this bit is from an earlier post that this post links to, but it got me curious, and your comment is on this one, so:

(2) be willing to ask people to volunteer for things. Meaningfully contributing to your community is something that many people really value, and you don't have to pay them for it.

how many volunteer-hours would you estimate went into last solstice?

if i'm understanding right:
- alief: you intuitively feel this to be true, but are not intellectually convinced that it is true. you may behave as if it is true but don't necessarily endorse that behavior
- belief: you may or may not intuitively feel this to be true, but you are intellectually convinced that it is true. you generally behave as if it is true and endorse doing so
- celief: you do not intuitively feel this to be true, nor are you intellectually convinced that it is true, but you behave as if it is true regardless for pragmatic reasons (though you may not necessarily endorse this)

Could go "aspirat". (Pronounced /ˈæs.pɪ̯.ɹæt/, not /ˈæsˈpaɪ̯.ɹɪʔ/.)

Italy? Not Ireland?

I have a copy of Allison Lonsdale's Live At Lestat's album somewhere, but I usually just listen at https://youtu.be/rXALHxGeSps

Her Mysteries! I love that song and keep hoping it'll catch on, but never managed to make much headway. What was people's feedback on it?

My current landlord has allowed our friends to apply to other places on our lot before they are put on the market, and has also agreed to rent to people in our friend group and below-market rates. I think landlords do get value from tenants encouraging their friends to move in, because they can be expected to be similar quality tenants and make each other less likely to leave.

I would totally live in a Bay Area rationalist baugruppe if it were brought into existence!

I think that it would be totally possible to find an appropriate space pre-existing in the Bay somewhere that we could acquire and populate without having to worry about construction or the like. Evidence: something becoming more popular in the Bay Area is the idea of a "co-living" space. I toured one in San Francisco with a boyfriend of mine during his last housing search, and it was a charming dormitory-like multistory arrangement where each floor had several bedrooms, a bathroom, a living area, and a kitchen, with larger communal hangout spaces in a basement and everything connected by flights of stairs in the back. While we were there, the people living there spoke of other similar spaces in the city that they had contact with. More casually, my own living situation also resembles a baugruppe - I live in one of eight duplexes on a private lot, half of which are populated with good friends of mine. If rationalists bought out the landlord, it would not be much work to transform it into a baugruppe. I bet there are other apartment buildings or lots that would fit the bill, if we put in the legwork of finding them.

Actually, it occurs to me that I know the founder of Radio Eden (a co-living space in the Bay Area aimed at temporary or transitional tenants who just need to crash somewhere in the Bay for a few months). I'll talk to her about how she made that happen and see if she has any advice on how we could make this happen!

There are plenty of sentences that have a noun, a verb, and a subject without having an agent - anything in passive voice or any unaccusative will do the trick. I suspect the argument would be even better worded using semantic roles rather than syntactic categories, eg: "Causality exists when there is an event with an agent". This isn't a very interesting thing to say though, because "agent" is a casual semantic role and so relies on causality existing by definition. You literally cannot have an event with an agent unless there is causality.

Sometimes I still marvel about how in most time-travel stories nobody thinks of this. I guess it really is true that only people who are sensitized to 'thinking about existential risk' even notice when a world ends, or when billions of people are extinguished and replaced by slightly different versions of themselves. But then almost nobody will notice that sort of thing inside their fiction if the characters all act like it's okay.)

The only story I've seen directly address this issue at all is Homestuck, in which any timeline that splits off from the 'alpha' timeline is 'doomed' and ceases to exist once it diverges too far from the alpha. The three characters with time traveling capabilities are someone who is extremely careful to avoid creating doomed timelines, one who is nihilistically apathetic about death and creates doomed timelines willy-nilly, and one who is a psychopathic monster bent on using his powers for destruction. Several times, main characters are shown experiencing existential despair over the idea that their own timeline might be a doomed one, and at one point a character with time-traveling capabilities realizes that the only way to prevent the destruction of the universe is to travel back in time, leaving his current timeline doomed. His realization of the implications of dooming that timeline and his efforts to somehow save his timeline's version of his only surviving friend were particularly poignant (to me, at least).