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Where are we?
I'm enjoying lesswrong.com a lot so far, and it sounds like the last LW/OB meetup was a lot of fun. MBlume asks:
So far there've only been LW/OB meetups in the Bay area -- is there any way we could plot the geographic distribution of LW members and determine whether there are other spots where we could get a good meetup going?
I don't think that there are so many of us that we need an automated system for this; the threading system should be enough.I'll post a few top-level comments for various parts of the world, and encourage you all to follow up and tell us where you are. Ideally, find a comment that has where you live in it already and add "me too".
I'll try to keep this post updated with useful things. I can't wait to play Paranoid Debating!
Edit: Please don't post where you live in a new top-level comment! Try to find a comment referring to the rough geographic region you live in and post under that; it'll make this post easier to navigate. I've divided the world into three (North America, Europe, everywhere else); posting under those comments will help. Thanks!
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Comments (299)
The Less Wrong visit map:
And some more detail:
(edit: credit to Google Analytics for all of the heavy lifting in this comment)
This map would be better if it was based on visits divided by population. Currently it shows America as much darker than Britain even though Britain has about the same per capita LW readership... (and a considerably higher readership per landmass).
(Of course, getting the population for each country would be a right pain, so I don't blame you.)
This map would be best of all if it were an LW cartogram!
Is there an updated version of this? I don't have the know-how to do it myself.
Post in this thread if you live in Europe.
Post here if you live in Sweden.
Umeå, Sweden.
Same here! Are you still around?
Stockholm, Sweden.
Härnösand, Sweden.
Uppsala, Sweden.
Gothenburg, Sweden.
People of Belgium, unite behind me ... if any.
I'm from Belgium
Post in this thread if you live in France.
I live in Paris
Yvelines, next to Paris
Right next to Paris myself, Palaiseau en fait.
Greetings, from Toulouse.
I am too.
I live near Carcassonne
I'm in Paris
I live in London, UK.
I'm in London, and till we organize something I recommend the UKTA/ExtroBritannia meets.
Another Londoner here. By power of statistics there should be enough of us to organize it even the next weekend if we wanted.
If anybody else wants to organize that, go ahead, I don't really have much experience in this. But in case there are no other volunteers I'll do it. So if any Londoners interested in rationalist meetup in some coffeeshop or pub, just email me at Tomasz.Wegrzanowski@gmail.com If there will be 5 or more interested people, I'll suggest some times and places and hopefully we can set the first meetup this way.
The first one is always the hardest, the next one will hopefully be less ad hoc than that.
I'd go for a weekday evening in a pub in town to kick off...
Weekdays are useless to anyone not actually in London - even close by, it would take too long to travel in after work.
Also, pubs are hugely overrated for serious talk, where you want less echoes, less music, less TV and less shouty people. Try a Starbucks?
Edit: meeting near a station or at least Zone 1 tube is also a plus.
I'm up for that - Tue/Wed/Thu (tho not in silly season). Alternatively, a weekend midday/afternoon, unless you'd like to come out to Windsor. :)
The post you're replying to is very old, but see Calling LW Londoners - a meetup on Sunday 2011-01-02 seems likely!
Fantastic. Thanks for that :)
Reading, UK, and UKTA is excellent.
I'm in Slough - work in London. This thread is a couple years old, though, any current activity?
Hi. Yes, it's still going. The last meeting "The neuropsychology of self control - and its implications for AI and brain simulation" was on 13 November. See my links above for future meetings, and hope to see you there :)
Cool. Thanks. That does sound interesting.
I did check out the group page, but I noticed that you can't see the calendar unless you're a member... but I don't like to join unless I can see the calendar of past events (to see if they're local/relevant/interesting etc)... catch-22 sometimes ;)
Of course, I could join, look, then unjoin - but that's far more effort... especially when you have to be approved first.
Hmm... that does seem a little foot-shooting, unless you join too many groups and want a reason not to ;)
There's nothing in the ExtroBritannia list's calendar though, but you can see the events on the blog.
That would be an accurate description of my life ;)
Currently I am interested in way too many things - and have a habit of joining up to all of them to see if I'm interested enough to continue going along...
Unfortunately I am limited by time from going to everything I'd like.
I'm in London
Devon, UK. London meets are a bit far at the moment, but I may be moving.
I'm also in Edinburgh, Scotland.
me too, University of Edinburgh
London as well.
Eastbourne, East Sussex
Edit: Also Oxford, UK in termtime.
Post in this thread if you live in Finland.
Tampere, but a Hungarian.
Helsinki here.
I live in Oulu.
Oulu as well.
Helsinki
Norwich, UK.
Newport, South Wales (Casnewydd, De Cymru). Rarely in London, willing to travel to Bristol or Swansea.
Cambridge, UK.
Me too! (But gjm knew that).
I'm mildly surprised that so far there's only the two of us.
Copenhagen (city, not snuff).
Copenhagen.
Germany, NRW, Gütersloh
Rostock, Germany.
Cologne, Germany
Xixidu, are you interested in a mini-lw-meetup in nrw?
Berlin, Germany
Munich, Germany
me too.
Stuttgart, Germany
Slovakia, Bratislava
Riga, LV.
Anybody from Romania?
Oslo, Norway
Oslo, Norway.
This post is a good idea, but wouldn't it be easier for everyone to join the less wrong facebook group? I'm not positive, but I think the geographical sorting can then be easily viewed automatically. You could then invite the subgroups to their own group, and easily send group messages.
I thought of that, but quite a few folk seemed to object to the idea of using Facebook here, so I thought this was the safest option. I'm in the Facebook group too, as Paul Crowley.
The location I'm providing is a little vague because I want to say where I am, but posting that as a female almost guarantees a loss of anonymity in various contexts. I'm in the Western United States. For those using find in page, my region includes:
Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Hawaii, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, Utah, Washington, and Wyoming.
Would it be a good idea to bump this to the front page every now and then?
Maybe a link to it in the text of the monthly open thread?
And to the Welcome thread.
Post in this thread if you live in the US or Canada.
Victoria, BC
Also Victoria, BC.
(Same person as user "Eoghanalbar", which I'm not using anymore.)
Also Victoria, BC. Home of the sasquatch and pacific tree octopus, and where the conservative party is named 'the liberals'.
Washington DC.
Im in ur capital advizin ur prezident.
glad I'm not the only Bayesian who loves OotS
rest assured...
In the NoVA/DC area as well.
Me too.
I'm not officially in DC, but I'm close enough to have a metro stop within walking distance of my house.
Within 160 miles or ~3 hours of DC according to Mapquest.
In between DC and Baltimore
Likewise, in the DC area.
Montreal, Canada
Québec, Qc, Canada.
Post in this thread if you live within what you consider easy driving distance from New York City.
NYC area: Rob Zahra, AlexU, and Michael Vassar sometimes...
I live in NYC proper.
Brooklyn
ay, North Kersey for me and I am in the city 3-4 days a week
I live in central New Jersey.
Me too: Princeton.
Long Island, work in NYC
Montana
Post in this thread if you live in the Pacific Northwest.
I live in Redmond, WA.
I'm in central Oregon
Post in this thread if you live within driving distance of Dallas, TX.
Waco, TX. (Prompt reply, I know...)
Sugar Land (Houston area), not exactly day trip material but with sufficient notice I could make something.
I'm currently in Tyler, TX.
I live in Richardson.
I just caught this when I saw Silas post in the sidebar. I don't know if you're still around LW, but I live in Richardson as well, although I plan to move to the Bay Area soon.
I live in Mount Pleasant, TX.
Waterloo, Ontario.
Seattle, WA
Calgary, Alberta.
Ottawa, Canada.
I'm moving to Ottawa on May 1st.
How many people do we need to have quorum?
One representative from each of the twelve colonies.
Can I be Caprica?
Certainly! And I shall be the Vogon representative.
Ottawa, Canada
Phoenix, Arizona
Wohoo! Glendale.
I'm mostly a lurker, but I'm in Toronto.
Canada, Ottawa.
Post in this thread if you live in New England
I attend the University of New Hampshire in Durham, NH, and live on campus.
I am in Massachusetts about every other weekend on average, and I considered posting this in "Massachusetts." I could easily make a MA meetup.
Post in this thread if you live in Massachusetts
I live in Amherst, MA.
Should we also be posting how mobile we are? I rely on the bus system and the goodwill of my roommate to get around. I couldn't attend an event in, say, Boston unless there was carpooling.
Medford, MA. Enjoyed the OB meetup on the MIT campus, which was convenient since I work across the street. I'd be up to renting a car and driving to Amherst or New Hampshire for a meetup on a weekend, especially if there was time for hiking.
Cambridge, MA. Rarely venture beyond Boston metro area.
However, I'll in the Pioneer Valley on Apr. 17-19, if anyone is interested in a meetup that Sunday (19th), say NoHo or Amherst.
The bus is less friendly on weekends, but I could get as far as Amherst Center (and back) without spending unduly long waiting for multiple buses.
I live in South Deerfield, MA and work in Northampton
Contact me at EconomicProf@Yahoo.com
I live in Bedford, MA
I live in Plymouth, MA during the summer, and am able to get to Boston.
West Hartford, CT.
<tumbleweed>
Post in this thread if you live in California
Post in this thread if you live in the Bay Area.
I live in San Francisco.
I live in Santa Clara, but I don't have a car, so...
I live in Marin County.
I live in Redwood City, at least for now.
I live in Berkeley.
I'm in Palo Alto
Palo Alto (it might technically be EPA)
I live in Berkeley.
I live in Davis.
I live in seaside,ca.
Hey there. I think our current closest regular meetup is at Tortuga in Mountain View, which is to say -- miles away from you. If you're inclined to try hosting your own meetup, I strongly suspect you'd at least hear from some UCSC folk.
Harrisburg, PA
Florida, the central part.
Nashville, Tennessee
New Brunswick, Canada.
Minneapolis, Minnesota
St. Paul, Minnesota -- I see there was a meetup in 2009 but could't find anything else... how many Minnesotans are there? Can we get together?
Post in this thread if you're in the Philadelphia area.
Within 28 miles or 40 minutes of Philadelphia according to Mapquest, which sounds basically accurate to me.
I'm in Philadelphia.
Albuquerque, New Mexico.
Why are people voting the comments on this post up and down? 7 completely neutral comments expressing where people live have been voted down to zero. That's crazy.
cipher and I removed the upvotes from our own comments since we were making lots of comments to give structure to the thread, and did not feel it was fair for us to earn karma from them.
Don't worry about it, we'll get rid of karma for self-upvotes later.
So (in other words) you want to require actual upvotes (from others) to earn karma, rather than merely avoiding downvotes. Are you sure this is a good idea?
Why shouldn't one's own vote count?
Because right now user karma correlates more strongly with post count than with post quality. You get what you measure, so that needs to be fixed.
But why shouldn't it correlate with post count? That way the incentive structure encourages active participation; under the system Eliezer prefers, people might be tempted to hold back.
Is this there a need to correct things in this direction? Are we getting too many low-quality posts and comments?
(I also think that the automatic self-upvote makes sense on the grounds that making a comment should itself be considered a statement about what sort of comments the user would like to see more of. If not, the user can always undo the upvote.)
That depends on whether or not total karma is supposed to indicate anything meaningful. As is, it will mostly indicate how early a member joined and how active they've been.
Since comments tend to get upvoted more often than downvoted, why would people hold back? A comment's 'expected karma' would still be positive :)
We can still add an extra "post count" to a user's profile if anybody needs to know that.
And no, I don't think that this site is glutted with low-quality comments, but it's young and I already can't keep track of all that's being said, so a gentle nudge in the "quality over quantity" direction would be a Good Thing.
Unless you're confident that later will be soon, it still seems to make sense to work around the system for now.
BTW, MBlume, nice bit of mind reading, I was impressed by that!
Dublin, Ireland.
Limerick, Ireland.
Anyone from Russia? I live in Moscow.
Rostov-na-Donu here :)
I know a couple of guys here in Rostov (was quite surprised to discover them!) who are interested in That Which Cannot Be Named Yet. They could definitely learn a lot from reading LW and the OB corpus, but unfortunately their English isn't good enough.
(BTW, I didn't think you were from Moscow, thought you're an immigrant -- your English is way too good for a regular Russian.)
Me too.
I'm from Bashkortostan, but now I live in Dolgoprudny, Moscow Oblast because, you know, I'm a student and my university is located there.
Post in this thread if you're female. (I'm not; just wondering.)
I'm female. Why is this a matter of interest?
I'm curious about who reads the site, I guess.
Los Angeles, Ca
hey, just so you know, there's some other southern californians hanging out down-thread
Canberra, Australia.
Brisbane, Australia
Canberra, Australia, too.
I'd love to meet any of you near Atlanta, GA!
Yup, me too.
I'm from Nigeria.
Where in Nigeria?
I live in Lagos, but I'm currently at my University; it's in Ogun state.
You're (presumably) Nigerian as well (Yoruba from your name)?
Haha, I live in Lagos too. One day we'll have a proper meetup :)
Okay. :)
Post in this thread if you live outside Europe, the US, or Canada.
Lahore, Pakistan
Any other African expats? Rwanda? In fact, I'll see your small central African nation and raise you a Burundi, Uganda, or Eastern Congo if it's not buried in lava by next week.
Shanghai, China
Mumbai, India
Taipei, Taiwan.
Bangalore, India, honest confession, a lurker more than a commentor. I feel i don't know enough.
hey.. am from Bangalore.. on/off lurker.. had an acct for long.. but this is my first comment.. -Srikanth Thunga
I can't be the only guy to generate the 410 hits from Israel... if I am, that is very sad.
I'm from Israel. Currently live in Jerusalem studying at HUJI.
Sao Paulo, Brazil
Same! Are you still around?
Around São Paulo, yes. Around LW, not much anymore, I mostly read it via feed reader.