One of my favorite aspects of Less Wrong is that every time I go to a new city (Oxford, Boston, Philadelphia and New York soon!), I know there’s a group of people who will be happy to discuss rationality and welcome me into their community.
It would be really cool if more Less Wrongers could have these experiences by traveling cheaply from city to city, meeting up with other smart, interesting people to have fantastic conversations, go to meetups/conferences/summits in new cities, and make friends in real life!
Unfortunately, while traveling to different meetups (and conferences/summits) is intellectually and emotionally rewarding, hotels can be prohibitively expensive. In order to make traveling more affordable, the Less Wrong community could implement a system where community members can stay at each others houses (in guest rooms, on sofas, or on floors) for free/extremely affordable rates.
Benefits of this system:
1) The traveler gets a free/affordable place to stay.
2) The host gets guaranteed company and (hopefully) some great conversation.
3) Less Wrong community bonds will be strengthened through real life interactions between members.
4) The value of meetups, which largely derives from the chance to meet other LWers, will increase as the pool of people attending grows.
5) People can be friends in real life!
6) Implementing this system is super easy. We just add a google maps page to Less Wrong.
Logistics:
1) LW could create a google map where people interested in hosting put down a place marker in their general location (no need to list their actual address) and tag it with their username.
2) In their LW profiles, hosts could write a short description of what kind of accommodations they'll be providing (room/sofa/floor), what kind of guest they want to host (eg., male vs. female, people who are willing to talk a lot, etc.), how they want to be compensated by their traveler (e.g., conversation, a meal, a chore, a small monetary gift, etc.) and usernames of at least two other Less Wrong members who would be willing to serve as "references" to the host's non-creepiness.
3) Likewise, travelers should have a section in their LW profile that list at least two other Less Wrong members who are willing to serve as references as well as how they're willing to compensate their hosts.
4) A potential traveler would look at the map, find a suitable location, and then send a potential host a message asking if they can come over.
5) The host could then look at the traveler's posts to see how long they've been a member and read their posts (a fantastic measure of how interesting or obnoxious the potential traveler may be).
How to encourage people to host:
While the benefits are obvious for the travelers, benefits for hosts are slightly less tangible. Here are some ways to incentivize hosting.
1) Traveling etiquette states that the traveler offers their host a gift. (E.g., buys or cooks the host a meal, does a house chore, goes to a museum with their host, etc.).
2) Much like how LW keeps track of number of posts, up votes and down votes, there will also be a scoreboard for how many travelers people have hosted. Hopefully, this will make being a popular host a badge of pride.
Well, maybe I can try to take a crack at it.
1) Less Wrong is already incredibly male slanted. According to the most recent survey I know of, Less Wrong members report themselves 96.4% male. Thus, whatever effort is put into a 'dating thing' will certainly end up wasted.
1a) Addendum: Actually, we're an incredibly narrow group demographically speaking. We could probably make a decent run at a 'Gay White 18-30 Athiest high-IQ dating site'. I'm not personally interested in that, but I'm sure someone could run with it.
2) It's been noted before that we have a gender imbalance, and that such an imbalance harms the art of rationality as a whole. Such behavior on a Less Wrong partnered endeavor could easily push away women here and prevent new women from joining. "...my goal [are to] create rationalists not create female rationalists. But if half of the audience is being filtered for some silly avoidable reason, then I want to fix that." And this qualifies as a silly, avoidable reason.
3) Part of Less Wrong's draw is that the members generally appear high status and rational; those who join can become high status and rational too. Advertising our singles (all loaded on one gender) will bring down our status as a group. Advertising that our members are trying to catch fish in the desert (96.4% male!) will harm the perception of rationality even further.
4) By allowing such an option into hypothesis space we'd push people away from Couchsurfing. A potentially usefully tool would lie underutilized because people would have to worry about being sexually assaulted by strangers on the internet.
5) Even if everything went exactly as 'hoped' and an attractive girl actually took you up on the offer, it still comes out squicky. You have a girl, isolated in a stranger's house in a strange city, with nowhere to go and (since they're already couchsurfing) no money, who has already consented to sex as payment for shelter. That's not exactly rape, but it doesn't offer very much in the way of withdrawing consent. It could easily go bad; hell it sounds like a recipe for making badness.
In summation:
1) Won't happen, 2) lets not push away women more, 3) makes us look bad, 4) stops people from couchsurfing, 5) WTF?