I’m interested if you’re still adding folks. I run local rationality meetups, this seems like a potentially interesting way to find readings/topics for meetups (e.g. “find me three readings with three different angles on applied rationality”, “what could be some good readings to juxtapose with burdens by scott alexander”, etc.)
jenn
Karma: 840
Writer Spotlight: Paul Graham
Authentic Relating Games
Otherness and Control in the Age of AGI
Lightning Talks
Replacing Guilt
Bring Your Laptops and Come Research Local Charities
Focusing
Grief 2.0
Longtermism/acc
ACX Meetups Everywhere Fall 2024
My Apartment Art Commission Process
Small Identity Exercise
Silent Book Club
SSC 10 Year Retrospective: 2014
Night Markets and Hyperbolic Crochet Skillshare
Radical Empathy and AI Welfare
You Have Now Subscribed To Bug Facts
happened to run this two days in a row, first at my regular meetup and then at a normal board games night. i was expecting it to be a pretty serious workshop exercise for some reason, but it turned out to be very fun!
in the rat meetup people were very aware about the 1⁄3 chance that the group was trying to deceive them. actually, at some point one person was like “i know you’re trying to help me, but i’m going to be dumb and dissent anyways”, and then did so.
at the board game night most people seemed to feel like it was very rude to bring collusion up as a possibility, which I was really surprised by—it was like they didn’t want to think about it, and it was comparatively much easier to lead them to false conclusions.
i found that fermi estimate questions worked best for this game (allowing reasonable error margins), because it let the collective strategize on how to go in a specific direction (try to get the number too high or too low). and also you get collaborative fermi estimate practice in for free in most rounds :]
i came with a list of pre-generated questions, but we actually found that it was quite fun to tailor the question to the specific lonesome (e.g. we knew that one person was into climbing, so the question we asked was “how many climbing gyms exist in the world”. we knew another person knew too many facts about space, so we asked them about ancient history instead). so instead of sending the lonesome away for 3 minutes, we decided on a question first, and then rolled the dice, and then started the timer and began strategizing.
some good questions we used:
how many climbing gyms exist in the world?
how many Canadians die to auto accidents every day?
how many years did it take to build the great pyramids of giza? (this is one where we were trying hard to mislead but accidentally led the lonesome to the right answer lol)
how many oreos are produced every year?
how many countries are in the UN?
when was the first Nobel prize awarded?
a question that was almost good was “what is the chubby bunny world record”—we were unable to find any conclusive information on this on the internet :{
I have a fun crowd where half the people who showed up already read the entire thing in their own time as it came out, that was helpful :p