Meetup : Waterloo Meetup: Nomic
Discussion article for the meetup : Waterloo Meetup: Nomic
The second meeting of our newly founded LW Waterloo chapter. Suggested activity is a game of nomic, with a discussion topic to be decided.
Join our mailing list (http://groups.google.com/group/lesswrongwaterloo) for more announcements and a better venue for discussion.
Hope to see everyone there! Slight edit: This week’s meetup is at Symposium (http://www.symposiumcafe.com/waterloorestaurants.html).
EDIT: Tonight’s meetup is at 9pm, not 8pm. Sorry!
Awesome. Consider playing the no initial ruleset game of nomic, rather than the overly convoluted rules from the initial proposal. Nomic is much more meta when you have to come up with a way to allow for making rules.
Interesting. Could you elaborate on this a little more?
Well, if you have 6 people in a circle and want to play nomic but don’t have any rules, what would you do?
You’d have to start by coming up with the mechanism by which rules are put into place. You’d have to define a rule, voting, consensus, recording, etc. It’s very possible.
The one time I successfully did this was at Burning Man two years ago, and I think it took around an hour before the first rule was written on pad of legal paper. ’Twas a great game.
I’m bad at scheduling things and forgot to make a reservation. Tonight we’ll be meeting at 9pm instead of 8. I really apologize for any inconveniences this might cause.
tl;dr: The time is changed to 9pm.
I can’t make it, but I’ve been mulling over the idea of trying to get a bunch of LWers to experiment with the general forms of internet nomic play and group-group interactions. The idea that’s kicking around in my head is to get a big list of names of interested people and randomly assign them to groups of 2-4 who meet in IRC and run a very low structure initial nomic of the sort Keven has talked about in the past, except with chat logs for posterity.
These could evolve however they evolve… but the vague intent would be for one or more of them to run over long-ish periods of time (maybe on mailing lists or web pages or FB pages or whatever they use as a longer term medium), and then, in the weeks/months after the smaller nomics get settled (or collapse or have someone a benevolent dicatator or whatever) we could try to merge the survivors somehow into a larger thing that respects as many of the the cool ideas as possible.