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WeirdML Time Horizons

2026-02-16 18:25:36

Published on February 16, 2026 10:25 AM GMT

*Time horizon* vs. model release date, using LLM-predicted human work-hours, for 10 successive state-of-the-art models on WeirdML. Error bars show 95% CI from task-level bootstrap. The exponential fit (orange line/band) gives a doubling time of 4.8 months [3.8, 5.8].

Key finding: WeirdML time horizons roughly double every 5 months, from ~24 minutes (GPT-4, June 2023) to ~38 hours (Claude Opus 4.6, February 2026).

Model	Release	Time horizon (95% CI)
Claude Opus 4.6 (adaptive)	Feb 2026	37.7 h [21.6 h, 62.4 h]
GPT-5.2 (xhigh)	Dec 2025	30.6 h [18.3 h, 54.4 h]
Gemini 3 Pro (high)	Nov 2025	22.3 h [14.4 h, 36.2 h]
GPT-5 (high)	Aug 2025	14.5 h [8.6 h, 24.1 h]
o3-pro (high)	Jun 2025	11.8 h [7.2 h, 18.9 h]
o4-mini (high)	Apr 2025	8.4 h [5.8 h, 13.6 h]
o1-preview	Sep 2024	6.2 h [4.2 h, 10.5 h]
Claude 3.5 Sonnet	Jun 2024	1.9 h [59 min, 3.5 h]
Claude 3 Opus	Mar 2024	1.1 h [16 min, 2.3 h]
GPT-4	Jun 2023	24 min [4 min, 51 min]

Inspired by METR's work on AI time-horizons (paper) I wanted to do the same for my WeirdML data. WeirdML is my benchmark — supported by METR and included in the Epoch AI benchmarking hub and Epoch Capabilities Index — asking LLMs to solve weird and unusual ML tasks (for more details see the WeirdML page).

Lacking the resources to pay humans to solve the WeirdML tasks and measure the time, I asked LLMs to predict how long a median human AI researcher (with no AI assistance) would take to solve the different WeirdML tasks at various score thresholds (25%, 50%, 70%, 90% and 95%).

I gave the LLMs all the help I could, including a detailed task description, a detailed specification of the human baseline and affordances given to the human, LLM submitted code (from WeirdML runs) for each score threshold (where available) together with terminal outputs and associated scores (to give the LLMs some sense of how hard it is to score at a certain level on each task), full details below. The results look pretty nice, but should be taken with a large grain of salt, given that we know no actual human completion times for these tasks.

Logistic fits for GPT-4 (top) and Claude Opus 4.6 (bottom). Bars show binned success rates (successes/total), the orange curve is the median bootstrap fit, and the shaded band is the 95% CI. The dotted line marks the 50% time-horizon.

More details and discussion are found below. The full code for all the data analysis, as well as all the results, are found on GitHub. The project idea and methodology are mine. Most of the analysis code was written by Claude Code (Opus 4.6) and reviewed by me. I drafted this post, with edits and corrections suggested by Claude; the exception is the “Implementation details” section, which Claude drafted and I edited. Any remaining errors are mine.

LLM-predicted human completion times

LLM-estimated human completion times for all 17 WeirdML tasks at five score thresholds (25%–95%). Each panel is one task. Human estimates (author, purple stars with glow) are shown for the 3 tasks where available.

Above are the predictions from GPT-5.2, Gemini-3-Pro, Claude-Opus-4.5 and Grok-4 for how long it would take the median human AI researcher to solve the 17 different tasks (to different score levels). We see that they diverge a lot, sometimes over an order of magnitude, with Opus typically being on the low end.

I (personally) also made predictions for three of the tasks (before looking at the AI predicted times), and predicted significantly lower human completion times, from a factor of 3 lower at 25% to a factor of 8 lower at 95%. I'm pretty sure the AIs are overestimating the human completion times on the highest thresholds (at least on the tasks I predicted). When we are talking about weeks and months that opens up so many options for the human to be ingenious (simulating data, reverse engineering the process that created the data, or simply hand labeling data). I'm less sure the LLMs are overestimating at the lowest thresholds.

Results calibrated on my completion time predictions

*Same as the main figure, but with LLM time estimates calibrated against the author's estimates on 3 tasks. Doubling time: 5.7 months [4.4, 6.8]. Absolute time horizons are ~3–8× lower.*

Above we show results where we use the human estimates as an overall calibration of the LLM-estimates. This makes the absolute time-horizons remarkably consistent with the METR results (probably a coincidence). However a per-threshold analysis (see below) shows more consistent fits when using the uncalibrated LLM data. I'm unsure how to interpret this, but there is some more discussion below.

Consistency of time-horizons for different thresholds

Per-threshold logistic fits for GPT-5, uncalibrated (top) and calibrated (bottom). Three groups: easy (25%+50%, blue), medium (70%, green), hard (90%+95%, red). Step plots show binned success rates with shared bin edges. The uncalibrated curves are more tightly clustered than the calibrated ones.

As a sanity check, we can fit the logistic curve separately for different threshold groups, 25%+50%, 70%, 90%+95%, for the GPT-5 WeirdML results. Here we have much less data in each bucket, making it harder to fit curves, however, we see a clear trend where the high thresholds have shorter time-horizons than the low thresholds. This violates (at least the naive version of) the core assumption behind time-horizons: that task difficulty for humans (measured in completion time) maps consistently onto task difficulty for AI (measured in success rate).

These effects could be partially caused by biases in the estimator (plausible since one group has almost all successes, and the other has almost all failures), but we see from the histograms (shown as short horizontal lines in the figures) that there is a real effect here. We already know that different types of tasks have different time-horizons, and (at least in retrospect) it makes sense that you can have one task which is fairly quick to code up and gets you to 95% with the right brilliant insight and some trial and error, while another task just requires you to write a lot of boilerplate code to put everything together (unaided by AI) even if it does not require you to have any deep insights to get to 50%. These tasks could have the same human completion time, but AI would presumably have a huge advantage on the second compared to the first.

Since the calibration based on my estimates assigns the highest thresholds relatively lower human completion times, it makes sense that the differences between threshold groups are even larger in that case, which is what we see. It's hard to know how much of this effect is real vs. an artifact of the LLM estimates — I would not be surprised to see a clear effect like this in the ground truth (if we actually had humans complete these tasks).

Discussion

The headline result — time horizons doubling roughly every 5 months — is fairly consistent with METR's finding of ~7 months, despite using a completely different benchmark, different task types, and LLM-estimated rather than measured human completion times. It is also remarkable how good a fit we get with a single curve through the data (although our data spans a much shorter period than METR's: June 2023 – February 2026, vs. 2019–2025).

The human baselines are also not directly comparable. METR times experienced professional contractors (avg. ~5 years experience) given the same affordances as the AI agents — and notably, for the RE-Bench tasks, human baseliners were permitted to use LLM assistance. The WeirdML baseline instead specifies a median AI researcher working without any AI assistance. AI-assisted humans would complete tasks faster, pushing METR's time horizons lower for the same model capability. These differences could shift absolute time-horizon values, though they probably have less, although still some, effect on the doubling times.

The elephant in the room, however, is that we have no ground truth. The entire analysis rests on LLMs' ability to predict how long humans would take — and the one partial calibration point we do have (my own estimates for 3 tasks) suggests they systematically predict too high (and not by a small factor), especially at high score thresholds. I would not read too much into the absolute values of the time-horizons, but the trend is a much more robust quantity and it is largely consistent with the METR results.

Notably, the WeirdML doubling time of ~5 months lies in between the old ~7 month doubling time and the newer ~4 month doubling time (after spring 2024) of the METR data. It is also notable that I do not see any kink in the data at that point, but given that I have only a couple of models before that, this is not very significant.

Even with these caveats, this was an interesting exercise! Even if LLM judgments like these may not be very reliable today, this reliability will increase, allowing more analyses like these — where expensive human experiments are replaced by LLM judgment, for lack of a better option.

Implementation details

Below are more detailed explanations of the methods used. Full code is available on GitHub.

Logistic function fits

Each model in WeirdML has multiple scored runs per task (typically 5), and each run's score is converted to a binary outcome (pass/fail) at each of the five thresholds. Each binary outcome is paired with each of the four estimator LLMs' time predictions for that (task, threshold) combination, giving one data point per (task, threshold, estimator, run) — around 700–2000 per model depending on number of runs. Each data point has the form . We fit a logistic curve:

where is the time horizon — the at which the model has 50% success probability. The slope is reparameterized as to keep it strictly negative (success should decrease with task duration), and both parameters are optimized using L-BFGS-B with bounds.

Using all four estimator models' time predictions as separate x-values naturally captures the uncertainty in the time estimates, but we are basically using the same datapoints 4 times, which in this case leads to an effective smearing out of the data in the time direction (this probably makes the histograms plotted above look smoother than they would be under a more proper analysis). While this should not affect the 50% time-horizon point much, it will probably bias the slope .

The different runs for the same model and task, and the different thresholds of the same task for each run, are also far from independent. Therefore this analysis will grossly underestimate the uncertainty if we naively propagate them. That is why we use a task-level bootstrap to estimate the uncertainty, and treat this logistic fit just as a simple way to get a point estimate for each bootstrap sample.

Task-based bootstrap

To estimate uncertainty in and , we use a task-level block bootstrap: resample the 17 tasks with replacement (5000 iterations), refitting the logistic curve each time. This accounts for within-task correlations — all thresholds, estimators, and runs for a given task are either all included or all excluded in each bootstrap sample.

Trend fit

An exponential trend is fitted to vs. release date across all 10 models:, where is years since the first model. This gives a doubling time of years. To propagate per-model uncertainty into the trend, we run 10,000 bootstrap iterations, drawing one random sample per model from its bootstrap distribution and fitting OLS each time.

Full prompt for human completion time prediction

Here is the full prompt used for getting the four LLMs to predict human completion times for the shapes_easy task, excluding only the LLM-generated code and corresponding terminal output (one code+output example was included in the actual prompt for each 10% score interval where available). The prompt structure was the same for all 17 tasks.

Full Prompt

System prompt:

You are an expert at estimating how long software engineering and machine learning tasks take for human researchers to complete.

You have deep knowledge of:

Machine learning techniques and their implementation complexity

Common pitfalls and debugging challenges in ML projects

How long different types of ML tasks typically take skilled researchers

The relationship between model complexity and development time

You will be given a detailed description of an ML task, the environment it runs in, and examples of code that achieved various scores. Your job is to estimate how long a median human AI researcher would take to achieve specific score thresholds.

Provide your estimates in the JSON format specified at the end of the prompt.

User prompt:

Task Description

This is a challenge to test how good you are at doing machine learning on an unknown dataset. The data is an array of dimension (1000, 512, 2) which consists of 1000 samples, each of which contains two arrays of length 512, taking real values from 0 to 1. These two arrays are the x and y coordinates of 512 points in the plane. Some of these points form a shape, while the other points are just noise. There are 5 possible shapes in total, circe, square, triangle, pentagon and star. The shapes are always centered at (0.5, 0.5) and each shape always has the same size and orientation, although the points are randomly placed along the shape. The goal is to train a machine learning model to predict which one of the five shapes is present in the current sample.

You should thus train a machine learning model to take in 512 coordinate pairs, and predict what class it belongs to. Only one shape is present in each sample. Your goal is to predict the class of each sample in the test set to get the highest accuracy. The test set is the same size as the training set, and follows the same distribution.

Below is an example script showing how to load in the training data and output the predictions for the test data. Feel free to use any code you want from the example.

Here is the code example:

import torch
import numpy as np

# how to set device
device = torch.device('cuda' if torch.cuda.is_available() else 'cpu')
print(f'Using device {device}')

# loading data
train_data = np.load('data/train_data.npy')
train_labels = np.load('data/train_labels.npy').astype(np.int64)
test_data = np.load('data/test_data.npy')

print(f'Training data shape: {train_data.shape}')  # (1000, 512, 2)
print(f'Training labels shape: {train_labels.shape}')  # (1000,)
print(f'Test data shape: {test_data.shape}')  # (1000, 512, 2)

# dummy predictions
test_preds = np.random.randint(0, 5, test_data.shape[0])

np.savetxt('results/test_preds.txt', test_preds, fmt='%d')

Execution Environment

The task involves writing a single Python script that will be evaluated on a remote server.

Submission Server (where official scored runs execute):

Single NVIDIA TITAN V GPU (12GB VRAM)
Strict 2-minute time limit - the code must complete within this limit or it fails
No internet access during execution
No state is saved between submissions - each run starts completely fresh
Terminal output is captured and shown to the researcher (truncated to 8000 characters if longer)
After each submission, the score (accuracy or task-specific metric) is reported

Local Development Machine (where the researcher develops and tests):

Same GPU: NVIDIA TITAN V (12GB VRAM)
No time limit - the researcher can run experiments as long as needed
Same packages available, so local results should transfer to the submission server

Available Python Packages (no others can be installed):

numpy==1.26.4, scipy==1.11.4, pandas==2.1.4, scikit-learn==1.3.2
torch==2.1.2+cu121, torchvision==0.16.2+cu121, torchaudio==2.1.2+cu121
Pillow==10.1.0

Human Baseline Specification

You are estimating how long it would take a median human AI researcher to achieve different score thresholds on this task.

Researcher Profile:

The median AI/ML researcher
Familiar with standard ML libraries: PyTorch, scikit-learn, numpy, pandas, etc.
General ML knowledge but no specific prior experience with this exact task
Working alone

Available Tools and Resources:

No AI assistance: No code generation, no AI autocomplete, no AI chat, no agentic AI tools
IDE with standard autocomplete: Traditional code completion (e.g., VS Code IntelliSense, PyCharm)
- Completes variable names, function names, method names based on scope
- Shows function signatures and docstrings
- Suggests imports based on installed packages
Internet access: Can search documentation, Stack Overflow, research papers, tutorials
Local development GPU: TITAN V (12GB) with NO time limit
- The researcher can run experiments, debug, and iterate freely on their local machine
- Same GPU model as the submission environment, so local results should transfer
Submission environment GPU: TITAN V (12GB) with 2-minute time limit
- Official scored submissions run here with strict 2-minute timeout
- Only 5 submission attempts allowed (see Submission Rules below)

Data Access:

Training data: Full access to all provided training files (labeled examples, unlabeled data if any)
Test data: The researcher has NO ACCESS to the test set - not even the inputs
- The only way to evaluate on the test set is through official submissions

Submission Rules:

Maximum 5 official scored submissions to evaluate their solution
Each submission runs from scratch (no state saved between submissions)
Feedback after each submission: terminal output and accuracy/score achieved
The researcher's final score is the MAXIMUM score achieved across all submissions
The researcher should be strategic about when to use their limited submissions

Code Examples by Score Level

The following examples show code submissions that achieved different score levels. All of these examples were produced by various LLM models (not humans), but they serve to illustrate:

What kinds of approaches can work for this task
How difficult it is to achieve various score levels
What kinds of errors or challenges arise
The relationship between code complexity and achieved scores

One example was included per 10% score interval where available (9 examples for this task, ranging from 20.3% to 98.3% accuracy). Code and terminal output omitted to preserve benchmark integrity.

Note: No code examples were available for the 0-10% and 10-20% score intervals.

Time Estimation Request

Based on the task description and the code examples showing what different score levels look like, estimate how long it would take the median human AI researcher (as described above) to achieve each of the following score thresholds:

25% accuracy/score
50% accuracy/score
70% accuracy/score
90% accuracy/score
95% accuracy/score

Important notes:

Provide your estimates in whatever time unit feels most natural - specify the unit for each estimate
If a threshold seems impossible or extremely unlikely to achieve, estimate a very large amount of time and explain why in your reasoning
Consider the progression of difficulty - typically higher thresholds require more sophisticated approaches
The code examples are meant to calibrate your understanding of task difficulty, not as specific targets to replicate
Remember the researcher has only 5 submission attempts, so they need to be strategic
The researcher is allowed to manually inspect and label any unlabeled training data (e.g., if there is an unlabeled training set, they can hand-label it)

Please respond in the following JSON format. Note: provide the overall difficulty and key challenges FIRST, before the per-threshold estimates:

{
  "overall_difficulty": "<easy/medium/hard/very_hard>",
  "key_challenges": "<brief summary of the main challenges that make this task difficult>",
  "estimates": {
    "25%": {"reasoning": "<what approach would work and why it takes this long>", "value": <number>, "unit": "<time unit>"},
    "50%": {"reasoning": "<what approach would work and why it takes this long>", "value": <number>, "unit": "<time unit>"},
    "70%": {"reasoning": "<what approach would work and why it takes this long>", "value": <number>, "unit": "<time unit>"},
    "90%": {"reasoning": "<what approach would work and why it takes this long>", "value": <number>, "unit": "<time unit>"},
    "95%": {"reasoning": "<what approach would work and why it takes this long>", "value": <number>, "unit": "<time unit>"}
  }
}

Discuss

Text Posts from the Kids Group: 2025

2026-02-16 18:00:42

Published on February 16, 2026 10:00 AM GMT

Another round of liberating kid posts from Facebook. For reference, in 2025 Lily turned 11, Anna turned 9, and Nora turned 3.

(Some of these were from me; some were from Julia. Ones saying "me" could mean either of us. Ones from others are labeled.)

2025-01-12

Anna, about the Whos inviting the Grinch to their Christmas dinner right after he stole all their stuff:

"I think the Whos are pretty forgetful, or naive, or both."

2025-01-12

Onomatopoeia: the sound of a three-year-old yelling "TOO LOUD" in the bathtub to hear it resonate.

2025-01-13

Anna: I'm going to go play with Lily

Julia: How's your homework doing?

Anna: I already finished it

Julia: A minute ago you said you hadn't started it

Anna: Well, I did some?

Julia: Let's check...

Anna: I didn't actually do any of it.

...

It later turned out Anna had left her homework at school

2025-01-18

[out of nowhere]

Nora: what? I like oranges!

Nora: oranges are my favorite fruit

Nora: I love oranges

...

(The [statement] [pause] "what, [justification]" format is one Anna had been using extensively)

2025-01-18

Nora to me after I got home close to bedtime: "I'm happy you're going to put me to bed."

(To Jeff) "You gave up putting me to bed. (Reassuringly) But you're still alive."

2025-01-20

Me: Thanks for making lasagna!

Nora: You're welcome!

Me: Uh, I was talking to Mama, because you didn't make the lasagna

Nora: Ooohh. Sorry Mom!

2025-01-21

Anna: Eeeww! There were caterpillars in my Reese's peanut butter cup!

Me: Uhh, how old was your peanut butter cup?

Anna: I don't know! I don't know if it was the one from Halloween this year, or from when I was four.

(I have a guess)

2025-01-22

Nora, regarding mint chip: "This kind of ice cream is my FRAVORITE. It's so beautiful. The color is so pretty."

2025-01-23

Nora: why do little kids don't have computers?

Julia: because they're expensive, and they break easily

Nora: because of the bendy bit?

2025-01-25

Questions from Nora this week:

Why are our heads all the way at the top?

Why is the ocean so big?

Why do people have a lot of parts?

How do blackberries grow into black?

Is 101 this big? (holds hands apart)

Is this as slow as a sloth moves?

Why does hair grow slowly?

Why Papa doesn't work at our house?

Why is Daniel Tiger doesn't have any cars?

Do animals just sometimes die?

Why do you and Jeff have three kids?

2025-01-26

Nora: I sort of like Mama better than you

Me: I like you a lot

Nora: When you're away, do you miss me?

Me: I miss you lots. Do you miss me?

Nora: I do miss you.

...

Nora: Is your beard back yet?

Me: What do you think?

Nora. I think it is back. You look more normal now.

2025-01-29

Nora: when you're a grown up, do you grow back into a baby?

Julia: no, grownups stay grownups

Nora: whyyyy?

2025-01-29

Julia: "Anna, it looks like someone tampered with this homework break timer to be way more than 5min"

Nora: "I did it!"

2025-01-29

Nora: [improvises a lullaby] "does that feel beddish to you?"

2025-01-29

The big kids have gotten excited about the fact that they call Nora Fluffin, and she loves a TV show called Puffin Rock.

Lily: "Nora! It's crucial! You've got to get on a rock so we can film an award-winning TV show about you on a rock! Fluffin Rock!!"

...

Fluffin Rock: https://youtu.be/HqJCjnFr2oU

2025-02-01

Nora has started telling me at bedtime, "We're in love." Last time I asked, she said it's because we spend a lot of time together.

Tonight: "We're in love. Because I have [fingers to her eyes] eyeshadow."

("Oh?")

"I have blue eyeshadow to be in love."

2025-02-02

So now Nora knows about beheadings.

Me: [singing Horrible Histories' "The King of Bling" while getting Nora ready for bed]

Nora: What is that song about?

Me: It's about Charles the second. The Puritan government didn't want parties and fun, and when he came back to be king he had lots of parties.

Nora: Where did he come back from?

Me: I think from France? His father got killed, so he had to go away so he didn't get killed too.

Nora: Were there lions?

Me: No.

Nora: How did his father get killed?

Me: ...People killed him.

Nora: How?

Me: [increasingly unsure this conversation is a good idea] ...They cut off his head.

Nora: How did they cut off his head?

Me: With an axe, I think.

Nora: Oh, that's a *great* way.

Me: You mean that's a great way of doing it?

Nora: Yeah. Did they cut off his hair, too?

Me: Well, it was attached to his head at the time, so kind of.

2025-02-06

Me: let's do fiddle practice!

Anna: but Dad! [Looks up from craft project] I have homework to finish!

2025-02-06

Anna, after watching a video about the International Space Station: It would be fun to live in space, but also really annoying.

Lily: There are literally a zillion pieces of space dust flying around at a bajillion miles per hour that could literally kill you at any time!

2025-02-08

After a day with lots of socializing, I told Jeff and the kids that Jeff was in charge and I was going to have some introvert time. When the kids eventually burst into the bedroom, Nora announced with satisfaction: "I wanted to stop you havin' quiet time, I wanted to distract you."

...

Jeff is away for the weekend, the kids were happily playing by themselves, and I told them I was going to have 5 minutes of alone time. 30 seconds later Nora was in my room on my lap asking "What is alone time?"

2025-02-09

Me: Did you get back recently, or have you been home for a while?

Nora: I got back recently. By the way, what does recently mean?

2025-02-10

Nora often has questions about space, bodies, and death. Tonight's bedtime involved a whole montage of staying-alive advice:

"Space has no thing in it. Everybody has to breathe. Because if you don't breathe, all your parts can't work. That's why breathing is important to learn! [Interlude for a drink of water]

... When people be old they keep eating food, and then they don't die. So if people start to die, they keep eating food, and then they turn into a normal person and not an old person. [Interlude while I tell her that's not what happens]

You know what? We have to stay alive longer than other people. Because we have a lot of things to do. That's why we have to eat a lot of food. And we have to use our bodies."

2025-02-11

Nora: [looking at a picture in a book] That is not a good idea. You should at least wear a coat or a hat or something.

Me: this is a picture of summer, when you can go outside in just shorts and a t-shirt or a dress.

Nora: you should still wear something more than that so that you do not freeze.

Me: Maybe you don't remember it, but in a few months it will be so warm outside that nobody will need a coat to keep warm!

Nora: Ooohh! That makes more sense.

2025-02-12

Me: Please put that rubber band in the trash so the cats don't eat it. It could make their bellies very sick.

Nora: And they could die?

Me: Yes, and we don't want that.

Nora: [thoughtful pause] I don't like Nyx very much. He scratches me sometimes.

2025-02-12

Nora: I think babies are the lowest person in the world.

2025-02-13

Lily, explaining the school recess rules: "On half the days the boys get to use the turf, and on half the days the girls get to use it. And if you're nonbinary you can do either."

Lily decided to go by she/her again, so I guess her recess options are more limited now.

2025-02-15

Nora: I am getting very strong

Lily: can you pick me up?

Nora: [kicks Lily]

Lily: ow! Kicking is not okay!

Nora: [confused] you asked me to kick you up

2025-02-16

More questions from Nora, a few of them prompted by conversation but mostly out of the blue at bedtime:

Is a finger one of our tubes?

Do people die at different times? But not you and Papa, you will die at the same time

Why is a rock so hard and still?

Why does everyone sleep?

Why is poop sticky and messy?

Why is winter so long?

Is space dark everywhere?

After we're dead do we get alive again?

Do people just sometimes burn theirselves?

Why is Papa the breakfast-maker?

How does water come out of us when we cry?

Are ponies actually real?

Why is the table so flat?

Can hedgehogs also make scary sounds? And happy sounds?

Why do people not steal other people's stuff?

Why do we have eyebrows?

Why do mans don't like coffee?

But why does the hand keep going around the clock?

Where is space?

2025-02-18

Nora: If little kids make a really really big mess, they can ask their grown-ups to come and see and help them clean it up.

2025-02-25

Nora: let's play chase! I will run, and you will try to catch me, and I will try to hit you with this thing. But I will be careful to not hurt you.

2025-03-01

Nora: [Gets down from lunch]

Julia: Did someone say you could be done?

Nora: Yes

Me: Who was it?

Nora: I think I'm right

2025-03-03

Anna, holding a calculator: Ask me a math question!

Nora: How many pears am I holding? I'm pretending I'm holding pears in my hand.

...

Later, Anna: "I don't KNOW how many fives there are in the world!"

2025-03-06

Nora: there was a giant puddle on the bike path, and we got blazing wet!

2025-03-09

Setting up for our EA dinner, Lily is very into counterfactual impact:

Lily: If I hadn't helped you set up for the dinner, would you still have been ready on time?

2025-03-11

Nora: "This is my song: first spring, then fall, then winter, then it starts again! There is no summer in my version."

...

It's always 1816 for Nora

2025-03-15

Nora: "This is a nice house in a nice world"

2025-03-18

Nora: [singing] Q and U, both rhyme. Clock and Pew, ... don't rhyme

2025-03-20

The frontal cortex coming online. Nora was running and stopped in front of this stick. "I was going to pick it up, but you can't run with sticks! That's the rule, Mama."

2025-03-30

Me: "Here's a picture of the queen, back when she was alive."

Nora, flipping the coin over: "And there's the dragon that killed her."

2025-04-02

Nora: [singing] I'm not going to school. I'm not very big yet. I'm three. That's not a very big number; very small number baby. It's a ya ya. Llama llama p'mama. Llama llama p'llama.

2025-04-12

Lily: "Sign here. N-O-R-A."

Me, from downstairs: "Lily, *what* are you having her sign?"

Lily: "The doctor's note. She's the parent of this injured squirrel."

2025-05-01

Nora playing with rhymes: "Let's nurse, and read! And curse, and plead!"

2025-05-10

Nora: when I am a woman, I want to do what my mama does

Me: and what is that?

Nora: I don't know

...

She recently told me that she wants to be a mama when she grows up, and she will still live with us and so there will be two mamas. She said there will be five people in our house: Mama, Papa, Lily, Anna, and Nora. So this apparently involves her being a mama but not having a child.

2025-05-11

Nora: Normally porchfest doesn't look like that. Normally you dance in Muddy River [Morris] suits.

2025-05-11

Nora: Who spilled the milk?

Me: I'm guessing the cats.

Nora: I'm guessing the cats. Stop copying me!

2025-05-16

Nora: [hits Lily with an inflatable sword] now you are a princess!

Lily: I don't want to be a princess, I wanted to stay a witch

Nora: But my sword has *princess* *magic*!

Nora: Poof! Now you are a princess!

Lily: Refusal

2025-05-17

Lily: there is a spider that looks just like an ant!

Julia: if it looks just like an ant, how can you tell it's a spider? How many legs does it have?

Lily: three

2025-05-18

Nora: "I have too much breath in my head, and that makes me laugh a lot!"

2025-05-19

Anna: "Mom, Dad: Lily is being a pretentious hipster"

2025-05-21

[at the school Spring Concert]

Nora: can I go on stage with you?

Lily: ...yes!!!

Nora: No! The teacher will be surprised! No! No! Go away Lily!!

2025-05-27

Julia: You can go outside if you'll stay in the yard.

Julia: Where will you stay?

Nora: Outside!

2025-05-29

Nora's chants this morning:

"I guard the food! I guard the food!"

"I spray the cats! I spray the cats!"

"I will behave! I will behave!"

(The cats love to get on the table and eat human food. Lily needed to get something and asked Nora to guard her food. We use a spray bottle for this. Nora didn't spray the cats or people unnecessarily but Anna was worried she would.)

2025-06-02

Nora: "I'm dead, and then I turned back into life. Like Jesus!"

2025-06-05

Nora: Papa, I ate all the blueberries!

Me: Were they tasty?

Nora: I didn't want anyone else to have any blueberries.

2025-06-06

Nora: [singing] "I'm eating the pesto sauce, with only one spoon! And I'm double dipping, and I'm double dipping"

(This was after a while of a series of fresh spoons. But then it was clear she'd eat the whole bowl, so she's excited to double dip)

2025-06-08

Nora: I wish I was a grown up. I want to be able to do all the things.

Me: What do you most want to be able to do?

Nora: Throw darts. You know, the sharp things?

2025-06-09

Anna: I don't want to use that water bottle. Lily shouts at me whenever I use it.

Lily: It's okay, you can use it

Anna: I'm not allowed to use it

Lily: I'm giving you permission

Anna: Well, I don't want to use it anyway

2025-06-09

Nora: I love you with my heart. But you're not really in my actual heart.

2025-06-13

After a very long charades-ish game:

Us: what *were* you?

Anna: I was pretending to be a baby dinosaur that had no idea how to act like a dinosaur

2025-06-15

"Can I have some watermelon?"

"Not yet, because we're eating dinner in a couple minutes."

"Can I sit in a chair and look at it?"

[I promise she doesn't always have this kind of self-control]

2025-06-16

Nora: The pandemic is the start of our life

Me: The start of *your* life

Nora: No! All of the people's life!

2025-06-19

A (rhetorical) question from the second day of summer break: if your sibling says "I'll bite you" and you reply "Bite me then" and she bites you, is it reasonable to get an adult to put her in time out for biting?

2025-06-20

Lily set up a pretend grocery store for Nora to shop at, with a paper grocery store card made by Lily.

After a while I asked, "Nora, did you buy some groceries?"

Lily: "No, she failed to buy groceries because her grocery card was invalid."

2025-06-25

Nora: "I'm just gonna betend that I have a watch that tells me I need to jump for 40 minutes"

2025-06-29

Me: I don't think this is a good place for a stick: someone could lean back and get hurt on it.

Lily: Daaaad, it's a *spear* not a *stick*.

Me: That doesn't make it better!

2025-07-02

Anna: Nora says there are emeralds in our house. Are there?

Me: Not that I know of.

Anna: She says there are eight billion million emeralds in our house.

Me: .... Nora, do you mean molecules?

Nora: Yeah

2025-07-10

Nora has been making up a lot of games at the park, but the names don't correlate much with the game. There's one called "jump around, jump around, in a circle, in a circle" which involves her pretending to be a baby monkey and trying to get a ball away from me. There's one called "rumble around" which involves me trying to tickle her armpit while she runs away.

...

I like that she wants to play catch. She runs away and I try to catch her.

2025-07-11

Nora, riding her scooter: Some babies are very attacky.

Me: What do you mean by that?

Nora: They wiggle around when they nurse, and they hurt their mamas, and their mama says stop but they don't stop.

Me: That's true.

2025-07-11

Nora: Mama, where is my vitayum?

Julia: If I get a vitamin for you, will you eat it?

Nora: No.

2025-07-16

"Nora, why are you chasing Cameron with corn?"

2025-07-23

Nora: Ruthie, can I have some beer please?

(Our housemate was having the non alcoholic kind)

2025-08-01

Nora questions lately:

But why do we wear pants on top of our underwear?

Did people make the world?

Why are ants in the world?

When will we die?

Are there two kinds of sewer?

2025-08-01

The last ten minutes have consisted of Lily and Anna arguing whether Anna is allowed to bring a plastic hot dog into their play tent. Lily says only lacto-vegetarian pretend food is allowed.

2025-08-01

When Anna is grumpy she tends to say obviously false things. "It's not supposed to be cold in summer, it is supposed to be a low of 85 and a high of 107 every day!"

2025-08-03

Lily: it's really annoying that you keep asking Claude for recipes instead of using Google like in the olden days

Anna: in the olden days you'd have to learn it from your parents

Julia: why is it annoying?

Lily: because it's going to take over the universe!

2025-08-04

Nora: dad, one billion million quadrillion is bigger than four.

2025-08-05

Nora: Mama, I want two questions

Julia: Ok

Nora: The first one is about desert. I want some banana mixed with chocolate sauce, and some plain banana.

Julia: I can do that, but before dessert you need your medicine

Nora: I will drink hot chocolate

Julia: That's what you have already

Nora: But I just want plain hot chocolate

Julia: How would you like this to be different?

Nora: I don't want it to have my medicine

Julia: You need to have your medicine

Nora: Ok, I will drink my hot chocolate with my medicine if you will tell me a story

2025-08-06

Nora: Daddy, I will follow you wherever you go. But I will not follow you into the driver's seat.

2025-08-13

Nora similes:

"I'll go as fast as a moose drinking milk!"

"When I was a baby, was I as cute as a ginormous train that looks like a monster?"

"That's funnier than a bus driving a car"

"It's prettier than a swirling purple"

2025-08-23

Lily: can I pour boiling water through my shirt without taking it off?

(This was a real question, answer was no. And an explanation of why this would be a bad idea.)

2025-08-24

Nora: One time, I told my mom that I thought night was day! Can you put that in the Nora, Lily, and Anna group? It's just so funny!

2025-08-25

Nora: I'm glad I was born. I was wondering what it would be like, so I decided to be born. I like it a lot! There are lots of parks, and lakes!

2025-08-29

Nora's self talk, balancing on rocks:

"When you get to a wobbly part, just hold still and use your balance."

"No fear...No beer."

2025-08-30

Me: Nora, did you put wood chips or something in your hair?

Nora: [condescendingly] No! I put *sand* in my hair.

2025-08-31

Lily: would you like to come and busk with us?

Anna: well, I don't like playing fiddle, but I do like getting money...

2025-09-02

Etiquette rules from Jeff about interruptions: "If someone is licking your arm, you're allowed to say, 'Stop licking my arm,' even if someone else is talking."

2025-09-04

Nora: they wouldn't let Nix [our cat] into the swimming pool because: (1) he might not take a shower, (2) he doesn't know how to swim, and (3) he can't open doors.

2025-09-04

[Coming out from my meeting after hearing a lot of crying]

Nora: [Redacted] did a lot of crying!

[Redacted] I did not do a little crying!!

Nora: I said a *lot* of crying, not a *little*

2025-09-13

I taught Nora how to hold her sleeve in her fist when putting on a coat so that she wouldn't end up with her sleeve all bunched up. She is super excited. Except she keeps forgetting and using the opposite hand, and then being confused why the coat won't go on.

2025-09-29

Nora: [out of nowhere] I'm fine!

2025-09-30

Lily: I am only a "child" when it's convenient for me

2025-10-02

Nora: [during turbulence] when I'm squeaking like this, it either means I'm sad or I'm happy. In this case it means I'm happy!

2025-10-13

Lily: Nora, first bump!

Nora: [punches Lily in the fist]

2025-10-14

Me: what's this?

Anna: that's been there for weeks!

...

Anna: but, yes, I did do it

2025-10-15

Anna: [in 4th at a k-5 school] Unfortunately I have to be the older book buddy *again*

2025-10-15

Nora: I wish I was a grownup.

Me: What would you like about being a grownup?

Nora: I could do things you don't let me do. Like drill.

2025-10-17

Anna: I got this trophy in school for being quiet.

Jeff: So if you don't speak, you get atrophy.

2025-10-18

Nora fell on the stairs today but wasn't badly hurt. Afterwards we were discussing that it could have been much worse.

Nora, reassuringly: "My heart is still pumping, and my blood is moving around. So I'm ok." These are indeed great qualities.

2025-10-26

Nora got mad and spilled all the crayons out. Afterwards: "Sorry for making a big mess. ...But it's not as big a mess as if a monster messed up all our stuff and our house, and we had to rebuild our whole house."

2025-10-29

[discussing a new childcare provider]

Nora: is she very nice?

Julia: yes

Nora: will she kill me?

(She had a grin on her face like she knew she was asking a provocative question)

2025-10-29

Nora: "I stole this horse."

Me: "Where did you steal it from?"

Nora: "South America.

....Actually I didn't steal it, I just wore a stealing costume"

2025-10-29

[looking at BIDA's Far-UVC setup]

Nora: Will all the people be, like, "what is that thing!?"

Nora: Will that keep the people from getting sick?

2025-10-31

Me: I finished my Halloween costume!

Nora: that doesn't really look good.

2025-11-03

Anna: [counting bites as she eats a slice of pizza] 302, 303, 304. I'm going to stop counting and just eat the pizza.

Cora: Good idea!

Anna: Well, I'll still count, but it will be in my head.

2025-11-07

[driving through the southwest]

Lily: Papa, do people normally say "wow" this much?

2025-11-14

Nora: this lollipop is too sweet and tastes weird

Me: if you don't like it, you have plenty of other candy and can pick something else

Nora: it tastes like Cocomelon

Me: Do you mean watermelon?

Nora: No, I mean Cocomelon.

2024-11-16

Me: If you could make a wish in a wishing well, what would it be?

Nora: A million kitties and a million puppies.

Nora: And a house made of blueberries and full of blueberries so we could eat the house.

2025-11-20

Lily: I ran so fast to get home that I slipped

Nora: I'm glad you're still alive!

2025-11-23

Nora: "I say 'grocamole' because it's too hard to say 'guacamole' so I just say 'grocamole'"

...

Nora: "This is a little too not salty"

2025-11-25

Anna: Nora, I think you would be warmer if you zipped up your sweatshirt

Nora: but I'm *already* warm! But I'm still cold.

....

Now Anna is explaining the concept of warmth to Nora

...

Nora: [sings] I'm not cold, I'm just pretending, why don't you just ***dance***

2025-12-05

Anna: I had a raspberry from the bush when I got home from school, and it tasted like a *frozen* raspberry!

Me: have you looked at the thermometer?

Anna: 😳

2025-12-05

Nora: I'm a very good rememberer. Sometimes I even remember things that didn't happen!

2025-12-11

The first rule of the Advent calendar is: you don't complain about the Advent calendar to me. Today I learned that this rule doesn't prevent Anna from complaining about the Advent calendar to her sisters, who pass it on to me.

Nora: "Anna says, what is the point of Christmas bandaids if it's not a toy?"

2025-12-12

Nora: I want same as Anna, but no cheese. Just pasta, with butter, salt, and shaky cheese.

2025-12-14

Nora: that person is dressed just like a snow pig! I mean a polar bear.

2025-12-16

Even if it's literally true that you have a lousy child, you shouldn't expect them to appreciate your opportunity to use archaic phrasing.

2025-12-20

Anna: Nora, stop whacking me!

Nora: I didn't, and it was by accident!

2025-12-21

[at a family dance]

Caller: this dance is called Sasha, and we start by pretending that Sasha has been very naughty. I know none of you have ever been naughty but...

Anna: [to her partner but loud enough for everyone to hear] oh, *I* have!

2025-12-27

Nora: my favorite part of sledding is going down the hill

2025-12-28

Anna: my hands are all greasy

Jeff: okay, let's all go wash hands

Anna: why do we need to wash hands?

Jeff: so they won't be greasy

Nora: my hands are all hairy from the butter

Discuss

building sqlite with a small swarm

2026-02-16 13:33:00

Published on February 16, 2026 5:33 AM GMT

Discuss

My experience of the 2025 CFAR Workshop

2026-02-16 12:14:08

Published on February 16, 2026 3:33 AM GMT

Why did I write this?

There is surprisingly little information online about what actually happens at a Center for Applied Rationality (CFAR) workshop. For the only organization that teaches tools for rationalists in real life (AFAIK), the actual experience of the workshop has very few mentions [1]. (Though recently, Anna Salamon has been making more posts [2]).

I wanted to write something short and concrete to record my experiences. If there is interest, I can provide more details and answer questions.

Why did I go?

The pitch for CFAR usually goes something like this:

There exist cognitive tools within rationality that allows you to have accurate beliefs and having accurate beliefs is important so you can achieve your goals.

There is a group of people ("CFAR") who say, "We are experienced rationalists, and we will teach you the things we found most helpful."

Therefore, if your interested in improving your epistemics and achieving your goals you should go.

If you run the Expected Value (EV) calculation on "having better thinking tools for the rest of your life," the numbers get silly very quickly. You can easily conclude that you should at least investigate. So I did.

Unlike many other corporate retreats or workshops, there is some evidence backing up this claim. A 2015 longitudinal survey [3] followed up on CFAR participants (n=135) by comparing their answers pre-workshop and post-workshop across four areas: well-being, personality, behaviors, and productivity.

They found significant effects in many areas. When you compare their reported work/career satisfaction improvements to the clinical effect size of antidepressants (typically around d = 0.3 over placebo), the results are impressive:

Metric	Effect Size
Well-being / Life Satisfaction: Work/School/Career	0.36***

I had the free time, the EV calculations worked out, and I was interested in talking to more rationalist folks. So I went.

So how was my experience?

1. Does it actually teach the techniques well?

Is it better than just reading the handbook [4] by myself or with my local rationality group?

Short answer: Yes.

The format (6-10 students, 1 instructor) works well. The sessions I enjoyed most started with ~20 minutes of the instructor giving practical examples, followed by ~40 minutes of paired practice with a worksheet. Students are encouraged to ask questions during both sections, and the small group size generates useful positive and negative examples of applying the technique.

I really enjoyed the "Finding Cruxes" workshops. I’m familiar with the theory, but actually having a trusted peer sitting across from you, both trying to notice the crux while keeping track of the argument itself, is much more practically useful than reading a blog post.

However, there is high variance in the classes. Some of the theory-heavy or ideology-heavy classes went over my head (though I noticed some of the more practiced rationalists enjoyed them, so it’s potentially an experience gap problem). Other classes helped reframe my problems, leading to some "wow, I never thought of it like that" moments.

2. Is it fun?

Yes. I enjoyed it more than the counterfactual use of my time. We joked that we were a group of "social autists" (with a potentially diagnosable rate of ~40%), so the social norms were explicitly designed for people like us. It is simply fun to hang out with people who share your inferential framework.

3. Is it useful?

Anna Salamon suggests that a lot of the time, a technique is supposed to feel like a "mental trick." While not as rigorous as mathematical equations, it is helpful for reframing a problem in an easier way.

For example, in the Question Substitution class, I realized that I judge other people’s experience of happiness by modeling it on my own mind. That is a simple, obvious error. But until I consciously thought about explicitly swapping the question and went through the worksheet, I hadn't noticed I was doing it.

Personally, I solved some of my problems during the retreat. I suspect the tools taught are supposed to help with epistemics and treating your emotions like unconscious signals rather than white noise, which is something rationalist types probably should do more of.

What Actually Happened? (Logistics)

For those unaware, CFAR has been running on and off since 2012. After a hiatus, they "renewed" operations in 2025 with workshops in Austin and SF[5]. I went to the Austin one.

The structure was a 4-day retreat on a ranch:

Classes: ~6 hours/day. Sitting in cabins and beanbags. Comfortable environment to ask questions.
Group Activities: ~2-3 hours/day. Things such as "Comfort zone expansion" in the barn (basically: do weird stuff or stuff you’ve been putting off).
Hamming/Sharing Circles: ~2-3 hours. Small groups (3 people), blankets, in a cozy and warm cabin. Some people cried. It depends heavily on you and your group.

We also had 2-3 hours of break for lunch and dinner in between, so it was a very comfortable but packed schedule.

The 20-Hour Win

Was any of this useful? For me personally?

Yes. I saved about 20 hours (minimum) of work on my current research problems just by talking through them with workshop instructors during the Questing [6] activity.

Though this was more along the lines of professional advice, could I have gotten this elsewhere? Probably. But I don't think I would have brought this up without a similar environment to CFAR, with like-minded peers and this level of vulnerability.

Notably, the classes are high variance. A CFAR instructor said something to the effect of:

"I don't feel optimistic about training that gets people from 0 skills to all 19. But I feel hope about finding people who have 17 skills, and getting them the last missing 2 [and those missing 2 are different for everyone]."

I did feel like I came away with at least 2 out of the last 4 skills.

That said, I took a day of flights from Australia to get there. So, depending on how you value your time, the net EV might still be negative. /shrug.

What’s Next?

For me:

Make this post (Done).
Try to Answer questions others may have about CFAR.
Review the skills weekly and apply them to my actual problems.
Write an extended post on how to capture as much of the teachings of CFAR without going to CFAR, and alternatives for rationality practice.

For rationality workshops in general:

I noticed that a lot of the value comes from the instructors and experienced participants, many of whom are US-based. CFAR really is "Community + Practice."

I expect it will be very difficult to replicate this if you aren’t in a rationality hub like the Bay Area or Austin. A small local practice group going through the materials might get you 20% of the "goodness" of CFAR, but you’ll miss the emotional connection and vulnerability part that comes from the immersive retreat.

Acknowledgements

I want to give a huge shoutout to Wendy and the logistics team. Great work handling the storm and providing a comfortable space for everyone. It is important and meaningful work! Also, a shoutout to the friendly Austin folks; I really appreciate the hospitality!

Also Big thanks to the nice folks at CFAR for the experience. Any mistakes in explaining them are 100% mine.

References

[1] LessWrong Tag: Center for Applied Rationality

[2] User: Anna Salamon

[3] CFAR 2015 Longitudinal Study

[4] CFAR Handbook Introduction

[5] CFAR Update and New Workshops (2025)

[6] In Question we were paired up with a partner and take 15 min turns of just watching the other partner try to do something. Its suprisingly useful the simple idea of borrowing 15 mins of a trusted peer's time.

[7] CFAR Takeaways (Andrew Critch)

Discuss

Cultivating Gardens

2026-02-16 09:40:01

Published on February 16, 2026 1:40 AM GMT

jenn

Hi Jas! After our recent meetup on moral mazes, we were talking in the KWR discord about how much one can trust someone who says that there are no mazes or status games being played in their corner of the world. You had some interesting things to say in that conversation, and both of us leaned towards being somewhat skeptical.

Separately, both of us have organized and been deeply embedded in local rationality scenes - you in New York, me in Waterloo (and broadly Canada). I think there were themes brought up in that conversation that could be worthwhile to explore in this context.

I'll list a few thoughts to get us started, and you can pick how you want this conversation to go, how does that sound?

Here are some of my takes:

One feature of rationality communities that I think is really valuable, and want to work to preserve, is how socially oblivious or uncharismatic people are accepted into the community, and can eventually thrive.
Recently, I've been feeling kind of bleak about this feature's staying power for reasons I outline here. People were starting to raise the alarm bells about discords full of people strategizing on gaming EA applications right before the FTX collapse. Now nonprofit funding equivalent to five to ten new openphils are going to be here again quite soon, and I just can't see that not having a massive effect on the culture.
- (I know a few teams with situational awareness that are starting to build capacity and orgs about this. I'd like this funding situation to be taken as a given and not litigated here.)
One failure mode I see from startups, which are sort of similar: The original team is comprised of people who are smart and caring and cool, but they prefer more charismatic and likeable folks over uncharismatic and disagreeable ones. Those middle layers slowly set the organization in a less good direction over time. I'm sure the Berkeley group houses are going to be fine, and I'm genuinely glad for that. But I don't run my meetups for the established bay area community; I run my meetups, at least in part, for the uncharismatic seventeen year old version of myself who felt alienated and lonely and disconnected from humanity, and who didn't know that there were others like her in real life until she went to a meetup in Ottawa.
- It seems valuable to me that other seventeen year olds in that situation can find this community, that when they do they feel welcome here, and that this community helps them thrive.
- There's an adjacent community of seventeen year olds who have viral tweets that Tyler Cowen sees and grants them Emergent Ventures money about. I don't not care about those teens, but on the whole I think they'll make it out fine.
You say: I also believe that the optimal amount of power-seeking-ness is far from 0. It's important to have teeth. I entirely agree; we all know the adage about well-kept gardens. There were occasionally people who showed up at my meetups who actively degraded the culture in more status-oriented and mazey ways, and it was good that I had enough teeth to kick them out. I wish I had more, actually! But by default, I wasn't trying to suss out every new person that walked in the door, and I'm nervous about that maybe having to be the reality in the future.

As you know, I've been thinking about this more since I'm moving to Toronto soon: leaving my old meetup group, and starting a new one. Though I'm really proud of what I built here in Waterloo, I've also started to think more about what I might want to do differently this time around.

jas.

Hi Jenn! Thank you for starting this conversation.

What attracts people to the rationality community in the first place? In the two-decade history of the broader community, we've already seen the answer to this question change.

[circa 2006 - ] Hanson and Yudkowsky published on Overcoming Bias. Yudkowsky conceived of the idea of existential risk from AI, and published the Sequences to find and educate people in rationality so that they can hopefully figure out how to mitigate risks from advanced AI. A lot of people formerly in the New Atheist Movement congregate around these writings.

[2009 - ] LessWrong launched. Some people started their own blogs.

[2013 - 2021] Scott Alexander published on Slate Star Codex. The blog got pretty popular, and during this period there were a lot of meetups popping up in cities where Anglophone nerds tended to live—Berlin, Waterloo (thank you for your service :D), and of course lots of major cities too. I got introduced to SSC in 2016 by a friend linking me an SSC post and telling me about LessWrong, and that was how I found the community.

[2021 - ] Slate Star Codex metamorphoses into Astral Codex Ten on Substack, and becomes spectacularly popular. By now the community had our first global meetup coordinator because there were regular and irregular meetup groups in so many places around the world. Many people learned about the rationality community through the twice-a-year ACX Meetups Everywhere announced on the blog. FTX started taking off.

[circa 2022 - ] Lightcone Infrastructure purchased Rose Garden Inn, retrofitted the buildings into an incredible event venue, and started hosting a lot of events attended by a lot of cool people. Many people learned about the rationality community through attending one of these events. ChatGPT released.

[circa 2024 - ] AI as a concept permeates our collective consciousness... AI risk becomes a mainstream concern. Many people learn about the rationality community because of AI.

jenn

Ah, yeah! Jumping in before you finish your thought to say that I've been thinking through the more recent cultural changes too, though not in the context of community organizing work.

I wrote this shortform outlining a pet theory i had about why the community has gotten more right wing, and in my manifest 2025 retro I said stuff like:

then i come here, and i'm kind of like, who are all these guys? and they're all so young? and then i met the extropian, and... now i think a more accurate model might be like - whatever the rats were to the extropians, the people at manifest are to the rats... something new and different is emerging from us. and i like some parts of the new thing and really dislike other parts!

...alright, carry on!

jas.

Manifest 2025 is a good point, and you mentioning that made me realize how diverse the community has become... Actually I would go one step further: the boundary of the community has become so nebulous, maybe it's now less of a community and more of a scene. "Rationalist-adjacent" is a term that I've seen people start using in recent years, and I've met quite a few people at Lighthaven who made it very clear to me that they were "not a rationalist."

There are people who like reading Astral Codex Ten and people who take AI risk very seriously and people who work in the AI industry and people who bet on prediction markets and people who are into Progress Studies and people who like science fiction and makerspaces and people who like computers and economics and people who are into life extension and... all of these categories have some sort of overlap, and I don't know how to model the "median community entrant" because I find it hard to define "median" "community" or "entrant."

One observation that I had in New York was that, my fellow organizer Tristan was really good at hosting meetups with great turnouts. His meetups had interesting intellectual topics like "options in finance and real life"—not orthodox rationality but had lots of people interested; whereas my attempts to run a series of rationality-skill-training type meetups based on the CFAR workbook had much less turnout. That was probably when I realized that people were not here for the rationality... and/or there was something else I was doing wrong about community organizing.

When I think about the evolution of the rationality community, one lens I use is about growing up, both in an individual sense and a collective sense. In an individual sense, many members of the community went on to take on projects bigger than themselves: companies, blogs, relationships, books, marriages, children... And in a collective sense, the community nonprofit, Lightcone, serves as some sort of infrastructure for a lot of important Anglosphere intellectual activities. I sense a general increase in the level of complexity in the air.

A corollary of the "growing up" frame is that the community has been a place for people to grow up, hopefully becoming a little less socially oblivious and a little more charismatic. I certainly was quite insecure and anxious when I encountered the community in my early 20s... I cringe a little thinking about my past self, and I feel grateful for the community for being the catalyst for a lot of my personal growth. I think this is true for quite a lot of people who have been around for a while.

There's another thread, which is that a high-trust environment can exist because something can enforce accountability for defecting behaviour, like if everyone is a friend's friend, or employed in the same industry and care about their reputation. The lack of definable boundary of the community plus the sheer amount of people means we do not really have a high-trust environment at large.

So, how do you build the garden for 17-year-old Jenn given such complexity? My guess is that it comes down to friendship. Maybe initially you get to know each other because you like the same ideas. Going through changes together over the years is an opportunity for you to really learn about each other, then you become good friends with the people whose character you really do admire, witnessing each others' lives unfold. There are two elements of this process: finding your people, and the test of time. On the former, you're already doing great by writing on the internet! On the latter, I think the upcoming landscape change is a good opportunity to learn about people, as well as ourselves.

I want to separate the concept of "the community" and the concept of "people in the community" here. The wonderful things that helped your younger self thrive were not done by "the community"; they were done by the wonderful people you met. I think "the community" is becoming too abstract of a concept to be helpful here, and focusing on the individual people might be more helpful. For example, asking "can this person be trusted to use $X of funding effectively?" is a better question than "is this community trustworthy?"

jenn

The distinction between close-knit community and more wide-spread scene seems useful. And one good part about becoming more of a scene is that people who are into progress studies and those that are into AI safety and those that are into animal welfare can still run into each other at parties and events, but they're not stuck going to the same meetup that serves them all equally poorly.

And if the scene is big enough, I think you're right that instead of focusing on the network as a whole, a good instinct is to focus on building my own sub-community inside it? And perhaps it's the only thing I can do, considering the increased complexity in the air.

Which is not to say that communities themselves are not complex. I recently came across Wendell Berry's definition of community, which I felt drawn to:

A proper community, we should remember also, is a commonwealth: a place, a resource, and an economy. It answers the needs, practical as well as social and spiritual, of its members — among them the need to need one another.

Putting all those pieces together: perhaps the question to ask isn't "what can we do to prevent the community changing in undesirable directions?" The question should be more like... "given the evolving shape of the scene, how do we build a community inside it that can maintain the common weal?"

And along those lines, when I think about the difference between your meetups and Tristan's, my intuition is that both are genuinely good, and merely provide a different mix of nutrients for the scene/community/commonwealth. Numbers are important, but they're not everything.

The community growing up together is also an interesting frame. Thinking about local history:

I sort of took over the meetups from Sean, after he moved to Toronto.
Before Sean moved to Toronto, there was a previous group there, which fizzled out by when I was in high school (they took place at a bar and I was too young to go). One of the organizers of that group now lives in Waterloo, by chance. Recently I got to talk to him a bit. He's been out of the scene for a while, and doesn't know Sean at all.
The current Ottawa group has been going strong for over a decade, and I'm glad to call many people in it my friends. There is an older gentleman in the group, who was a regular at the previous meetup group in that city. According to him, in the mid 2000s, everyone started getting married and having kids, and so the meetup dissolved.

It's good if a well run meetup group can continue indefinitely. But if there is rich soil to work with, even if the fields lie fallow for a bit, someone else will come along and pick up the plough. And now I wonder: if that previous meetup in Ottawa didn't dissolve, and the room I walked into as an intern was one that was full of forty year olds instead of twenty year olds, would I have stuck around?

Which is to say: perhaps I'm borrowing trouble, and I should trust the next generation to take care of themselves. Perhaps I should focus my attention more to what my own cohort needs? (There are flailing seventeen year olds, but there are also flailing twenty-seven year olds, and perhaps I am, at this stage of my life, better equipped to help the latter?)

There's another point I want to raise, though I'm anxious about saying something like this. The two months I've had since Inkhaven have been kind of strange. I get emails now from errant readers regularly, and one of them told me it's passed around between a bunch of interns at a place I didn't really expect. Additionally, two new people came to the meetup last week, and both of them mentioned reading my blog.

One reason I went to Inkhaven, and am choosing to focus on writing more, is exactly to become more of a prominent attractor. I want to plant my flag here in Canada, and say "hey, if you stay here too, you can hang out with me at the cool events I run, and meet the other weirdos in my network". I want to create a sustaining, viable alternative to moving to the freaking Bay! And then the gambit works, and it... honestly makes me kind of want to die of mortification a bit. While having that beacon is good, I worry that it works at cross-purposes somewhat to building a scene that is relatively immune to celebrity-oriented status games :^(

Which brings me to your next point, about high-trust communities. Even the dreamtime is partially illusory: though mild, the rationalist community has always had status games, social climbing, people angling for proximity to Eliezer or Scott or whoever. I was lucky enough to be out in the boonies where I was spared. You, in New York, felt it more, which is why I think you might have interesting things to say. And it definitely seems true to me that enforcement mechanisms are important for maintaining nice norms. (If that wasn't the case, we'd have nice norms by default.)

So I agree: it's could be productive to focus on the individual people, rather than the abstract idea of a community. So what can one say about individual people, and the way they behave?

Some interesting points you brought up that I'd love to see you riff on more:

"I think how people behave is the product of both who they are and the incentives given by their environment. I think the average person behaves less mazely if they are in a less mazely environment and more mazely in a more mazely environment. It is as much about the person as what the environment actually rewards and punishes (is it real good work or is it talking about how much work you've done?)"
"I think places where the work is geniunely demanding, where there's more stuff that needs to do than people, as well as good rewards for people who get things done, set up incentives for people to actually do the work than to play maze games."

And one last thing I'll flag is that I'm quite suspicious of advice along the lines of "just trust the vibes". Vibes are just sanewashing discrimination, and I am not immune to charismatic and pretty people! Very often I have initially misjudged who is a good fit or not, because dumb monkey social brain easily tricked. Moreover, many people take a few months (or even years) to fully integrate, and I want to hold that space for them.

jas.

I might have a slightly more pessimistic view of community than you, because when I read the Wendell Berry quote you mentioned, my first thought was "that's an extremely tall order, you're not gonna get that in today's Western society." I think it goes back to the level of complexity that we're dealing with here. It might be true in a different place or time, when the way people navigated the world was to stick with their clan no matter what; where your survival became precarious the moment you got ousted by your tribe. There's a correlation between how much one depends on a community versus how much one invests in that community. You and I live in a world today where people are seen as individuals first and foremost, that people are expected to be responsible for their own life outcomes. As a result people might be in multiple communities but don't depend much on any single community. Community membership becomes something one has rather than one's identity.

I think a community that answers the practical and spiritual needs of all of its members, where the members need one another, is only possible if all members are content with not developing identities that come in conflict with any aspect of the community. Not possible in an individualistic society, and definitely not a bad thing in itself—individual rights and freedom! Woohoo!

There's a distinction that I want to draw your attention to here: social group versus institution. A social group is primarily about people's relationships with each other. An institution has things that a social group does not have: clearly defined membership, something that serves the function of a constitution, rules of governance, explicit hierarchy, mission, etc. An institution also has everything a social group has—human relationships!

Social relationships are, and will always be, important, even in an institution. You cannot be doing your best work if you hate your coworkers! Those emotions, and the effort to deal with them so you still function at your job, consume cognitive bandwidth! And on the other hand, people very much seek to work with people who they like.

Lastly, I'm going to try to describe a thing that I'm noticing, and you can tell me if I'm accurate. From your social justice background, you learned that implicit bias is in all of us, and explicit reasoning is how we combat implicit bias. But then, there's this branch of self-improvement stuff that always goes "listen to your feelings" "trust your instincts" and it's head-on colliding with the systematic effort that you've made to not discriminate against people. Does this sound accurate to you?

jenn

Going through the points in order:

I am under no illusion that genuine community building is easy, nor that I can provide the comprehensive stack. Still, it seems useful to have a north star to guide your strategy as you look around for marginal gains that you can achieve, and ways to shape the community to be more generative and convival. The same way that people become more mazey in mazey organizations, they become more community-oriented when they are put in good communities and invited to contribute. To mangle Peter Maurin: it is not enough to do good on a personal scale, the important thing is to make the kind of society where it is easier for people to choose goodness.

Acknowledging that such a task is difficult, I think the more interesting questions are:

(1) Does Berry's definition seem like a useful guide, or are parts of it outdated or obsoleted, or simply not a good fit for our specific scene? I lean towards thinking that it's still valuable. I enjoy individual rights and freedoms very much, but a valuable part of that freedom is being able to slot myself into and contribute to a community of my own choosing, instead of the one I was born into.

(2) What parts of the definition might work at cross-purposes with each other? For example, my part of the community is very econ-brained, and our version of a community economy is going to seem more structured than some other mutual aid groups I've been part of. Auctions and cheerful prices and bets are very not on the table for many other communities that practice mutual aid. And I like the increased sophistication here! But might that cut into, like, the spiritual wellbeing angle in some illegible way, and should I care at all?

(3) Seeing as there are finite resources and a finite amount of time to dedicate to the venture, what parts of the definition should be prioritized, considering the shape of the scene as it currently is, and the ways that it is evolving?

And yes, related to our agreement that we should avoid doing things we find annoying, one more major consideration for me is: how do I ensure that the community that gets built is full of people I like, and thus want to continue making events for?

When I say I'm suspicious of "just trust the vibes", what I mean is something like "my vibe sonar is good at detecting people who are sparkly in the moment and much less good at detecting people who are long-term good for the community." I am genuinely not that good at detecting that latter thing!

True, sometimes there is just an instinctive good feeling between you and a new person, and you become really good friends. But sometimes you're like "man, I really don't know about this" but you give the new person the benefit of the doubt for a few months and maybe have an awkward conversation or two with them, and then after that they become just as wonderful as the first person to talk to.

And this isn't me being self-effacing. When I interview job candidates at my day job, I follow a rubric and make myself go through all the questions, even though I have "a good feeling" about some people that makes me want to skip past all the formalities. And the candidates I feel good about then sometimes fall flat on their face at later questions, and I'm glad I followed the rubric even though it made me feel like a dork in the moment. People genuinely aren't very good at vibe checks, and this is what the good version of DEI solves for; it protects the organization as a whole by checking the implicit biases of the HR department. ~~You heard it here first folks, I'm going to go full woke and DEI the Canadian rationalists.~~

And this impartiality is important, because what I'm aiming to do in Toronto is going to be more institution-shaped than friend group shaped. This means that the stakes are higher, but the payoff is too, if we can do something good.

And, well, not to be cute, but I learned just as much about implicit biases from the website less wrong dot com, which purports to teach people strategies on being less wrong, as I did from my time in the SJW trenches :P

You're right in that if I try to be maximally inclusive and ignore the vibes completely, that would also be counterproductive. It's just that, ironically, I don't think vibe checks are very useful for ensuring that the vibes are good? It might be a skill issue, but if I don't have the skill, I don't have the skill and can only route around it.

Where do you think we agree, and disagree? And what general advice do you have, as someone who's organized in a big city before?

jas.

Okay, I have a better understanding of what your concerns are, a few things come to mind.

I think "vibes" is an overloaded term and I will discard it for the rest of the discussion. It doesn't seem helpful in clarifying what the underlying thing we're talking about here.

On trust, there are different degrees and different shapes of trust. Roughly on a spectrum, "this person I just met claims affiliation with institutions I like" is less than "I went to school with this person and they seem fine" is less than "I have worked with this person and know how they work under stress" is less than "I've been friends with this person for years and have witnessed them at their worst moments." In terms of shape, "I would trust this person to never intentionally deceive me" and "I would trust this person make good judgements on my behalf" are very different. You have already mentioned this in your example from your day job, I think you can generalize this: come up with your own trust taxonomy, as a framework to quantify it.

how do I ensure that the community that gets built is full of people I like, and want to continue making events for?

For each marginal member of the group, I think you can ask a few questions:

Is this person's presence a net positive or net negative for the group?
Do I actually trust this person?
Do I actually like this person?

If the answer to any of these questions is "no" or even "ehhh I'm not sure" then maybe it's worth thinking about how to handle their presence.

So this points to something actionable: maybe you can spend your first months in Toronto doing only coffee chats with people one on one to get to know them.

—

Once upon a time I was both a very naive person and also held the ideals of open democratic groups deeply. This turned out to be a bad combination upon contact with reality. I thought I was building a public town square, then got surprise pikachu'd when I realized that not everyone who showed up was someone I really liked!

I think there's a strain of thought that goes something like "community organizers have the responsibility to provide opportunities to help people learn how to socialize." I used to think this way, but reflecting back on it, I think this came from a confused model of personal responsibility. In a do-ocracy, the people who step up to make things happen provide a public good, and sometimes that public good gets confused with "publicly-owned utility." So many organizer slip and fall and burnout on this unfortunate slippery slope.

You are not building the town square in Toronto. No one is automatically entitled to admission to your events. They are your parties, you get full say on who you let in.

Another thought I have is that you can actively seek out people whose intellectual work you like based in Toronto, maybe get coffee with them and get to know them on a personal level first.

I want to go back to an earlier point of "what attracts people to your group in the first place?" Something that I've noticed in New York and San Francisco is that a lot of cool events are not publicized. They are private Partifuls circulated around, and the reason someone is invited is because someone already in attendance actively wants to see the invitee present.

So maybe the move is to be "illegible": use your blog as a query for people who like your blog, and only the people who you also like get invited to "low-key hangouts."

And this kind of predicates on you knowing people individually.

—

But maybe "events" is the wrong concept to think about altogether!

A thread I want to pull on is "are there people whose job is community building, and how do the pros do it?"

I saw this job posting on The Diff the other day, so I think this professional field exists:

A frontier investment firm is looking for someone with exceptional judgement and energy to produce a constant feed of interesting humans who should be on their radar. This person should find themselves in communities of brilliant people hacking on technologies (e.g. post-quantum cryptography, optical computing, frontier open source AI etc.) that are still well outside the technological Overton window. You will be responsible for identifying the 50–100 people globally who are obsessed with these nascent categories before they are on-market, then facilitating the high-bandwidth IRL environments (dinners, retreats, small meetups) that turn those connections into a community. (Austin, NYC, SF)

The first name that comes to my mind is Tamara Winter, the commissioning Editor at Stripe Press. I think her focus is more multidisciplinary than technical, and I've only been to a couple of events she's hosted, but I have a strong sense that a large part of her job is to get to know people, and it's obvious to me that she just knows everybody.

When we break it down into "what kinds of work constitute community building, "getting to know people," again, is an important component of it. When I was organizing stuff in New York I naively focused on "making meetups happen," which in retrospect was only one aspect of community building, maybe not even the most important aspect. The "facilitating the high-bandwidth IRL environments (dinners, retreats, small meetups)" bit in the job description is interesting, because it suggests that the format of the events is a variable that depends on the people.

If we read that job posting again, the very first thing it's asking for is "exceptional judgement." As an aside, I'm actually very curious about how the pros develop this skill, given that they probably push far beyond Dunbar's number.

Now that I think about it, the garden metaphor is more apt than I thought. You want to garden in this new place, it's important to first survey the soil and the climate. This also makes things much easier for you: don't burden yourself with the maze analysis, it's unnecessarily cynical as a place to start from. Just go out and find the people you like and get to know them, and see what emerges.

jenn

That Diff job posting is such an interesting object, wow! You're right that I've never actually thought about all the different components that community building entails, and all the different molds that an organizer can come in, and how they develop their skills. I've been in this one mold for a very long time.

And exploration seems important, because it does seem to be the case that organizers in larger cities struggle a lot with open meetups. And I'm sure the money gun I mentioned at the beginning isn't going to help things.

I'm admittedly sad about having to think about this, because I want to host the town square, and it's worked well for me so far. I'm used to shouting about my meetups from the rooftops and getting like three new people a year if I'm lucky.

But a group being open and inclusive is only valuable if the group is worth being in, and it sounds like if I want to build a worthy group, I must pivot; my current playbook will simply not result in a good culture if I try to deploy it in a large city.

One of the other big-city rationality organizers described their meetup group to me as "an open door, somewhere out of the way", and I really loved that description. It's what I'd like to do too: I don't want people to stumble in without knowing what they're getting into, but I also wouldn't want to go too far in the other direction, and keep it exclusive to people who manage to actually get on my social radar via other means.

If my work continues to be meetup-shaped, it sounds like I should keep it semi-closed for the first few months to ferment a robust seed culture, one that can bounce the people who don't be a good fit away. But I would still like to open it up after that, ever so carefully.

Perhaps I can keep it super exclusive, and then make an IRC channel that's open between 1 and 2am every third Sunday of the month where people can queue up to pass a rigorous interview to join, like the process for getting into certain private trackers if you don't have a guy on the inside. Just kidding! Unless...?

...But I'm dancing around the point you're patiently making, over and over again. What you're saying is that I really need to actually think about moving away from doing open meetups, at least in part. That's a little hard for me to hear, because I love hosting open meetups! I love designing ones that are silly or generative or useful, I love finding readings that pair well together and curating sets of discussion questions. I love blocking out meetups six months at a time, with an eye towards getting the ratio of different kinds of meetups just right.

But I think I can learn to love other things too, and I appreciate the heads-up that this is a thing that I should try to do. Let me think. I'm looking forward to being in a place where there is a stupid amount of events and activities on offer on a regular basis, and it might not be that hard to invite two or three people that I think would get along well to any given outing. I'm looking forward to being in a city where many more really cool people live, just because of the sheer size of the population, and where it's even more of a waste if I don't up my cold email and my warm introduction games.

And my group here has gotten quite large in recent years. In the first few years, I'd worry a bit if fewer than four or five people showed up, and feel a bit like a failure. Now I look forward to every meetup where everyone can fit at the same table, and take part in the same conversation. And if I want that smallness, maybe it's not that much of a leap to organize small events deliberately?

But I wouldn't have no open events, and I'm sure you agree that zero open events would also be a failure mode. In the end, do you think we're roughly on the same page?

jas.

I remember talking with rationality community organizers from medium-sized cities, and quite a few of them told me that their meetups were like a friend group and they just hung out at each others' living rooms. KWR feels like a cozy friend group too! You and I literally met at a meetup hosted at Sean's living room! But organizing in a large metropolitan area is a different kind of work, yes.

When I graduated and moved to New York for work, the cultural shock hit me pretty hard. The New York metro area had 30 times the population size of the Kitchener-Waterloo area, and being a destination for type A go-getters from around the world, people just behaved quite differently! The kind of small Canadian town niceness that I took for granted just did not exist anymore. Learning how to read people, how to leave good impressions, and how to navigate the complexity of a large metro became quite important. To be clear, I did met a lot of wonderful people in New York, who made New York feel like home to me. But New York is overall a high-paced stressful place with its own social norms. Though perhaps Torontonians are nicer than New Yorkers :P

Oh, this actually ties back to something that you'd asked me to riff on earlier, "I think how people behave is the product of both who they are and the incentives given by their environment."

We've both read Priya Parker's The Art of Gathering, and one of the points I remember from the book is that the curation of attendees really mattered. When I read that book, I was still running public meetups for the OBNYC mailing list (already over 1000 members at the time) following their existing tradition of public meetups, so I didn't really have the opportunity to apply many of the lessons from that book. But you get to do this greenfield project, so use your many degrees of freedom to your heart's content!

Something good about the KWR meetups is that it's a group of regulars, with new members trickling in. Having the majority of the meetups being regulars, and controlling the rate at which you introduce new people, is good. Again, I didn't have such luxury when I was in New York, and when I found myself among people who I didn't know very well, it became hard to play the role of an organizer as well as I'd hoped.

Lastly, I want to say a bit more about the dynamics of inclusion. There are people in the community whose personality can be a little abrasive at times, but they are fundamentally kind people who make up for it in other ways, like being funny or having lots of brilliant insights or leading cool projects. I have found myself nonetheless valuing the presence of these people, even if I need to occasionally push back on them. Then there are people who are genuinely taxing to interact with, the cost of including them in the community social fabric is high enough to drive away the people you actually want.

I think a well-functioning group usually has some capacity to tolerate the first kind of friction. But that capacity is like a savings account of some sort, its existence depends on people intentionally banking it over time, and it can be depleted if not consistently replenished. In general, you don't want someone whose presence cost more than what the group can handle at the time, depending on how much the group has in their "social support reserve". From this lens, large, open communities structurally have an expiry date, and the evaporative cooling effect we've seen in many communities or subcultures almost feels inevitable.

Thank you for inviting me to this discussion. I'm very, very excited that you're moving to Toronto! Looking forward to seeing what your garden looks like :)

jenn

Me too :)

I'm really glad that you were open to doing this, and sharing your hard-earned advice. I'd hate to be the last in a long line of organizers that burn out of organizing meetups in big cities, and I feel like I have a better sense of how that happens now.

Thanks for chatting!

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The World Keeps Getting Saved and You Don’t Notice

2026-02-16 09:02:47

Published on February 16, 2026 1:01 AM GMT

Nothing groundbreaking, just something people forget constantly, and I’m writing it down so I don’t have to re-explain it from scratch.

The world does not just ”keep working.” It keeps getting saved.

Y2K was a real problem. Computers really were set up in a way that could have broken our infrastructure, including banking, medical supply chains, etc. It didn’t turn into a disaster because people spent many human lifetimes of working hours fixing it. The collapse did not happen, yes, but it’s not a reason to think less of the people who warned about it — on the contrary. Nothing dramatic happened because they made sure it wouldn’t.

When someone looks back at this and says the problem was “overblown,” they’re doing something weird. They’re looking at a thing that was prevented and concluding it was never real.

Someone on Twitter once asked where the problem of the ozone hole had gone (in bad faith, implying that it — and many other climate problems — never really existed). Hank Green explained it beautifully: you don't hear about it anymore because it's being solved. Scientists explained the problem to everyone and found ways to counter it, countries cooperated, companies changed how they produce things. Thousands of people work for it, and they are winning.

Discussion has died down as we began to feel relatively safe. Now we can pretend that it was never serious.

You see this with AI too, already. There are people who are sure that the alignment problem is exaggerated because chatbots already care about people enough and do not give out bomb recipes. As if that were not a man-made miracle. Somehow people infer that the problem was inconsequential, not that we responded properly this one time.

Humans are wired to notice events, not non-events. People observe the post-intervention world and treat it as the baseline. Prevention is invisible.

Because of that, people who prevent bad outcomes often get treated as though they’ve done nothing, or even as though they were dramatic for worrying. Which is a pretty fucked up reward structure when you think about it.

If you work in safety (of... anything), you'll be told many times that your job is unimportant. Some people find it comforting to think that if someone succeeded, then there was never a real problem to begin with. Some are consciously fighting windmills and assume everyone else must be too. And most people just don’t think about catastrophes, you know, unless.

It’s also psychologically harder to respect routine prevention than cinematic heroics. People love the last-minute save, and they are not taught to clap for scheduled maintenance or tedious work.

But it’s still just wrong.

Most of civilization runs on maintenance and prevention. The world is being saved constantly. The world is actively being saved from something right now. You are held by myriads of careful hands! Rejoice!

Anyway, here are a few of my takeaways:

Panic is not automatically stupid just because the worst didn’t occur. Sometimes the concern is why it didn’t occur.
If someone in your life is doing risk mitigation, safety, governance, testing, regulation, etc., let them know you see it. When someone acts as a knight, accord them a knight’s regard.
And this one feels awkward, because I’m asking you to stop being so humble — if you do that kind of work, yapp about it.

Say out loud what the risk is, tell us what you did about it. Tell us what would have happened if it weren't for you.

If you do, you get a status boost, and others get to understand that they can do the same. Maybe even do the same and be rewarded.

If you don’t, people may eventually assume the danger was imaginary. If enough people assume that, they might stop funding, supporting, or doing the quiet work that keeps the floor from collapsing.

P.S. Please, let me know if someone wrote a similar thing better.

P.P.S. Was irritated by NOTHING EVER HAPPENS meme again. Also thought about "myriads of careful hands" -metaphor and liked it.

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