LucasSloan

Follow up to: Less Wrong NYC Tl;dr: Two new regular weekly meetups in the Bay Area: In the Berkeley Starbucks on Wednesdays at 7pm (host Lucas Sloan), and in Tortuga (in Mountain View) on Thursdays at 7pm (hosts Shannon Friedman and Divia Melwani). New Google Group for the whole Bay Area, all welcome to join. Hi everyone in the (San Fransisco) Bay Area. I'm Lucas Sloan and I've been organizing LW meet ups in Berkeley for about 8 months now. I think that we've accomplished great things in that time, the last week's had about 40 people show up, which is a number that was beyond my wildest dreams when I held my first meet up and 7 people showed up. As good as things are, I've been spending a lot of time thinking how we can do even better in the future. The main catalyst in my thinking has been the accounts I've been hearing over the last two months from people who've visited the New York Less Wrong group and the amazingly positive reactions people have had to their accomplishments. Now that Cosmos has written a post describing what he sees as their successes, I think now is an excellent time to start a discussion about the future of the Bay Area Less Wrong group, and how to make it awesome. The main thing that the New York group has that I want for the Bay Area group is a sense of being a close-knit community of like-minded friends. At a Berkeley meet up we get into all sorts of very interesting conversations with our fellow rationalists, but I don't feel a personal connection with most of the people who come to meet-ups, even those people I've seen at many - I am friendly with everyone who comes to meet-ups, but I am not friends with everyone who comes. I see two things that contribute to this problem (though I'm sure there are more) - size of meet-ups, and the frequency of meet ups. The large size of meet ups makes it impossible to establish rapport with everyone, because there is no way to have a good conversation with 40 other people in 4 hours. Even