Reflections on Less Online

Published on July 7, 2024 3:49 AM GMT

Meta: This post turned out longer, slower, and less well-written than I hoped. I don’t see any similar posts in a quick search, though, soI'm posting it anyway. I’ve tried to front-loadfeedback that might be useful to the organizers, and put more personalstuff towards the end. For context, I attended LessOnline and the Manifest-branded SummerCamp, but not Manifest itself, and my main prior experience with events likethis is fandom conventions such as (local to me) Dragoncon.

As I left the Lighthaven dorm to find breakfast, five people at a tablein the courtyard invited me to join a game of Zendo. This was the firstnotable thing to happen to me at LessOnline. It was also the thing thatconvinced me that yes, the trip across the country to attend would beWorth It.

I have never played Zendo before, and don’t expect to play it againanytime soon. That the game was specifically Zendo is not important. Theimportant part is that five people in the same place knew what Zendo isand found that kind of game worth playing.

There’s an attitude that I associate with normies, aptly summarized byTycho Brahe (the writer, not the astronomer) as: “Many people respond tonew information, especially densely coded information, as somethingbetween an insult and a chop to the trachea.”

There’s a different attitude, one that I associate with securitymindset, aptly summarized by John Gordon as: “Alice will happilyattempt, with someone she doesn't trust, whom she cannot hear clearly,and who is probably someone else, to fiddle her tax returns and toorganise a coup d'etat, while at the same time minimising the cost ofthe phone call. A coding theorist is someone who doesn't think Alice iscrazy.”

A lot of things happened over the course of my trip, but whatmade it worth it wasn’t any particular event. It was spending a weekaround the sort of people that play Zendo, take dense coding in stride,and think Alice is a necessary kind of crazy.

Lighthaven

First and most critical to minimizing P(doom), look at the adorable doggie!

His name is Leo. As best I could tell from asking others, he’s notattached to the site, he hails from one of the adjacent properties andjust likes the people. I was going to nominate him as the LessOnlinemascot, but must admit that Agendra might be more appropriate.

Ahem. So.

Lighthaven (the venue) names all its buildings after mathematicians, and thespace looks exactly like you would expect a mathematician to want it tolook. Every wall was a whiteboard; every not-otherwise-used flatsurface held books along the lines of GEB. The public spaces wereorganized in such a way as to encourage 4-8 person conversations,usually near a whiteboard. The semiprivate dorms supplied more Stuffthan the average hotel (e.g. I brought things like earplugs and sleepmasks, only to find that was taken care of). The presentation roomseating was surprisingly comfortable. The outdoor turf was easy on thefeet (I went almost all week shoeless, which feels nicer than you’dthink). Food was catered, snacks were available 24/7, supply cabinetsheld a wide array of random necessities. Power plugs were everywhere. Inshort, someone put considerable thought into eliminating the stupidfiddly bits of life in general and conventions in particular.

That last part seems more important than is obvious. An obnoxiouslylarge proportion of life goes towards 1. doing the stupid fiddlybits, 2. procrastinating about doing the stupid fiddly bits, and 3.worrying about procrastinating too much about doing the stupidfiddly bits. Even at conventions, that’s usually an issue, because Ihave to pack and fly and unpack and make sure I know where food andwater is and that all my stuff is charged and that there’s a backup planfor when it’s 2am and I skipped dinner and everything is closed.

Lighthaven took care of most of that. Getting there and back was ahassle, but once there, aside from basic hygiene, most of the stupidfiddly bits of life were not my problem. There was nothing nagging atthe back of my mind to demand attention. My plate was empty,and I felt free to think.

I don’t know how much of that is lighthaven-specific vs.LessOnline-specific. I do know that I appreciated thefull-service approach. The value of having something done for you is notjust the time you save by not having to do it. For most tasks, thatbarely matters. It’s the brainwidth you save by not having to keepthat task in cache, not having to swap it in and out. It’s the house ofcards that didn’t fall over.

Events

The schedule started out (mostly?) empty. Anyone who wanted to run asession could add it to the schedule themselves. The resulting range ofsubjects was much wider than I expected. Rather than give a list ofinteresting stuff I’ll just link to the schedule itself.That just about anything seemed to be allowed helped me feel comfortablerunning a couple sessions of my own, described in more detail further down.

A recurring theme for me was trying to participate in extended eventsand not following through.

I took a shot at the puzzle hunt, but realized early on that I couldn’tfinish it. The price in missed events of doing it “right” would be toohigh. Doing it wrong was still fun as hell, though!

I showed up for the hackathon kickoff, but wrote no code. Programmingtakes time I couldn’t spare. This was disappointing but I don’t regretit.

I signed up for the quant bootcamp, but stopped halfway through. Onepart exhaustion, one part too many conflicting events, one part “nearlybroke my toe early in the second day”^[1]. I felt pretty bad aboutthis one; Ricki is a fantastic teacher and my dropping out probably hurtthe rest of the class via reduced simulated competition.

The common factor in all cases was sky-high opportunity costs; there weretoo many things to do and I can only be in one place at one time. That isa good problem for an event to have.^[2]

Some of the scientifically-themed sessions (I’m thinking of Gene Smith’ssessions, but there were plenty of others) wouldn’t have been out ofplace in Dragoncon’s science track. Just saying.

My partner wanted me to check out the Goth 101 session just to see whatwas covered. Sadly, I could not, because it conflicted with ScottAlexander reading from the newly-published version of Unsong. I felt badfor the presenter; there might have been less fortunate sessions to bescheduled against, but I can’t think what.

The most surprisingly-positive event was Hot Seat and its reprise. Ihadn’t heard of the game before. Each person, for their turn, spent afew minutes on the clock getting asked the sort of questions that mostpolite people don’t discuss with anyone but their therapist—or maybetheir spouse, if they aren’t that repressed.^[3] It wasn’t alwaysfun, but it was...a thing I’m glad I participated in.

The most surprising quasi-omission was tech; there were far fewertech-related sessions than I expected. Perhaps I overestimate howtech-centric LessWrongers are. Or perhaps most of us just get our fix ofthat somewhere else.

My favorite single event was the Fooming Shoggoth concert. As Scottonce put it in a Solstice context: “There are only a few hundredpeople in the world who would possibly enjoy this and they are mypeople and I love every last one of them.” I don’t suppose the playlistis available? I found some of it on Spotify but it seems incomplete.

(my favorite session name was “Expecting Expected Value”. Those who werethere will understand why)

Miscellaneous observations

The biggest difference between LO and other conventions I’ve been to:Usually, most of my time is spent listening to speakers in sessions. AtLO I spent much more (and more rewarding) time talking with othersin the common areas.

LO’s size seems close to optimal. At somewhere between one and threemonkeyspheres, it was large enough that there were always new people tomeet, but small enough to regularly run into those I’d previously met.Larger events (e.g. Dragoncon) feel anonymous in a lot of ways; youcan’t continue an interesting conversation with someone if you never runinto them again.

Some individual sessions were nonetheless overcrowded. The way fanconventions seem to deal with this problem is to schedule over-popularevents in the same block. That wouldn’t square with the “anyone canschedule anything” mechanic, though. This feels like it should be asolvable problem, but I don’t know the solution.

I do worry that if LO recurs, it may quickly grow “too big”—too farbeyond the monkeysphere, or just plain too big for Lighthaven tocomfortably accomodate. In my experience, overcrowding is an attractorstate for conventions.

The sense of environmental trust was much closer to gatherings within mysocial circle than to what I would normally think of as a convention.People left their personal items wherever, and didn’t worry about whathappened to them, even with relatively expensive things like laptops.I’m sure part of this was “if you can afford to attend a $400-$1000event, you’re not going to bother with petty theft”, but still, thedegree of tacit trust of fellow attendees was remarkable.

What to do with my laptop was a hard problem for a different reason:Hauling my backpack everywhere is annoying, but trying to take notes ona phone is even more annoying. And I found that I wanted to take a lotof notes. Probably another good problem for an event to have.

There was a presentation on recent genetic optimization advances.Anywhere else, I would expect Q&A contributions of the form: “how doesthis interact with {insert culture war issue here}”. Here, I insteadheard (for example) “What are your research bottlenecks and how much moneywould it take to make them not bebottlenecks?” I couldn’t help but think that that kind of question ispart of what makes this crowd our crowd.

LessWrong favors Ask Culture and I tried to remember thatthroughout the weekend. I kept a low bar for requesting things of thestaff, trusting to them to refuse if necessary. It seemed to work fine.

I signed up for LessOnline and the Manifest-branded summer camp, but notfor Manifest itself. I expected the camp to be mostly “LessWrong peoplestaying for the following event as well”, and that seemedaccurate. The interactions I had on the first day of Manifest (before Ileft to catch my flight home) suggested an incoming crowd thatfeels less my own—none of them were bad, but my internal impressionwas something like “wait a sec, techbros are actually a thing thatexists, not just a nerd-shaming caricature? Huh?” My sample size was small,though, so I don’t trust that impression. I’ll probably do Manifest nextyear (if there is a next year) just on VOI grounds.

I gathered after the fact that the Manifest night market was mostly(entirely?) a job market. I wish I’d realized that at the time; I’m notexactly on the market but I’m thinking about it.

Suggestions

Since it's too late to use the Complaints PlatonicSolid, here are some things I found myself wishing for often enoughto stick in my head. I presume the organizers have long sincedone their own post-mortem, but hopefully something in here is still useful:

Provide lecterns and microphones for presenters. I ran two sessions andnever had a good place to put the laptop running the slide deck. Andwhile I can project my voice well enough if I try, not everyone can dothat effectively.^[4] The Dragoncon tech track sometimes uses a paddedwireless mic that can be thrown to whoever wants to speak, which is veryuseful for recorded Q&A. Or any Q&A.

(while the audio setups or lack thereof left something tobe desired, the video setups were much better than I’m used to. Mostconferences don’t seem to grasp the idea that people in the back shouldstill be able to see the entire screen)

Speaking of recording, record sessions for which that would be usefuland make slide decks available...if practical. I know this is muchharder to do right than it sounds. But it would reduce the need forlaptop-hauling considerably.

More powerful AC units for the dorms. My initial horror at the lack ofcentral air was admittedly misplaced, but if by ill luck the whole weekhad been like Tuesday, sleeping on-site would have been a much lesspleasant experience.

Most of the outdoor areas were sock-and-barefoot-friendly; it would benice if that were true everywhere, though I suppose it’s not thatimportant. Also, consider doing something about that two-inch stepbetween the Bayes kitchen and the room behind it. Ow.

Maybe more lapdesks for the common areas, but I’m not actually sure ifthat would be net-positive. Good for working on things, but the lackprobably discourages talking to devices rather than people.

I see no obvious way on the site to send Lightcone money, or tootherwise contribute to this happening again, and I would like to. Whatdo I do?

Personal notes

Meta: The rest of this is less relevant to LessOnline as a whole.Anyone reading for feedback-acquisition purposes can skip down to LastThoughts.

As the saying goes, if you’re the smartest person in the room, find aroom with smarter people in it. I had that squarely in mind when Idecided to make the trip. It delivered. There aren’t a lot of contextswhere I’m in the bottom half of the local IQ distribution, and I lovedit.

I found the infohazards session unreasonably amusing, and generallyliked the idea of infohazard discussion corresponding to late nightghost stories. Clearly I am a moron. The smartest person in that roomwas the one who ducked out to avoid the relationship-relatedinfohazards, and, when they returned, checked with the organizer thatthe board was clear of same before looking at it. (The actual smartestperson at LessOnline presumably didn’t attend the infohazards sessionto begin with, because why would you do that?)

The most interesting hotseat question (of those directed at me) wassomething like “what do you consider your three biggest mistakes?” Ishould have answered “getting on this hotseat”, but I didn’t think ofit until it was too late. My actual answers (spoken and unspoken) wereinteresting, though, because I noticed a pattern: they were all of theform “waiting so long to do X”. I can probably learn something fromthat.

The funniest hotseat question (again of those directed at me) was: “If you hadto pick someone in this room to slap, who would it be?” To which Ianswered, (paraphrased): “Everyone’s expecting me to point at that guy,including that guy. I pick me instead.”

(I stole that answer from HPMOR and I’m not sorry.)

Actually there was an even funnier moment at the reprise, of which theasker told me later that he didn’t have to ask that question any morebecause the funniest possible thing had already happened. Sadly thequestion was NSFW so I won’t repeat it here. Suffice it to say that itis possible to crack up a room by turning one’s head in just the rightdirection at just the right time; and, on a completely unrelated note,thank you Aella for being Aella.

I wish I’d attended the Hamming Circle; it might have been similarlyinteresting. I can’t remember what I was doing instead.

The population was 80-90% male, and that feels sad, but I don’t knowthat much can be done about it. It did make me reluctant to make a passat anyone, for fear that (among other reasons) the lopsided gender ratiowould make me Annoying Guy #37. I did so anyway on one occasion, butthat was in a context where social barriers were deliberately lowered.

(she and her partner were monogamous, so it didn’t go anywhere, but wechatted off and on for the rest of the week anyway. It had theunexpected effect of making me feel like an ambassador for open-spectrumrelationships—a position I’m ill-qualified for, but I tried to be onmy best behavior anyway)

Something came up in the quant lessons that I might write about later: Iasked for books on the subject, and Ricki noted that reading about itwas the wrong way to learn it. I agreed, but noted that I was only ableto absorb the information at such speed because I was already at leastsomewhat familiar with the concepts from prior reading.

(Ricki’s a great teacher, and if she does it again next year then anyonewith any interest in the subject should jump on it, but it was a verydense curriculum, and also holy shit she talks like a machine gun. :-P)

Anyway, I gathered from the exchange that we have very differentlearning styles (I forget the details), and I know from prior experiencethat some people have the same issue with text that I have with voice,which is interesting but I don’t have packaged thoughts on it it yet.

Another subject I want to think on later: Conventioneering alone vs.with a partner. My partner couldn’t make it, and while that was a bit ofa shame^[5], I suspect that conventioneering alone is more condusiveto serendipity. Socially, it feels easy(-ish) to approach small groups,slightly harder to approach individuals, much harder to approachcouples. Logistically, it’s much easier to Do Things when you don’t haveto coordinate them with anyone. And not having existing social supportto fall back on forces one to sink or swim...with the natural result ofmore “swimming.” I’m not sure how much of a difference that actuallymakes (this is the first time I’ve been conventioneering alone in six orseven years, and the last time was a very different convention), but itseems like the effect would be greater than zero.

Whenever I spend a bunch of time in a LW context, I find myself wishingthat I could do something more direct for the AI problem, or thecommunity, or something else in the same general sphere. Sadly myprimary skillset (backend devops, more or less) is neither applicable tothe important problems nor in locally short supply, and even if it were,I think it would take more to persuade me to move to the Bay Area thanmy skills are worth.

Some things I did

I made an unconventional contribution to the puzzle hunt, but I’vewritten about that elsewhere so I won’t repeat the detailshere.

I ran two sessions. I didn’t plan to, they just sort of happened: I saidsomething about how it would be fun to do a session on subject X, atleast one person encouraged me to actually do it, I threw it on theschedule, I realized I had no slide deck and no idea how to do publicspeaking, and I fixed that on incredibly short notice.

(Heartfelt thanks to anyone who nudged me; doing things is hard andnudging helps. Also, any feedback that goes beyond ‘thumbs up’ or‘thumbs down’ is valuable right now, precisely because I’ve never donethis before and have no intuitive sense of what worked and what didn’t.)

The first I called “Video Game Archeology”, and it was a talk that I’vethought of doing at Dragoncon for years but never tried to pitch. It wason the trials and tribulations of trying to mod old cartridge games. Ithad no rationalist relevance other than the opaqueness of the problemspace. But I wanted to run it, and Less Wrong is a nerd space even ifit’s not specifically a gamer space, so I thought there might benon-zero interest. Apparently all it took was the audacity to put it onthe schedule, the willingness to ask my brother for help finding orproducing visual aids (thanks!), and the sacrifice of a night of sleep.

The audience was tiny but the presentation itself went well enough. Idon’t think the small audience was (entirely) lack of interest; I keptrunning into people who said (semi-unprompted) that they’d seen it on the schedule andconsidered attending, but either forgot about it or had a conflict.

Throwing a presentation together overnight was exhausting, so of courseI did it again a few days later.

The second I titled “Major Psychotic Hatreds”. It was a rant onmodern technology trends—on the web, mostly—in the style of the openerfrom George Carlin’s You Are All Diseased. Because telling a room fullof people that things they have probably worked on suck is a brilliantidea and nothing can possibly go wrong.

The small audience from my first session bothered me, but I had an idea.I'd previously overheard someone mention a sudden influx of visitors to theirblog, induced by a link from Aella. I thought I saw a way to exploit thatcelebrity effect: I scheduled my session right after Aella’s marshmallowfight, in the same room. With little going on that late, the leastinconvenient thing for the Marshmallow Legion to do afterward would be to stay for mysession. Feels like cheating, but cheating is technique.

(Also it gave me an excuse to go to the marshmallow fight. Not that Ineeded one.)

It worked, sort of. I ended up with a mostly-full room, but mostly notin tech. I’m not sure how many of the jokes actually landed, and I’m notsure how many of the serious bits were understood. And, obviously, I’mno Saint George on the delivery.

But it seemed to go well, with one embarrassing exception: I expectedthat everything I complained about would have been done by somebody inthe audience, but I did not expect that (almost) everything I complainedabout would have been done by the same guy—who also wasn’t familiarwith the deadpan-hostility style of Carlin’s that I was aping. This wasa bit like choosing specks and then finding out that all thespecks hit the same person.

It turned out fine, we had a nice chat about design afterward. But Ifelt bad about it.

Anti-Akratic Abnormalities

I notice, in the aftermath of the event, that I spent a vastly largerportion of the time at LO feeling mentally “on” and generally doingthings than is typical for me. I spontaneously put together twopresentations in two days while solving logic puzzles and sabotagingthe plotline behind the logic puzzles. I wrote up the story ofthe sabotage in a few hours. I made more new personalconnections in seven days than I have in the last seven years. In acampus full of strangers I went a whole week without feeling lonely!And none of it required any deliberate motivational hacking. I wasadmittedly on low-dose stimulants for most of the week^[6], butthose can’t be the primary cause, because I use them regularly for workwithout anywhere near that level of effect.

Like most everyone else here, I struggle with Doing Things—forexample, creating this post, which took a month. I’d like to know whatabout LO made Doing Things easier, so I can replicate it at somewhatlower cost than flying cross-country. I’ve come up with the followingpossibilities; I don’t know their relative importance:

different

John Nerst describes as an(unobtainable) empty plate

I’m not sure what else. But something in this soup was good for me. Ican’t point to a specific piece, because any individual piece, I do getin other contexts. Just not all at once.

Shoutouts

Due to logistic failures on my part, I didn’t need to leave for theairport until long after Summer Camp ended and Manifest started. Thankfully, the staff let me stay on campus later than I was supposedto, so that I wouldn’t be stuck at the airport for half a day. I didn’tgo to any Manifest events, though; I didn’t want to abuse theirgenerosity by attending things I hadn’t paid for.

Instead I spent Friday collecting the names of everyone I could findwho’d made the trip better for me in some way, great or small. This listis definitely incomplete, but I tried. It’s roughly chronological:

way

detailed in other posts

belly of theBeast

^[7]

Isabella and Rana probably made the biggest difference, since theirencouragement prompted me to do things. Also the puzzlemasters, whosework was nothing short of epic. Honorable mention to anyone who cameto my presentations, even if they didn’t stay, and even though I can’ttell the difference between sincere applause and social applause. Itstill helped.

Celebrities

I don’t usually do celebrity chasing, but with half the people whoseblogs I follow at the event I wanted to at least see them.

Met Aella and Nate, interrogated both.Met Sarah Constantin, talked about GPT training, suggested taking hersuccess with Randesque fine-tuning and trying it with LW dialogues;she seemed to think that was a good idea.Stole a seat at Eliezer’s lunch table, listened to fascinating conversationabout genetic engineering, contributed only a warning that the relatedsession was starting...but that’s not nothing, since it’s whateveryone at the table wanted to go to anyway.Made it to Scott’s Unsong reading. I’m a little sad that the physicalbook appears to have gotten substantial rewrites, but I’m sure it willstill be awesome.Did not get to meet Zvi, which is a shame, but I did eavesdrop on himpontificating a few times. His voice is not how I imagined it. Hisdemeanor is exactly how I imagined it.Half-met Robin Hanson. Probably the only social interaction where Ifeel like I just plain fucked up, in part because I don’t read hisblog regularly and appear to have mis-osmosised some things.Sat in on a David Friedman table talk; I feel bits of it tickling at mybrain but quotes escape me at the moment.Talked to Oliver Haybarka about the architecture of Lighthaven. Theplace is unique enough that I wondered what it would cost to replicatethe style elsewhere.

Last Thoughts

I didn’t know about LessOnline until a few weeks beforehand. I hadanother high-octane event just the week before, so I knew my socialbatteries (and vacation budget) would already be strained. I jumped onthe chance anyway. I’ve hung around Less Wrong and its diaspora fortwelve years and I knew I’d regret missing the opportunity.

I’m used to conventions being an annual Thing. I hope LessOnline canbecome the same, though I gather it’s highly questionable whether thiswill happen again at Lighthaven, or at all.

Even if it was just once, though, it was worth it. Thank you everyone atLightcone who arranged this, and everyone who made it work behind thescenes. You’re all awesome.

That two-inch step between the Bayes Hall kitchen and the roombehind it is...questionable, and my toe wants to punch it in theface. Again. ↩︎
I miss the NSDM game at Dragoncon every year for more or lessthe same reason. ↩︎
Hotseat was weirdly reminiscent of a practice of my old usenetstomping grounds, where we used to post and answer long surveys ofNSFW personal questions. ↩︎
I’m told that getting presenters to use the mic properly ishard, but that feels like a solvable problem. And having one atall means the option is there. ↩︎
This is my tribe rather than hers, but she understandably wantedto come anyway. ↩︎
Stimulants act as social lubricant for me, similar to theeffects of alchohol on other people. To those I interacted with, beaware that the me you spoke to is far more outgoing than my usualbaseline. ↩︎
Subject matter intentionally omitted. Side note, is there a nounanalogous to “infohazard” for topics likely to generate more heat thanlight, but without the hostile connotations of “mindkiller?” ↩︎

Discuss