As someone who runs a (university) rationality group, I am pretty unsure about this point. While we started off being more accommodating to those who haven’t (starting with someone basically summarizing the reading), I feel like—for a reason unbeknownst to me—the standard changed and now everyone does the readings by default. Not accommodating people, then, seems like something that pushes people in the right direction.
As someone who has been to this reading group several times, my take is that the quality of discussion was good/detailed enough that having wrestled with the reading before hand was a prerequisite to participating in a non-trivial way. From my perspective, the expectation was closer to “read what you can and its not a big deal if you can’t read anything” but I wanted to be able to follow every part of the discussion so I started doing the readings by default.
As someone who runs a (university) rationality group, I am pretty unsure about this point. While we started off being more accommodating to those who haven’t (starting with someone basically summarizing the reading), I feel like—for a reason unbeknownst to me—the standard changed and now everyone does the readings by default. Not accommodating people, then, seems like something that pushes people in the right direction.
As someone who has been to this reading group several times, my take is that the quality of discussion was good/detailed enough that having wrestled with the reading before hand was a prerequisite to participating in a non-trivial way. From my perspective, the expectation was closer to “read what you can and its not a big deal if you can’t read anything” but I wanted to be able to follow every part of the discussion so I started doing the readings by default.