Capital idea, old sport. I was considering making a thread about our group, but now there's no need. Supposing then that I, Grognor, should kick things off with a State of the Union address for the West Los Angeles LW meetups, eh, wot?

Our relocation last week went well. It was my goal to make it as difficult as possible not to know we had Officially Moved Somewhere Else; to that end I mentioned it in every single paragraph in the meetup post and the post to the mailing list, and individually messaged everyone I could contact who had ever attended who was not there when we agreed to move, two weeks ago. To the extent that this means anything, it means fast food places with good acoustics (no matter how loud we are in the back, you can't hear us at the front! which is cool) are better than dark, noisy, out-of-the-way bars where closed-to-the-public events frequently happen.

Abram recently proposed (because we are ostensibly a Less Wrong meetup group) that each week we openly report on rational or irrational things we've noticed ourselves doing since the last date of attendance, or whenever, really. I think it's a good idea, as it may provide useful feedback, motivation for the speakers, and inspiration to the audience, but it's been difficult to put into practice, because people naturally tend to talk of sundrier things, and because it's just really difficult to keep track of one's rationality. "The" checklist is unwieldy and there are still few objective day-to-day rationality metrics. I'm going to keep trying, though.

Over the last year, there has been a transition from/to, and a tension between, more practical meetup topics, and more theoretical, mathematical ones. I think this distinction is unprincipled and lacking in nuance; nevertheless it exists, and to the extent I do not say "mu" to the very framework, I lean toward the theoretical and the mathematical. This even though the meetups I've hosted have been more on the former side, with two exceptions. This is entirely because I don't know enough math, which I now consider a character flaw. One which I am remedying, 'ho!.

A couple of times, we've played a game called Contact, which is surprisingly fun for something that requires no equipment. It has nothing to do with rationality. We have played The Resistance a few times, which has received mixed reactions. Anton has introduced us to Quantum Go-Fish (also called Quantum Fingers, although Anton's name is better), which everyone likes the idea of but is really hard to play. There are basically two versions: one where we have cards and paperclips and everyone tries to play, and the version where we try to keep track of everything in our heads and on our fingers and all the fun is from everybody getting confused about the actual state of the game. The latter might be called "Drunken Quantum Go-Fish", since there's no reason to play it while sober. We have not tried the former. We haven't tried very many activities together, nor projects, even though I've tried to inspire people to make something more out of the group.

It seems most others just want a group to hang out with on Wednesday nights, and I'm the only one that wants to do some useful stuff with the group. This is okay; people shouldn't engineer some project just because I want them to. However, some of us have a Secret Awesome Thing in the works; stay tuned, but don't be surprised if it produces nothing.

This comment is already pretty long, so I might as well soapbox a bit: The "How to Run a Successful Less Wrong Meetup Group" PDF is terrible. It's full of gross salesman prose and useless pictures that require more scrolling, and because it's two columns, half the scrolling you must do is upways. If no one else wants to be a hero, I might just (with the blessing of (Luke? Kaj? whoever owns this thing)) condense it into a proper LW post or wiki article like it should have been all along, if I have another burst of mania like the one that caused this comment. and free access to a CFAR workshop.

For lack of a better name, The West LA LW Meetup Group is a fun and growing crowd. By the ever-reliable metric of "intuition", I think we are a successful group, in part thanks to me. We seem to be unique in that, rather than having zero hosts or one person who hosts every time, whoever feels like hosting the next meetup just goes ahead and does so. We meet every week, but when no one feels like hosting, the meetup is unannounced, on both this site and the mailing list, and attendance is smaller when that happens. I prefer these meetups, because they are more intimate and less stressful, although this is an uncommon sentiment. I might prefer if "someone" took over and hosted every meetup, to reduce the total number of decisions we collectively have to make about who hosts.

I really appreciate this crowd. They have directly improved my life, not only with their presence but also with acts of kindness and of prudence, and I have improved theirs with my stage presence and the items I give to every newcomer. The West LA LW Meetup Group is approximately my entire meatspace social life, and thus I say hooray.

I've been failing to get around to doing this for a month now. London Meetup report for the Schelling Point Game.

This was based on my post, Schelling Point Strategy Training, which was in turn based on an actual attempt I made to coordinate with someone on picking a film from a miscellaneous selection of DVDs.

To give people a taste of this process before moving onto the game itself, I'd actually brought along two selections of DVDs, one with unambiguously alphabetisable titles, and one containing two films whose titles began with numerals and 'The' respectively. Passing these selections of DVDs round the table in a bag, participants had to coordinate on a film. People tried to coordinate on an assortment of criteria including title, colour of the box, and popularity or genre of film.

The first of two main insights from this meetup was made at this point: people will argue at length over the most appropriate procedure for selecting a Schelling Point. It's not just that your own procedure seems obvious, but other people's procedures seem inappropriate or even silly. This seems like an important observation when it comes to coordinating with other humans.

The game itself went as follows: two teams of five people were each given ten minutes to (a) come up with a set of objects that would be difficult for the other team to coordinate on, and (b) come up with a strategy for coordinating on arbitrary sets of objects given to them by the other team. Some constraints were in place: the objects were written on index cards (to avoid simple ordering); the objects had to form some sort of natural set; the objects had to be distinct, and distinguishable from one another by the team presenting them. One point would be awarded if an outright majority of the team managed to coordinate, and three points would be awarded for total coordination in a team.

We ran this for two rounds. In the first round, Team A presented "representations of the letter 'a'", with minor variations on font, serifs, etc. Team B presented Kanji characters. Both teams settled on a choice procedure involving the object's position on the index card. In the second round, Team A presented "Scribbles" (literally scribbling over the card, and distinguishing the scribbles with post-hoc identified idiosyncracies of each scribble), and Team B presented 2x2 grid combinations of the addition and multiplication symbols. Each team achieved partial coordination on both rounds.

At this point, the second insight from this meetup was apparent: artificial coordination problems have a "presentation layer" that's vulnerable to hacking. The index cards were an attempt to circumvent an obvious decision procedure in the "presentation layer" of a list (pick the first on the list), but they just present a new type of presentation layer, and the game becomes about finding an choice procedure for arbitrary objects presented in that manner. This is not a characteristic of real-world coordination problems. We thought of various ways of constructing the game that would do away with this, but they were technically cumbersome for a game in a pub.

The group was split as to whether to continue with the game, so we abandoned it for various other coordination experiments involving writing stuff on index cards. We then played The Resistance, primed up to the eyeballs with thoughts of coodination strategies.

In summary:

• People like to argue about coordination strategies
• When played with smart people, this game rapidly degenerates into hacking how the options are presented rather than coordinating on the options themselves
• I don't look like a spy