Meetup : Salt Lake City, UT: Schelling Day

Every person reading this (ESPECIALLY YOU!) is challenged to leave ONE piece of feedback regarding what you think about this event. Before, during, or after. One sentence. Doable?

Why should I care?

• There will be dinner! Eat food!
• Hang out with and befriend generally awesome people!
• Have friends or family you want to introduce to rationality? This makes a great appeal for emotional thinkers!
• Generate hedons and warm fuzzies!
• Generate fond memories to be nostalgic about!
• Receive empathy for what's going on in your life!
• Gain arbitrary Kudo points for having come!

I like hanging out with just generally awesome people. It's why I joined this group in the first place!

Spending time with people is fun. But getting to know people—really, truly getting to know people—is hard. Rewarding, but hard.

Sharing your fondest hopes and deepest fears is a powerful way to make connections, but exposing your soul like that terrifying. Worse, it’s awkward. There are few socially appropriate times to bring up stuff like that. Even when everything works out beautifully, getting it started feels stressful and not-fun.

As soon as people are in a context where everyone agrees that sharing is normal (e.g. an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, or a conversation with a therapist, or Truth or Dare), the stigma and self-consciousness don’t hold people back nearly as much.

This is our version of Truth or Dare: optimized for more plausible deniability, more warm fuzzy feelings, less debasement†, and more genuine connection with other people.

• Five different flavors of Truth: Struggles, Joys, Confessions, Hopes, and Miscellaneous.
• To provide plausible deniability, everyone rolls a die before speaking. A one means you cannot speak your turn, a 6 means you MUST. The result is not shared.
• What happens in the Schelling Game stays in the Schelling Game.

This game is traditionally meant to played every April 14th, the birthday of Thomas Schelling, for the obvious reason‡, followed by dinner and socializing. I moved it around a bit to get it on the weekend instead of a Monday.

Any of that interest you? All you have to do is:

• RSVP now. I won't hold it against you if you back out later.
• Show up at 9771 S 170 E, Sandy UT
  2:45pm on April 20th. If you come in after we start the game at 3:00, please wait for the lull between speakers to announce yourself.
• Find us near the Trax station on 9800, just north of Dewey Bluth Park. There will be a small boat in the driveway.
• Bring your observations on what you've been up to since last meetup, if you've got any to share.
• Children are welcome, provided they are mature enough to either handle the adult themes in the game, or entertain themselves mostly unsupervised while we play.
• Anyone who brings Potluck contributions will get Two Rationality Points. If you'd like to show some non-food support for this and other events, I have a PayItSquare set up: http://www.payitsquare.com/collect-page/edit/24123

Thank you for your time, and thank you for being part of the most fun, engaging, and all-around rewarding social group I know.

(†) Don't worry about missing the discomfort and humiliation of dares. That will be the focus of a different game, later in the year >:-D Muahahahahahaha! (‡) A Schelling point is is a solution that people will tend to use in the absence of communication, because it seems natural, special or relevant to them. This is an arbitrary consensus point for changing social rules. It fits.

PS: Be warned--fuzzy feelings are fun, but they do run a risk of skewing your view of people. It is up to you to find the appropriate benefit/cost balance. PPS: This is plagiarized heavily from the original Schelling Day post. Don't sue me.