I've noted this before, but I'll repeat it here: If the DC meetup could even occasionally occur on a Saturday afternoon instead of a Sunday afternoon, then I would probably attend. But you've coordinated on a time that never works for me. It's probably advantageous to always meet at the same time from the standpoint of consistency of attendance by the same people, but if you want to expand the number of people attending at least irregularly, variability in time would likely work better.

I'm part of the swing and blues dance scene in the Baltimore/DC area. There are a lot of nerdy/intellectual types in this scene so there's really no shortage of finding intelligent people to talk to. And the people I know who fit that type isn't limited to Baltimore/DC; I travel around a lot for dancing (Las Vegas, Montreal, London, etc.) and a lot of the same type of people are in the scene internationally.

I've been doing this for about 10 years so I'm also somewhat well connected. There's almost always some dance party to go to on the weekend in some city that I can drive to.

I sort of understand Zendo but what's the point of playing dominion at a LW meetup?

Because it frequently conflicts with previous commitments and often, when I am free, it is playing board games, which I don't enjoy. No knock on those who do (including most of my friends) but I find them unbearably tedious.

I live in DC and am an instigator of things (mostly theatre outings, debate, etc). That makes it easy to pull someone into my social circle, since there's usually a movie night, play outing, Shakespeare reading I'm hosting withing the next three weeks to invite them too. (And wanting to be invited to that sort of thing is an excellent filter from my end to see that I will like them).

Typo:

Factors that cut against volunteering have social value

should be "having"

Ehh... As the other commenters are saying, it's unclear how it would promote rationality, or what its Ultimate Effect would be...

But I think you should do it anyway. I'd read it.

Only about 10 percent of new social programs in fields like education, criminology and social welfare demonstrate statistically significant benefits in RCTs

This is a higher rate than I'd expected. It implies that current policies in these three fields are not really thoroughly thought out, or at least not to the extent that I had expected. It seems that there is substantial room for improvement.

I would have expected perhaps one or two percent.

In my career coaching work, one of the things I try to teach is how to spot these patterns of which way a market is going. This has some classic signs, and I can give plenty of examples of other industries in which this same pattern took place.

Examples would be appreciated. But this seems to be a case of trying to time the market and the usual objection applies; if you can time the market to within a year you can make huge piles of money. One of the contributors on HN, lsc of prgrmr.com talks about how he was calling the property bubble in the Bay area for years before it popped, and how if he had just got in at the frothy height of the dotcom bubble like everyone else, he'd still be ahead now on property, very far ahead.