Scott's opinion is much more relevant than mine here, but I'd say the first criteria is whether you enjoyed reading the review and the second criteria is whether you learned something from the review.
As a sidenote, I'm frequently impressed by how much of the comment section Scott reads. Your odds are surprisingly good at just asking in an open thread! This is not at all true for me, I mostly just read the comments on posts about meetups.
'pologies for my insufferable pedantry, but I can't help saying: it's "the first criterion", "the second criterion".
(And extra apologies if anybody reading is also cursed to now go through life, as I am, constantly noticing and becoming unnecessarily annoyed by "criteria" used in the singular..)
How does Skyler feel about being called a "czar", given that seemingly it is a BIG DEAL that Kamala Harris was never a czar and that's just a mean thing the Republicans are saying about her, and she was a czar? Axios got a lot of mockery recently due to the *same journalist* saying today "Kamala was never a czar, don't say that, it's false", having said yesterday "Kamala was appointed border czar".
In the New York Times crossword, it's usually TSAR (especially when the letters are at the end of crossing words - lots of words end with T and S) and only occasionally CZAR (when the constructor wants to show off how they can fit a Z into the grid, while tricking the solver) but I've never seen any other spellings.
In US political contexts, its almost always "czar", though I suspect British contexts use "tsar". (When I type in "Arif Ahmed free speech" Google autofills "tsar".)
I sent my first one - it was pretty lame - but I got a lot of useful feedback from one of the editors. She even passed passed my little substack piece about rolling my own puzzle creation helper program around to the other editors. Will Shortz read it! I felt like Ed Grimley meeting Pat Sajak. Positively mental!
Very nice! I haven't yet. Two years ago, I constructed my first few puzzles, but none of them seemed good enough to submit yet (I think they each had some four letter acronyms that stumped my friend who regularly places in the top 30 in ACPT). I had told myself that once I submit my book, I'll submit some crossword puzzles, but it turns out I've been procrastinating that book pretty badly. (I do have a paper in the works about what puzzles show us about epistemology generally.)
I think Scott calling me the Meetups Czar is funny and it makes me smile.
I'm not sure how apparent this is since I try and take my role at least as seriously as the people interacting with me take it, but I have a puckish sense of humour and goofball streak a mile wide. A lot of my actual time spent on czaring is handling a bunch of forms, spreadsheets, application paperwork, and other bureaucratic efforts. I basically predict that fraction only goes up as I try to expand and do more.
The bureaucracy has a purpose I care about, I agree someone needs to do it, at this scale that person is me, and there's parts of it I find joy and reward in. That doesn't stop much of it from being tedious and work. Every chance to be weird and silly about it recharges some of the energy I deplete by logging the hundredth reimbursement request.
As for Harris's Czardom being a big deal, I feel like that's less of a black mark against the title than Russia's historical usage of the term. The best competing title I've heard is "President of the Scott Alexander Fanclub" but that implies I'm elected, which I'm totally not. Unless we're talking about the Ankh-Morpork form of elections known as One Man, One Vote where Scott is the Man, and has the Vote.
May I suggest you consider using multiple spelling of Czar/Tsar and seeing how that plays out? Maybe have a system for selecting the spelling each time but don't tell the rest of us what it is. Toss in the occasional Kaiser for fun.
My reactionary point of view would be that only those coronated as such by a legitimate patriarch should be referred to as czars. My liberal point of view would be that every man, woman and child is a pope and may thus coronate anyone as a czar.
"While the pope recited the above-mentioned formula, Napoleon turned and removed his laurel wreath and crowned himself and then crowned the kneeling Joséphine with a small crown surmounted by a cross, which he had first placed on his own head."
But Skyler is not a Czar because of being appointed to some ministerial responsibility, Skyler is instead the rightful emperor of All Russias (and is the one person meeting that description who runs meetups).
For larger groups, the system at the last London meetup I went to worked very well: have named tables (A, B, C, etc) and a grid on the wall with half hour timeslots on the X axis and tables on the Y axis. The grid starts off blank, and attendees are encouraged to volunteer to propose topics which they can run or chair a discussion on, with topics added spontaneously over the time (e.g. I met someone there equally enthusiastic about having children, so we decided to host a pronatalism table).
This made me laugh for a good minute and a half straight. Okay, you got me, they also might argue with you for hours over things you think are basic common sense.
But there's an excellent Siderea analysis of leadership and rabbits that helped me see respect in an uncommon light. I'd recommend reading the entire series, but the key line is in https://siderea.dreamwidth.org/1191890.html and starts "Student Kings, take notice"
I am new to reading Astral Codex X. This sounds awesome but I have only read a couple articles. Anyone have any advice about how to get started? Or some of his best stuff?
There's also the SSC subreddit, where people discuss all sorts of things related to the SSC/ACX blogs (most of the time) https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/
You can also check out posts by ScottAlexander / Yvain on Lesswrong
And I'd definitely recommend attending a meeting even if you're new. Lots of people having all sorts of interesting conversations. It's a good vibe.
Scott's Best Of section is here: https://www.astralcodexten.com/about (search for "Where do I start?") I mostly agree with that list except I think you should leave Meditations on Moloch until 10 or 11, it's great but it's not a great introduction.
A slight tangent: how my frien became our trade union representative...
Him (phoning union headquarters): "Hi, I'm a union member, and I'v3e just heard that we're going on strike, but I don't know who our union representative is. Can you tell me?"
Union headquarters: "Thanks you for volunteering to be the union rep."
====
Anyway, I imagine that asking who is organizing the local ACX meetup may operate on a similar principle. (The Cambridge one was organized by Hamish last time, so I'm assuming I'm safe).
I had no idea ACX had authors other than Scott - is Skyler just here for the meetups, or was this blog actually co-authored by the two of them? Sorry if I just missed some announcement.
I basically* just co-author meetup things around here.
Substack can give authors of a post notifications for comments, and I want to get notified when people comment on the meetup posts in case it's a question I can answer. Also, while the call for organizers post is pretty similar to previous years I do update the links and make minor iterative improvements on the text. So yeah, I'm just in the byline for meetup stuff.
*I neither confirm nor deny writing one of the Book Reviews.
I'd like to start a meetup in my city. What is the optimal frequency for follow up meetups? Every month? How are you guys organizing that? Discord? Mailing lists?
> What is the optimal frequency for follow up meetups? Every month?
Unless you're really good at organizing events (like whoever runs the Orange County weekly meetups), every month is probably a big stretch. Every "ACX Meetups Everywhere" cycle is very doable though.
> How are you guys organizing that? Discord? Mailing lists?
I generally post on LessWrong. I think some groups may do mailing lists though but I'm not sure how effective they are.
Start with the second question: How do you organize follow-up meetups? I'd say a google group, because it's free, it's easy, and it's a safe assumption that every attendee will have an email address. Lots of local communities use things like Discord or WhatsApp which invite more chatter and socializing outside of the meetups themselves, and those aren't bad answers either.
Then there's frequency. The optimal frequency depends a lot on you and anyone else who steps up to organize. I believe that organizer effort is the most important resource to local groups, and that the most common cause of a group dissolving is organizers stepping away for some reason. If you try for a high frequency, burn yourself out, and stop organizing, then it obviously-in-hindsight wasn't optimal.
My suggestion would be to meet every other week, at the same time and same place. (Though plausibly at a more convenient place than the ACX Everywhere meetup.) "First and third Tuesday night" is easy enough to remember, frequent enough to be habit forming, and infrequent enough hopefully to not be too big of a burden for organizers. Lots of groups do monthly, and in those cases the chatter of a Discord server becomes more useful. Weekly has some lovely community magic if you can pull it off, but it's a significant lift for organizers.
Before the ACX Everywhere meetup, print out some way for them to sign up for a mailing list. (I suggest a QR code pointing to a google form.) Figure out when the next meetup is. At the ACX Everywhere meetup, tell everyone what the frequency is, when the next meetup is planned, and that if they want they can sign up to hear about future meetups right here on this mailing list.
Ask me more questions if you like! Helping people start meetups in their cities is pretty central to what I try and do as Meetup Czar. You can also reach out at https://www.rationalitymeetups.org if you want my email or videocall schedule.
There's a planned San Francisco meetup, though the details I'm going to leave to the Times & Places post. You can check https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1R4ksvZBJd4HhXgCELeQ8oJMT06Z1y4iunuyO8xmYrQA if you're curious what the preliminary set of meetups look like, though I want to point out the word "preliminary" is important in that sentence and these change or move around as organizers reach out to me.
There's a planned London meetup, though the details I'm going to leave to the Times & Places post. You can check https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1R4ksvZBJd4HhXgCELeQ8oJMT06Z1y4iunuyO8xmYrQA if you're curious what the preliminary set of meetups look like, though I want to stress the word "preliminary" is important in that sentence and these change or move around as organizers reach out to me.
Hosting ACX Everywhere meetups globally not only creates opportunities for people with similar interests to connect, but also allows individuals to demonstrate initiative and community spirit by organizing events, whether small or large. https://retrobowl25.com
Scott,
My comment is off topic, but I'm putting it here because I know you or Skyler will read it.
What criteria should we use for evaluating the book reviews?
Scott's opinion is much more relevant than mine here, but I'd say the first criteria is whether you enjoyed reading the review and the second criteria is whether you learned something from the review.
As a sidenote, I'm frequently impressed by how much of the comment section Scott reads. Your odds are surprisingly good at just asking in an open thread! This is not at all true for me, I mostly just read the comments on posts about meetups.
'pologies for my insufferable pedantry, but I can't help saying: it's "the first criterion", "the second criterion".
(And extra apologies if anybody reading is also cursed to now go through life, as I am, constantly noticing and becoming unnecessarily annoyed by "criteria" used in the singular..)
I did wonder at the pluralization as I was typing that, but didn't take the time to check. Your pedantry is appreciated here!
Very generous of you to say so - I totally get how boorish it usually is to point these things out - so 'fanks!
How does Skyler feel about being called a "czar", given that seemingly it is a BIG DEAL that Kamala Harris was never a czar and that's just a mean thing the Republicans are saying about her, and she was a czar? Axios got a lot of mockery recently due to the *same journalist* saying today "Kamala was never a czar, don't say that, it's false", having said yesterday "Kamala was appointed border czar".
https://www.foxnews.com/media/media-rushes-declare-kamala-harris-border-czar-immigration-crisis-haunts-campaign
So should we call Skyler a czar or not?
Under my heuristic of "ignore US politics unless impossible to do so for the given topic", yes, we should call Skyler a czar.
..I think your heuristic might actually be the Secret to True Happiness..
Now the next step is to fight over "Is it Czar, Tzar, Tsar or Csar?" 😁
All hail our unelected overlords imposed on us by fiat of the Real Caliph!
Noam Chomsky's power grab is getting out of hand.
Germans are happy with: Zar. "ц" is just one letter.
As the least exercise of his powers I think Scott can decide how spell it.
In the New York Times crossword, it's usually TSAR (especially when the letters are at the end of crossing words - lots of words end with T and S) and only occasionally CZAR (when the constructor wants to show off how they can fit a Z into the grid, while tricking the solver) but I've never seen any other spellings.
In US political contexts, its almost always "czar", though I suspect British contexts use "tsar". (When I type in "Arif Ahmed free speech" Google autofills "tsar".)
Have you tried submitting any puzzles yet?
I sent my first one - it was pretty lame - but I got a lot of useful feedback from one of the editors. She even passed passed my little substack piece about rolling my own puzzle creation helper program around to the other editors. Will Shortz read it! I felt like Ed Grimley meeting Pat Sajak. Positively mental!
Very nice! I haven't yet. Two years ago, I constructed my first few puzzles, but none of them seemed good enough to submit yet (I think they each had some four letter acronyms that stumped my friend who regularly places in the top 30 in ACPT). I had told myself that once I submit my book, I'll submit some crossword puzzles, but it turns out I've been procrastinating that book pretty badly. (I do have a paper in the works about what puzzles show us about epistemology generally.)
Surely Harris and Skyler would be Tsarinas?
edit: Wait, Skyler might be a man, sorry, I only know that name from TV.
I think Scott calling me the Meetups Czar is funny and it makes me smile.
I'm not sure how apparent this is since I try and take my role at least as seriously as the people interacting with me take it, but I have a puckish sense of humour and goofball streak a mile wide. A lot of my actual time spent on czaring is handling a bunch of forms, spreadsheets, application paperwork, and other bureaucratic efforts. I basically predict that fraction only goes up as I try to expand and do more.
The bureaucracy has a purpose I care about, I agree someone needs to do it, at this scale that person is me, and there's parts of it I find joy and reward in. That doesn't stop much of it from being tedious and work. Every chance to be weird and silly about it recharges some of the energy I deplete by logging the hundredth reimbursement request.
As for Harris's Czardom being a big deal, I feel like that's less of a black mark against the title than Russia's historical usage of the term. The best competing title I've heard is "President of the Scott Alexander Fanclub" but that implies I'm elected, which I'm totally not. Unless we're talking about the Ankh-Morpork form of elections known as One Man, One Vote where Scott is the Man, and has the Vote.
May I suggest you consider using multiple spelling of Czar/Tsar and seeing how that plays out? Maybe have a system for selecting the spelling each time but don't tell the rest of us what it is. Toss in the occasional Kaiser for fun.
I recommend "God-Empress"
Blackadder Politics:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h6mJw50OdZ4
One Man, 16,472 Votes!
My reactionary point of view would be that only those coronated as such by a legitimate patriarch should be referred to as czars. My liberal point of view would be that every man, woman and child is a pope and may thus coronate anyone as a czar.
Or self-coronate, like Napoleon?
"While the pope recited the above-mentioned formula, Napoleon turned and removed his laurel wreath and crowned himself and then crowned the kneeling Joséphine with a small crown surmounted by a cross, which he had first placed on his own head."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crown_of_Napoleon#/media/File:Ingres,_Napoleon_on_his_Imperial_throne.jpg
I think it's acceptable for Skyler to be "Caesar", if we understand that position to be a junior partner to Scott's "Imperator".
But Skyler is not a Czar because of being appointed to some ministerial responsibility, Skyler is instead the rightful emperor of All Russias (and is the one person meeting that description who runs meetups).
What is the purpose?
For larger groups, the system at the last London meetup I went to worked very well: have named tables (A, B, C, etc) and a grid on the wall with half hour timeslots on the X axis and tables on the Y axis. The grid starts off blank, and attendees are encouraged to volunteer to propose topics which they can run or chair a discussion on, with topics added spontaneously over the time (e.g. I met someone there equally enthusiastic about having children, so we decided to host a pronatalism table).
Seconding that the London Unconference setup works quite well, hat tip to Ed who usually runs those and from whom I learned the tactic.
> due to the way human psychology works, once you're the meetup organizer people are going to respect you
They are? Finally? And you tell me now, and bury it at the bottom of an FAQ??
This made me laugh for a good minute and a half straight. Okay, you got me, they also might argue with you for hours over things you think are basic common sense.
But there's an excellent Siderea analysis of leadership and rabbits that helped me see respect in an uncommon light. I'd recommend reading the entire series, but the key line is in https://siderea.dreamwidth.org/1191890.html and starts "Student Kings, take notice"
Would anyone come to a meetup in Fresno? If more than 3 people say yes I'll commit to organizing it.
I am new to reading Astral Codex X. This sounds awesome but I have only read a couple articles. Anyone have any advice about how to get started? Or some of his best stuff?
For the (now past) Republican primary: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/hardball-questions-for-the-next-debate
The best, though typical, Bay Area House Party: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/even-more-bay-area-house-party
And typical of humor: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/riddle-of-the-sphinx-ii-sustained
I'd suggest you read some of Scott's old posts on the old blog: https://slatestarcodex.com/top-posts/
Some of his best writing to date is there
There's also the SSC subreddit, where people discuss all sorts of things related to the SSC/ACX blogs (most of the time) https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/
You can also check out posts by ScottAlexander / Yvain on Lesswrong
And I'd definitely recommend attending a meeting even if you're new. Lots of people having all sorts of interesting conversations. It's a good vibe.
thank you!
Scott's Best Of section is here: https://www.astralcodexten.com/about (search for "Where do I start?") I mostly agree with that list except I think you should leave Meditations on Moloch until 10 or 11, it's great but it's not a great introduction.
If you've read that and want more, but still not all of it, I'd go here: https://www.lesswrong.com/codex.
After that point, I'd suggest just browsing the archives.
thank you!
A slight tangent: how my frien became our trade union representative...
Him (phoning union headquarters): "Hi, I'm a union member, and I'v3e just heard that we're going on strike, but I don't know who our union representative is. Can you tell me?"
Union headquarters: "Thanks you for volunteering to be the union rep."
====
Anyway, I imagine that asking who is organizing the local ACX meetup may operate on a similar principle. (The Cambridge one was organized by Hamish last time, so I'm assuming I'm safe).
This was also how I became editor of an ISO standard.
Me; "Hi, I'm a computer security researcher. Please could I have a copy of the Committee Draft of ISO xxxx.."
British Standards Institute: "Thank you for volunteering to write it."
Plot twist: you were the 10th person to call them about that but nobody else took the bait. :P
You're not wrong. I have had more than one conversation that pattern matches to
Them: I wish there was a meetup in my city.
Me/Scott: Want to run a meetup in your city?
This is also a very effective way when leading a team to get fewer complaints or more proactivity.
I had no idea ACX had authors other than Scott - is Skyler just here for the meetups, or was this blog actually co-authored by the two of them? Sorry if I just missed some announcement.
I basically* just co-author meetup things around here.
Substack can give authors of a post notifications for comments, and I want to get notified when people comment on the meetup posts in case it's a question I can answer. Also, while the call for organizers post is pretty similar to previous years I do update the links and make minor iterative improvements on the text. So yeah, I'm just in the byline for meetup stuff.
*I neither confirm nor deny writing one of the Book Reviews.
I'd like to start a meetup in my city. What is the optimal frequency for follow up meetups? Every month? How are you guys organizing that? Discord? Mailing lists?
> What is the optimal frequency for follow up meetups? Every month?
Unless you're really good at organizing events (like whoever runs the Orange County weekly meetups), every month is probably a big stretch. Every "ACX Meetups Everywhere" cycle is very doable though.
> How are you guys organizing that? Discord? Mailing lists?
I generally post on LessWrong. I think some groups may do mailing lists though but I'm not sure how effective they are.
As might be expected, I have thoughts about this.
Start with the second question: How do you organize follow-up meetups? I'd say a google group, because it's free, it's easy, and it's a safe assumption that every attendee will have an email address. Lots of local communities use things like Discord or WhatsApp which invite more chatter and socializing outside of the meetups themselves, and those aren't bad answers either.
Then there's frequency. The optimal frequency depends a lot on you and anyone else who steps up to organize. I believe that organizer effort is the most important resource to local groups, and that the most common cause of a group dissolving is organizers stepping away for some reason. If you try for a high frequency, burn yourself out, and stop organizing, then it obviously-in-hindsight wasn't optimal.
My suggestion would be to meet every other week, at the same time and same place. (Though plausibly at a more convenient place than the ACX Everywhere meetup.) "First and third Tuesday night" is easy enough to remember, frequent enough to be habit forming, and infrequent enough hopefully to not be too big of a burden for organizers. Lots of groups do monthly, and in those cases the chatter of a Discord server becomes more useful. Weekly has some lovely community magic if you can pull it off, but it's a significant lift for organizers.
Before the ACX Everywhere meetup, print out some way for them to sign up for a mailing list. (I suggest a QR code pointing to a google form.) Figure out when the next meetup is. At the ACX Everywhere meetup, tell everyone what the frequency is, when the next meetup is planned, and that if they want they can sign up to hear about future meetups right here on this mailing list.
Ask me more questions if you like! Helping people start meetups in their cities is pretty central to what I try and do as Meetup Czar. You can also reach out at https://www.rationalitymeetups.org if you want my email or videocall schedule.
I will not be hosting a Buffalo meetup; however, if someone else does, I can supply a fog machine and disco lights
What about San Francisco..?
There's a planned San Francisco meetup, though the details I'm going to leave to the Times & Places post. You can check https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1R4ksvZBJd4HhXgCELeQ8oJMT06Z1y4iunuyO8xmYrQA if you're curious what the preliminary set of meetups look like, though I want to point out the word "preliminary" is important in that sentence and these change or move around as organizers reach out to me.
Any updates? London UK
There's a planned London meetup, though the details I'm going to leave to the Times & Places post. You can check https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1R4ksvZBJd4HhXgCELeQ8oJMT06Z1y4iunuyO8xmYrQA if you're curious what the preliminary set of meetups look like, though I want to stress the word "preliminary" is important in that sentence and these change or move around as organizers reach out to me.
Thanks!
@Skyler have the meetings for the Bay Area (Berkeley or San Francisco) already scheduled?
I am also looking forward to the meeting. https://thedinosaurgame.io
Hosting ACX Everywhere meetups globally not only creates opportunities for people with similar interests to connect, but also allows individuals to demonstrate initiative and community spirit by organizing events, whether small or large. https://retrobowl25.com