but this particular subtopic (i.e., what I say in the preceding paragraph, as well as your answer to the puzzle) is, IMO, an important and potentially quite fruitful one to explore.
I think I’m fine with the conversation continuing, but preferably in a way that ties it back to the original context (i.e. meetups and local rationalist communities), if that’s possible. (That said, as noted, I think these comments could be reworked into a top level post).
I’m not actually sure what you mean by “running a group in this way”, since I don’t think I really specified a way. Any kind of doling out awards seems like it’d congeal into a status quo if you did it roughly the same way each time.
I think I’m fine with the conversation continuing, but preferably in a way that ties it back to the original context (i.e. meetups and local rationalist communities), if that’s possible.
It certainly is possible, and in fact I’ve already had a few discussions (outside of LessWrong) of precisely this application of what I’ve learned from my WoW experiences.
I’m not actually sure what you mean by “running a group in this way”, since I don’t think I really specified a way.
Indeed, you didn’t, which is why it’s tricky to tease out the (apparent-to-me) divergence in our views. It’s not that you specified a way of running a group, but rather that what you said encodes certain assumptions about how a group will, necessarily, be run.
That’s cryptic, I know; I’d like to make my meaning very explicit, but doing so will require a diversion into some more actually-talking-about-WoW, and also many more words. I actually started writing out my answer as a comment, but it got very long very quickly. So I think I’m going to take your suggestion, and try to write this up as a top-level post or two (at which point, I hope, we’ll either come to agree, or at least our disagreement will be clarified completely).
I think I’m fine with the conversation continuing, but preferably in a way that ties it back to the original context (i.e. meetups and local rationalist communities), if that’s possible. (That said, as noted, I think these comments could be reworked into a top level post).
I’m not actually sure what you mean by “running a group in this way”, since I don’t think I really specified a way. Any kind of doling out awards seems like it’d congeal into a status quo if you did it roughly the same way each time.
It certainly is possible, and in fact I’ve already had a few discussions (outside of LessWrong) of precisely this application of what I’ve learned from my WoW experiences.
Indeed, you didn’t, which is why it’s tricky to tease out the (apparent-to-me) divergence in our views. It’s not that you specified a way of running a group, but rather that what you said encodes certain assumptions about how a group will, necessarily, be run.
That’s cryptic, I know; I’d like to make my meaning very explicit, but doing so will require a diversion into some more actually-talking-about-WoW, and also many more words. I actually started writing out my answer as a comment, but it got very long very quickly. So I think I’m going to take your suggestion, and try to write this up as a top-level post or two (at which point, I hope, we’ll either come to agree, or at least our disagreement will be clarified completely).