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 (294)
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'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.
It would be neat to know the distribution. (I'm F.)
I doubt we'll get an idea of distribution from this thread, but I'm female.
Thanks, I'm glad to know that. Since I made that comment, there's been a survey and they found that about 3% of us are female. Maybe it's as high as 10% or 20% with error and lurkers, but we're still a minority.
Have you been following Less Wrong for a while, or have you recently come across it?
I'm new, as evidenced by the fact that until now I did not realize I had a handy inbox that told me about replies. (Yes, that was an apology for taking so long to respond. cough Sorry.) Haven't been on much since I joined (few months past) what with exams, but hoping to become a little less of a lurker now that they're finished and I've read through a fair bit of the sequences and whatnot.
I kind of wish there were sequences on math and science and other such things on this site - I can get most of the concepts, but I'm still in high school and the maths goes over my head sometimes.
People have recommended betterexplained and khan academy for math mostly and some science.
Thank you! Betterexplained is alright, but Khan Academy is amazing - easy, simple, great layout, progress tracking, instructional videos, challenges. I'm working my way through the logarithms track at the moment. (Yes, I am that far behind all of you.)
The Less Wrong visit map:
And some more detail:
(edit: credit to Google Analytics for all of the heavy lifting in this comment)
Is there an updated version of this? I don't have the know-how to do it myself.
Great stat visualization and breakdown! But it's not in first normal form: There's two Bellevues, and the St. Petersburg entry doesn't specify whether it's Florida (which has a blob in the St. Petersburg/Tampa area, and no entry for Tampa) or Russia (which seems to be the origin of a few prominent LW'ers). I'm not sure of the most efficient way to resolve the ambiguities.
All of the heavy lifting here is done by Google Analytics.
(The St. Petersburg entry in the "US visitors by city" pdf is the one in the US).
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!
New Jersey! Arent there enough OB/LWers to make a greater new york area meetup once in 2 months possible?
Princeton area. I'm good to meet up in NYC too.
Dublin, Ireland.
Limerick, Ireland.
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.
Melbourne, Australia
Melbourne as well...
Yep.
Another.
Same here.
Me too.
Another.
One more!
Sydney, Australia
But I could make it to Canberra ;)
+1!
Sydney, Australia too.
Sydney here too
I'd love to meet any of you near Atlanta, GA!
Yup, me too.
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.
I downvoted a few comments on the same principle yesterday, but I see those have been repaired. Hope people didn't take it as disapproval.
Okay seriously, don't worry about this, it'll get fixed eventually and then we don't want to have to run back and change everything back around. A few points of temporary karma are not important.
Don't worry about it, we'll get rid of karma for self-upvotes later.
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!
lol, thanks =)
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.)
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.
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.
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.
Anyone from Russia? I live in Moscow.
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.
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 live in St. Petersburg. Unfortunately, that's Florida, not Russia. Which is a shame, because I'm always impressed by your comments, and usually learn something. спасибо.
Post in this thread if you live outside Europe, the US, or Canada.
Mumbai, India
Sao Paulo, Brazil
Same! Are you still around?
Around São Paulo, yes. Around LW, not much anymore, I mostly read it via feed reader.
Auckland, New Zealand
Me too!
Chch, NZ.
Ditto!
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.
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
Post in this thread if you live in Europe.
Slovakia, Bratislava
Riga, LV.
Anybody from Romania?
Oslo, Norway
Oslo, Norway.
Post here if you live in Sweden.
Gothenburg, Sweden.
Härnösand, Sweden.
Uppsala, Sweden.
Umeå, Sweden.
Same here! Are you still around?
Stockholm, Sweden.
People of Belgium, unite behind me ... if any.
I'm from Belgium
Copenhagen (city, not snuff).
Copenhagen.
Post in this thread if you live in the Netherlands.
Present!
I live in Amsterdam.
Do you still live there? I'll be there on vacation next week, and I'd be interested in meeting up (general policy of looking for opportunities to meet people IRL that I only know online - if that's not your cup of tea, I'd totally understand).
Germany, NRW, Gütersloh
Cologne, Germany
Xixidu, are you interested in a mini-lw-meetup in nrw?
Gießen, Germany.
I suspect there may be some undercover-readers out of Frankfurt am Main, see: http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/lesswrong.com# " It has a relatively good traffic rank in the city of Frankfurt Am Main (#3,397)."
If there are, hands up by any means, we could have enough people for a german meet-up!
Also Gießen, Germany.
Berlin, Germany
Munich, Germany
me too.
Stuttgart, Germany
Rostock, Germany.
Post in this thread if you live in France.
Greetings, from Toulouse.
I am too.
I live near Carcassonne
I'm in Paris
I live in Paris
Yvelines, next to Paris
Right next to Paris myself, Palaiseau en fait.
Post in this thread if you live in Finland.
Helsinki
Helsinki here.
I live in Oulu.
Oulu as well.
Tampere, but a Hungarian.
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.
I live in London, UK.
London as well.
Eastbourne, East Sussex
Edit: Also Oxford, UK in termtime.
Another Eastbourne, East Sussex.
Guildford, UK. Definitely up for any London meetups.
Yay London
Devon, UK. London meets are a bit far at the moment, but I may be moving.
me too, University of Edinburgh
I'm also in Edinburgh, Scotland.
I'm in London
I'm in London, and till we organize something I recommend the UKTA/ExtroBritannia meets.
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.
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...
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 :)
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.
Reading, UK, and UKTA is excellent.
Post in this thread if you live in the US or Canada.
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.
Fairfield, Iowa.
I dub Pavitra's post the beginning of the Great Plains thread.
Lincoln NE
Pittsburgh, PA
About 280 miles or 5 hours from Pittsburgh according to Mapquest.
Vancouver, 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'.
Montana
Salt Lake City. Seems we're the entire mountain time delegation.
I don't think words can convey just how happy seeing this post has made me.
I am also from Salt Lake City :)
hey me too!
Great! Perhaps we could stage a meetup.
Oh, hey there! Nice to know I'm not completely alone here.
Post in this thread if you live in the Pacific Northwest.
I'm in central Oregon
I live in Redmond, WA.
Post in this thread if you live within driving distance of Dallas, TX.
Waco, TX. (Prompt reply, I know...)
I live in Mount Pleasant, TX.
Sugar Land (Houston area), not exactly day trip material but with sufficient notice I could make something.
We do seem to be thin on the ground in Texas.
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.
Waterloo, Ontario.
Seattle, WA
Calgary, Alberta.
Montreal, Canada
Me too: Montreal, Canada.
Québec, Qc, Canada.
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?