Here from HN, so discount my opinion as you will. This essay and my own thoughts on it allowed me to really get a grasp on something that has been at the edge of my mind for a while. As a warning, my understanding is that Inkhaven comes out of the effective altruism and rationalism space, so I'm carrying those preconceptions over as I'm reading this essay. I consider myself rational, as most people do, but I don't think I'm a rationalist with a capital R. Rationalism has not settled in my heart as the ideology through which I perceive and understand the world, more than any other ideology.

I think the crux of what I'm after is why this community would need a channel for coordinating walks. What's so wrong with letting such information be left unsaid? What if I found pleasure in the social technology of walking around and gathering up a group of people, or asking people during lunch, assuming you all ate together everyday, whether they wanted to go for a walk sometime that afternoon? To me, as someone outside the rationalist community, slack maximalism as described here, throws thousands of years of the social technology of small group interaction and pleasant small talk out the window in favor of online group chats.

I do understand the nature of the Inkhaven residency puts a time pressure on intellectual production and striving for the most effective methods is incentivized. But is it so much more effective overall to post a message in slack? What if, while I am walking around asking people if they want to walk around later, I engage in a five minute conversation with someone and learn about something I missed that is happening later on, which I would like to attend, but would not have known about otherwise? Of course, if we were all operating maximally in slack, then I could have read about that event in slack, and I never would have thought to ask about the walk, and waste so much time walking around in the first place!

What gets me I think is that to engage in slack maximalism is to commit to being always online in principle. I focus on the walking aspect here, because at some level, in some aspects, the point of a walk is to get away from the computer and get offline. Would it be considered uncouth if I didn't want to check slack for a today to focus on something, if I instead went around writing my thoughts down by hand with pen and paper, inquiring directly to others, wherever I might find them, whether they would like to take a stroll with me?

What if I don't want a thousand other people's voices in my head all day, what if I wanted to focus on my thoughts alone? Would I be precluded from effective participation in Inkhaven? Is there a way to engage with Rationalism without the internet, or is it defined by it's medium? I appreciate this essay because it allowed me to pinpoint one of my hesitations about rationalism, in that I don't want to spend so much time alone reading and replying to other people's posts on the computer, as opposed to engaging with them in real life. There's clearly value in that mode of engagement and communication, it's produced some interesting thoughts, but I also don't think it's for me, at least not as I understand it.