My plan is to pick one of these and predict like hell, because sixteen possibilities makes this look more daunting than it is, and then I plan to move on to others or come up with my own when it's semi-habitual. I did a sort of method of elimination to pick my initial habit-former. I'm not going to list my entire process, unless someone really wants me to, but I settled on #13 because:

1. I already do something similar to this. All I have to do is affix a Predict step to the beginning of my algorithm.
2. Successful and unsuccessful predictions are very clear cut, which is good for getting System 1's attention and successfully forming the habit.
3. It has few, if any, trivial inconveniences.
4. It's not associated with an activity that has an ugh field around it for me.

I haven't been here long, but I feel like I've seen comments like this a lot, of the form, "This is all Well and Good, but how precisely do I really, actually implement this?" And sometimes that's a valid point. Sometimes what looks like a suggestion is all noise and no signal (or all signal? Hell, I don't know).

Other times someone is apt to say, "I predict that this post will not result in actual improvement of Problem X," in Rationalspeak and all, and they are universally acclaimed. For you see, in this way, they and all of their followers are above the fray.

When the suggestions are good, I've always felt that it's a bit inconsiderate to immediately ping the Burden of Thought back at someone who just wrote a blog post on a site as critical as LessWrong. I share things when my brain sputters out and can't go any further on its own; it needs help from the tribe. Did you or the people who upvoted you think for five minutes by the clock about how you might form a predicting habit before outsourcing the question to Julia_Galef? It's awfully easy to never form a predicting habit when the President of CFAR conveniently never gets back to you! You also could have #8-ed and predicted whether or not you would be able to come up with a way to build a predicting habit.

I sort of (read: completely) made an example out of you for community's sake, so sorry if I was hurtful or otherwise. This is not all directed at you in particular; it was an opportunity to make an observation.

(I run the Sydney group with @Taryneast)

We seemed to uncover our own version of dunbar's number with groupsize. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number in trying to hold a group discussion with more than about 11 people. very quickly we break off into two smaller groups. At first it was annoying because we lost focus and then we decided it was better and ended up being good discussions in two groups as long as we compared notes after between the groups.

We have 4 types of meetups; pub-social-type, dojo-focus-type, active-healthy-fun-social-type, indoors-home-online-type. These allow for a lot of variety and we seem to have 2-3 each month.

We (the organisers) had a genuine problem when after 6 months of good meetups we asked ourselves - how do we know we are being effective at our goals? (being something along the lines of; social, improve effectiveness of the people who attend, improve the lives of the people who attend)

Where its easy to be doing well at "social" its not so easy to work out if we were doing well at improving the lives of our constituents. We came up with one idea and that was to survey people; did it once. Did not yield valuable information (although we had doubts about self-reporting anyway). Would love to know how other meetups have worked out if they were being effective at what they are trying to do. Also what are the goals/purposes of your meetups?

We have a commitment ritual where in our dojo-serious meetup people can choose to commit to a task to be done by next month. tasks people have committed to include; tidying the back room, losing 1kg, mowing the lawn, one chapter of physics, read one book by next month, do a coze activity, set up a system to listen to music while running, spend 10 hours working on a programming project. Although anything could be a set-able task. We always make sure to ask for a concrete goal - one where you will know if you succeeded or failed. and make sure to get them all recorded, and check up one month later. We have a whole set of information about goals and goal-setting which we have run more than once (similar to the CFAR stuff because we have alumnis) which I am happy to write down if there is interest.

Lesswrong is less work than other things I have organised, and people are thrilled to attend, where in other groups I have felt burdened to be the one organising, as well as like it was hard work to do. people just seem to turn up. in other groups we seemed to be missing something in the "motivate attendees" equation. Also in other groups there have been fights to reach the top, and to be the leader or coordinator. I would happily give up my position of "the one who organises things" if anyone asked, but so far no one has.

We used to set topics for our pub-friendly-meetup, Usually following on from the conversation of the last meetup. Once the conversation was heavily about finance so we set the next meetup about finance and got a poor attendance. Shortly after (and now) we have been topic-less during the pub meetup and let the conversation flow. Anyone can ask a question to the group, and anyone can contribute. At the time of running the finance meetup it seemed like a really valuable topic to talk about, (following on from health management, organising life) and the discussion topic from the meetup before, I am still unsure why we didn't have piles of attendees.

I received a few piece of feedback that people felt "this topic is not my interest" and excused themselves from the meetup because of it, even though most of the meetup was free discussion followed by sharing ideas on the topic. This is why the pub meetup is now topic-less and will probably stay that way to encourage visitors from new people.

I recently had a battle with myself over encouraging attendees VS being content with as many as we have; on the one hand - growth is good, on the other - reaching out too far and we collect people who are not as interested and not ready to delve in. I have personally slowwed down to let people naturally find us.

Our core is around 10 people, of which 5-7 usually attend events, we have 3 organisers, we have a mix of age, profession, education, background, genders (basically everything). At most meetups our core will equal the number of new attendees (never before attended).

So far we have done no outreach rationality, we probably will not do any for a while.

the only really measureable outcome we have right now is that - yes we are being social.

The only systems we have in place to cutoff bad topics are knowingly placing eye contact between the 3 organisers to try to direct opinions as to whether to cut someone off or let them keep going. its a super secret that no one knows, we didn't even try to make it happen, we just do it. So far it hasn't been bad enough for any major action, only mildly bad for short periods of time.

I love the list of predictions, but I also feel fairly confident in predicting that this post won't prompt me to actually make more (or more useful) predictions. Do you have any tips on building the habit of making predictions?

Location has been updated.

Note: 4pm not 5pm, time widget is misbehaving.

Netflix and Spotify Premium are pretty expensive. I could see these being worthwhile if you're really dedicated about movies/music, but buying the occasional DVD or downloading music tracks from the likes of Amazon/iTunes Store will probably be cheaper in the long run for most folks.

E-paper readers are interesting, but if I were to buy one I would choose it for openness to homebrew development. That way I could use the e-paper display for other purposes as well, such as running software on a remote box.

We ran a summer solstice event in Sydney also. 8 people attended for a potluck picnic in Centennial park, general social interaction, then we watched the sun go down while reflecting on the year that had been. This was followed by an attempt to get candles working -- even with cups to shield them, they kept being extinguished. Fortunately, this was about the worst thing to go wrong.

After the sundown, different people ran various short sessions. We had one on the hedonic treadmill, one on what's known about planning new year's resolutions, a session where we discussed how the year had been for us, while everyone else listened, and one where people gifted ideas they thought were valuable, to everyone else present (an attempt for a better way to do kris kringle / secret santa type exchanges without the buying of pointless things).

All in all I consider it a major success. I had a great time, I think other participants did also. Definitely worth the time to organise.