I think affecting P(things go really well | no AI takeover) is pretty tractable!

What interventions are you most excited about? Why? What are they bottlenecked on?

PurpleAir collects data from a network of private air quality sensors. Looks interesting, and possibly useful for tracking rapid changes in air quality (e.g. from a wildfire).

(written v quickly, sorry for informal tone/etc)

i think that a happy medium is getting small-group conversations (that are useful, effective, etc) of size 3–4 people. this includes 1-1s, but the vibe of a Formal, Thirty Minute One on One is a very different vibe from floating through 10–15, 3–4-person conversations in a day, each that last varying amounts of time.

• much more information can flow with 3-4 ppl than with just 2 ppl
• people can dip in and out of small conversations more than they can with 1-1s
• more-organic time blocks means that particularly unhelpful conversations can end after 5-10m, and particularly helpful ones can last the duration that would be good for them to last (even many hours!)
• 3-4 person conversations naturally select for a good 1-1. once 1-2 people have left a 3-4 person conversation, the conversation is then just a 1-1 of the two people who've engaged in the conversation longest — which seems like some evidence of their being a good match for a 1-1.

however, i think that this is operationally much harder to do for organizers than just 1-1s. my understanding is that this is much of the reason EAGs (& other conferences) do 1-1s, instead of small group conversations.

• i think Writehaven did a mediocre job of this at LessOnline this past year (but, tbc, it did vastly better than any other piece of software i've encountered).
• i think Lighthaven as a venue forces this sort of thing to happen, since there are so so so many nooks for 2-4 people to sit and chat, and the space is set up to make 10+ person conversations less likely to happen.

i know that The Curve (from @Rachel Weinberg) created some "Curated Conversations:" they manually selected people to have predetermined conversations for some set amount of time. iirc this was typically 3-6 people for ~1h, but i could be wrong on the details. rachel: how did these end up going, relative to the cost of putting them together?

[srs unconf at lighthaven this sunday 9/21]

Memoria is a one-day festival/unconference for spaced repetition, incremental reading, and memory systems. It’s hosted at Lighthaven in Berkeley, CA, on September 21st, from 10am through the afternoon/evening.

Michael Nielsen, Andy Matuschak, Soren Bjornstad, Martin Schneider, and about 90–110 others will be there — if you use & tinker with memory systems like Anki, SuperMemo, Remnote, MathAcademy, etc, then maybe you should come!

Tickets are $80 and include lunch & dinner. More info at memoria.day.

have you tried Fatebook.io, from @Adam Binksmith ?

i thought this was excellent. thank you for writing it up!

Thank you for this! It can take a lot of effort to write, edit, and publish reports like this, but they (generally) create quite a bit of value. I found this one exceptionally concrete & clear to read — well done!

thanks for writing/cross-posting! i particularly liked that you had the reader pause at a moment where we could reasonably attempt to figure it out on our own.

I skimmed most of this post, and it seems great! Thank you for writing it.

However:

In this post, I introduce a concept I call surface area for serendipity …

I’m not sure what you mean by “introduce” here? I read it as “here is this new phrase that I’m putting forward for use” — unless I’m misunderstanding, I’m quite confident that’s wrong. You’re definitely not the first person to use the phrase.

Consider editing it to be:

In this post, I describe a concept I use called surface area for serendipity…

Or something similar.

fwiw i instinctively read it as the 2nd, which i think is caleb's intended reading