DE-RATTING 3: MY CONCERNS GOING FORWARD

Preliminary: the original accusation and my responses https://app.simplenote.com/p/wKW9DP
1. The main letter: https://app.simplenote.com/p/02HJS2
1.a. Memory / awareness as it relates to disregarding archival: https://app.simplenote.com/p/P5Jn9Y
2. Clarifications on frivolous shit: https://app.simplenote.com/p/8gcsJY
3. My concerns going forward, which this is: https://app.simplenote.com/p/lmlrpv

There is an exception to my non-desire to come to meetups. Unless some other event conflicts, I and my friends (/ entourage / satellite agents everpresently monitoring your discord with psyops) would still like to come to megameetups, because:

(1) I/we will meet new people not currently from this discord
(2) they're once-a-year or twice-a-year events
(3) they're attended by people who only go to those events
(4) unlike normal meetups, megameetups are huge; you can just avoid me and deal with it
(5) no one is required to use the discord to know they exist, i.e. they are treated as significantly more public than regular meetups, which are communicated in a clearly private way

The process for someone unwanted showing up to a regular meetup is easy: you move, and if they follow you around they're harassing you and pretty much any security guard will side with you.

The process for a megameetup is not clear. Suppose (I'm not going to do this) that someone shows up with an entourage of five or ten people. The event is already itself public, and open to the public. The supermarket (or Brewtorium or wherever) isn't going to remove them from your area because this is a personal dispute between both of you and the supermarket's security aren't concerned with your personal nerd beefs. What are you going to do? Fight them? Shoot them? On some level if you make a very large public event you must accept the possibility of this happening. The procedure for last time was "I hope a grocery store is okay with us setting up a tent."

Yet what is going on is asking me to treat a public event as a private event on your behalf. This strikes me as unreasonable, given that:

1. A megameetup is more than just y'all. There will be new people there, who I'd like to know/meet, who are not y'all. By expecting me to not go, you are expecting me to also sacrifice my access to new contacts who I would otherwise meet. If I'm only concerned with seeing those contacts -- so what? Ignore me and I'll do the same for you. This seems reasonable.

2. More crucially, the crux of this is whether a megameetup is treated as a public event or a private event. The last megameetup was clearly treated as a public event, i.e. anyone could go. That was very much the expectation. By asking me to not go you are expecting me to treat it as a private event when other people may be treating it as a public event. This is something I don't want to do, because no one else is doing that. It's in effect asking me to subordinate my standing to other newer people who may be treating it as a public event simply because there is an existing beef that these new people have no idea about nor care about. If, on the other hand, you treat this as a private event, that is more fair and reasonable, but whether you do or don't will change my attitude toward this scenario.

When I posed these concerns to one person, this was asked of me, and I am paraphrasing somewhat to obscure their writing style:

"What about LessWrong meetups is important to you? You seem socially adept enough and have tons of social circles you could participate in that are close to what you'd get out of LW. Does it really feel like you're being held back by not going to meetups?"

This is a fair question, and I think it illustrates two concerns at play: (1) social advancement and (2) novelty-finding.

In terms of social advancement, I don't find LW useful pretty much at all. I would, probably, if I worked in tech. In terms of finding people who I'd never meet elsewhere, LW is invaluable.

Rather than thinking of it as being "held back" or "advanced", I think of it as a way to filter for novel people who I would never meet otherwise. I feel blessed to have met about 5-10 people from Austin who I'd never have met without this meetup structure to attract us over a similar very specific and odd commonality. Mega meetups are ways to meet people with intersections of odd thoughts who would never otherwise get together.

And, yes, some people would rather not go to a megameetup if I am there. I would also prefer to not be around them, whoever they are, if they have that policy toward me. So, it's mutual at that point, and up to whoever decides to go.

But more to the point, I am not interested in regular meetups, and there are two of those every week barring thanksgiving and christmas and new years and probably two other holiday weekends. With megameetups biannually, that's a ratio of 94:2 or 47 times more attendance, not counting private events on other days. It seems a bit excessive to say "well, this person (who you are already not going to be around for 94 events out of the year) doesn't want to see you at this one large event, but you also don't want to see them, yet in spite of this you should sacrifice the unique opportunity to meet new people you'd meet nowhere else because they just feel like you should."

For the record, I am not saying I am definitely going to do this, but rather:

1. I would like to meet new people, and

2. There are certain people I'd really like to see, who wouldn't be there any other time of the year, which makes this an exceptional occasion from normal meetups.

Those are going to be my primary concerns. Still, the megameetups aren't frequent. For all we know I could reside in a different state entirely, or we could have another major outbreak which makes us quarantine, or I could get injured doing something stupid with weights (entirely plausible), or... any number of things!

Nonetheless, I'm being transparent with you, which means that at the very least I gave enough of a shit to detail my concerns, which means I am weighing your concerns against mine. If I truly didn't care, I'd have said none of this and shown up without telling you.

****** THE END ******

If you've truly read all of this, thank you. I appreciate your attentiveness, patience, and understanding.



Audible hopes you've enjoyed this program.