It's not exactly that I don't think people on LW could win political power, but the impression I've gotten is that not very many are interested in it or have tried it.

I attended one local LW meetup till now. Out of less than 10 people there was one person with interest in a political career and I did my best to provide him an idea of how to go about starting it.

Even if a huge fraction, say 20%, of the people on LW moved into political positions, that would still only be 320 (using the most recent survey results) scattered around the whole world (obviously concentrated in some areas).

That basically means LW is too small at the moment and the community needs to grow in strength. I think that's what's important. Growing is easier when you focus on people that are easy to win for LW's message. Smart colleague students who are likely to have resources in a decade because they are actually playing to win are good.

Politicians still need to win over the support of a political party, spend their time networking and building alliances with others in power, reaching out to a large constituency, etc.

In the US you need to raise enough money to buy television ads to win a district to get into congress. That means you have to network with people who are likely to fund your campaign.

If there are a lot of rich techies who aren't really satisfied with the people whom they are at the moment giving their political donations, then building relationships with those rich techies would be the ideal way to network. I think it's plausible that being at LW meetups is exactly the right place to be to network.

ChristianKI, do you not think reaching out to other groups would be successful?

At the start of wanting to create a Quantified Self (QS) community in Germany I chose to make the first meetups in German to reach a larger audience. That turned out to be a mistake. Nearly nobody that came did speak no English and quite a few people who move within the startup scene of Berlin speak no German and did come to English meetups.

We did make a point of emphasis that part of the idea of QS is having meetups while doing TV interviews, but most of the people that came to our meetups didn't came because of mainstream media contact. The kind of people who are actually receptive to the idea are unlikely to watch much TV.

That doesn't mean that I avoided speaking with mainstream media as it still reaches some people but the person who watches mainstream media programs just isn't likely to go to a QS meetup.

I don't think it is too bold to claim that the main memespace LW recruits from (youngish technophiles, mostly in America) have focused their lives thus far on different skills than the ones needed to reach political power.

I think there are quite a few people with a hacker mindset that make decent public speakers. Julian Assange did manage to tell a story that's touching enough to bring tears to the eyes of nerds. As far as passionate speaking abilities I'm also a fan of Bre Pettis.

Your medium nerd doesn't have high social skills but when you have someone who's serious about developing skills I think that often produces good results.

I could see Bre Pettis running for president in one or two decades. He's not a LW person but he does have strong community ties through being one of the founders of the Hacker Space NYC resistor.

ChristianKI, do you not think reaching out to other groups would be successful?

I don't think that one should never reach out, but I think that's often better to target your efforts closer at home. Think global act local.

Yes, if you have a good opportunity to get a liberal arts major to read HPMOR or explain him another concept take it. On the other hand don't led that quest distract you from actually making your community a place where fellow members of the community feel great and want to come to every meetup.