The Pros and Cons of Being Among Your Tribe

Reflections on LessOnline

I recently attended the rationalist conference, LessOnline. I wanted to document some of the experience, and found myself bifurcating my emotional reactions. The conference itself was wonderful, with great people, food, and venue, but there were pros and cons to going. Though the pros greatly outweigh the cons, both deserve to be mentioned.

Let's split and commit.

Cons

Social Anxiety

I have some measure of social anxiety, but it’s kinda weird in that public speaking doesn’t affect me in the slightest while socializing at a party with friends of friends is terrifying. I’ve come to understand it as something of an inverted U:

I can socialize easily among strangers because it doesn't matter to me if they hate me. It's easy to be sociable when there's nothing on the line. It’s even easier to do public speaking in front of strangers, because that isn’t even socializing, just me talking in front of people.

On the other side of the inverted U, with close friends and family, I know that I’m safe if I fuck up. If I commit some social gaffe or look stupid, who cares? These are the people I love and trust, and they likely got that position because they’ve seen me at my worst and didn’t run away.

When I got to LessOnline, on the other hand, I was surrounded by people at the top of the inverted U: people whose opinions I care about, but who I don’t actually know very well. If I fuck up in front of them, who’s to say how they’ll react? Maybe Zvi will walk away thinking I’m a moron, or one of the many venerable Scotts will realize I secretly have no idea what I’m talking about.

Whether or not it would happen like that, it feels plausible that it could. I could make an ass of myself in front of the community I’ve chosen, the one whose opinions actually matter to me. I might sometimes feel like an asshole, but if Duncan Sabien thinks I'm an asshole, that's Really Bad. Within my social context, he’s an Authority on assholes. If he thinks I’m an asshole, I can’t ignore it or brush it off or excuse it, I have to actually go soul-searching because it’s pretty likely I’m an asshole.

The same is true for everyone at LessOnline: everyone there is either a rationalist or rationalist-adjacent; their opinions of me are more credible evidence about who I am than the opinions of any collection of strangers could ever be.

Status-Consciousness

I found, when examining my own mental processes, that once I got onto the Light Haven campus I was abruptly much more conscious of status than I usually am. Suddenly who had status and authority and clout mattered much more to me than they normally do, and it took me a minute to figure out why.

Simply put, I actually want status in this community. I want to be respected here, because I respect the others here. Status in this community is meaningful to me in ways status outside of it isn’t.

So I had to assuage, internally, the parts of me that immediately began calculating how to appear important or smart or high-status, because I know from learning and experience that those parts are trying to accomplish a goal they can’t actually accomplish. One does not achieve status in this community by appearing to be anything; one achieves status by actually doing things, whether that be writing a popular blog, running a company or initiative to achieve a real-world outcome, or investigating the world with deep empiricism.

This hypersensitivity to status made me uncomfortable, because it’s not the kind of thing I endorse on reflection; I don’t want to be a status-seeking person in general, and being confronted with those parts of myself that crave it was unpleasant.

FOMO

For anyone who didn’t have the chance to attend (or who didn’t want to, or didn’t care, etc.) LessOnline is run a bit differently than most conferences. First of all, the space it takes place in, Light Haven, is specifically designed not to support large lecture-hall type presentations. The space is divvied up into a plethora of small-to-medium sized rooms where audiences of 10-30 might congregate, and a practical cornucopia of nooks where a few people might have conversations.

The calendar for the event is split up by space, and anyone could schedule any kind of talk they wanted to give in any of the spaces. This meant that attendees had to pick from multiple simultaneous sessions basically every moment except mealtimes. Additionally, we were advised in the opening session not to attend sessions, and to focus on having small conversations in private nooks instead.

So being at LessOnline meant not being at 90% of LessOnline, only unlike the people who actually weren’t there, I was extremely conscious of that 90% the entire time. Which sessions were so good I couldn’t possibly miss them? If I got caught up in a conversation, should I let it run on for as long as it naturally wanted to, or should I make excuses and get going to the next session I was excited for?

No matter what choices I made, I was missing out on something awesome.

So while the parts I got to attend and the conversations I got to have were great, there was so much of LessOnline that I feared missing out on (and actually missed out on) that it makes me sad.

New Kid at Lunch Syndrome

I’m not from Berkeley, and I’m relatively new to attending the greater Rationalist events. While there were some people I knew from my local community also in attendance, for the most part everyone there was a stranger to me.

And these strangers often already had their own friendships.

It’s a good thing, of course, for the community to have a bunch of people who know each other already, and I was witness to many fond reunions, but it reminded me starkly of switching schools in 9th grade. Things are unfamiliar and a little scary (but not too bad)…until you get to the cafeteria for lunch.

Because once you set foot in the cafeteria, you realize that everyone already knows everyone else, and everyone already has a place and a group and a clique, and there you are, the mysterious transfer student, only you’re not the main character of a YA novel, so it’s just super awkward and makes you feel about two inches tall.

I should mention that everyone I met there was super nice, and it was basically okay to sit wherever you wanted and join in any conversation you felt like, but that feeling of looking out over everyone already sorting themselves into their preexisting sub-groups and not knowing where I fit was an unpleasant thing to be reminded of.

Session Non-Attendance

I hosted two sessions at the conference, both on the subject of Georgism/LVT. The first was an introduction, the second a more advanced discussion. I had a lot of fun and learned a lot from both; the advanced session in particular did a great job of showing me where my knowledge ended, so now I know what I don’t know!

While I liked hosting the sessions, I did feel the anxiety of wondering if anyone would show up to them, or if hosting them was worth it (after all, if I’m hosting a session I can’t be attending one, can I? It’s also time and space someone else could be using for a session; would it be better to let them have it?). This anxiety peaked right before my first session, which, well…

There’s always the chance, when you schedule a session, that someone else will schedule something awesome at the same time. A talk by Scott Alexander, a Q&A with Zvi - these sorts of things suck up most of the oxygen in the conference when they happen.

In my case, Aella decided to give a session, aimed at straight men, about how to be hotter to women. In case you were wondering, the population of LessOnline is, shall we say, somewhat tilted towards straight men. And Aella is one of the foremost experts on sex in the world, let alone in our little community.

Upon seeing Aella’s session be scheduled at the same time as mine, I felt I was, to put it bluntly, fucked. And not in the fun way.

Much to my surprise, both of my sessions were attended by non-zero amounts of people, which was nice. I still felt that swooping anxiety, but I think both me and those who attended my sessions got something out of them.

Pros

Ambiance and Eavesdropping

Imagine you’re in a mall, or perhaps a school or your workplace. What kinds of conversations do you overhear? What’s the ambiance of the place?

Are people talking about the news? The latest celebrity gossip? Their homework? The weather?

LessOnline had, hands down, the best ambiance and eavesdropping I’ve ever experienced. Every conversation was fascinating to listen to, and the snippets you’d hear passing by only fueled the relentless sense of intellectual curiosity that permeated the conference.

I overheard conversations about a libertarian archipelago and machine learning models and fantasy books and battery physics, to name a few topics, and there really aren’t any other physical places I can go where the topics of conversation range over such vistas, all while being high-quality, high-trust interactions.

Better Conversations

I’ll admit I had a few conversations where I defaulted to resume-style get-to-know-yous (what’s your job? where do you live?), but I shucked that kind of talk pretty early on. Instead, I’d start conversations by asking people what they were passionate about, and I always got an awesome answer.

I had a great conversation about developing microbes that could survive on Mars with someone doing a startup on the topic, just by noticing the illustrations of microorganisms on his shirt and asking about them. And I got the chance to talk to some physicists and physics-enthusiasts about reversible computing, which I’d read about recently but confused the crap out of me, and they were happy to walk me through how it works and what’s so cool about it.

Halfway through a conversation with a former Amazon employee about why Prime Video’s recommendation system is…suboptimal, we were joined by another person and the topic shifted to web serials, and we’d all read a bunch of the same ones!

I love the conversations I get to have with my friends, but I’m well aware that they’re a highly selected bunch. Being able to have a phenomenal conversation with any random stranger, and knowing that as I walked around, was a surreal and exciting experience.

Everyone Gets My References

I made, on two separate occasions, oblique references to Ender’s Game, and everyone instantly knew what I was talking about. The first was in a conversation about, among other things, why we don’t see video games incorporating LLMs yet for NPC dialogue, wherein I mentioned that I just wanted a giant to ask me which of two drinks to take. The other was a conversation about, among other things, the concept of an orbital university, where I suggested that maybe it could include a place for children to shoot lasers at each other.

Sharing a cultural milieu, a vocabulary, and a set of interests with everyone means that everything from pop-culture references to esoteric blog posts were in-context, and that felt really, really nice.

You don’t realize how hard a long-inferential-distance relationship is until you’ve tried the alternative.

The Topics Are Amazing

Normal people talk about normal ideas: what’s within the Overton Window, what’s happening with their lives and children and parents and health, movies and gossip and so on.

And that’s fine!

But I do like to talk about all kinds of strange ideas, and LessOnline was a place for exactly that.

Some of the things I talked to people about:

• why different lawyers have to represent clients who know each other,

• worm fanfiction,

• how to redo public education,

• why reversible computing is super energy efficient but can only be done with quantum computation,

• meta-adaptations in genes and memes that make evolution proceed faster,

• why Hollywood sucks at making good movies,

• recommending web serials,

• why Amazon’s streaming recommendations suck,

• how organizations decay and rot and calcify and how that might be fixed or avoided, how war and violence might be justly used,

• tons of Georgist stuff because apparently I’m the Georgist person here (I also gave two talks on the subject),

• why Knowles was robbed of a Nobel,

• how a computer including a closed timelike curve breaks reality,

• why cruises are good examples of an ‘open border’ policy (but American tourists often suck),

• whether it’s theoretically better to terraform Mars or Venus,

• uncertainties around the Drake equation,

• how cluster B/dark triad people ruin things,

• pandemic preparedness,

• free range children,

• and more.

The sheer variety was mind-blowing, and everyone had something interesting to contribute, even if they didn’t know a lot about the subject at hand.

Conclusion

I had a great time at LessOnline, even accounting for the anxiety. The pros vastly outweigh the cons.

I’m already looking forward to next year!