Lighthaven Sequences Reading Group #12 (Tuesday 11/26)
- [Open in Google Maps] [Open in local app]
- 26 November 2024, 6:00 pm—10:00 pm
- 2740 Telegraph Ave, Berkeley, CA 94705, USA
NB: This week there is a film-watching event afterwards. We’ll be watching The Big Short (based on the votes in the comments). Yes, you have to read the sequences in order to join the film-watching.
Come get old-fashioned with us, and let’s read the sequences at Lighthaven! We’ll show up, mingle, do intros, and then split off into randomized groups for some sequences discussion. Please do the reading beforehand—it should be no more than 20 minutes of reading.
This group is aimed for people who are new to the sequences and would enjoy a group experience, but also for people who’ve been around LessWrong and LessWrong meetups for a while and would like a refresher.
This meetup will also have dinner provided! We’ll be ordering pizza-of-the-day from Sliver (including 2 vegan pizzas). Please RSVP to this event so we know how many people to have food for.
We’re roughly working through the sequences highlights. The mandatory readings this week are
Optional: Thanksgiving Prayer
The posts should take around 15-20 minutes to read if you’ve read them before, and 30-60 mins if it’s your first time.
Doors open 6pm (yes we’ll let you in early if you get here). The event starts at 6:15 when we’ll welcome people, give a few announcements, and then split into groups. Dinner will be served at about 7:30pm, after which point we’ll hangout around the fireside as late as we feel like. If you’d like to help us keep dinner going, you can donate here (dinner costs about $200 each time, we recommend $5-$15 as a donation amount per person).
You can come without having read the essays from the sequences, we do want you to get to join, but then you will have to do a punishment. (And then you still have to catch up on reading the essays during the meetup.)
Some questions to ask yourself about the essays as you read them
What’s the most important point in the essay?
What’s the weakest point in the essay? Or what is the essay wrong about?
Can you think of a way to apply the ideas in this essay to your own life?
For the future
This is a weekly meetup! If you’d like to get notified of future events, you can subscribe to our meetup below to get an email whenever we add another one.
We read the first three during week 7, is that on purpose?
Oops! That was a mistake. I guess we’re re-examining these ones tonight (they are pretty good ones). I have a spreadsheet for tracking this sort of thing, I will make some adjustment there to avoid this mistake again.
Edit: Oh I think I was on vacation that week, which is why I didn’t notice.
Screen arrangement suggestion: Rather than everyone sitting in a single crowd and commenting on the film, we split into two clusters, one closer to the screen and one further.
The people in the front cluster hope to watch the film quietly, the people in the back cluster aim to comment/converse/socialize during the film, with the common knowledge that they should aim to not be audible to the people in the front group, and people can form clusters and move between them freely.
The value of this depends on what film is chosen; eg “A space Odyssey” is not watchable without discussing historical context and “Tenet” ought to have some viewers wanting to better understand the details of what time travelly thing just happened.
… why? I’ve watched this movie, and I… don’t think I’m aware of any special “historical context” that was relevant to it. (Or, at any rate, I don’t know what you mean by this.) It seemed to work out fine…
The content/minute rate is too low, it follows 1960s film standards where audiences weren’t interested in science fiction films unless concepts were introduced to them very very slowly (at the time they were quite satisfied by this due to lower standards, similar to Shakespeare).
As a result it is not enjoyable (people will be on their phones) unless you spend much of the film either thinking or talking with friends about how it might have affected the course of science fiction as a foundational work in the genre (almost every sci-fi fan and writer at the time watched it).
This seems like more a problem of phone addiction than a problem with the movie. Newer movies aren’t improved by being cut off from using a palette that includes calm, slow, contemplative, vibe-setting scenes.
The amount of empty space where the audience understands what’s going on and nothing new or exciting is happening is much, much higher in 60s-70s film and TV. Pacing is an art, and that art has improved drastically in the last half-century.
Standards, also, were lower, though I’m more confident in this for television. In the 90s, to get kids to be interested in a science show you needed Bill Nye. In the 60s, doing ordinary high-school science projects with no showmanship whatsoever was wildly popular because it was on television and this was inherently novel and fascinating. (This show actually existed.)
It was more of a 1970s-90s phenomenon actually, if you compare the best 90s moves (e.g. terminator 2) to the best 60s movies (e.g. space odyssey) it’s pretty clear that directors just got a lot better at doing more stuff per second. Older movies are absolutely a window into a higher/deeper culture/way of thinking, but OOMs less efficient than e.g. reading Kant/Nietzsche/Orwell/Asimov/Plato. But I wouldn’t be surprised if modern film is severely mindkilling and older film is the best substitute.
Okay, but you’re not comparing like with like. Terminator 2 is an action movie, and I agree that action movies have gotten better since the 1960s. But in terms of sci-fi concepts introduced per second, I would suspect 2001 has more. Some movies from the 1990s that are more straight sci-fi would be Gattaca or Contact, but I don’t think many people would consider these categorically better than 2001.
Based on my prior experience running meetups, a 15m gap between ‘doors open’ and starting the discussion is too short. 30m is the practical minimum; I prefer 45-60m because I optimize for low barrier to entry (as a means of being welcoming).
I also find this to be a significant barrier in participating myself, as targeting a fifteen-minute window for arrival is usually beyond my planning abilities unless I have something else with a hard end time within the previous half-hour.
Oh interesting, thanks for the feedback. I think I illusion-of-transparency’d that people would feel fine about arriving in the 6:15-6:30 window. In my head the group discussions start at about 6:30. I’ll make a note to update the description hopefully for next time.
That was true this week, but the first time I attended (the 12th) I believe it wasn’t, I arrived at what I think was 6:20-6:25 and found everything had already started.
I’ve updated future posts to have start time at 6:30 and doors open at 6pm.
Three films got 4 upvotes, and my favorite of them is The Big Short, so that’s what we’re watching tonight!
Poll For Films to Watch
Use this thread to
Thumbs up films you’d like to watch
Thumbs down films you would not watch
Add new films for people to vote on
Moneyball
The Martian
A Boy and His Dog—a weird one, but good for talking through & a heavy inspiration for Fallout
RRR
Ex Machina
“All the Presidents Men” by Alan Paluka
“Oppenheimer” by George Nolan
“Tenet” by George Nolan
300
“The Big Short” by Adam McKay
“Asteroid City” by Wes Anderson
“2001: A Space Odyssey” by Stanley Kubrick
“The Wind Rises” by Miyazaki—People who build things must learn how to live.
Rashomon (Kurosawa in Japanese) epistemics of 5 people who share an experience but have disjoint recollections
John Carpenter’s The Thing.