be surprised.
I don’t, FWIW.
Whatever, man. My hips remember the original dance.
I definitely dance. I met my wife doing ballroom dancing. I picked up social dancing after breaking up with a long-term girlfriend because I knew I’d fare better if I were to make a bunch of friends and have a new hobby that wasn’t moping or being lonely.
I dance. Very badly though.
I go out social dancing 2-5 times a week.