I agree we don’t know what the best skillsets are. I have a version in my head that’s maybe one third The Art Of Rationality and two thirds The Art Of Screwtape though the boundaries between those are fuzzy. There is a confounder I’ve noticed where people tend to be growing all the time anyway, so it’s common for them to get better at random tasks and generate false positives. (Example: A ten year old who doesn’t know Bayes loses Magic games to a ten year old who does, but they can both lose to twenty year olds with experience and money.)
I notice I don’t have that high of a threshold for trying things here. Most of that willingness to flail about and risk fake versions of this (especially if I flag it as fun meetup ideas more than flagging it as intensive rationality training) are downstream of a lot of thinking about which parts of a meetup are load bearing. “Rationalists get together to play 7 Wonders or Hanabi and chat” is a beloved pastime which I wouldn’t try to replace with “Rationalists get together to do physics homework” but would be cheerful about trying to replace with “Rationalists get together to play Rationality Cardinality or Calibration Trivia and chat.” Double Crux continues to be a popular ACX meetup activity, and I suspect that’s because it involves pairing up to talk about something that’s divisive.
I agree we don’t know what the best skillsets are. I have a version in my head that’s maybe one third The Art Of Rationality and two thirds The Art Of Screwtape though the boundaries between those are fuzzy. There is a confounder I’ve noticed where people tend to be growing all the time anyway, so it’s common for them to get better at random tasks and generate false positives. (Example: A ten year old who doesn’t know Bayes loses Magic games to a ten year old who does, but they can both lose to twenty year olds with experience and money.)
I notice I don’t have that high of a threshold for trying things here. Most of that willingness to flail about and risk fake versions of this (especially if I flag it as fun meetup ideas more than flagging it as intensive rationality training) are downstream of a lot of thinking about which parts of a meetup are load bearing. “Rationalists get together to play 7 Wonders or Hanabi and chat” is a beloved pastime which I wouldn’t try to replace with “Rationalists get together to do physics homework” but would be cheerful about trying to replace with “Rationalists get together to play Rationality Cardinality or Calibration Trivia and chat.” Double Crux continues to be a popular ACX meetup activity, and I suspect that’s because it involves pairing up to talk about something that’s divisive.