Here’s the main consideration from my point of view as an organizer:
Lesswrong.com is still the #1 source of newcomers to the San Francisco meetup.
We haven’t had much chance to try out the new meetup functionality on lesserwrong.com yet, but we really need it to work. This is our community’s primary source of new blood, and it is super important for that to be all set before the migration happens.
If people are leaving as we speak, then scaling it to the size it already is may indeed require change.
A sense that other people are paying direct attention to you, noticing important and real aspects of you, and not rejecting those aspects.
This is rare in my experience because people mostly don’t actually pay attention to each other, they just notice some vague surface-level details that are easy to remember and not much else.
Have you looked at possible empirical bases of “raw happiness” such as Kahneman’s Day Reconstruction Method?
(see also: Happiness is Not a Coherent Concept)
I see. In that case
This can only be seen as a failure of rationality.
seems very non-obvious to me. Though of course the decline of LW1 was very bad for people not near any in-person community or involved with any of the LW diaspora online, I am not sure that it had a bad effect on the community as a whole.
But then, I’m not sure how to define “bad effect on the community as a whole,” either, short of the entire thing dissolving.
We saw that the community was in a steep decline until recently, despite the fact that many rationalists wanted the community to thrive.
Why do you believe this? Or by “community” do you mean “the LessWrong website”?
From my vantage point, it looks like the overall, in-person+online community has been growing slowly ever since I joined it ~6 years ago.
Yeah, ok, “I don’t have time for that” is definitely a valid response to this.
So, not having access to the original post you linked to on Facebook, here is how I would summarize the thing you’re saying here. Please correct me if I’m wrong.
“Social reality” is a reference to the idea that everything that humans say to each other is mediated by political or social concerns, such that truth is being constantly warped as it passes through people’s brains, without the people involved even being aware of it. The term “social reality” specifically refers to the “alternate reality” that is created by these truth-warping distortions.
“Mana” means “ability to see the world as it genuinely is, without being affected by social reality.” When you have a lot of this ability, you gain the miraculous power to affect other people’s perception of reality, because they are still existing in a reality-distortion field even if you aren’t—so their social conceptions will move out of the way to make room for yours.
As a piece of general feedback: I find your writing useful but hard to understand, even though I have a general sense of how your brain works and what kinds of things you usually say. I think if I didn’t have those, your writing would be pretty much impossible to understand (edit: for counterfactual me, specifically). It’s very dense with jargon that means a lot to you but other people don’t have context on.
My guess is you could fix this by doing something that feels like “dumbing it down almost to the point of uselessness,” so that only very small concepts are presented in each post. In actuality I think this would make it much more useful.
I hope you find a way to make it work, because I think there’s a lot of value in it that is difficult for others to extract.
It’s called “Bold Orion.” (I found it in your Giant Epic Rationalist Solstice Filk spreadsheet.)
I think Bold Orion was supposed to be the “winter-themed” song for the evening. But it’s subtle and doesn’t explicitly use the word “winter.” edit: no wait, “Old Man Winter” is in the lyrics once. But just once.
Nitpick: might give people a slightly better sense of what it’s like, but mostly it’s a meta-discussion that’s gone way off the rails and has little to do with what actually happened on Saturday, and is more about What Is Or Should Be The Ultimate Idea Of Solstice, Really.
Thanks for sharing. As is often the case, I find myself agreeing with you on most concrete points but unhappy with the overly negative tone you’re taking. I hope that none of the core organizers are reading this now, because if I were them I’d want to take some more time to decompress before diving into criticism this harsh.
So, on to specific points:
I agree that this year was pretty scattershot, and didn’t feel like the arc pulled together well. Have you talked to next year’s organizer about helping out with creative direction? Running a Solstice and getting the tone of the arc right is pretty hard. Not just to say “Hey, don’t complain if you can’t help,” because that’s a legitimate thing to do—but I legitimately believe that having strong opinions about how the arc should be is really helpful for someone doing that work. And you clearly have strong opinions.
Similarly, my sense is that the quality of speeches is heavily dependent on having people available and willing to not only perform, but to write original speeches.
I think we really need to focus on what the organizers of Solstice can do to help prevent disruptions, rather than blaming the audience. One huge problem is that this year’s venue has no acoustically isolated indoor space to take kids, let alone having onsite childcare. We really do need to find an alternate venue.
I’m not really sure what to do to prevent applause other than just saying “please hold your applause till the end.” Maybe organizers of previous years could speak to how well that works, and/or other strategies they’ve used.
edit: One more thing re: candles: I wonder why we haven’t used LED candles at venues that don’t allow them? They’re obviously not as good as the real thing, but I do think they add to the atmosphere—I’ve run a couple small Solstices where we used them, and it went well.
There are some guidelines on what sort of content belongs on the frontpage.
I think, based on these guidelines, that the issue with this particular post would be “crowdedness”—people here have discussed this topic a lot already.
Aw man, and here I assumed it was because you were avoiding giving LW the addictive quality of a normal social network.
Because it’s spoilers? … and not in rot13.
I assume you have read Myth of the Framework. Doesn’t Popper himself emphasize that it’s not necessary to share an epistemological framework with someone, nor explicitly verbalize exactly how it works (since doing that is difficult-to-impossible), to make intellectual progress?
It’s kind of a convergent thing to do, among people of a certain level of success and awareness of how the world works.
Relatedly, my parents helped found an elementary school that my oldest sibling was in the founding class of. That school is now about as expensive per-year as out-of-state tuition at a nice university. (Still a nice school, though.) It has about 200 students at any given time.
My takeaway from this is that scaling schools at all at a reasonable cost is really hard.
There’s a reason why the culture that produced an outsized number of science Nobelists is not an engineering culture, but a rule of law one.
What do you mean by an engineering culture, and how is it distinct from the “rule of law” culture you described earlier?
I think most rationalists are way more in favor of tribal stuff than you’re implying. The Solstice is just one example.
We’re not shunning it because it’s what normies use, it’s just hard to start it from scratch. If you start doing these things, I bet a lot of people would be interested in them.
Yes, I’ve had many of our newcomers tell me that they showed up because of that feature (not because they went looking for in-person meetups). Discoverability matters.