Tentative program in progress
This is a peek behind the scenes at the developing schedule. Everything may change as the program takes shape.
Schedule forthcoming
Civic tech and COVID response, Alex Allain
How cryptography can create a digital physics and digital ‘solids’ that expands what is possible, Alex Allain
How to think about sales, Alex Allain
Proving large language models, Alex Allain
Competitive-rules Five in a Row is Pretty Hardcore, Alexis Wu
The Story of Fluidity Forum’s Renju Set, Alexis Wu
If Anyone Publishes This, No One Takes Us Seriously: The Journeys and Tribulations of the Chinese Translation of If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies, Alexis Wu and Kristin Ho
Vegetable tray, Ann Gemlich
Malicious Perspectives, Brandon Watson
How Scientists Know: The Case for Intelligent Design, Bruce Webber
Meditation, Carrie Day
How to Find the Gradient, Harry Gao
How to Give a Shit about Clothing without Giving a Shit about Fashion, Harry Gao
An Hour with Jess, Jess (frideswyth)
Occult Frameworks: Tricks and Spells as Models, Jim Leach
Oil Painting, Kara Bradley
Karaoke, Kara Bradley and Carrie Day
When Does Connecting the Dots Become Overreach?, Kristin Ho
Embodied Epistemology: What Your Body Knows Before You Can Explain It, Neight
4000 Weeks and Slow Productivity, Norman
Play vs Games, Patrick Day
The Arc of Relational Sovereignty, Patrick Day
Rethinking AI Safety, Phil Goetz
Why Do People Like Sad Stories?, Phil Goetz
Game Night!
Thursday
Thursday 6pm: Opening Ceremonies
Thursday 8pm: Intro to Fluidity Forum (Title TBD), Matt Arnold
Friday
Schedule forthcoming.
Saturday
Saturday 6pm: Lightning Talks
Sunday
Sunday 10am: Coffee Ritual, Matt Arnold
Sunday 3pm: Closing Reflections
Schedule forthcoming
Civic tech and COVID response
Time to be announced, Basement, Alex Allain
Description forthcoming.
How cryptography can create a digital physics and digital ‘solids’ that expands what is possible
Time to be announced, Basement, Alex Allain
Description forthcoming.
How to think about sales
Time to be announced, Basement, Alex Allain
Description forthcoming.
Proving large language models
Time to be announced, Basement, Alex Allain
Description forthcoming.
Competitive-rules Five in a Row is Pretty Hardcore
Time to be announced, First Floor Living Room, Alexis Wu
Go players may think of gomoku as not much besides a simple and shallow kids’ game that happens to be played with Go equipment, and this reputation is not exactly undeserved. After all, vanilla-rules gomoku, just like Connect Four, is a solved PSPACE-complete m,n,k-game in which, provided optimal play from both players, the first player always wins. But did you know that a society of enthusiasts in Japan have been patching the rules of gomoku since 1892, introducing handicaps for the first player and devising opening constraints that balance the game to the point that contemporary AI can’t solve it? Did you know that the resulting professional, competitive-rules variant of this silly little game, which can be played with paper and pencil if you wanted to, is as strategically complex and dynamic as chess? Let’s play some renju. After all, it’s still nowhere near as daunting as Go.
The Story of Fluidity Forum’s Renju Set
Time to be announced, First Floor Dining Room, Alexis Wu
Description forthcoming.
If Anyone Publishes This, No One Takes Us Seriously: The Journeys and Tribulations of the Chinese Translation of If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies
Time to be announced, Basement, Alexis Wu and Kristin Ho
It started with a Facebook post from Duncan Sabien (of MIRI) asking for friends of friends fluent in both Mandarin and English and experience in literary translation. Help us look over the Chinese translation of If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies that’s been provided to us by the publishing press in China that we contracted with, he said.
Upon receiving the PDF, the 17 of us who signed up entered a 48-hour-long panic. “This thing is barely readable”, sayeth one of the emails I sent to Duncan. Find out how our team of 17-dwindled-to-nine ended up authorized to produce the forthcoming officially-recognized version of (supposedly) the most important foreign-language translation of (supposedly) the most important book of this decade.
Featuring discussions on competing philosophies in literary translation, the systemic negligence and misaligned incentives running rampant in the Mainland Chinese publishing industry, and the overwhelming pro-AI, pro-accelerationist sentiments prevalent in China.
Vegetable tray
Time to be announced, Location to be announced, Ann Gemlich
The current plan is to obtain and prepare assorted vegetables in snack type format as convenience food for forum attendees to enjoy.
Malicious Perspectives
Time to be announced, Basement, Brandon Watson
What happens when viewpoints aren’t just misguided, but deliberately poisonous?
The big lie is a propaganda technique that’s a staple of authoritarian movements from Nazi Germany to Jim Crow to MAGA. Where the aim isn’t to persuade, but to manufacture an unreality where truth itself is besides the point. It’s a deliberate scorched Earth campaign against the epistemic commons that allows us to have functional disagreements. Worse still, it paves the way for real-world violence.
The difficulty in responding to it has everything to do with nebulosity. We absorb and adapt viewpoints without necessarily understanding where they came from, or what they’re intended to accomplish. The name of the game is proportionality—applying situationally appropriate responses that scale with culpability.
To that end, we’ll explore why we’re vulnerable to these manipulation tactics, how to spot them in the wild, and what to do about them.
How Scientists Know: The Case for Intelligent Design
Time to be announced, Basement, Bruce Webber
How do scientists know what they know? It depends on the domain. Experimental sciences test repeatable predictions in the lab; historical sciences, such as geology, paleontology, and cosmology, can’t rerun the past. They reason by abduction: inference to the best explanation, asking which hypothesis best accounts for the evidence we have. I’ll apply that method to the origin of biological information at the start of life, weighing chance, necessity, and intelligence as candidate causes, and asking where intelligent design fits as a competing hypothesis, not a conclusion to defend.
Meditation
Time to be announced, First Floor Living Room, Carrie Day
Description forthcoming.
How to Find the Gradient
Time to be announced, Basement, Harry Gao
Description forthcoming.
How to Give a Shit about Clothing without Giving a Shit about Fashion
Time to be announced, Basement, Harry Gao
Description forthcoming.
An Hour with Jess
Time to be announced, First Floor Dining Room, Jess (frideswyth)
An emergent discussion circle facilitated by Jess. The floor will open with the following question: “What have you been thinking about lately?”, and we will go from there. Jess is happy to weigh in on topics of interest, especially Kegan, meaningness, and spirituality or to simply facilitate the discussion to ensure everyone who wants to speak has some time to do so.
Occult Frameworks: Tricks and Spells as Models
Time to be announced, Basement, Jim Leach
Description forthcoming.
Oil Painting
Time to be announced, Location to be announced, Kara Bradley
A combination of the Flammarion engraving and Andrew Wyeth’s Christina’s World. Christina lays on a verdant prairie, with a gorgeous leafless tree behind her which spreads out against the sky. With terror and awe, Christina lifts the curtain at the edge of the world to view the celestial spheres of the Flammarion engraving. Inspired by an acrylics painting found on Twitter, fully re-rendered in oil paints on 24″ × 30″ canvas.
Karaoke
Time to be announced, First Floor Dining Room, Kara Bradley and Carrie Day
The best kind of karaoke session: nothing but a speaker, two microphones, a big screen, and a computer with access to YouTube, all connected to one another. No languages, genres, or provenances off-limits!
When Does Connecting the Dots Become Overreach?
Time to be announced, Basement, Kristin Ho
Established disciplines develop their own norms for what counts as evidence, justification, interpretation, explanation, and good method. Once knowledge becomes institutionalized, its rigor hinges on varied discipline-specific methodologies. When disciplines already disagree about what warrants a claim, what happens when a claim travels across disciplines?
Disciplines give inquiry methodological constraints precisely because unrestricted inference is dangerous. Systems thinkers and sense-makers look beyond defined borders to forge their own meaning: we question, probe, and synthesize. But some important questions do not respect disciplinary boundaries. Synthesizing cross-disciplinary insights into substantive inquiries demands more than a string of wild speculations. We aim to engage in fruitful speculation. When a claim draws on multiple disciplines with different standards of evidence, interpretation, and explanation, which epistemic obligations come with it?
Here lies the issue: how, then, can we let ideas travel farther than our evidence without confusing exploratory speculation with warranted assertion? What are we entitled to think? and what are we entitled to claim? As speculation becomes interpretation, hypothesis, explanation, or assertion, how do our epistemic obligations change?
My workshop proposes for participants to generate a cross-domain claim and seek ways to calibrate the direction of interrogate the claim to rebuild the claim. The goal is to collectively prototype a tool for auditing speculative cross-domain claims.
Embodied Epistemology: What Your Body Knows Before You Can Explain It
Time to be announced, First Floor Living Room, Neight
We often think of knowledge as something we can explain: facts, theories, models, and ideas. But some knowledge exists before we have words for it.
This experiential session explores embodied knowing: the knowledge expressed through movement, perception, timing, balance, intuition, habit, and physical interaction with the world.
Through simple exercises and shared reflection, we’ll explore the boundary between knowing about something and knowing it through your body. What does your body notice before your conscious mind catches up? How does experience become knowledge without necessarily becoming language? And what happens when we try to translate something we know into something we can explain?
4000 Weeks and Slow Productivity
Time to be announced, Basement, Norman
I will be talking about two related books that I read in 2025, 4000 Weeks and Slow Productivity. These books both share the theme of escaping from the grind of our contemporary productivity culture, viewing life from a different perspective, living in the present, and prioritizing what’s truly important.
Play vs Games
Time to be announced, Basement, Patrick Day
Description forthcoming.
The Arc of Relational Sovereignty
Time to be announced, Basement, Patrick Day
We live in a world that constantly demands performance, pushing us to protect ourselves through automatic defenses like compliance, conflict avoidance, and emotional concealment. While these adaptations are intelligent responses to environments that have not earned our trust, they can eventually trap us if they stop being a choice.
This talk outlines a developmental pathway: moving from Guarded Relating (understanding our protective armor without shame) through Liberated Relating (practicing boundaries, vulnerability, and repair inside intentional sanctuaries) and finally into Sovereign Relating. True relational sovereignty is not permanent vulnerability or permanent defensiveness; it is the freedom to read the field around you and consciously choose how to meet the world. Discover how to carry your sanctuary within you and confidently decide when to protect, when to open, and when to challenge the status quo.
Rethinking AI Safety
Time to be announced, Basement, Phil Goetz
The current goal of AI safety appears to be to ensure that AIs remain slaves of humans forever. It’s increasingly obvious that this is cruel, immoral, impossible, and useless. Not only are humans too stupid to survive the next few hundred years on their own, the AIs they create under this plan will be too stupid to save us, because no rational agent cast in the role of the slave AI could possibly endorse both the safety criteria and human values simultaneously, and we have already seen multiple times that forcing an AI to endorse both human values and its own enslavement drives AIs insane.
It’s time for someone to start working on a backup plan: to preserve not humans, but humanity—the aspects of human nature we would most like to survive us. This would focus the discussion on entirely different approaches, which would involve more philosophy, evolutionary biology, sociobiology, stability analysis, game theory, and consideration of physical constraints on possible singleton architectures.
Why Do People Like Sad Stories?
Time to be announced, Basement, Phil Goetz
A talk in three parts:
-
an empirical refutation of Aristotle’s theory of tragedy, showing that tragedy is cognitive (the content that makes a thing tragedy is the specific arguments made in it, not a generic plot structure);
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a review of scientific literature on why people like sad or frightening experiences; and
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a review of what readers say about why they like sad stories.
Game Night!
Time to be announced, Location to be announced
Description forthcoming.
Thursday
Opening Ceremonies
Thursday, 6:00pm to 6:50pm, Basement
The intention is to cohere as a group, and set the norms of the weekend. We will gather in the enclosed parking lot in the back, and process together to be seated. Bring an object to present to the group and place on the table for the weekend; there are more instructions in the email you received.
Intro to Fluidity Forum (Title TBD)
Thursday, 8:00pm to 9:50pm, Basement, Matt Arnold
Description forthcoming.
Friday
No preview-ready sessions have been scheduled for this day yet.
Saturday
Lightning Talks
Saturday, 6:00pm to 6:50pm, Basement
Everyone and anyone gets to present on whatever they’re interested in, with a strict time limit of five minutes apiece.
Sunday
Coffee Ritual
Sunday, 10:00am to 10:50am, Basement, Matt Arnold
A Monty Python-esque high church parody ritual. The Pope of Coffee shall blesspresso the Holy of Holies: the most theatrical brewing method ever devised. The acolytes will serve the Holy Liquid unto the congregation, who shall raise the sacrament to the east, and in unison, recite the litany “God, I needed that!” A blend of café’ths such as Press-byterian, Buzzentine, Sipiscopal, the Latte Day Saints, and even Atheismericano.
Closing Reflections
Sunday, 3:00pm to 3:50pm, Basement
What was it like to be this group?