I've been browsing LessWrong less often as of late, and I believe that one of the reasons is because I don't want to get all excited all over a new insightful LW post, only to discover that it's a meetup in a city that I'm not even in.
And for newbies to the site in particular, they're not going to see all the awesomeness of this site if they simply look at the frontpage and think it's a community just for meetups.
I'm sure meetup discussions can go somewhere prominent. Maybe a separate section can be devoted to them.
I'm not sure what's best, here. One nice thing about meetup posts on the front page is that it shows this is a very active community with lots of real people meeting in physical locations and having fun together.
Putting them in a sidebar with an indicator separating past and future meetups might be even more dynamic without being obtrusive.