I love this analogy! And the idea. I'm bullish on it being a good one.
But I've always thought that's the wrong way to think about these sorts of things. The question isn't whether it's a good idea, it's whether it's worth trying as an experiment. And that question feels to me like it has an obvious answer of "yes". It's cheap, low-downside, plausible, and high enough upside.
I've also always thought that, while seemingly mundane, these sorts of questions about how to have effective meetups might be really important. After all:
Lighthaven is a project by Lightcone Infrastructure, which is dedicated to facilitating intellectual progress on humanity's most important questions.
- https://www.lighthaven.space/
Well, "really important" might be a stretch. I see it as a Very General Helper move. It improves the productivity of people who are doing important things. Maybe "really important" should be reserved for more direct moves to tackle the central bottleneck. I'm not sure. I suppose it depends on the specifics.
This is a good idea, but I don't think you need an app feature to solve it (in fact, an app feature, to me, would seem to risk damaging the thing you actually want, which is to be in a conversation with interesting people instead of in a conversation with people who struggle find themselves in interesting conversations).
Instead what you can/could have done is the following:
Basically what I'm saying is that Less Online already had meeting stones and they were the comfy, shaded couches and chairs, and they got populated by people who were willing to talk to random strangers in part because they were not designated meeting places (i.e. we had shelling meeting stones).
That's what I did, but sometimes it didn't work well because all of the obvious places were full, and if I went somewhere else people would think I was intentionally avoiding the crowds. It also meant I only talked to people who sat in certain places.
It was particularly hard to find people to talk to during lunch.
I quite like this idea.
Perhaps we could also come up with a way for people on their own to signal whether they want people to come up and talk to them, or if they’re intentionally taking a moment to themselves.
Back in the mists of time, there was this game called World of Warcraft, where you and your four closest friends would team up to complete dungeons together. To handle the inevitable people with no friends, they added meeting stones near each dungeon. When you clicked a meeting stone, it added you to a queue, and once five people were in the queue, you would all be added to a group together.
I was thinking abut this at LessOnline last week, since I don't have any friends sometimes had trouble finding groups of people to talk to. One way to handle this was to walk up to an existing group and talk to them, but this was tricky since sometimes all of the existing groups were 4+ people already. My strategy ended up being to sit on an empty couch in the busiest areas and wait for people to come to me, but sometimes there were no empty couches in the busy areas.
This made me wish we had some (virtual) meeting stones:
This could also potentially be a non-WriteHaven app, and I'm tempted to just write it myself, but it would only really be useful if everyone at a conference was aware of it.
What do you all think?
The ideal conversation size might be smaller than four, but groups of two can lead to being matched with one other person who you don't actually end up liking, and not having an non-awkward way to extract yourself.
The conference organizers can setup a list of locations to randomly select from, like "The fire table near the Diagonal Hall".