happened to run this two days in a row, first at my regular meetup and then at a normal board games night. i was expecting it to be a pretty serious workshop exercise for some reason, but it turned out to be very fun!

in the rat meetup people were very aware about the 1/3 chance that the group was trying to deceive them. actually, at some point one person was like "i know you're trying to help me, but i'm going to be dumb and dissent anyways", and then did so.

at the board game night most people seemed to feel like it was very rude to bring collusion up as a possibility, which I was really surprised by - it was like they didn't want to think about it, and it was comparatively much easier to lead them to false conclusions.

i found that fermi estimate questions worked best for this game (allowing reasonable error margins), because it let the collective strategize on how to go in a specific direction (try to get the number too high or too low). and also you get collaborative fermi estimate practice in for free in most rounds :]

i came with a list of pre-generated questions, but we actually found that it was quite fun to tailor the question to the specific lonesome (e.g. we knew that one person was into climbing, so the question we asked was "how many climbing gyms exist in the world". we knew another person knew too many facts about space, so we asked them about ancient history instead). so instead of sending the lonesome away for 3 minutes, we decided on a question first, and then rolled the dice, and then started the timer and began strategizing.

some good questions we used:

• how many climbing gyms exist in the world?
• how many Canadians die to auto accidents every day?
• how many years did it take to build the great pyramids of giza? (this is one where we were trying hard to mislead but accidentally led the lonesome to the right answer lol)
• how many oreos are produced every year?
• how many countries are in the UN?
• when was the first Nobel prize awarded?

a question that was almost good was "what is the chubby bunny world record" - we were unable to find any conclusive information on this on the internet :{

how would you go about doing that?

thanks for the suggestions! and huh, I did not know this about textbooks, I think that makes it more viable as a partitioned book club feature.

That's it! Thank you.

I'm trying to remember the name of a blog. The only things I remember about it is that it's at least a tiny bit linked to this community, and that there is some sort of automatic decaying endorsement feature. Like, there was a subheading indicating the likely percentage of claims the author no longer endorses based on the age of the post. Does anyone know what I'm talking about?

thanks for writing this! can you say a little bit more about the process of writing notes on a scribe? I've been interested in getting one, but my understanding is that e-ink displays are good for mostly static displays, and writing notes on it requires it to update in real-time and will drain the battery fairly quickly? my own e-reader is from like, 2018, so idk if there's been significant updates. how often do you need to charge them when you're using them?

your points about taking the time to think through problems and how you can do this across many contexts is definitely what i was going for subtextually. so, thanks for ruining all of my delicate subtlety, adam :p

standing on others' shoulders is definitely a reasonable play as well, although this is not something that works great for me as a Canadian - international shipping is expensive and domestic supply of any recommended product isn't guaranteed.

counterpoint: I run a weekly meetup in a mid-size Canadian city and I think it's going swimmingly. It is not trivial to provide value but it is also not insurmountably difficult: I got funding from the EA Infrastructure Fund to buy a day off me per week for running meetups and content planning, and that's enough for me to create programming that people really like, in addition to occasional larger events like day trips and cottage weekends. 8-12 people show up to standard meetups, I'd say around 70% are regulars who show up ~weekly and then you have a long tail of errants. Lots of people move away since it's a university town, but when they visit they make sure to come to a meetup and catch up.

re: constraining, filling a new niche, etc - i feel like your POV is a bit doomered and this is pretty easy for a rationalist meetup to do - just enforce rules for good discourse norms and strongly signal that any topic is allowed as long as the dialogue remains constructive. make it a safe space for the people that will run their mouths in favor of the truth even if it kills the vibe at other parties and everyone else is glaring daggers at them, and people will show up. They'll show up because they can't get a community like that anywhere else in the city, as long as the city in question isnt in the bay area :P

heh, thanks, I was going to make a joke about memorizing the top 10 astrology signs but then I didn't think it was funny enough to actually complete

leaving out obvious things like religious garb/religious symbols in jewlery, engagement rings/wedding bands, various pride flag colours and meanings etc:

• semicolon tattoos: indicates that someone is struggling with or has overcome severe mental health challenges such as suicidal depression. You see them fairly often if you look for them. i've heard that butterflies and a few other tattoos mean similar things, but you'll run into false positives with any more generic tattoos.
• claddagh rings: learned about this while jewelry shopping recently; it's a ring that looks like a pair of hands holding a heart. it's an irish thing, the finger you wear it on and whether or not it's inverted indicates your relationship status.
• iron rings: In Canada, engineers wear an iron ring on the little finger of their working hand, made from the remains of a bridge that collapsed catastrophically. a decent number of my engineer friends wear the ring.
• lace code: basically entirely dead, but if someone is dressed like a punk and they're wearing black boots with red laces, there's enough of a chance that they're a nazi that i'd avoid them. there's like a whole extended universe of lace colours and their meanings but red is the most (in)famous one.
• astrology jewlery: astrology obviously isn't real but if someone is wearing jewlery with their astrological sign, that tells you that 1) they are into astrology (or homestuck if you're lucky) and 2) they likely have some affinity with their designated star sign, which you can ask them about.
• teardrop tattoo right under the eye: this person killed someone or was in prison at some point, or want to pretend that that's true for them (e.g. if they're a soundcloud rapper from the suburbs). also see other prison tattoos
• puzzle piece tattoo or jewelry: this person likely has an autistic child or close family member, and is not super up to date on the most uh, progressive thoughts on the topic. autistic people themselves are more likely to dislike the puzzle piece symbolism for autism