Well, there's three kinds of meetups I can imagine.

(1) You go for the intellectual content of the meeting. This is what I was hoping for in Santa Barbara. For the reasons I mentioned above, I now think it's unlikely that the intellectual content will ever be worthwhile unless somebody does some serious planning/preparation.

(2) You go for the social enjoyment of the meeting. I confirmed my suspicion in SB that I personally wouldn't socially mesh with the LW crowd, although maybe this was a small sample size thing.

(3) You go to meet interesting people. In my life I've had a lot of short-term and a few long term friends with whom I've had fun. But I've probably only known 3-4 truly interesting people, in the sense that they challenged my thinking and were pleasing enough to spend a lot of time getting to know well.

Any of the above would get me to go to a meetup, although I'd be most excited about (3).