Join the slack, the discords, the irc, the meetups, the big events like solstice, the tumblr, the facebook...

Lots of unguarded conversation going on.

People tend to be members of many different circles and these circles have different functions. You might have friends that are great to get drunk and do silly things with, and you might have friends that you rely on to get you out of messes that you dove into head-first, but they are probably not the same friends.

In meatspace there is a lot of functionality overlap because there is a limit on how many people you can be close friends with. But that doesn't hold online. It's perfectly viable to spend some time on the *chans for the lulz and spend some more time on high-brow forums discussing the hermeneutics of some ancient text.

The point is that one circle does not and can not do it all. Circles tend to specialize. LW is one of such specialized online circles. It does not and should not attempt to provide a full-service replacement for meatspace friends (though it might introduce you to potential candidates).

The "guarded" aspect is a function of two things. First, attention and time are valuable. By posting crap you're wasting the attention and time of many (potentially very many) people. Therefore there are strong incentives to post high-quality content and not unguarded "I had a peanut butter sandwich today". Second, this is the internet where all you post is both forever and can and will be used against you. If you want to be unguarded, do it somewhere where no permanent record of your unguarded behaviour is created.

Where is the chilling and watching all the Lord of the Rings movies together?

Let me remind you of what you said in this very post: "I don't even know any rationalists in meatspace". This is an entirely sufficient condition for being unable to chill and Netflix together with other rationalists.

I might suggest an open thread that functions as a classified ad, e.g. Help Wanted, must be able to XYZ, or Sidekick In Need of Hero, must live in X area, etc.

Everybody can make a new thread, so don't let yourself be hold back.

In practice, it's however worth pointing out that LessWrong is not the best channel of you want to reach all LW-adjacent people in a certain region. Most local LW communities have their own channels to communicate about local issues.

I agree, and you're pointing pretty directly at what hurt LessWrong as a community in and of itself: too high standards made the space feel unsafe for anyone wanting to discuss ideas not within a narrow band of things everyone in the community agreed were worth talking about. Only having discussion and only allowing upvotes seems to have helped a lot here, but that's beside your larger point.

I don't know about online, but we have some pretty strong communities in person. In particular, the friend networks in the Bay Area and New York are reasonably strong and resemble the sort of community you get with a small religious order that is embedded in a larger community. That we are all pretty different seems fine and even desirable even if that means all that unifies some of us is a very vague connection of "read a few of the same things".

But those few things in common are important to us, and so they bind us.

If you are looking for how to connect more with people and building your friend network, I suggest the following:

• attend events like a CFAR workshop or EA global
• get to know some people there and friend them on facebook (most of us are connected online via facebook)
• maintain the online connections
• visit people in person when you can (if you can pay for a flight and food, you can use these friends to string together crash space to avoid paying for hotels because even if they can't host you they probably know someone who can)
• and if you really want to get deep in the community, move to one of the hubs (Bay Area or New York)

I've been thinking about this post the last couple of days and I had an idea. I'm not sure if it directly addresses the topic, but if I don't write it down then it'll probably be wasted.

Idea: prior to an event like a CFAR workshop (or similar event) create teams of 5 people each. Organize by where they live and what leisure activity they enjoy. Choices are video games, movies, reading, board games, etc. In some rented space with plenty of snacks the 5 participants are asked to spend 4-8 hours in the same space. They can enjoy the leisure activity if they wish. Or, they can talk and just relax. The participants will have a chance to activate their parasympathetic nervous systems and authentically relate. The faces of the other participants will seem familiar and safe. This strengthens bonding in the larger cohort when the event begins the next day, or something.

Assumed context: Modern society puts too much focus on productivity. I have a strong bias about this because my career involves operational analysis. There are always top-down forces pushing to reduce staff by x% by increasing everybody's productivity. This is because cost metrics are clear. We can easily measure how many widgets were produced. Value metrics are often unclear. We can't easily measure the strength of a teams internal relationships (i.e. its social complexity). All of us are often trying to 'do more', and so in social settings we are often guarded. Consequently, strong social bonds are less likely to occur. This isn't just about places of work, it's part of our philosophy. We are all trapped in the attention economy, trying to create things that might make people notice us. (just like what I'm doing now I guess...)

It may be useful to distinguish between the goal-oriented skills of rationality (The Craft) and the people who gathered around the effort to build those skills (The Community) when talking about this. For example, if everyone was very careful and diligent about their posts on LW, but there was also a Discord channel full of people making whale puns and jokes about using one boxing glove on omega, would that fit what you want?

Because that exists. As Elo says in another post, there's a slack, a discord or two, an irc, a sort of loose constellation of tumblrs, etc.

I'm glad of the existence of a high standards place of discussion. I like reading the higher quality posts on Less Wrong, even if I don't usually have the motivation to write in that vernacular. I'm also glad that of the diaspora surrounding it that trade some quality of discussion for humour value. That said, I know I have a similar feeling about speaking up in the discord that I do about approaching a cluster of people talking to each other- an irrational impulse that I'll be interrupting Important People and won't measure up. This is basically the same feeling I have IRL, and my solution is the same. (Mentally suck in my gut, put on a smile, and do it anyway.) Even once I successfully speak up in a crowd, I can sometimes feel like I glanced off, that the contact was shortlived. I went to the NY Solstice last year, and despite having a really good time and meeting a bunch of people, I have to admit I haven't kept up any of those contacts like I'd hoped would happen.

I think a solution might be something like differentiating your warm fuzzies and your effective altruism. Lets keep Less Wrong's quality filter about where it is, while sometimes using it as a common place from which to spin off fun groups if we want. And, in the interests of attempting a solution- If you'd like to do some overwatch or play some D&D*, I'm game. I suspect an open invite to a tabletop game on the open thread wouldn't be badly received, and I've actually been considering that as a very low scale version of the community building efforts.

*I'm using D&D as a generic term here. I'd actually probably reach for Dungeon World, Exalted, or Chuubo's before I went for Dungeons & Dragons proper.

I agree with most of what you said. But in addition to changing the community atmosphere, we can also change how guarded we feel in reaction to a given environment.

CFAR has helped me be more aware of when I'm feeling guarded (againstness), and has helped me understand that those feelings are often unnecessary and fixable.

Authentic relating events (e.g. Aletheia) have helped to train my subconscious to feel more safe about feeling less guarded in contexts such as LW meetups.

There's probably some sense in which I've lowered my standards, but that's mostly been a fairly narrow sense of that term: some key parts of my system 1 have become more willing to bring ideas to my conscious attention. That has enabled me to be less guarded, with essentially no change in the intellectual standards that I use at a system 2 level.

Is there a reason that members of the community can't game together online? This post on Overwatch provides at least a small amount of evidence that the community would have enough members interested to form teams, and team-building seems to be one of the goals.

That requires that you (in order of importance)

1. Have good computer hardware to run the game
2. Have good latency to the servers (for me specifically, but statistically I'd imagine there shouldn't be a big one)
3. Have good skill at aiming
4. Actually spend quite a bit of time learning all the game mechanics

As an ex-gamer I just realized that I can drop the games (still miss them sometimes) and focus on reading a book or do some better activity. Games are incredible fun, but so (at least from what I've been told) are plenty of drugs that you wouldn't want to do, and once you generalize it a little bit games can be seen as a drug themselves.

Many people disagree with the 'gaming is a waste of time' opinion. I wouldn't say totally, but most games focus on being like chocolate versus a salad to your mind.