We've been running regular, well-attended Less Wrong meetups in London for a few years now, (and irregular, badly-attended ones for even longer than that). In this time, I'd like to think we've learned a few things about having good conversations, but there are probably plenty of areas where we could make gains. Given the number of Less Wrong meetups around the world, it's worth attempting some sort of meetup cross-pollination. It's possible that we've all been solving each other's problems. It's also good to have a central location to make observations and queries about topics of interest, and it's likely people have such observations and queries on this topic.
So, what have you learned from attending or running Less Wrong meetups? Here are a few questions to get the ball rolling:
- What do you suppose are the dominant positive outcomes of your meetups?
- What problems do you encounter with discussions involving [x] people? How have you attempted to remedy them?
- Do you have any systems or procedures in place for making sure people are having the sorts of conversations they want to have?
- Have you developed or consciously adopted any non-mainstream social norms, taboos or rituals? How are those working out?
- How do Less Wrong meetups differ from other similar gatherings you've been involved with? Are there any special needs idiosyncratic to this demographic?
- Are there any activities that you've found work particularly well or particularly poorly for meetups? Do you have examples of runaway successes or spectacular failures?
- Are there any activities you'd like to try, but haven't managed to pull off yet? What's stopping you?
If you have other specific questions you'd like answered, you're encouraged to ask them in comments. Any other observations, anecdotes or suggestions on this general topic are also welcome and encouraged.
I'm the de facto organizer of the Austin meetup, which has been meeting weekly for approximately 4 years. It has mostly been socializing at a coffeeshop, eating dinner at a home, or board games, and typical attendance has ranged from 3 to 9. I think a dozen was the most people we ever had at one time outside of the HPMoR wrap party. We have a fairly smooth gradient from regular members (people that show up every week) to people only on the membership list.
My impression is that socialization starts to fall apart at about 4 people, and becomes very unwieldy by 8 (speakers; listeners are basically free, which is why talks and debates work). Outside of a party format (where creation and fragmentation of groups is easily encouraged), though, splitting up doesn't seem to work that well (if you're sitting at two tables at a coffeeshop, say, or having multiple conversations at one table, it's difficult to reconfigure people so that people are close to who they want to talk to, as topics and mutual interests change).
The main issue stopping us from doing more is a lack of spare attention and energy, I think. It seems like there's a low effort attractor where people meet up at the same time at the same place and just socialize, and the high effort attractor where there are lots of things going on that cater to many peoples' interests and accomplish things. A recurring question is how much energy to put into main projects and side projects--we could, say, go learn to swing dance as a group, which would have a number of positive effects, but would come at the expense of whatever people would have spent that time on otherwise--which, presumably, would have had their own positive effects. Time I would spend on, say, generating talks for a LW meetup probably competes with time I would spend on, say, writing posts for LW, and it's not clear to me that it's better to do the former than the latter.
you should allocate some time to free-experimentation. When you discover that one activity was clearly better than another, you can change to the better one. Until then (and even after) having time to experiment (try new things) is valuable in itself.
the advantage of taking LW participants swing dancing (for example) is that you get to swing dance AND spend time with LW friends at once. (being more efficient than just doing one or the other)