After a hiatus of about a year the LessWrong Hamburg Meetup had a very strong revival! Infused by motivation from the Berlin Weekend I tried a reachout to collegues and via meetup.com and an amazing 24 people gathered on July, 17th in a location kindly provided by my employer.

Because the number of participants quickly exceeded my expectations I had to scramble to put something together for a larger group. For this I had tactical aid from blob and practical support from colleagues putting everything together from name tags to getting food and drinks and chairs.

We had an easy start with getting to know each other with Fela's Ice-Breaking Game.

The main topics covered were:

• An introduction into the topics, goals and methods or LessWrong illustrated with The Parable of the Dagger by pinkgothic. This was followed up by many smaller talks about how to apply rationality.
• A presentation and moderated discussion about effective altruism by ImmaSix.
• Moderated discussion about methods of artificial intelligence and machine learning.
• I answered many questions regarding biases and fallacies and we used the game cards I had prepared early multiple times. These attracted some interest and can be found here (Dropbox).

Beside the main topics there was a good athmosphere with many people having smaller discussions.

The event ended with a short wrap-up based on Irinas Sustainable Change talk from the Berlin event which did prompt some people to take action based on what they heard.

What I learned from the event:

• I still tend to do overplanning. Maybe having a plan for eventualities isn't bad but the agenda doesn't need to be as highly structured as I did. It could cause expectations that can't be met. 
• Apparently I appeared stressed but I didn't feel that way myself. Probably from hurrying around. I wonder wheather that has a negative effect on other people and how I can avoid that. Esp. as I'm not feeling stressed myself. 
• A standard-issue meeting room for 12 people can comfortably host 24 people if tables and furniture are rearranged and comfy beanbags etc. are added.
• Whe number of people showing up can vary unpredictably. This may depend on weather or how the event is communicated and unknown factors.
• Visualize the concrete effects of your charity. This can give you a specific intuition you can use to decide whether it's worth it. Imma's example was thinking about how your donated AMF bednets hang over children and protect from mosquitoes.

There will definitely be a follow-up meeting of a comparable size in a few month (no date yet). And maybe smaller get-together will be organized inbetween.

Review of our fifth LessWrong Meetup - Report from Berlin

Summary

We had visitors fank1 and just_existing from the Bielefeld/Paderborn Meetup. The meetup was great. It was a continuously lively discussion with everybody contributing personal and/or insightful and/or relevant pieces.

After ashort introduction of each other (because of the guests) we plunged immediately into interesting discussions mostly revolving around LeeWrong topics.

In between I retold my very positive experience from the Berlin LW community event. After a short summary about the effects of meditation we had a Mnemonics session inspired by the Berlin workshop.

One on-going topic was "Extrovert in Training" - techniques for and experience with getting in touch with people. How to start a conversation. What I still don't get is how to steer a conversation from small-talk phase to more personal topics - esp. in a group setting. Though this was not a problem during the meetup.

We also discussed selection pressure on humans. We agreed that there is almost none on mutations affecting health in general due to medicine. But we agreed that there is tremendous pressure on contraception. We identified four ways evolution works around contraception (see appendix for a short summary). We discussed what effects this could on the future of society. The movie Idiocracy was mentioned. This could be a long term (a few generations) existential risk.

There were other topcis which I recollect less clearly. Maybe the participants can comment on them below.

There will definitely be more LW Hamburg meetups. The next step is a joint Skype meetup with the Bielefeld group. I also relayed the Jonas Vollmers advice to get in contact with the Giordano-Bruno-Stiftung. 

The meetup ended with a photo and positive impression feedback round (peak-end rule). Afterwards out guests from Bielefeld stayed overnight in my (Gunnars) place.

Appendix

Four ways evolution works around contraception:

1. Biological factors. Examples are hormones compensating the contraception effects of the pill or allergies against condoms. These are easily recognized, measured and countered by the much faster operating pharma industry. There are also little ethical issues with this.
2. Subconscious mental factors. Factors mostly leading to non- or mis-use of contraception. Examples are carelessness, impulsiveness, fear, and insufficient understanding of the contraceptives usage. These are what some fear leads to collective stultification.
3. Conscious mental factors. Factors leading to explicit family planning e.g. children/family as terminal goals. The lead to a conscious use of contraception. The effect is less pronounced but likely leads to healthy and better educated children.
4. Group selection factors. These are factors favoring groups which collectively have more children. The genetic effects are likely weak here but the memetic effects are strong. A culture with social norms against contraception or for large families are likely to out-birth other groups.

Other LW Hamburg Meetup reviews

• Fourth Meetup (no notes)
• Third Meetup Notes: Small Steps Forward 
• Second Meetup Notes: In need of Structure
• First Meetup Notes: Starting small

Review of our third Meetup : LessWrong Hamburg - Structure

Summary

To make it short: We didn't follow the nice agenda we planned. We did the procrastination topic but diverged a lot. 

Course of events

In the long open beginning (expected) we talked a lot, played some MindTrap and had lunch together.

Then to get started I began the presentation of the main topic of this meetup: procrastination. This was basically a summary of 

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Procrastination
• http://lesswrong.com/lw/9wr/my_algorithm_for_beating_procrastination/
• http://bps-research-digest.blogspot.de/2010/05/cure-for-procrastination-forgive.html
• http://waitbutwhy.com/2013/10/why-procrastinators-procrastinate.html

This led to lots of satellite discussions which partly diverged but mostly were centered on examples of procrastination (though afterwards some felt that this got out of hand with too many personal details; this was controversial). This part was all in all very long but also led to quite some understanding of the problems of and strategries against procrastination. 

In the previous meetups there was an interest in the topics of and the objectives behind lesswrong. To get an authentic handle on the former I posted a topic poll in the Polling Thread. This I presented shortly (see appendix).

Interesting points we arrived at:

The image of lukeprogs procastination algorithm led to a discussion of what we called the mathematical fallacy/bias: Just giving a mathematical formula naming properties of interest leads to the false impression of scientificity and presents a false image of correctness and precision that just isn't there. This is a method sometimes seen in pseudo-science publications to give the impression of science. It is also used in economic sciences to approximate tendencies numerically. The general pattern of the mathematical fallacy is that modelling complex human behavior (like procrastination) in a simple formula is a special case of over-simplification riding piggy-back on the habit to take formulas at face value. The disclaimer on such formular (lukeprog actually gave one) just cannot be large enough. In this special case it would have been better to just name the four (nonlinear, crossrelated) effects on motivation instead of using the formula (at least until the five quantities in the formula are actually shown or defined in a precise way).

We planned the next meetup for Mar 30th, but the location (near Hamburg central station) is not yet fixed.

We did have more structure than the last time but a review discussion at the end clearly showed that just having one main topic with unmoderated side tracks wasn't enough and that all preferred a more formal structure - at least for topic presentations. Which on the next meetup will be theme-centered interaction.

Having keen observers of behavior allowed to pinpoint differences and misunderstandings in the group (actually involving me) to address these in a friendly helpful way.

Sidetrack

Following the advice from Lifestyle interventions to increase longevity I had bought an e-cig for the smoker in our round who wants to quit. He received it positively. He enjoyed the near-identical handling and the fact that he could smoke in the room (I didn't notice bad taste) and that there was no effort to 'light' and 'unlight' it. We discussed it afterwards whether it increased or decreased the amount of smoking (I had noticed that he had used the e-cig more often, but this may be balanced by a much smaller number of pulls. We promised to measure this.

Appendix