i think i agree that this does justified harm, but maybe for some subgroups or communities the justified harm is worth the benefits of such an event? our local rationality community has developed to a point where i think people are comfortable talking about "controversial" statements with their real faces on because the vibes are one where any attempt at cancellation instead of dialogue will be met with eyerolls and social exclusion but like, you know, it took a pretty long time and sustained effort for us to get here. (and maybe im wrong and there are people in the group with opinions they are still afraid to voice!)

im modelling this as something kind of like authentic relating - you're hacking the group's intimacy module and ratcheting up the feeling of closeness with a shortcut. it's not going to be as good as the genuine thing, but maybe it's a lot better than what one would have general access to. it's not everyone's thing, people with enough access to the genuine goods are likely to be like "wtf this is weird", sometimes it can go catastrophically wrong if the facilitator drops the ball... but despite all of that, for some people it's a good thing to do occasionally bc otherwise they will never get enough of that social nutrient naturally

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

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.)

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 :{

how would you go about doing that?

thanks for the suggestions! and huh, I did not know this about textbooks, I think that makes it more viable as a partitioned book club feature.

That's it! Thank you.

I'm trying to remember the name of a blog. The only things I remember about it is that it's at least a tiny bit linked to this community, and that there is some sort of automatic decaying endorsement feature. Like, there was a subheading indicating the likely percentage of claims the author no longer endorses based on the age of the post. Does anyone know what I'm talking about?

thanks for writing this! can you say a little bit more about the process of writing notes on a scribe? I've been interested in getting one, but my understanding is that e-ink displays are good for mostly static displays, and writing notes on it requires it to update in real-time and will drain the battery fairly quickly? my own e-reader is from like, 2018, so idk if there's been significant updates. how often do you need to charge them when you're using them?

your points about taking the time to think through problems and how you can do this across many contexts is definitely what i was going for subtextually. so, thanks for ruining all of my delicate subtlety, adam :p

standing on others' shoulders is definitely a reasonable play as well, although this is not something that works great for me as a Canadian - international shipping is expensive and domestic supply of any recommended product isn't guaranteed.