[Meta] Post-meetup reports and discussion
Looking at the discussion section recently, it seems like over half of the posts are meetups. I think it's really great that so many LessWrongers are able to get together and do interesting stuff. Looking at a lot of the topics, I often find myself thinking "I wonder what they ended up talking about." I looked at the meetups page and it looks like many give a description of the topic, but there is rarely any public followup. I also did a search which turned up surprisingly few post-meetup posts. For example, this Los Angeles meetup from a few days ago about resolutions looked really interesting to me and I'm curious to hear what kinds of strategies were proposed and if there were any insights or anecdotes that came up that would be useful to share with those of us that couldn't attend. I remember reading a meetup report back in November that told the story of the exercises they went through and it seemed to spark some good discussion. It even forced me to make a note to try some things on my own. This one was atypical in that it was very detailed and was a crosspost from a personal blog, but I feel like even short reports would give a chance for the rest of the community to chime in and give praise, suggestions, and feedback. When I tried to think of reasons not to share what happened in meetups, I came up with a few potential factors: 1. It's extra work 2. Keeping it private increases the feeling of community within the group 3. Meetups are supposed to be a safe place where your actions or comments won't be broadcast to the world 4. Nothing really post-worthy happened Some potential arguments in favor of having a post-meetup discussion post: 1. It would allow LessWrongers who weren't in attendance to get involved in the discussion 2. Insights would be shared with the whole community 3. Meetup organizers and attendees could get suggestions for ways to improve future meetups 4. Non-attendees could use these ideas to host their own meetups 5. Sum
Thank you! This is exactly what I was looking for. Thinking in terms of bits of information is still not quite intuitive to me, but it seems the right way to go. I've been away from LW for quite a while and I forgot how nice it is to get answers like this to questions.