Just Finished Our Zoom Conversation, and It Was Such a Pleasure!

Great seeing those of you who were willing to be seen, great having all of you (about 60 people total) on board, and many thanks to Michael, Will, and Orin for participating! I hope to have another of these soon—much hope you can join us again!

Comments

[wnoise]

I had to drop out partway through. I hope you can get the recording up relatively soon.

[joeycolemanca]

Thank you for the opportunity to listen into your conversation. It was very insightful, I joined around :32 and look forward to the replay of the first half.

[Andrew Dhuey]

I enjoyed it very much. Two suggestions:

1) Have participants send questions or suggested topics to Eugene only via the direct chat feature on Zoom (thus you don't have to weed through all of the public chat comments to find them).

2) Boot and block a troll immediately if they abuse public chat or their webcam. None yesterday, thankfully, but they will appear. That's what they do.

[Peter Gerdes]

Are you going to post a recording for those of us who couldn’t make it?

[Jeff Walden]

It might be nice, next time, to have two separate channels: one purely dedicated to realtime questions, or to questions for top-line consideration, or elaborations on current question answers; and one for just pure discussion backchannel. This would probably require using more than just Zoom's builtin messaging setup, which seems to allow 1) exactly one forum for messages sent to everyone, and 2) individual channels for participant-to-participant messaging, but no ability to have multiple all-group fora.

For example, at one point EV (?) mentioned how much worse this would have been had it happened thirty years ago. And that seemed like a very good time for me to mention https://humanprogress.org/article.php?p=2531 as an analysis of that question, but for 25 years ago. Useful information for sure. But, something to have to read around if you're looking for pertinent questions to discuss.

Fun time all around for sure, tho! But I think we're doing something wrong if EV has to BYOB...

[Bill R]

The audio was too choppy for me, although it was nice to see your faces. Looking forward to the recording.

[Leo Marvin]

Interesting and enjoyable. Thanks for doing it.

I don't know how common this was, but on my cheapo monitor speakers Michael was considerably louder than the other three. Sufficiently so that I lowered the volume each time he spoke. then raised it again for the next contributor. If no one else experienced that, then forget I said anything. I'll cope. But if others found the same thing, then for next time I assume a quick sound check at the beginning to adjust the input levels, or if Zoom doesn't provide individual controls then each speaker's distance from the microphone, would correct it.

[arch1]

Thanks. Stimulating, enjoyable and well-facilitated (including the "leave-them-wanting-more" approach to drawing it to a close)