community-history

the rationality community is so weird. i was just reading some blogs and liked them, and started going to a meetup full of nerds. It was just a bunch of ppl in their early 20's being earnest and trying really hard, and we had a potluck every week and debated each other, and eventually some of us were founding companies and noticing crypto and talking about/investing in ai (very early) and writing books and everyone was dating or had dated each other, and was founding goup houses, and eventually i see more and more names of people i've known for a long time (or knew of through friends) in the news, and reporters start coming to our internal events, and some of us buy a big campus as a community center, and that old friend you played goofy bonding exercises with at that meetup in 2015 now happens to run the grant process you just applied to, etc we were just interested in some blogs, man! But I think being interested in those bloggers correlated with a certain type of unusual-thinking agenticness and - dare I say, attempts towards rationality - that had a lot of downstream returns. I was totally oblivious to how special it was in the early days. I didn't know we were so unusual.