A few thoughts I had about the weekend. May think of more later:

• I really missed hanging out with rationalists in person. Since I moved from Berkeley to San Francisco I don't spend as much time in person with rationalists.
  • One of the big things I missed is related to communication style. I feel extremely free to say whatever I'm thinking with rationalists, thanks to high decoupling norms that are much more robust than they are anywhere else. In almost all other conversations I have to at least think about censoring myself, even if I don't in practice always have to. With rationalists I can turn off the censoring check.
  • I also missed having deep, in-person intellectual conversations with the subset of the community who are into the same stuff as I am. It's a really great experience to have high-bandwidth conversations with people whom I have short inferential gaps with.
• I learned about some lines of AI safety work that I'm really excited about and give me some hope.
• Food was tasty and plentiful.
• I enjoyed having a number of conversations with folks who resonated with my experience being a religious rationalist. It gives me the sense that I have developed something of a "unique perspective" that lets me bring missing value to conversations.
  • I know there were even more people who wanted to talk to me about spirituality and Zen than I got to. If you were one of those people whom I failed to meet up with, please DM me and we'll find some time to chat!
• I was kind of put off by how disorganized and messy things were around the venue. Partly this is just because thing get messy when there's lots of people, but one thing I like about EA Global by comparison is that the aesthetics are often better in little ways, like chairs are consistently arranged neatly and common spaces stay cleaner. I find it's harder to think clearly when I'm surrounded by mess.
• I wish I had arranged my schedule to take today off to allow for some decompression from the weekend rather than jumping straight back into work!