LessWrong readers are invited to apply to the Lurkshop

Same question - I applied on Nov 22 and haven't heard back

Hiya! I'm the co-organizer Jonas mentioned.

This is partially an un-conference style event. The point is not that we the staff have something we want to present to the participants; the point is if we get these people together, we think something worthwhile will happen. (My personal prediction is that at least two participants’ lives will majorly shift because of this program.)

Most of the most valuable events I’ve been to had excellent people and ~no scheduled content. For the most valuable events I’ve been to with content, the content wasn’t the thing that provided the majority of the value for me or most other attendees.

I’ve run ~9 other large workshop-type events and many smaller events, and all of them had a lot of content, but the content mostly functioned to set a context for good conversations. I suspect for the demographic of LessWrong readers, having lots of classes won’t be as useful for context-setting, since there’s already a large body of interesting topics that are common knowledge that people can discuss.

All that said, if I have time, I'll share a default/baseline schedule later tonight.

I just want to say that this didn't raise alarm bells as expensive or weird for me. It is last minute. Arranging things around the holidays sucks. Basically they can either rush to get it done or wait til mid-January at earliest. And, once organizers already know they want to do it, doing it earlier means value of information can be usable sooner too (eg, they can repeat it sooner or put people in contact with opportunities that crop up in January), it most likely makes it worth a good portion of dough to get it done ASAP.

Also, the referrals are basically no expense in the grand scheme. Assume they have 40 attendees and 80% of the attendees are found via referral: that will be $3,200^[1]. If the rest of the event is worth doing so last minute, that DEFINITELY is to expand their short notice applicant pool and let readers consider who is well suited. It could say, double the quality of the average accepted person. It's basically the best and most affordable last-minute marketing you can get.

Nothing raised a scammy flag for me. It's what I expect a nontrivial number of last-minute workshops to look like (10%?), and I expect last-minute workshops to be much more common than scams in this community (maybe 30x as common?). I also think only a rare scam will use something like this post (maybe 2% of scammy/net-negative/risky community things will), as there are better and cheaper ways to scam or brainwash people. Crunch those numbers and this post looks to me to be about 150x as likely to be related to a good/legit workshop than a bad one. ^[2]

That said, I guess it is good to realize how nervous people might be about risk? I'm just surprised if people did find this scammy.

1. ^{^}

   In a comment, they've clarified they expect about 20 ppl, so actually it would be even less, $1600, but about 40 was my initial estimate

2. ^{^}

   Rough numbers but yeah I think you have to be really ingratious to the LW community to get odds that are worse than 49:1 here, so def worth applying, and hardly even worth refining the ass-numbers more carefully at that initial estimate of distance between options

Thanks for the feedback! I’ve edited the post to clarify where the funding is coming from and who is running this.

Regarding the content, one of my co-organizers may leave another comment later. The short version is that we’ll be re-running some of the most popular content from previous workshops, but primarily focus on informal conversations, as participants usually rate that as much more useful than the actual content of the workshop.

We're pretty unsure what the quality of the applications will be. My 85% CI is that we accept 5-50% of people who just read this post and apply.

1. Lodging is on-site. It's at a renovated former sorority house. Everyone should get their own bedroom, and if getting a private bathroom is a crux for doing we can make sure you get that too, though by default bathrooms will be shared.
2. You'd submit a reimbursement request for expenses. If that poses a challenge, we can work something else out. I expect the only significant expense you'd need reimbursement for to be travel -- we'll provide food and lodging.
3. I expect 20 people, but it wouldn't surprise me if it turned out to be significantly more or fewer. In general, it will be small.

I wasn't an initial downvoter (just saw it now), but I am now (I vote for effect, not direction, and I think ~30 is a good target - I'll remove my downvote if it gets much below that).  I put the reasons for my concern in a comment so they can be addressed, which would also cause me to change down- to upvote.

It's funded by the Atlas Fellowship, which is funded by Open Philanthropy. It's something of a side-hustle of Atlas (outside of the scope and brand of the organization, and run by a subset of our team and some external collaborators). We have a fair amount of experience running different kinds of workshops, and are experimenting with what programs targeted at other demographic and niches might look like.

Thanks for the feedback! Added to the OP.

We might if it goes well. If you want to be pinged if we run one, please submit a quick application through our form!

Yes. (Within reason.)

"Career networking" feels like it encompasses some useful stuff, like hearing about new opportunities, meeting potential co-founders, etc.

It also sounds like it encompasses some bad stuff, like a race to get the most connections and impressing people.

We're going to try and have some of the useful kind of career networking, and to push hard against the strong pressures towards the bad kind of career networking.

There also aren't that many careers out there just waiting for an employee to come slot into a well-defined role that actually makes progress on preventing x-risk or similar, so we're much more excited about helping people carve out their own path, not in connecting them to to employers running hiring rounds.

Is there going to be a digital option?

Unfortunately we're not going to be able to accommodate that. It's fully in-person, since a large part of the point is in-person interactions.

Worked for me a few minutes ago (~ 10:45 EST USA).