There is a rule in the design of software and user interfaces called the Principle of Least Surprise. It says that when a person interacts with your software or interface, and they take an action such as filling out a form or clicking a button, the correct outcome is whichever...
or: Invisible Social Consensus is Real And Can Hurt You Related: Annoyingly Principled People, and what befalls them, both in terms of the claim being made, and in that I am certainly being Alice and/or Alex here. I think the biggest blind spot most people have about how they make...
> JAKE: You were outside, I was inside, you were s’posed to keep in touch with the band. I kept asking you if we were gonna play again. > ELWOOD: Well, what was I gonna do? Take away your only hope? Take away the very thing that kept you going...
I’ve attended ten years of Bay Solstice and volunteered at rehearsals for a couple years, and I’ve noticed that even the songs I don’t like very much hit harder than the speeches, almost always. Great speeches are possible, but rare. And having delivered a really good one myself, and put...
Includes a link to the full Gemini conversation, but setting the stage first: There is a puzzle. If you are still on Tumblr, or live in Berkeley where I can and have inflicted it on you in person[1], you may have seen it. There's a series of arcane runes, composed...
By request, my notes on how I adapted I Have Seen the Tops of Clouds into a speech for Solstice and best-effort advice on how to do the same yourself.
[Last update: 2025-06-07] The Bay Area rationalist community has an entry problem! Lots of listed groups are dead, the last centralized index disappeared, communication moved to private discord and slacks. This is bad, so we're making a new index, hopefully up to date and as complete as we can! This...