Location: Vancouver, Canada

I was introduced to Less Wrong by a long-time friend who had been reading the website for about a year before I first visited it. Over time, I've generally become more integrated with the community. Now, a handful of my closest friends are ones I've met through the local meetup. Also, with related communities, the meetup does a lot to give presentations between people, and facilitate skill-sharing, and knowledge bases.

I know that several of my fellow meetup attendees also made great friends through the meetup. There has been at list one instance of two of them becoming roommates, and now a few of my friends are trying to put together a 'rationalist house' this summer.

For those not in the know, a 'rationalist house' is a group home based around intentional meatspace communities that have risen around this website, so as to create a better living environment where new domestic norms can be tried. There are several in the Bay Area, at least one in Melbourne, probably one in New York(?), etc...

The founder of our meetup, who doesn't visit this website much anymore, but is generally in contact with the meetup otherwise, made connections with a successful financial manager who more-or-less became a mentor for him. Based upon the mentor's advice, this friend of mine is now trying to launch his own software company.

Several of us from the meetup have attended a CFAR workshop, including myself, and my friend who introduced me to Less Wrong has done continually ongoing volunteer work for them for the last year. As a result, we've become friends, and acquaintances, of much of the rationalist community in San Francisco. Additionally, a few of my friends have been spurred involvement with other organizations based in the Bay Area (e.g., YCombinator, the MIRI, Landmark). He also started an ongoing swing dancing community in Berkeley while he lived there, because memes.

Less Wrong introduced my friends, and I, to the effective altruism community, which infected a few of us with new memes for doing good, spurring at least one of us so far to have donated several thousand dollars to organizations, and projects, like the global prioritization research currently being jointly executed by the Future of Humanity Institute, and the Centre for Effective Altruism.

For the sake of their privacy, I'm not posting the names of these individuals, or their contact information, directly here on the public Internet, but if you'd like to get in touch with them to ask further questions, send me a private message, and I can put you in touch with them.