Rationalist Town Hall: FTX Fallout Edition (RSVP Required)
Edit: K, all those who filled out the form should have emails now. No promises that any further form-fills will get emails.
Stated at the top for emphasis: you have to fill out the RSVP form in order for me to email you the links.
On Sunday 27th November at 12 pm PT, I am hosting an online Town Hall on zoom, for rationalists and rationalist-adjacent folks (e.g. EAs) to think through the FTX catastrophe and propagate thoughts, feelings and updates.
Lots of people I know have been shocked by and are still reeling from the news these last 2 weeks. I’m very keen to hear what updates people are making about EA and crypto, and understand others’ perspectives.
Some people coming include Zvi Mowshowitz, Oliver Habryka, Anna Salamon, and more.
To get the Zoom and Gather Town links, fill out the RSVP form. I will send the links to everyone who fills out the form. The form involves agreeing that the event is off the record to the corporate news media, and all attendees will fill out the form.
What Will The Format Be?
Spontaneous lightning talks. During the event, anyone who wishes to can give a 3-minute talk on a topic of their choosing, followed by 2-mins of Q&A — it can be on something you’ve already thought about, or it can be a response to or disagreement with someone else’s lightning talk.
This is a format I’ve used before pretty successfully in both big (70 ppl) and small (7 ppl) groups, where we’ve gotten on a roll of people sharing points and also replying to each others’ talks, so I have hope that it will succeed online. (This format has also had other names like “Lightning Jazz” and “Propagating Beliefs”.)
We will do lightning talks for up to 1.5 hours (depending on how much steam people have in them), hopefully giving lots of people the chance to speak, and after that the main event will be over, and we’ll move to Gather Town to have group discussions (and those who are satisfied will go home).
If you wish to, you can submit for a lightning talk ahead of time with this Lightning Talk form.
Who is invited?
As well as Rationalists/LessWrongers, I welcome any people to this event who are or have formerly been part of the EA community, people who have formerly worked for or been very close with FTX or Alameda Research, and people who have worked for or been funded in any way by the FTX Future Fund.
I hereby ask others to respect the Rationalist and EA communities’ ability to talk amongst themselves (so to speak) by not joining if you are not well-described by the above. For example, if you had not read LessWrong before the proposed FTX sale to Binance, this event is not aimed at you and I ask you not to come.
Details
When? Sunday November 27th, 12:00PM (PT) to 14:00PM (PT).
Where? The Town Hall talks will happen in Zoom, then discussion will continue in a private Gather Town.
RSVP link? Fill out this RSVP form to get links. Everyone who fills out the form will get sent a link, I’ll send them out 24 hours before the event and then again ~60 mins before the event. You can also hit ‘going’ on the public Facebook event for the joys of social signaling, but also fill out the form so I can email you the links.
Maybe consider taking votes on some things, writing prediction markets on what the votes will be at the end of the session.
I have stickied this post for 2 extra days to make sure ppl get a chance to see it.
Time in you local timezone. Assuming that PT stands for PST
Yes, PST.
Seems like there’ll be a lot of people coming! To get the online format down pat before the event, I’m doing a practice run at 2pm PST Saturday (tomorrow) on Zoom. I’d love to have 15-25 people join, even just for 30 mins, to test the format at a bit more scale. Saturday’s event will be “Let’s discuss hot takes on AI x-risk” moderated by me. No prep required.
I did a practice run today with 5-10 ppl, and the initial format didn’t flow very well, but we tried a variation that worked much better (a format that I’m currently calling “Hot Takes Debate Club”).
If you are up for talking on Zoom with people you disagree with, I’d appreciate it if you came :) I’ll post the zoom link here at the time.
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/88532128753?pwd=N1FkY0tLK2pMSERpaFo3SHVoRVAwdz09
Edit: Woop, had a solid session with 18 pp. Though I don’t think anyone came who I didn’t reach out to on other channels.
When will you send out the link for tomorrow?
This afternoon.
Still waiting.
Working on it atm.
Proposed sale. It didn’t transpire.
Yep, edited.
Emails sent out, you should have one if you applied by 8:30pm. Has updates on the format (I’ve been testing it out in smaller groups, have some improvements). Will process the new form submissions tomorrow.
Unfortunately I decided to make the invite-list for this event a bit more restrictive and not open-invite. Given the chaos and narrative-control swirling around FTX, and given that the number of people has become more than I expected (160+), I’ve been more selective in the invites, and only invited ~80% of the people who filled out the form. The form didn’t give me much to go on so it definitely could be better, alas.
I’m so sorry to change plans the evening before, I hope this isn’t too disruptive for folks. Hopefully future events won’t have this level of background adversarial forces and then I can get back to running lots more open-invite online events (like I did during the pandemic).