Meetups Are Fun
A very brief retrospective on LessOnline, Summer Camp, and Manifest
True!
I just got back from a week-long rationalist meetup. It started with LessOnline, a festival for bloggers.
LessOnline attendees led discussions and gave presentations on subjects like how to talk to journalists (if you absolutely must), parenting as an immigrant, fighting Moloch in politics, land value taxation, how to write and enjoy fiction, spreading factual information, the lives, troubles, and possibilities for gifted children, the world if you changed your mind about just one crucial thing, accounting in nonprofit organizations, the best ways to exercise and eat, observably fraudulent reasons people deviate from clinical trial preregistrations, the newsletter business, semantics, running a microschool, personal investing, gene therapy, psychological sex differences, overcoming writer’s block, and more.
Throughout the conference, some people spent time working on their art, others got to know one another by playing hotseat,1 and at least one person tried to red team the Lumina probiotic out of the mouth of another attendee (try to imagine how that works). There were plenty of people pitching startups, showing off products, and some investors even showed up specifically to meet some of the conferencegoers. There was fanboying and fangirling, and sometimes it even went both ways. There were debates all the time, including one that devolved into a shouting match between a handful of OpenAI and Anthropic employees.2
There were also workshops aplenty, meet-and-greets galore, so many different games, Q&As, and tons of impromptu programs that popped up at a moment’s notice, including small-scale chess and go tournaments, wrestling matches, smoke, meditation, and stretching sessions—and so much more, all packed into less than one city block.
I think the nature of the venue was key to the success of LessOnline. If it weren’t set up for it, I don’t think all of these activities could have gone off so flawlessly. The name of the venue is Lighthaven, and here’s how it looks from above:
To enter the Lighthaven campus compound, you have to cross underneath a brick gateway. After you do, you immediately see the old Rose Garden Inn, now renamed Aumann Hall:
One of the first things you notice after walking in is that it feels nice. Everything is comfortable and conducive to discussion, games, and just generally hanging out. Here’s an alcove near the entrance as an example:
If you look out that window, you’ll see an area of green. It’s filled with cushions, sitting spaces, firepits, and fake grass that doesn’t stain your clothing or have any bugs in it.
When you walk into that next building, you’ll quickly notice that the interior is both elegant and, once again, filled with cushions:
If you walk outside in any direction, you’ll find more cushions, more fake grass, whiteboards, firepits, cool chairs, and open places that I saw accommodating activities like wrestling, teaching people to juggle, foot races, stretching, meditation, and gymnastics exercises.
Walk out of there and you’ll see another house, more firepits, meeting areas you can block off with curtains, and lots of cushions, strategically-located buckets of freshly-stocked blankets and furry ponchos every which way, along with the route to the last set of buildings.
As you’re approaching the Eigenspace, you start to notice areas like this:
Turn around and, on the one side of the (pictured) building, you have another outdoor meeting area below, one above, and (not pictured), there’s a gym, a stream, and another comfy enclosure to hang out in.
Finally, if you walk around or through the Eigenspace, you get to its rear garden, which turned out to be a cozy place for an impromptu Shabbat service.
If you look through pictures of the campus, you’ll quickly get an idea for just how cozy and comfortable it is, and how it’s set up to encourage people to get into groups, while allowing people to find quiet spaces they can be in alone, without ever being too far from the action. The atmosphere is so relaxed that you feel like you’re at home the whole time you’re there, and if you’re in the slightest way physically uncomfortable, you just have to move around until you run into another cushion or one of the unlimited number of fun places to sit with friends or one of the many quiet places you can work—places which, I’ll add, were reliably available even when there was more than a hundred people on the property.3
After LessOnline came to a close, most of the attendees left, but a considerable number remained for the five-day summer camp that followed. In both cases, the schedule (managed through a handmade scheduling applet made by Rachel, of Rachel’s Substack) went something like this:
Wake up whenever.
Work from whatever spaces you want, have a meal, hang out, exercise, or do some activities, which you could add to the schedule on a whim if you so wished.
Hang out with groups, go to parties off-campus, and otherwise have a good time as the sun comes down.
It was very fun and there was always a lot to do. Since this took place in Berkeley, there were also always other parties within walking distance or a short drive away in San Francisco proper.4 There was plenty to do, and you could come and go as you pleased, always able to return to people having discussions, pulling all-nighters, networking, or just doing something that you could usually join in on.
During this time, I got to have many long (and short!), inspiring, and occasionally intimate discussions with people I really admired, ranging from Robin Hanson discussing incentive-aligned designs for health insurance and criminal justice systems, to synthetic biologists debating the feasibility of cloning von Neumann5, and physicists talking about Boltzmann brains. I was even able to encourage some people who hadn’t yet committed to public writing to go all-in and write down some pieces that, in one case, I’ve already started digesting.
A lot happened during the summer camp and, despite being much shorter, it felt like a great deal more happened during what followed. The Manifest conference—hosted by Manifold and Manifund—was constantly filled with people, and its sessions were so consistently high-quality that it was almost sad because, by nature of fitting into one weekend, they had to compete for the same time slots. This isn’t just my opinion. Go see what these other bloggers have also written about the event:
Neither of those authors made a remark about one of my favorite parts of Manifest: degeneracy.
I ran into tons of people gambling on every little outcome—sometimes with cash, sometimes with digital cash, in one case with crypto, and more often on Manifold. There was gambling on competitions, gambling on coin flips, gambling about how many people would attend a given talk, and even gambling done to ensure something happened. For example, my friend gambled that I wouldn’t get into a physical fight with
. When I learned about the bet, I walked outside, found him, and challenged him to a wrestling match that I won by pinning him in under 15 seconds.“The market had to clear!” and so the market cleared:
The biggest counterparty to the bet was Manifold co-founder Austin Chen. I hope to see him on the other side of my fight bets next year.
A lot more could be said about LessOnline, Summer Camp, and Manifest. They were all great events, and I could ramble for hours about all of the great people I met, sessions I had, and discussions I was involved in, but I won’t. I’ll just say this: We should have more of these meetups and, if you weren’t there, you missed out, but there’s always next year.
At one point during the Summer Camp people started playing in the buff.
I’m not going to say how this resolved here, but I will say that the resolution really makes me laugh.
And people also had other reasons to feel comfortable, like 24/7 security doing screening for everyone who came into the compound, always-available food and drink aplenty and in many varieties, well-stocked medicine and toiletry cabinets with EpiPens placed conspicuously, potpourri and bidets so no areas or people ever smelled, etc.
One moment that will stick with me was arriving at a party and seeing Agnes Callard and her husband Arnold Brooks standing outside, waiting to call up an Uber, because “It’s not a real party without desserts.” They were a joy to hang out with and it felt like every other thing they did was unique to them.
I am looking forward to a piece on cloning from a sequence by Niko McCarty.
Sounds like a very cool event. Sad to have missed out on an incredible agglomeration of Elite Human Capital 💯.
Neat write up! It did make me want to visit next year