# Every ACX/LW House Party

*The following is a fictionalized account of the *[*ACX/LW weekend*](https://substack.com/home/post/p-191233515)* that happened 20th-22nd of March 2026. It’s assembled from different stories and reports from participants, taking their perspectives and shaping it all into the style and voice of*[*the Bay Area House Party Series*](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/sota-on-bay-area-house-party)*with some artistic license.*

You almost didn’t come.

This is not unusual. You almost don’t go to most things. The sofa has never once demanded that you make small talk. The sofa is, in every measurable way, a safer bet than forty strangers in Munich.

It’s probably going to be normal and boring anyway. Just people in a room. Nothing remarkable.

Then again, there is a reason you spend so much time lurking on lesswrong and acx, there is almost a feeling of community about it, people who notice the same details and make the same jokes about things.

A whole weekend, though. What if nobody talks to you. What if everybody talks to you and you run out of things to say by Saturday noon.

Your arguments for staying home aren’t even internally consistent. If you were a better rationalist, you’d update on this.

If it’s really bad, you can always just leave early.

You check the group chat one last time. The organizer has posted a poll: “When will you arrive? Friday evening / Saturday morning / Saturday afternoon.”

Someone has responded: “I feel terrible voting on this. I can’t assign a probability to discrete options. Can I please provide a distribution?”

The organizer just wanted to know whether to buy Friday snacks.

You go. You’re in Munich.

[![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!MdYJ!,w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F41e068d3-41bf-4f48-be09-e4b9e082fb63_1600x901.jpeg)](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!MdYJ!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F41e068d3-41bf-4f48-be09-e4b9e082fb63_1600x901.jpeg)

Maybe thirty people tonight. A guy in glasses turns to someone near the drinks and puts on a voice: “So. Tell me about your AI startup.”

It’s a bit. He’s doing the Bay Area House Party thing: a fictional blog series where a narrator attends San Francisco house parties and every guest is pitching an improbable startup. Probably half the room has read all nine installments.

“Actually, it’s going pretty well. We’re hoping to close our Series A.”

Beat.

He does not know where to go from here. Someone else steps in: “He was doing a bit. There’s a blog series. It’s satire. Mostly.”

“Oh,” says the stranger. “But I do have an AI startup.”

“Yeah. We’re getting that... That’s actually pretty cool, so what is it that you do?”

* * *

You drift through the room. Someone uses the word “mimetic” and a few heads turn. At another cluster, “Schelling points.” More heads. Then someone mentions Ted Chiang.

Every rationalist in earshot turns their head. Eight people, maybe nine, swiveling toward the sound like a flock of birds changing direction mid-flight.

You are fascinated. You casually drop “nootropics” into a sentence you aren’t even particularly committed to.

Heads turn.

Someone catches your eye. “One person says something uncommon but shared in this space. Everyone turns. And now we start talking about the turning. This could only happen with these people, it’s a community bonding moment.”

“And the fact that we’re now identifying it as a community bonding moment...”

“--is itself a community bonding mo--”

“--yes, which means--”

“--infinite recursion--”

Everyone stops. Simultaneously. Like a program hitting its stack limit. The recursion terminates by mutual, wordless consent.

“Chocolate tasting?” says someone, and everybody moves.

* * *

The chocolate tasting is the first organized event of the weekend. The organizer stands near a table with seven numbered chocolates.

“Thank you everyone for coming. This is awesome.” He means it. “I proposed this text” (of course there had been a list of texts to read for common discussion) “because this group tends to be very heady. We’re in person. We’re connecting as people here. Getting back to our senses a little is always nice.”

You are watching a room of spreadsheet builders and probability theorists being told to get back to their senses. Several of them look like they have never been to their senses.

“Take a snapshot of how you feel right now,” he says. “Then take the chocolate. Smell it. Let it melt in your mouth. Watch what that does to your state. You’re not just looking for bitterness and sweetness. You’re watching what it does to you.”

“I’ll come around and prompt you. Questions like: what mythical creature would snack on this chocolate? If this was a magic potion, what effect would it have?”

You glance around the room. These are unusual questions for a tasting. Aesthetic, almost woo. The kind of thing that would get sideways looks in most groups. Nobody flinches. Thirty people sit with chocolate mythical creatures and potion effects like these are perfectly standard analytical tools.

“Has everyone done the reading? Can we do hand signals?” You look up. You have skimmed the article, but it was very long, and there were six of them. “I know not everyone has, but please expose yourselves so we can do a little group shaming.”

Group shaming. Over assigned reading. For a chocolate tasting.

But strangely, there is no anxiety. You ask your brain, hey, what’s up with that?

Your brain explains: The person who just proposed mythical creature questions about chocolate considers the idea that anyone might be shamed for not reading it so absurd that he can just joke about it. Threat level literally zero.

Your brain has already moved on.

Small groups form. Chocolate number three is passed around. The person next to you has closed their eyes and is concentrating hard enough to be meditating, so you close your eyes too.

You let the chocolate melt.

It does something you didn’t expect. You expected to taste chocolate. You do taste chocolate. But then the chocolate does something else, something that is no longer about flavor. It becomes a temperature, and the temperature is a place, and for a fraction of a second you are somewhere quiet and damp, and it’s raining but you don’t mind. Maybe some straw?

“What did you get?” asks the woman to your left, who has been typing into her phone’s notes app for thirty seconds.

“Something wet. Quiet. Maybe a door closing against weather.”

She nods. “I got an old barn. Wood. Something used to live there but doesn’t anymore. There’s hay on the floor.”

Huh.

Across the group: “Mine cracked. Like stepping on ice on a lake and hearing the split under your foot but you’re not running.”

The fourth person: “I got nothing. It’s chocolate. It’s fine.”

Nobody treats the elaborate descriptions as remarkable. Nobody treats the bare one as insufficient. The range of responses is just the range.

* * *

Saturday. The group is bigger now. Forty people, give or take. Someone has made coffee. The venue smells like grounds and yesterday’s chocolate. The event organizer is already up, rearranging chairs for the morning sessions, checking the program board is visible from the entrance, pointing a late arrival toward the kitchen. You noticed him doing something similar last night during the chocolate tasting, keeping one eye on the room, making sure sight lines worked, steering people who looked lost toward conversations. The weekend has this quality of running smoothly that looks effortless, and you’re starting to see the work underneath.

* * *

You walk into a conversation about GPU prices. Not tech commentary, this is personal. These are people whose research, whose half-trained models, whose side obsessions live or die by compute access.

“Have you seen H100 spot prices?”

“Don’t.”

“I’m just saying--”

“Please don’t.”

Someone lowers their voice: “Don’t talk about GPUs too loudly. Zuckerberg will hear you and come steal them.”

The laugh ripples through in layers. Some people get the callback. Others find the image of Zuckerberg materializing in Munich to confiscate hardware inherently funny.

You wait for someone to identify this as a community bonding moment.

Nobody does.

Progress.

* * *

You turn a corner. Four people are sitting in absolute silence, eyes closed, a single piece of chocolate on the table between them. You stop. Nobody moves.

One opens their eyes.

“This one is like a horse,” she says. “Very big. But also like smoke, after a building that has been a home for a long time has burnt down.”

The others nod slowly. Another opens their eyes: “A cathedral. Not abandoned, just between services. The stone floor is cold under bare feet and the light is coming in from the wrong direction, through a window that should face east but doesn’t, so everything is lit backwards and the shadows pool where the warmth should be. There’s incense, but from a long time ago.”

You back away slowly. You don’t want to interrupt something that might be sacred.

* * *

Someone mentions Alpha School. Heads turn.

Two parents are hosting a session about a school built around agency and mastery for kids who need something the standard system isn’t providing. The session was scheduled for a fixed time slot. It runs more than double the allotted time because nobody can stop talking.

One of the parents came from Amsterdam and she mentions how she misread the date. She showed up a full week early. On the wrong weekend, she ended up finding her first supporter and, scrolling through the attendee list, her potential co-founder.

“In expected-value terms,” she says, “this was probably the best scheduling mistake I’ve ever made.” Nobody responds with platitudes. They respond with questions, with contacts, with ideas.

While this is happening, you notice someone new hovering at the edge of the group. The posture of a person who wants to join but doesn’t know if they’re allowed. You know this posture. You were making it twelve hours ago.

The event organizer notices within seconds. Of course he does. Peels off, starts a quiet side conversation, guides the newcomer toward a smaller cluster nearby. The newcomer’s shoulders drop. The whole thing takes less than a minute.

* * *

A group is discussing the news and what the optimal balance between staying informed and staying sane is, when someone stakes out what they clearly believe is uncontested ground: “At least we can all agree that short-form video is unambiguously toxic.”

“Well, actually...”

“When someone spends a lot of money optimizing a tool for a very specific function, you can often turn that tool around and use it for your own purpose,” they say, already warming up. “Short-form video algorithms are phenomenally good at capturing attention. That’s why they’re destructive, right? But the first few minutes genuinely have a calming effect, depending on your state when you start. And you can use this!”

Something shifts in your head. The room blurs slightly and what you see instead is a Bay Area house party, a pitch circle forming, an entrepreneur gesturing with quiet conviction while investors lean forward in their chairs.

They’re proposing a method. Use short-form video as an onramp to meditation. Tame your algorithm. Teach it specifically what calms you, not what grabs you. Your brain supplies the powerpoint and laserpointer. “Create an environment where your future stressed self, the version of you picking up the phone at 11pm, will encounter something helpful instead of something designed to keep you scrolling. Then stop, with precise awareness of how long the effect stays beneficial.”

Someone pushes back: sure, you intend to stop after a few minutes, but the whole point of those platforms is that you won’t. The investor question forms in your head: where does the money come from? There is no business model because the best version of this works against the people with money.

You wait for the pitch to collapse, the way they always do in the posts when the economics hit the wall. But nothing collapses. Nobody pitched anything. A person just suggested a way to use a tool, and it was a good suggestion, and the conversation moves on.

You wander off, genuinely unsure whether you’ve just been half-convinced to download TikTok.

* * *

The chocolate group has migrated, spread out into the hallway, blocking it.

[![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!tw0Z!,w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F19c9a7b4-b888-4e34-9af6-e538704fc5a2_1600x901.jpeg)](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!tw0Z!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F19c9a7b4-b888-4e34-9af6-e538704fc5a2_1600x901.jpeg)

Sitting in a loose circle, eyes half-closed, sharing increasingly wild images they associate with each chocolate. Looking at them, your mind overlays the image from the Bay Area House Party series: hooded figures seated in a pentagram, the Urbanist Coven conducting their rites. A coven is forming.

Someone mentions buying an absurdly large quantity of chocolate for an event a while back.

“When exactly did you buy it?” someone asks.

Confused looks. This is an oddly specific follow-up to a casual aside.

The person asking pulls out their phone. On it: a graph. Cocoa commodity futures, 2022 through 2026. The line goes up and then it goes very, very up. Prices roughly tripled, then kept climbing to the highest nominal level in recorded history. For a few months, cocoa futures outperformed Bitcoin.

“You got a good price, actually,” says the person with the graph. “By March 2024 you’d have paid triple.”

Of course. Of course someone at a chocolate tasting has a cocoa futures chart on their phone. Of course the question “when did you buy it?” was not small talk but a prompt for market analysis.

* * *

The group needs to split into discussion groups. People need to be matched by familiarity and interest.

Someone proposes a show of hands.

“That’s a one-dimensional projection of a multidimensional preference space,” says a person who has clearly been waiting their entire life to say this sentence in a room that would appreciate it.

The discussion lead, grinning, suggests that people could physically arrange themselves into a two-dimensional graph. One axis for familiarity. One axis for interest.

She’s joking. Obviously she’s joking.

People start moving. They actually want to form the graph. Chaos and confusion ensues, the groups just end up being assigned randomly.

These people have now demanded probability distributions for polls, produced cocoa futures charts at tastings, and tried to physically become a scatter plot.

* * *

The coven, again. Five people in a circle, eyes closed, producing descriptions that sound like dispatches from a dimension adjacent to this one.

“Like the color blue, if blue were a sound. Not any blue. Cobalt. And not any sound. A bell, but made of wood.”

Someone passing by stops. “Genuine question. Why does this matter? It’s chocolate. Why are you sitting in a hallway with your eyes closed making up metaphors?”

The coven does not seem offended. But something shifts. The dreamy energy drops away, and what’s underneath is nerd. Pure, enthusiastic nerd.

“High-level problem solving doesn’t just require abstract thought. At the highest levels, it requires embodied understanding. Most scientists describe their biggest breakthroughs as something physical clicking into place. We’re sharpening the ability to notice, to attend, to distinguish between things that are similar but different, in a domain where the feedback is immediate and the input is incredibly rich. So this is what analytical thinking looks like when you point it at something you can actually taste instead of an abstraction.”

Another person: “It also is genuinely a lot of fun to do this with other people. And, also, chocolate?”

The enthusiasm was genuine and a little childlike, and that’s what made it convincing. Better food mediation than TikTok, anyway. You’re still not convinced about the TikTok thing. You move on.

* * *

Late afternoon. Another shared moment. You don’t even remember what triggered it. Someone said something, everyone recognized it at once. Someone starts to say “This is--”

“We need a name for this,” says someone else. “It keeps happening.”

“Bonding recursion,” someone proposes. The room nods.

And then the room goes still. Naming a complicated social phenomenon that kept recurring, analyzing it together, insisting on getting the label exactly right: this is itself something that could only happen here, with these people. The label applies to itself the instant it’s spoken.

“Bonding recursion,” someone says again, and the gag retires on its best joke.

* * *

Sunday. Blood on the Clocktower. A social deduction game where a village tries to identify hidden defectors through discussion and voting. Werewolf, but optimized until every added rule makes it better.

You are drawn in. Actual fun, the kind where you forget you’re supposed to be watching yourself have fun. You have a theory about the poisoner that you’re 60% confident about. You’re arguing with someone and you realize you have not once thought about whether your arguing is making you look weird.

And then you do the thing.

“Should we factor in the storyteller’s physical movements during the eyes-closed phase?”

The table goes quiet. You know this quiet. You’ve caused it before.

The storyteller looks at you.

“Of course you should factor that in,” they say, grinning. “That’s part of the game.”

“Just keep in mind that I know you might be tracking my movements. So I’ll sometimes move specifically to throw you off. I’ve been doing this all game, by the way.”

The thing that makes you weird at other game nights is just how people play here.

Brain?

Your brain, quietly: Yeah. I know.

* * *

And then it’s just over. You leave the building.

The introverted exhale. This was very nice. This was also enough humans for the next three months.

You’re walking down the street in Munich. Random people. A couple with a stroller. An older man with a newspaper. And there’s a flicker of something you weren’t expecting. An impulse to recognize them, to include them in your space, like they are part of your team, a willingness toward strangers that has no business being there.

Brain?

Your brain, sounding as surprised as you are: Don’t look at me. I didn’t do that.

Three days of that and something recalibrated. The stranger-default moved. People went from strangers to potential friends, and you didn’t decide this. It just happened. And it also already starts dissipating, you’re back in the city now.

This might have been something like... home. Or might become that.

So maybe not three months. Maybe you’ll check for the next meetups in a week.

Or maybe two weeks. Let’s not get hasty.