I find the PDF kinda annoying to read, could we copy it over here?

The watchmen publish their work publicly, people read the writeups and check that they make sense, pretty much anyone can become a watchman if they want. (The whole idea is that the writeups can be private during low-key-fundraising periods but public afterwards so it's easier to sanity-check. Also, during the lowkey periods, there can be private mailing lists for discussion)

The answer to "who watches the watchmen" is "distributed spotchecks by readers." Will that be perfect? No. It just has to be good enough to be make it worth making a lot more political donations at scale.

It feels like you're a) assuming I'm more absolutist about this than I am, b) that I haven't thought about the stuff you mention here, and I don't really know why.

Ah, alas. Well I just replaced most of the instances with "bloc" but I'm not sure if the connotations of that are quite right anyway.

I thought "political machine" was a category that included the corrupt bad thing in the wiki article but also included other things, and, man now I'm not sure there's even a good word for exactly what I want.

In this case, I'm not saying "let's make an Epistemics Party." I'm saying, rationalsphere people who agree on political goals should coordinate to achieve those goals as effectively as possible (which includes preserving rationality).

I expect this to look more like supporting ordinary Democrat or Republican candidates (in the US), or otherwise mostly engaging with the existing political apparatus.

I did say roughly that this would happen, the thing I regret was somehow threading the needle on communicating:

"guys, when I say it's gonna get dark, I'm, like, more serious than usual. But I am also more serious than usual about it being light at the end, when you are evaluating the darkness which is darker than you expect, I will be trying pretty hard to counterbalance that." (literally those words feels too awkward, but, that's the vibe I wanted)

I think depends on how much you believe in yourself vs other specific people. I agree with funding other specific people you believe in. 

(fixed)

Mmm, I'm thinking of before vaccines came out. I have more thoughts about that but maybe don't want to make this thread all about that. 

I've heard similar comments from several people about the afterparty, and regret not spending a lot more time trying to make it a good part of the experience. I think in future years I maybe would prefer the afterparty on Saturday night to be more primarily "for Solstice attendees" and try to make a different night of the weekend the "everyone from all over the extended community comes over."

(You didn't mention the decompression zone but I maybe also want to take the opportunity to apologize: I had announced the decompression zone around firepits, but, then it turned out that all the firepits were full of people by the time I got there, and the whole area was so loud it felt hard to do announcements to direct people into the room we found. What I realize now was that I should have put up more/bigger signs about that)

Ah whoops. Fixed.

(Normally this wouldn't have been that bad a problem since the form itself is private, I happened to make it public to be easier to get feedback on the questions earlier today)