Q. "Can you hold the door?" A. "Sure."

That's straightforward.

Q. "Can you play the violin at my wedding next year?" A. "Sure."

Colloquial language would imply not only am I willing and able to do this, I already know how to play the violin. Sometimes, what I want to answer is that I don't know how to play the violin, I'm willing to learn, but you should know I currently don't know.

Which I can say, it just takes more words.

I want a word that's like "capable" but clearly means the things you have the knowledge or skill to do. I'm clearly not capable of running a hundred miles an hour or catching a bullet in my bare hand. I'm not capable of bench pressing 200lbs either; that's pretty likely in the range of what I could do if I worked out and trained at it for a few years, but right this second I'm not in that kind of shape. In some senses, I'm capable of logging into someone else's LessWrong account- my fingers are physically capable of typing their password- but I don't have the knowledge of what to type.

This comes up in places where a thing is obviously possible to achieve, and wouldn't require, say, the kinds of built up physical changes to my body that lifting 200lbs would require, but I still don't expect to be able to pull it off. If I had someone experienced, who did know how to do it, sitting at my shoulder giving me advice the whole way it would be obviously possible. 

Nevertheless, acting like I'm capable of flying an airplane or resolving a messy divorce or interpreting a blood test if I had to do it right now is going to result in some problems. I'd like to be able to say I'm not able to accomplish that without a bunch of disclaimers that yes, I could learn, or I could follow someone's close directions and manage it, but that's different.

Attendee: knock knock Hey, is the organizer in there?

Me: Yeah, what's up?

Attendee: The fire department is here, and we think an attendee just left in an ambulance but we're not sure who or why.

Me: . . . I'll be right out.

And that's the most stressful thing that's ever happened to me as an event organizer.

A history of the NYC Rationalist Megameetup is in my drafts. Someday I hope to finish it, ideally around when I announce 2024's iteration.

Epistemic status: memories from five years ago where I was stressed and sleep deprived at the time.

So, the primary thing I thought the Megameetup did was have overnight space for the people who registered for overnight and space during the day for people who registered for the day. I closed registrations when I thought we had as many people as the space could hold, and made most of my calculations and planning based on the number of people who registered. (Mostly food, but I'd also been asked to check that certain people the community had had problems with weren't attending.) I knew Solstice was going on that weekend and had coordinated a little bit with the Solstice organizer, but mostly just to know the time and location so I knew when to send people over. 

During the weekend- if I remember correctly, this was in the early afternoon on Saturday, so about five hours before Solstice and while the Megameetup was in full swing- people start pointing out that with registration closed, people who just planned to go to the afterparty didn't know if they were supposed to just show up or what. I don't remember the exact conversation, but basically over the course of about fifteen minutes I realized that lots of people were assuming that the megameetup would host Solstice's afterparty, and that an unknown number of people were attending Solstice who hadn't registered at all with Megameetup but expected to go to the afterparty. 

I have five hours to prepare for an unknown number of people to converge on us, when we were already at what I thought was capacity for the venue with a little safety margin, while simultaneously trying to keep the event I knew I was planning on course. I could try and tell people not to, but lots of people including my co-organizers have been assuming obviously the afterparty is at the Megameetup and people who went to solstice can come, even if they didn't tell Megameetup they were coming, and if Megameetup isn't hosting this then someone else is probably going to have to try and plan the afterparty with a different venue and that's going to be even more complicated.

We pulled it off, in hindsight I think it was fine, I don't know if anyone who wasn't in the room with me when I found this out even realized I didn't plan on having extra people from Solstice, but I was wound tighter than a drum for the rest of the weekend and that's still the second worst thing that's happened when running a megameetup from my perspective.

The moral of the story is, leave margins when planning occupancy and capacity limits for an event, and check explicitly and clearly what the expectations are when inheriting an event someone else has run before you.

2019's Rationalist Megameetup was. . . special and stressful in many ways, actually.

Thank you! You're right, "nobody goes there, it's too crowded" is an effect that keeps the ladder unfurled, as is a kind of cohort dynamic I don't have as good a conceptual handle for^[1]. This post is mostly talking about meetups because they're on my mind a lot and I had the examples handy. Ideally, the big and the small and the old and the new can reinforce and help each other, and sometimes that works. Other times, we get the pulled up ladder. 

1. ^{^}

   at a first pass description, sometimes there's no public meetup so someone starts one, meets a bunch of new people who don't have connections, makes friends, start having their friends over for dinner or going to museums and they're too busy to run the public meetups and don't need to because they have their social needs met. Then after a year or two of no public meetups, someone new starts one, and the cycle repeats, so you have multiple groups that don't intermix as much as one might hope. 

Update: Will has informed me that they won't be able to be there. If anyone else wants to pick up Alicante or meet there in the absence of an organizer they can.

Usage of ChatGPT/Dall-E I did not think about until I had the idea to try it- in the middle of a tabletop RPG session, pulling out my phone, describing the scene in a couple of quick sentences, and then showing the phone and the resulting picture to the players without breaking my pacing.

Anyway, the current results of music AI make me suspicious the next time I play a bard I might be able to come up with new songs mid session.

If you were not previously aware of it, you might want to give this a listen. I suggest Hymn To Breaking Strain and When I Die.

I feel like it should be a Gregorian chant. C'mon, it's in Latin already!