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Meta: This post turned out longer, slower, and less well-written than I hoped. I don’t see any similar posts in a quick search, though, so I'm posting it anyway. I’ve tried to front-load feedback that might be useful to the organizers, and put more personal stuff towards the end. For context, I attended LessOnline and the Manifest-branded Summer Camp, but not Manifest itself, and my main prior experience with events like this is fandom conventions such as (local to me) Dragoncon. ---------------------------------------- As I left the Lighthaven dorm to find breakfast, five people at a table in the courtyard invited me to join a game of Zendo. This was the first notable thing to happen to me at LessOnline. It was also the thing that convinced me that yes, the trip across the country to attend would be Worth It. I have never played Zendo before, and don’t expect to play it again anytime soon. That the game was specifically Zendo is not important. The important part is that five people in the same place knew what Zendo is and found that kind of game worth playing. There’s an attitude that I associate with normies, aptly summarized by Tycho Brahe (the writer, not the astronomer) as: “Many people respond to new information, especially densely coded information, as something between an insult and a chop to the trachea.” There’s a different attitude, one that I associate with security mindset, aptly summarized by John Gordon as: “Alice will happily attempt, with someone she doesn't trust, whom she cannot hear clearly, and who is probably someone else, to fiddle her tax returns and to organise a coup d'etat, while at the same time minimising the cost of the phone call. A coding theorist is someone who doesn't think Alice is crazy.” A lot of things happened over the course of my trip, but what made it worth it wasn’t any particular event. It was spending a week around the sort of people that play Zendo, take dense coding in stride, and think Alice is a necessary kind o