I think many of us, during many intention-minutes, had fairly sincere goals of raising the sanity of those who came to events, and took many actions backchained from these goals in a fairly sensible fashion. I also think I and some of us worked to: (a) bring to the event people who were unusually likely to help the world, such that raising their capability would help the world; (b) influence people who came to be more likely to do things we thought would help the world; and (c) draw people into particular patterns of meaning-making that made them easier to influence and control in these ways, although I wouldn’t have put it that way at the time, and I now think this was in tension with sanity-raising in ways I didn’t realize at the time.
I would still tend to call the sentence “we were trying to raise the sanity waterline of smart rationality hobbyists who were willing and able to pay for workshops and do practice and so on” basically true.
I also think we actually helped a bunch of people get a bunch of useful thinking skills, in ways that were hard and required actual work/iteration/attention/curiosity/etc (which we put in, over many years, successfully).
I think many of us, during many intention-minutes, had fairly sincere goals of raising the sanity of those who came to events, and took many actions backchained from these goals in a fairly sensible fashion. I also think I and some of us worked to: (a) bring to the event people who were unusually likely to help the world, such that raising their capability would help the world; (b) influence people who came to be more likely to do things we thought would help the world; and (c) draw people into particular patterns of meaning-making that made them easier to influence and control in these ways, although I wouldn’t have put it that way at the time, and I now think this was in tension with sanity-raising in ways I didn’t realize at the time.
I would still tend to call the sentence “we were trying to raise the sanity waterline of smart rationality hobbyists who were willing and able to pay for workshops and do practice and so on” basically true.
I also think we actually helped a bunch of people get a bunch of useful thinking skills, in ways that were hard and required actual work/iteration/attention/curiosity/etc (which we put in, over many years, successfully).