I recently moved to Karlsruhe and found that it is quite a shame that there is no organized rationalist community in this city!  In consequence, the goal of this post is to take a first step towards building a LessWrong meetup in Karlsruhe.

Felix Karg and I did a quick brainstorming to find out what we would like a LessWrong meetup in Karlsruhe to be like and how we could contribute to it.

The following gives a short summary of what we came up with.

Goals:

• Provide platform for regular meetups, reading groups (the sequences, the codex, other rationalist reading material), discussions, workshops and other events
• In general: locally connect rationalists and encourage interaction
• Maybe also (in the long term): facilitate exchange with other local rationalist communities, organize larger events

Our contribution:

I would be willing to take an organizing role, including e.g. organizing a (up

to) (bi-)weekly reading and discussion group.

Next steps:

• Find participants
• Organize a first meeting
• Establish means of communication and a regular interval for further gatherings

Problem:

Oops oh yeah the pandemic...

It is maybe not possible and most certainly not a good idea to meet indoors within the next few months. In contrast to that, outdoor meetings are probably less of a problem, but will often be limited by the weather and the limited sunlight of short winter days.

To that end we can:

• wait (and postpone further action until the temperatures allow for more comfortable outdoor meetings or until the pandemic relaxes)
• meet outside
• meet online

So?

In order to find out how many people would be interested in participating in a local rationalist meetup in Karlsruhe, I suggest that we do an online meeting on 2020-11-14 at 14:00 on meet.jit.si/KarlsruheLW20201114. This will be an opportunity to discuss individual opinions on how to proceed short-term.

If enough people are interested I would be comfortable with having future meetings outside as long as the weather permits it. If however too few people are with me on this, I think that it is probably best to wait until spring (and maybe organize a few online gatherings).