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Metus comments on Open thread, 24-30 March 2014 - Less Wrong
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Comments (156)
It took me a long time to find LessWrong and I found it through a convoluted and ultimately entirely random series of events. Though English is neither my first language nor do I live in an anglophone country so I'd love to find a similar community in my language, German, or more generally interesting smaller, though active, communities in other languages than English. How would I go about that?
There are LessWrong meetups in many countries, in particular there are 4 in Germany.
See http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Less_Wrong_meetup_groups
I'm pretty sure that due to the free rider problem, active and lively communities are much more likely to grow via word of mouth than via public advertising or easily googled websites.
Maybe try Mensa? I don't know if they're any good, but they're in Germany and they're big enough to know an LWish community if one is available.
In Berlin we found that having Quantified Self events in English makes more sense then holding them in German. All the interested people speak English. Our local Berlin LW meetups are also in English. There no good reason to use German if you want to discuss intellectual topics on a deep level. English is the language of science. English is the language of programming.
That said, see whether there a LW meetup, QS meetup, Chaos Computer Club Erfa or Hackerspace at your city. That's were the kind of people who are here hang out. Meetup.com in general is good to find interesting groups.
When the Chaos Computer Congress was still in Berlin I went there multiple years in a row. Now I don't travel to Hamburg but if you are free on 27-30 December going there, is a very worthwhile experience to be in the company of very smart people.
As far as general strategies for finding communities, talk to people. Ask them to which communities they belong.
At Paris meetups we occasionally have more people who speak German than people who speak French :)
Who actually speak it at the meetup or who can speak it? People in Paris speaking German at a public meetup would go against my idea of French people looking out to protect their language.
Who can speak it; we usually speak English though not if all participants speak good French.