My First LessOnline

Over the weekend, S and I attended LessOnline, “A festival of writers who are wrong on the Internet.”

One of the sessions I attended was about making lists, run by Dynomight, author of, “How I learned to stop worrying and structure all writing as a list.

I realized at the beginning of the session that although I feel no writers block for personal writing, I feel it about technical writing, where I worry about being judged.

If I use the list technique as well as drawing more pictures, earlier, I might be able to vanquish the block.

In addition to attending many sessions, I really enjoyed hanging out in an open area, allowing spontaneous conversations to just happen.

Among those were conversations with a couple of other St. John’s College alumni — I call us the “Johnnierats” affectionately. I’m sure the overlap between St. John’s and this community is bigger than just the three of us.

There were a lot of niche famous people at LessOnline, names you might expect in a gathering like this.

One of the best attended sessions was Scott Alexander’s about investigating The Miracle of the Sun.

S was there as well, and she had a good time, too, for which I was really glad.

I also appreciated her perspective — she wasn’t as star struck as I was, and spoke more freely.

She wondered to me about how Robin Hanson’s futarchy proposal would work, which made me realize I didn’t fully understand it either, so we looked it up and got some better understanding.

This reminds me that coming in with a fresh mind and asking good questions is great for learning.

It was a great weekend — excited to do it again next year.