When: Wednesday, October 2, 6:30 PM
Where: The Territory (house), 5238 11th Ave NE, Seattle.
Why: I’ll be in Seattle as part of the Meetups Everywhere tour
Who: Anyone who wants. Please feel free to come even if you feel awkward about it, even if you’re not “the typical SSC reader”, even if you’re worried people won’t like you, etc.
How: For more info, contact orborde[at]gmail or see the Facebook event.
Darn! I’m in Seattle for a brief business trip, but my flight leaves at 7:20 tonight. I should have checked the meetups everywhere schedule and stayed an extra night!
I had a great time, some of the regular discord users met up as well. I was genuinely surprised at how large the turnout was (and how awesome The Territory was). I was Connor and I hope I didn’t offend anybody or overtalk. Really appreciate everyone I met.
Over 100 people showed up! If you missed it or want to come again we have weekly dinners at The Territory on Mondays at 7pm (normally more like 10-15 people than 100+).
Awesome event, as always! I do have a question about people’s recollection, though, and would love to get Scott’s thoughts on one amazing phenomena I noticed:
There were apparently over 100 people in attendance who we can assume are usually very interested in both evidence-supported arguments and fact-checking, especially during a disagreement, and yet during the entire six hours I was there I never saw anyone looking at their phone during a conversation
By mutual silent accord, we all just…didn’t do that.
Not during disagreements.
Not when someone wondered out loud about an totally checkable fact.
Not when someone would reference a specific essay or article and someone else would say, “Oh, what was that? I’d like to read it, too.”
We all just stopped doing the check-your-super-computer-in-your-pocket thing that we almost certainly do in our day-to-day lives.
As far as I’m aware, avoiding the use of a phone to look something up wasn’t a posted house rule, or anything like that, and was never directly addressed.
Does this phenomena occur at other meetups? Any speculation as to why?
(As for me, I’m Christina, I have long, dark curls to my waist and was wearing a black dress, red sweater, and striped socks, stayed pretty late talking and talking and talking. )
I remember fact-checking “number of android devices” in the world with a quick phone-google. I suspect it might have something to do with charitability. There wasn’t that much CW-type discussion, so a lot of people were just being given the benefit of the doubt. I see a good reason for why we do this too. People who are steeped in a culture war have a huge list of “dishonest/untrue claims typically made by outgroup”, and when nobody pattern matches it to “obvious lies I’ve heard a thousand times” it winds up just being taken in good faith. “Nobody fact checking others” is a decent sign that nobody has said anything egregiously wrong – at least until things get extremely technical.