(That last paragraph is a pile of sazen and jargon, I don't expect it's very clear. I wanted to write this note because I'm not trying to score points via confusion and want to point out to any readers it's very reasonable to be confused by that paragraph.)

Not that much crossover with Elicitation. I think of Elicitation as one of several useful tools for the normal sequence of somewhat adversarial information exchange. It's fine! I've used it there and been okay with it. But ideally I'd sidestep that entirely.

Also, I enjoy the adversarial version recreationaly. I like playing Blood On The Clocktower, LARPs with secret enemies, poker, etc. For real projects I prefer being able to cooperate more, and I really dislike it when I wind up accidentally in the wrong mode, either me being adversarial and the other people aren't or me being open and the other people aren't. 

In the absence of the kind of structured transparency I'm gesturing at, play like you're playing to win. Keep track of who is telling the truth, mark what statements you can verify and what you can't, make notes of who agrees with each other's stories. Make positive EV bets on what the ground truth is (or what other people will think the truth is) and when all else fails play to your outs.

If you haven't seen it before, I recommend checking out Basics of Rationalist Discourse and Twelve Virtues of Rationality. That isn't me trying to say you didn't need to write this since it already exists- I actually enjoy reading different people's takes on what's important in a rationalist discussion or practice. Thank you for the extra vantage point! Since it is a topic people have written on before and likely will again, it might be worth retitling this something like "SD's Tenets of a Rational Debate" to make it easier to talk about.

Focus is an interesting addition I don't think I've seen before in things like this. It has some appeal to me (I like efficiency) but I also enjoy meandering conversations sometimes. Do you have thoughts on when to be focused and when to let the conversation take its time?

There's this concept I keep coming around to around confidentiality and shooting the messenger, which I have not really been able to articulate well.

There's a lot of circumstances where I want to know a piece of information someone else knows. There's good reasons they have not to tell me, for instance if the straightforward, obvious thing for me to do with that information is obviously against their interests. And yet there's an outcome better for me and either better for them or the same for them, if they tell me and I don't use it against them.

(Consider a job interview where they ask your salary expectations and you ask what the role might pay. If they decide they weren't going to hire you, it'd be nice to know what they actually would have paid for the right candidate, so you can negotiate better with the next company. Consider trying to figure out how accurate your criminal investigation system is by asking, on their way out of the trial after the verdict, "hey did you actually do it or not?" Consider asking a romantic partner "hey, is there anything you're unhappy about in our relationship?" It's very easy to be the kind of person where, if they tell you a real flaw, you take it as an insult- but then they stop answering that question honestly!)

There's a great Glowfic line with Feanor being the kind of person you can tell things to, where he won't make you worse off for having told him, that sticks with me but not in a way I can find the quote. :(

It's really important to get information in a way that doesn't shoot the messenger. If you fail, you stop getting messages.

I think of Ziz and co as less likely than 2std out, for about the reasons you give. I tend to give 200 as the rough number of organizers and groups, since I get a bit under that for ACX Everywhere meetups in a given season. If we're asking per-event, Dirk's ~5,000 number sounds low (off the top of my head, San Diego does frequent meetups but only the ACX Everywheres wind up on LessWrong, and there are others like that) but I'd believe 5,000~10,000.

And I wouldn’t really try to figure out how to be happy by looking at what religions say about it.

People have been thinking about the problem for thousands of years, most of the written answers we've got come from religion and philosophy. Maybe they're all terrible answers but virtue of scholarship, sometimes I read a book and check.

(Which is—I’m sorry to say it—perfectly illustrated by your whole “let’s look at the Wikipedia page for each religion and see how many times it mentions ‘happy’ or ‘happiness’” thing. Come on! Obviously that is a nonsensical thing to be doing here! It isn’t even a “quick and dirty approximation” to anything; it’s just noise.)

I mean, not total nonsense but it isn't a very detailed way to figure this out, I just couldn't think of a better way after thinking for sixty seconds that didn't involve doing some kind of literature review on each of them.

On the contrary, Buddhism strikes me as a religion which is deeply anti-life and pro-death (very “life goals of dead people”). I would not even consider going to such people for insights about joy, of all things. Hence my somewhat incredulous comment.

Checking: Have you ever read a book to learn about Buddhism before coming to the conclusion that you wouldn't consider going to them about it? Talked to a Buddhist for a while? Read a dictionary entry? A book review of some other book? 

I'm not particularly disagreeing with your conclusion at the moment, just- dude, I talked to a few Buddhists in passing, they told me a bit about what they believed, I read a book about it, I wrote a review of the book. If it bugs you that I asserted "Buddhism is unusually X" in the preamble to a book review would this go away if I added a citation from the Dalai Lama saying something to this effect, because I still have the book and I'm pretty sure there's a line in there somewhere. I have watched you assert wilder things with less evidence though so I think this is an isolated demand for pedantry.

I disagree with #1

Okay, let me try starting from before that point then. 

There's a bunch of things commonly referred to as emotions. Happiness is one. Anger is another. Sadness is a third. This list is not exhaustive but there's lots of lists of emotions, here's one.

Have you ever felt any of these, such that you could say "gosh, I'm really angry right now" as a fact about the world?

basically agree with #3, and agree with what #4 says but almost certainly not with what you mean by it. (I also—obviously—disagree with the notion that these things form some kind of meaningful sequence of specificity or claim strength etc.)

- wait. You don't think happiness is a thing that people can notice about themselves, but you do think there's some kind of circumstance that makes a particular person happy? Like, I could go to the beach, and I would be happy, but I couldn't notice that fact? I put them in that order because I assumed if you were going to disagree with one of them you'd also disagree with all the ones after, so I'm pretty surprised here.

It sounds like you've got the same thing going on that the book is talking about, and I'm either labeling a different thing "compassion" in my head than you and the Dalai Lama are talking about or something else is going on.

Possible but from reading the book I think that interpretation is unlikely to be correct. The authors seemed to think empathy itself brought some joy even in these cases.

Well… hard to say. The LW mods now pass that threshold^[1], but then again they’re not beginning now; they began eight years ago.

My sense is that if the mods had waited to start trying to moderate things until they met this threshold, they wouldn't wind up ever meeting it. There's a bit of, if you can't bench press 100lbs now, try benching 20lbs now and you'll be able to do 100lbs in a couple years, but if you just wait a couple years before starting you won't be able to then either.

Ideally there's a way to speed that up and among the ideas I have for that is writing down some lessons I've learned in big highlighter. I'm pretty annoyed at how hard it is to get a good feedback loop and get some real reps in here.

Yes… essentially, this boils down to a pattern which I have seen many, many times. It goes like this:

...

In this case: a bunch of people who are completely unqualified to run meetups are trying to run meetups. Can they run meetups well? No, they cannot. What should they do? They should not run meetups. Then who will run the meetups? Nobody.

There are circumstances where trying and failing is very bad. If someone is trying to figure out heart surgery, I think they should put the scalpel down and go read some anatomy textbooks first, maybe practice on some cadavers, medical school seems a good idea. I do not think meetups are like this and I do not think the majority of the organizers are completely unqualified; even if they're terrible at the interpersonal conflict part they're often fine at picking a location and time and bringing snacks. That makes them partially qualified.

The -2std failure case is something like, they announced a time and place that's inconvenient, then show up half an hour late and talk over everyone, so not many people come and attendees don't have a good time. This is not great and I try to avoid that outcome where I can, but it's not so horrible that I'd give up ten average meetups to prevent it. Worse outcomes do happen where I do get more concerned.

It's possible you have a higher bar or a different definition of what a rationalist meetup aught to be? I'm on board with a claim something like "a rationalist meetup aught to have some rationality practiced" and in practice something like (very roughly) a third of the meetups are pure socials and another third are reading groups. Which, given my domain is ACX groups, isn't that surprising. Conflict can come for them anyway.

Hrm. Maybe a helpful model here is I'm trying to reduce the failure rate? The perfect spam filter bins all spam and never bins non-spam. If someone woke up, went to work, and improved the spam filter such that it let half as much spam through, that would be progress. If because of my work half the [organizers that would have burned out/ attendees who would have been sadly driven away/ maleficers who would have caused problems] have a better outcome, I'll call it an incremental victory.

And there ought to be “centralized” efforts to develop effective solutions which can then be taught and deployed.

waves Hi, one somewhat central fellow, trying to develop some effective solution I can teach. I don't think I'm the only one (as usual I think CEA is ahead of me) but I'm trying. I didn't write much about this for the first year or two because I wasn't sure which approaches worked and which advisors were worth listening to. Having gone around the block a few times, I feel like I've got toeholds, at least enough to hopefully warn away some fools mates.