good point! two other low-context meetups happen by default every year, the spring and fall ACX megameetups. I also do try to do a few silly meetups a year that are low context.

I put four questions into the survey that formed a loop.

what omg this is the coolest thing ever. kudos!

...and of course the comfiest things of all are tri blend t shirts, which contain a mix of both polyester and rayon. you can multi track drift poisons!

While true, bamboo rayon also isn't the best for human health or the environment, so it really is a pick your poison kind of deal. Here's a short write up from Patagonia about why they don't use it in their products, and of course a lot of Patagonia's things are polyester or polyester blends. (The terms viscose and rayon are generally interchangeable.)

It doesn't seem obvious to me which is worse between wearing polyester and bamboo rayon, health wise, but I do personally find rayon much more comfy.

1. you'll know if you actually clicked through to the reading 😏
2. no, i meant this metaphorically! srinivasan is fairly outgroup, so it's interesting to see her engage with hanson's tweets.

this is lovely and so sweet <3

I wrote up my much less seriously considered tests at https://jenn.site/2024/12/llm-creativity/ in part due to this post.

LLMs for creative work seems to be an area that you're poking at a lot these days and I always enjoy seeing what you get up to with it :]

Waterloo, Ontario
December 14th, 6:00pm.
Event link: https://www.lesswrong.com/events/LBZGbJRnsuqGP7Mnh/waterloo-solstice-2024

i think i agree that this does justified harm, but maybe for some subgroups or communities the justified harm is worth the benefits of such an event? our local rationality community has developed to a point where i think people are comfortable talking about "controversial" statements with their real faces on because the vibes are one where any attempt at cancellation instead of dialogue will be met with eyerolls and social exclusion but like, you know, it took a pretty long time and sustained effort for us to get here. (and maybe im wrong and there are people in the group with opinions they are still afraid to voice!)

im modelling this as something kind of like authentic relating - you're hacking the group's intimacy module and ratcheting up the feeling of closeness with a shortcut. it's not going to be as good as the genuine thing, but maybe it's a lot better than what one would have general access to. it's not everyone's thing, people with enough access to the genuine goods are likely to be like "wtf this is weird", sometimes it can go catastrophically wrong if the facilitator drops the ball... but despite all of that, for some people it's a good thing to do occasionally bc otherwise they will never get enough of that social nutrient naturally

I have a fun crowd where half the people who showed up already read the entire thing in their own time as it came out, that was helpful :p