Huh, thanks for flagging this. I'm paid a lot more than $37 an hour, so this got me to look into my invoices this year. It turns out that I took a lot of time off this year, such that my weekly hours are significantly lower than 35. Working to revise.

A lot of this is in the pre-prep; for example your events page can more strongly set an expectation that you must do the readings if you want to attend the meetup, by providing discussion questions that are very clearly based on the specific arguments that the writers of various pieces make.

If someone shows up who has not done the readings, you can do a few things:

• ask them to chill somewhere quiet and do the readings before joining the group discussion
• give them a shallow summary of the readings and let them participate but also like, don't throw them excessive bones or overly accommodate them
  • if someone references something in one of the texts, you can give a quick summary of which reading it came from
  • whenever they raise a point that's in the readings, explain (in a polite, non-snide way) that the readings address this point by saying xyz

Basically, you shouldn't actively punish people who don't do the readings, but your programming design should not accommodate them. When they come to readings discussion based events, they should end up feeling something like "oh crap, I could get a lot more out of this if I came prepared by doing the readings, everyone else is engaging in a much deeper level than I can manage to."

And then they'll know to do the readings going forward.

screwtape i hate to say it but all of these takes are still quite responsible and reasonable... here are my actually unreasonable takes for ex:

• you need to fumigate your meetup group for brainworms by hosting at least one very right-wing coded and one very left-wing coded meetup per year
• all community discords should be fletcher bridged to at least one other community discord of a nearby community
• there is nothing wrong with taking a significant fraction of all canadian rationalists to a nude beach, and while you as the organizer should not make the prediction market that will implicitly pressure people to strip naked and go skinny dipping, it's fine to inject a whole bunch of liquidity into that market when someone else inevitably creates it

Attendee preferences are, as Jack Sparrow would say, more like guidelines.

One thing I'll add is that which attendees become regulars is shaped by the kind of meetups that are on offer. So it's very good to only run the meetups you want to run, because that will attract the people that are most interested in the things that you are most interested in, and together you can veer the rationalist culture of your city in beautifully deranged directions.

you can do this by highlighting the entire text, and then clicking the reaction button to react to all of the selected text :B

please, uh, please do not actually do that.

hmm, I guess the posts that I want (which doesn't exist) are one level less meta than those: given a group of people, and a concrete problem to solve or question to answer, what are some ways you can apply the former to the latter?

You know, that's an exceedingly reasonable read of how I ended that post. But! For the record, I love Canada too much to leave, and this is not a thing I am considering doing. What I have done is put in my two month's notice, and I'll be moving from my beloved little town to Toronto early next year. I figure there'll be enough action in the fourth largest North American city to keep me occupied :)

But also yeah probably a bunch of American inkies are gonna move, eh.

This is crossposted from the EA Forums because I expect similar (but weaker) dynamics to impact the rationality community.

I think some alternate form of (2) could be interesting, where instead of the requirement being 500 words/day it's 1000 words/2 days or 1500 words/3 days. I feel kind of hampered by daily posting because there's a few longer posts I'm working on and what I want are some 8 hour deep work sessions on them and instead I'm doing them in these terrible 2-3 hour bits.

Seconding this, I try to get my posts out by 6pm so my homies on the east coast can read them, but sometimes I faff about. I think it would be really good if the deadline was 9 or 10pm, and then I feel like I can chat to people, do more slow collaborative pieces with others, and talk about their posts with them. I feel like this might help with, like, idea generation and stuff as well? If there's a few hours in the day where you can talk about your posts and the posts others want to write.