(Habryka here. My account still appears to be broken)
I want to outline my thinking a bit, about why I decided to organize all of this with so much reliance on Facebook:
The attendance at these events heavily relies on networking effects and reducing trivial inconveniences. I did consider organizing it on LessWrong, but it’s just less integrated into most peoples life as Facebook is. This was the easiest way for people to invite their friends, get notified of new parties, spread information and, most importantly, get interested in the event if you so far haven’t been completely hooked on the book.
This is the last obvious big opportunity to get more people to read the book. Sending people to LessWrong, a website they’ve never been to and often only tangentially heard off, to then send an email to the current organizer, not really knowing who else of their friends will be there, if any, and then add that event manually in their own calendar, just seemed like a path that too many people would not bother to go.
I don’t like Facebook. I don’t like their stance on privacy, and I don’t like the social pressure that drives everyone to sign up for it. But I think the stakes on this are high, and the potential positive impact on the world is large. And I think the number of people who are shied away from this because of its reliance on Facebook is smaller than the number of people who would not otherwise come.
This is the reason why I made all information available outside of Facebook and spent multiple hours copying details from the Facebook events into the spreadsheet. Because I want to make sure that if someone doesn’t have Facebook, and wants to attend, that they will be able to. But the need to reduce trivial inconveniences for that category is a lot lower, as I think most would be willing to jump through a lot of hoops to be able to attend these.
I don’t think the decision was completely clear, but I did make the decision consciously and tried my best at weighing the benefits and drawbacks. I am interested in anyone’s thoughts on this.
Good stuff! My algorithm is essentially identical. I also made a poster that summarizes the key advice/methods for defeating procrastination. It’s my version of Step 2, 3 and 4, but visually displayed. I put it up on my wall so I don’t have to rely on my memory of the equation or the various anti-procrastination methods. I circle or note the things that tend to work well and focus on using those. When I notice I’m procrastinating, the solution is usually staring me right in the face.
In case anyone else finds it useful, here is the graphic I made from the advice in Steel’s The Procrastination Equation and Luke’s How to Beat Procrastination. Any suggestions of things to add/modify/remove are welcome. Update: the graphic (plus a pdf version) is explained in more detail here.