Since you’re bringing it up, I do want to clarify it wasn’t a pure social hangout. Some rationalist meetups are people standing around talking about whatever they’re into, some have board games people are playing or readings people are supposed to have read and then talk about, some have specific activities. This was one of the latter, specifically the thumb-on-the-scale variation of Zener Science.
I actually put a lot of thought into signposting for meetups, trying to make sure that people who don’t want to participate in some kind of meetup activity knows about it before making the decision to go. E.g. if someone doesn’t want to read Scott Alexander’s writing or talk about it, that’s pretty reasonable, but if that person show up to the event calling itself an ACX Reading Group where the announcement says you’re supposed to read one of Scott’s essays, it’s not the organizers fault.
(The next bit of this is me working through the Zener Science example, because I’m actually not satisfied with how I signpost it.)
The thumb-on-the-scale Zener Science example is not one of my better signposted meetups and I’d like to solve that problem someday! I’d give it a C+. From my perspective, the problem stems from the fact that most people (especially people at rationalist meetups!) don’t believe in psychic powers and aren’t motivated to practice the stats/science skill the event is trying to work on. What happened without thumb-on-the-scale is they show up, guess at two or three cards, and then conclude (because they were already confident of this, despite not having done enough tests to conclude this from the experiment) that psychic powers aren’t real.
So I can’t necessarily signpost this as an earnest investigation into ESP, because I don’t think ESP works, my attendees mostly don’t think ESP works, and unless I prompt it the experiment isn’t going to be good enough to prove anything.[1] I want to signpost it as a place to practice some stats/science skills, because that’s my goal, but that works better if I can get people to dig a little deeper than just looking at a couple cards. To achieve that, I want to make them a little suspicious and work through the stats of how many right answers would indicate something weird was going on. Since I’m not actually psychic, I sometimes cheat the deck somehow, but since I really don’t want people to wind up not able to trust me I want to signpost that I’m doing something unusual.
Hence the Might Be Lying sign. Good glomarization means sometimes I use the Might Be Lying sign when I’m not actually lying- attendees shouldn’t be able to look at the sign and go “okay, the answer is he’s cheating the deck/psychic” without doing any tests. In theory I might be lying at any time, but when ideally wearing the sign is a good signal that something different is going on; I claim people shouldn’t update much about my propensity to lie in normal life based on my propensity to lie when wearing the sign. But that’s getting a bit complicated for a meetup announcement.
Coming back to your assumptions:
You did not clearly state you were definitely going to lie about certain things) and in the context of a “social experiment”.
I didn’t clearly state I was definitely going to lie about certain things, because sometimes I run the Zener Science straight without the thumb-on-the-scale variation and I’ll wear the sign there as part of a glomarization strategy. It’s in the context of a pretty specific experiment, and it’s parapsychology, not social science. (Though I can see myself wearing a Might Be Lying sign for similar reasons in other kinds of activities—though sometimes I don’t need the sign, as in Jimramdomh’s example of social-deception games.)
To me it seems quite similar to people wearing signs saying “I might be rude” and then actually being rude.
Funnily enough, I’ve kinda run that meetup too. I’d give myself an A- on signposting there, and cheerfully endorse people deciding not to go to meetups in that style, safe in the knowledge that I’m not going to try and make them use Crocker’s Rules at events announced as reading groups.
I’m actually pretty excited about doing some variation of Zener Science with a mix of people who believe in ESP and people who don’t, who were coming together in good faith to figure out what’s going on. Wiseman & Schlitz’s Experimenter Effects And The Remote Detection Of Staring sounds like a good afternoon to me.
And indeed, once or twice someone showed up to the Zener Science meetup who did believe in psychic powers. Whenever this happens I try to pivot to investigating how they think the psychic powers work and what we’d need to change about the test in order to provide evidence one way or another, without making them feel put on the spot or ~othered by being the one person out of a group to hold a contrary belief.
Seems a reasonable set of preferences.
Since you’re bringing it up, I do want to clarify it wasn’t a pure social hangout. Some rationalist meetups are people standing around talking about whatever they’re into, some have board games people are playing or readings people are supposed to have read and then talk about, some have specific activities. This was one of the latter, specifically the thumb-on-the-scale variation of Zener Science.
I actually put a lot of thought into signposting for meetups, trying to make sure that people who don’t want to participate in some kind of meetup activity knows about it before making the decision to go. E.g. if someone doesn’t want to read Scott Alexander’s writing or talk about it, that’s pretty reasonable, but if that person show up to the event calling itself an ACX Reading Group where the announcement says you’re supposed to read one of Scott’s essays, it’s not the organizers fault.
(The next bit of this is me working through the Zener Science example, because I’m actually not satisfied with how I signpost it.)
The thumb-on-the-scale Zener Science example is not one of my better signposted meetups and I’d like to solve that problem someday! I’d give it a C+. From my perspective, the problem stems from the fact that most people (especially people at rationalist meetups!) don’t believe in psychic powers and aren’t motivated to practice the stats/science skill the event is trying to work on. What happened without thumb-on-the-scale is they show up, guess at two or three cards, and then conclude (because they were already confident of this, despite not having done enough tests to conclude this from the experiment) that psychic powers aren’t real.
So I can’t necessarily signpost this as an earnest investigation into ESP, because I don’t think ESP works, my attendees mostly don’t think ESP works, and unless I prompt it the experiment isn’t going to be good enough to prove anything.[1] I want to signpost it as a place to practice some stats/science skills, because that’s my goal, but that works better if I can get people to dig a little deeper than just looking at a couple cards. To achieve that, I want to make them a little suspicious and work through the stats of how many right answers would indicate something weird was going on. Since I’m not actually psychic, I sometimes cheat the deck somehow, but since I really don’t want people to wind up not able to trust me I want to signpost that I’m doing something unusual.
Hence the Might Be Lying sign. Good glomarization means sometimes I use the Might Be Lying sign when I’m not actually lying- attendees shouldn’t be able to look at the sign and go “okay, the answer is he’s cheating the deck/psychic” without doing any tests. In theory I might be lying at any time, but when ideally wearing the sign is a good signal that something different is going on; I claim people shouldn’t update much about my propensity to lie in normal life based on my propensity to lie when wearing the sign. But that’s getting a bit complicated for a meetup announcement.
Coming back to your assumptions:
I didn’t clearly state I was definitely going to lie about certain things, because sometimes I run the Zener Science straight without the thumb-on-the-scale variation and I’ll wear the sign there as part of a glomarization strategy. It’s in the context of a pretty specific experiment, and it’s parapsychology, not social science. (Though I can see myself wearing a Might Be Lying sign for similar reasons in other kinds of activities—though sometimes I don’t need the sign, as in Jimramdomh’s example of social-deception games.)
Funnily enough, I’ve kinda run that meetup too. I’d give myself an A- on signposting there, and cheerfully endorse people deciding not to go to meetups in that style, safe in the knowledge that I’m not going to try and make them use Crocker’s Rules at events announced as reading groups.
I’m actually pretty excited about doing some variation of Zener Science with a mix of people who believe in ESP and people who don’t, who were coming together in good faith to figure out what’s going on. Wiseman & Schlitz’s Experimenter Effects And The Remote Detection Of Staring sounds like a good afternoon to me.
And indeed, once or twice someone showed up to the Zener Science meetup who did believe in psychic powers. Whenever this happens I try to pivot to investigating how they think the psychic powers work and what we’d need to change about the test in order to provide evidence one way or another, without making them feel put on the spot or ~othered by being the one person out of a group to hold a contrary belief.