One of the most valuable services the Less Wrong community has to offer are the meetup groups. However, it strikes me that there isn't a lot of knowledge sharing between different meetup groups. Presumably there's a lot that the different groups could learn from each other -- things that can be done, experiments that have or haven't worked out, procedural and organisational tips. Hence this post. Please go ahead and write a summary about your local less wrong meetup below:
- What meetups do you run?
- What's worked?
- What hasn't?
- How is the group organised?
Rationality Dojos
We started these off using material taken from CFAR workshops -- gradually over time related topics such as Kegan's Immunity to Change have been introduced.
We started off running these as one two hour session, all given by the same person, but after a year we switched to a new format, where we break off into two - three segments run by different people. This keeps people's attention better, reduces the amount of work individual presenters do, and allows us to experiment with new material without having to worry that if it doesn't work out the whole session will be rendered pointless.
There's a strong focus in the dojos of doing work on real problems people have -- we want to avoid sessions where people give talks, everyone feels enlightened, but people then don't go ahead and use the new knowledge. We also take advantage of the monthly timing to allow people to lay down goals for the next month that they'll be made accountable for at the next meetup.
We tried one of these in LA, and while I wasn't there, I heard people liked it - but it's a lot of work to run, and so it only happened one time. Part of that is that it was much longer, and part is that finding a venue was hard.