We've gone beyond the capacity of the human mind to an extraordinary degree. And by the way, that's one of the reasons that I'm not interested in the debate about I.Q., about whether some groups have higher I.Q.s than other groups. It's completely irrelevant. What's relevant to a society is how well people are communicating their ideas, and how well they're cooperating, not how clever the individuals are. So we've created something called the collective brain. We're just the nodes in the network. We're the neurons in this brain. It's the interchange of ideas, the meeting and mating of ideas between them, that is causing technological progress, incrementally, bit by bit. However, bad things happen. And in the future, as we go forward, we will, of course, experience terrible things. There will be wars; there will be depressions; there will be natural disasters. Awful things will happen in this century, I'm absolutely sure. But I'm also sure that, because of the connections people are making, and the ability of ideas to meet and to mate as never before, I'm also sure that technology will advance, and therefore living standards will advance. Because through the cloud, through crowd sourcing, through the bottom-up world that we've created, where not just the elites but everybody is able to have their ideas and make them meet and mate, we are surely accelerating the rate of innovation. - Matt Ridley, When ideas have sex

Less Wrong meet-ups should be orgies. Everybody should be having sex with everybody. They won't be having sex with their bodies of course... they'll be having sex with their brains. Do you want people to have safe brain sex? No way! Every meet-up should be responsible for the birth of a billion beautiful brain children.

And in order for this to happen... you really can't have a format where everybody holds their questions/comments until the end of some lecture. You can't pass one mic around and have everybody listen while one person speaks for 5 minutes. You need a format where people freely and simultaneously throw their thoughts out there... and freely share their thoughts on other people's thoughts.

You want a bunch of brain storms... not one brain drizzle.

With a completely decentralized format... you can have dozens of different discussions simultaneously occurring. But... how can you know what people in other clusters are discussing? You can't... unless people use Reddit to share notes on their discussions.

When information becomes more symmetrical (here, here)... the nodes can continually better position themselves. The AI cluster will grow or shrink depending on people's interests and information. Same thing with the economics cluster and the transhumanism cluster and the epiphyte cluster. Clusters will break apart and reform with different nodes... so there will be fusions and hybrids... like Chinese tacos and coywolves.

The logical consequence of destroying the dam is that you'll get a flood of information. Facilitating a bunch of brain storms will result in a deluge of information. The challenge will then be prioritizing. Your brain can only process so much information... so you'll want to process the most valuable information.

This is why "quarters up" is necessary. The crowd uses their pennies, nickles, dimes and quarters to give more volume to the most important information. Essentially they are saying... "have sex with these ideas!"

Offering to pay a woman with whom you are on a date for sex isn't a good move.

Is it a good move to accurately communicate your valuation of her company? Of course it is. And it's absurd that it's acceptable to give her a diamond but it's not acceptable to simply give her the money instead.