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Comment by fergie | Hacker News Reader

Interesting to see that the progressive journalist Ezra Klein was in attendance. Also Kaja Kallas. Not quite sure what to make of that.

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It's influential people talking to each other. If they don't go, they're missing out.

Having thought about it, I wonder if Klein, Ferris and maybe some of the others were there to give talks.

Doesn't seem like it :

> I’ve now been once. Everything is off the record, but I’ll just say that it is nothing like the ordinary conference where there are keynote lecturers you barely get to meet (if at all), or where you listen to some pre-packaged lecture.

> There are no speeches, presentations, panels, or anything like that. Everything is geared around small-group discussions with 6-10 people in a session or a lunch/dinner. You repeatedly find yourself in deep conversations about life/death/family/career issues with a handful of other people who happen to have great professional accomplishments (although none of that is even mentioned). The experience was both intense (lots of intense conversations) and refreshing (i.e., no hierarchy or status-signaling).

https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2022/02/16/hey-i-got-...

EDIT : or maybe it's more complex than that :

https://www.wired.com/story/how-peter-thiels-private-dialog-...

What exactly are they missing out on?

Connections, insider information, possibility to pitch your projects to very wealthy people etc.

Collusion.

Can also be.

Optionality. The power available to any one person to do anything in society is directly proportional to their genuine connections to others, even if brief.

Meetups in person with real connections happening (even if brief) create so many new possibilities for those in attendance.

The disappearance of in-person meetups (especially among developers) in the US after Covid is a tragedy - so much could be happening that is not.

The Manifesto for Agile Software Development only happened because a group of developers met up in person. They disagreed about nearly everything, but what they agreed about changed the industry.

So he is the new Epstein of the AI age, just without the obvious problem parts. He has his own antichrist-grade problems which are in a way worse.

> Interesting to see that the progressive journalist Ezra Klein was in attendance.

" " <— I think you dropped these — not certain where they go, though

Because he's a controlled opposition nepobaby with little actual intellectual merit, like many in the sector. Similar to Sam Harris, who's also on the list, with new atheism. Sometimes you just need some people to propagandize and all that's important is that they're loyal.

He's there just to make a certain group of people slightly more okay with some questionable views.

"progressive"

Journalists will often try to attend these things to get a scoop, the other attendees will be trying to influence that scoop. That may not definitely be the case here, but it's also not given they're plants or anything.

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