I'm a little surprised to see the issues of LWers interacting with women reduced to "being careful when discussing explicit awareness of social reality" ... with a link to PUA stuff.
1) PUA stuff is hardly the only example out there of "explicit awareness of social reality".
2) It's quite telling that the implication of the post is that "women don't like explicit awareness of social reality", rather than the (more accurate) "women don't like PUA".
One way to encourage women to participate in rationalist communities might be to make a conscious effort not to portray us as silly, manipulative, fickle, irrational gold-diggers. Some rationalists do a good job of this ... many don't. And PUAs, rationalist and otherwise, are usually bad at this. (Yes, there are exceptions.)
PUA stuff targets the middle of the bell curve. Of course it looks silly to intelligent people.
This. Pickup at the right of the bell curve looks a bit different. It involves more puns, for instance.
Pickup at the right end of the bell curve looks like this:
"If I were to ask you out, would your answer to that question be the same as the answer to this one?"
(Disclaimer: I didn't make it up. I saw it somewhere else on this site, long time ago.)
How much do you actually communicate with people who are around the middle of the bell curve? In places like LW, people often have a very skewed perspective about the bottom three quartiles.
My experience is that intelligent people overestimate the abilities of people around the middle.
http://www.overcomingbias.com/2009/07/stupider-than-you-realize.html
It's skewed in several ways, each of which would be a complex topic in its own right. In this particular context, I have the impression that nazgulnarsil's idea of what the middle of the distribution looks like would correspond more exactly to somewhat higher percentiles.
I actually had not noticed that LWers alienated women in any way. And yes, I am female. And maybe not very observant.
http://lesswrong.com/lw/134/sayeth_the_girl/
http://lesswrong.com/lw/13j/of_exclusionary_speech_and_gender_politics/
There are many more but I do not want to continue to dig them up.
I found your blog, and I liked it, and it occurred to me that the mode of thinking and expression that's common in feminist (or kinky, or gender-conscious) circles isn't unrelated to the LessWrong mode. They're different languages, but they're similar in being explicit about social dynamics that are normally implicit, and encouraging people to self-modify their minds and second-guess their own thoughts in a way that provokes a knee-jerk "but that's unnatural!" reaction in "normal" people. So maybe this is a good blog for feminists.
Nitpick: It had "PUA" in the title, but the formerly-linked article was not about seduction/gender in any way.
I will not make this particular mistake again (is there a term for "Boo Lights"?), but I still think the idea of explicitly practicing high-value social skills in a group is a good one.
Ha! I see I assumed too much and miscommunicated by under-communicating...again.
I meant LW treats people like they are silly, none of their core values are beyond question, their imagined reasons are confabulations, and their real reasons reek of bias, irrationality, and anti-epistemology.
It doesn't seem at all correct to say "average men treat women like they're silly, but rationalists don't do that!"
Sure, rationalists treat men as silly too, which might be what is meant, but I think that part of the statement is literally false.
I don't think it's bad to analyze social phenomena.
Neither does anyone else. It's just that if one actually analyses social phenomena instead of consciously or subconsciously taking the opportunity to judge/play ploitics, one pisses off many, many people very quickly.
I do think it's bad to engage in or endorse (unwanted) sexually manipulative behavior.
I summon HughRistik! But even if I were to accept manipulation as a natural kind, which I don't, rather than as a continuum with communication and influence, where are you going to draw the line?
I also think it's bad to equate distaste for unwanted sexually manipulative behavior with distaste for analysis.
PUA is up there with psychology, sales and marketing in the ranks of useful insights into how people actually work. It is unfortunate that there are some desperate misogynists among them, but if one is to denounce it then sales, marketing, PR, they all gotta burn too.
I have a big crush on HughRistik. It is important to note that he is not an accurate representation of PUAs. He is considerably more concerned with ethics, more friendly to feminism, more willing to acknowledge systemic problems in the PUA subculture, and smarter than the vast majority of PUAs. Quotation from one of his writings:
"There are a lot of problems with the seduction community that feminists correctly observe, including misogyny, cynicism towards relationships, and a few tactics that are bad for consent." from: http://feministcritics.nfshost.com/blog/about/seduction-communitypickup-artists/
(edited for grammar)
There are people who show up once or a few times and fail to continue coming. They rarely give explanations for why they stop showing up. I imagine some move, some find other ways to spend a Tuesday, and some don't like what we do. Good data on this is unavailable to me.
The group has rejected one person. This person had been drinking too much, and disruptive over several weeks. The process took several hours of discussion before the person was asked to come on the condition that they stayed sober at the meetups. The person decided not to come back.
This post is wonderful! The general category of "codified knowledge about best practices on how to do something important gained from doing it for hundreds of hours" is way underrepresented on LW. The density of practical experience makes it harder to write than finding a study or bias and musing about it, but it also makes it a lot more useful.
I look forward to helping replicate these practices in the Bay Area. Although achieving gender balance here is going to be a pretty significant challenge...
You get gender balance (or closer to it) by having members invite women they know who seem like they might be interested. I got involved because a friend and fellow-LessWronger invited me. Thinking about the other women... we have a couple who were there from the beginning, a friend of one of the old-timers, Divia whom people knew from the West Coast, and some others whose "origin stories" I don't know.
I don't think you have to paint it pink or anything. Just ordinary networking. (You might possibly have an extra challenge in that San Francisco has more men than New York, proportionally -- but at the scale of an in-person meetup I'm not sure that matters.)
Thank you so much for this post. This is absolute gold for someone like me.
I have only just recently begun a Less Wrong meet up group in Sydney, Australia, and have been scouring around for advice and prior models to go of and you pretty much just provided everything in one freaking awesome post!
What's really encouraging is that in doing comparisons I already see similar happening in my group. Firstly most of the attendants are very good friends of mine, to whom topics pertaining to rationality come up naturally at almost any occasion, their great fun to hang out with, and most have shown keen interest in a fortnightly Less Wrong meeting. It's really encouraging to receive some confirmation that what I'm doing does have this potential, and it's really good to have a precedent to give me some basic idea of what to expect.
I wish I could upvote twice!
I'm interested in hearing a bit more on meeting structure ("Meetup Topics" heading), as well as how it relates to time progression (what types of activities work best for forming the tribe vs. later maintaining it).
I'll be in NYC Apr 1-18 inclusive with the sole agenda of actually meeting the community this time.
You know, it finally occurred to me that instead of complaining about the paucity of LWers in Texas (or infiltrating churches, or planning a move), I should start and promote one right here, and draw all the latent rationalists out of the woodwork, even if it is Waco.
(Btw, I visited the NYC group last November while Will was out of town and stayed in his room. [Edit: Yes, he was aware of this, jokers.] Great group, but you already knew that.)
You should check out project Sifter, which is essentially what you are describing, started in San Diego in the late 90's but now worldwide including NY. http://sifter.org
It is fairly quiet lately due to lack of "heroes" but it only takes one to revive an area and the membership is there (and fairly easy to grow).
(Disclaimer: it's my site. But it's ad-free, no fee -- I just maintain it for the benefit of the members.)
Open to collaborations if you want to merge efforts. I have some solutions brewing for the heroes problem, and other ideas in the...
Rationalists are still human, and we still have basic human needs.
I see this happen quite a bit: people (even other rationalists, apparently) seem to believe that rationalists should be advanced enough to not have basic psychological needs of this sort. This is a complete non sequitur. How does having accurate beliefs, good decision-making skills, and the rationalist attitude inhibit those basic needs? And why those needs and not even more basic needs, like comfort?
I'm very happy you included the word "Bacchanalia" in your post, it made me laugh. These sorts of aesthetic touches are what allow people to really read material. Keep up the good work.
I am very interested in replicating your success in the Bay Area. Thank you for writing this all up.
But real heroes shouldn't need the promise of a high status title to get the ball rolling.
Real heroes are the sorts of things we expect to find in escapist fantasy, but we live in the real world where promises of status really do get certain people off their duff and acting on important problems.
Most progress is accomplished in small groups: There is strong consensus that group discussions rarely result in updating, even if they are fun. Conversations of 2 or 3 (maybe 4 at the most), seem to produce the most useful insights. This is why spending time together bilaterally is incredibly important to group development. When a handful of people are all interested in a particular topic and practice it together, they form a de facto working group which allows them to iterate rapidly and then teach it to the rest of the members.
This is important and o...
This sounds extremely awesome. Something like this would improve my quality of life incomprehensibly much, I'd do very desperate things for it.
If I were in an area with critical mass, I'd go out and do the hero thing RIGHT NOW. I'd probably fail but as I said I'm desperate. However, where I live is not near critical mass, not even near it, maybe 2 or 3 orders of magnitude away from it. I can't travel far or move because of... medical reasons, and it will likely remain this way for the foreseeable future. I am trapped and miserable, please help.
The Cambridge meetup group has a core group of regulars, but hasn't expanded much beyond that. Thanks for all the ideas; I'm going to try applying some of them to make the group more active and hopefully attract more people to it.
I intend to keep this post firmly in my mind, as I will soon begin graduate school in a new location.
I am so glad this article was linked to in a comment. We are in the midst of forming a Cincinnati/Columbus area meetup group, and this is useful information. I am pretty impressed by how much response we have gotten. The email list is at 10 people, and we expect 8 at our first meetup.
I could use advice on the issue below, as well.
As LW-ers in non-major cities want to form meetups, I think they are likely to face the same difficulty that we are currently facing, which is that we are pretty spread out. No mid-sized city has enough by itself to establish its...
IMHO there is little chance that an online-only community could replicate the successes (many friendships among the members, very high levels of enjoyment, motivation and engagement) of LW NYC. Why not? See the post I just made.
This post inspires me. I'll definitely keep this in mind when considering the next meetup in Helsinki.
(Unfortunately for organizing meetups, I'll be traveling until August. I hope my motivation won't have subsided when I come back.)
I live (by explicit preference) in a small town in the rural mountain west. Has anybody had success with starting a rationalist group in a small town?
I did not believe that life could be this much fun or that I could possibly achieve such a sustained level of happiness.
you didn't explain how meetups = sustained level of happiness...
or did I miss something?
I've searched the site, but I can't find any lw meetups in my area, Tampa, FL. Does anyone know if there are and how to find them?
I still have on my google calendar a "LW/OB Meetups" calendar, which says, among other things
NYC LW/OB Meetup Sat, August 11, 11am – 1pm Moonstruck Diner (400 W 23rd St, between 10th Ave & 9th Ave) map
Is this obsolete?
You have mentioned "Presentation" as one of meetup topics. Could you please tell me, have you ever made or heard a presentation of some scientific discoveries and break-troughs at your meetups? For example, someone could read an interesting article in a magazine, and tell about this topic at the meetup. Or just talk about his or her own speciality and science interests. For me it seems to be useful and interesting kind of activity to do at rationalists' meetings.
I don't have a lot of time to travel into the city at the moment, but I'm graduating in a matter of weeks, which should hopefully leave me a bit more mobile. I'll make a point of checking this out.
I'm contemplating make a trip to New York on the weekend of April 2-3 specifically in the hopes of meeting some members of the LW NYC Chapter (and EY as well, if I can manage it). Since I don't know anyone in the city, I'm hoping this comment will generate interest in having some kind of get-together on that weekend.
I'd be traveling from Ottawa, Canada; anyone in the region is welcome to contact me by PM to get in on the action. (I've already canvassed XFrequentist and received a positive reply.) Cosmos has offered to let me crash at his place, but I haven't asked him about extra space for other folk.
Rationalists are still human, and we still have basic human needs. I see this happen quite a bit: people (even other rationalists, apparently) seem to believe that rationalists should be advanced enough to not have basic psychological needs of this sort. This is a complete non sequitur. How does having accurate beliefs, good decision-making skills, and the rationalist attitude inhibit those basic needs? And why those needs and not even more basic needs, like comfort?
I see this happen quite a bit: people (even other rationalists, apparently) seem to believe that rationalists should be advanced enough to not have basic psychological needs of this sort. This is a complete non sequitur. How does having accurate beliefs, good decision-making skills, and the rationalist attitude inhibit those basic needs? And why those needs and not even more basic needs, like comfort?
Several members broke off old relationships and some of them entered new ones within the group.
Cult alert.
Should one's SO be worried if one considers going to a LW meetup?
No, this is not a mere worldview phenomenon. Apparently the NYC LW group has successfully proved, contrary to all stereotypes, that rationality done right makes you a more attractive mate.
Contrast:
1) "How could you say that! You terrible mean person who wants to hurt my feelings!"
2) "You need to understand that when you say something like that, it makes me feel as though you're trying to hurt my feelings, whether or not you do."
3) "I'm sorry about how I reacted; even though I know on the level of rational probabilities that it's extremely unlikely you meant to hurt my feelings, I'm still working on getting my brain to alieve that and not just believe it."
Let's say you've got a mate at level 1. Then you join a group in which you find (a) single people at level 3 and (b) a widespread understanding of the concept of the "sunk cost fallacy" and the importance of saying oops and changing your policies occasionally.
What do you think happens next?
And yes, NYC LW is demonstrating that this also works with women realizing that they can no longer stand to be around non-rationalist guys.
PS: Cultish countercultishness. I'm actually pretty sick of hearing someone yell "Cult!" every time rationalists try to coordinate as well as a model railroad club. Why Our Kind Can't Cooperate.
A relationship between two rationalists can be much happier and freer of drama. If Eliezer's example isn't clear enough, here's another one.
"I'm worried about X."
Non-rationalist: "I've told you a million times, that's not gonna happen! Why can't you trust me?"
Rationalist: "Ok, let's go to Wikipedia, get some stats, and do the expected value calculation. Let me show you how unlikely this is."
Which conversation ends in a fight? Which conversation ends in both people actually feeling more at ease?
There are female memes to the effect "Men are endearing fools," and male memes to the effect "Women are beautiful fools." But a fool eventually gets frustrating. It is an incredible relief to meet someone who isn't foolish. "Whoa... you mean you can embrace an idea without being an uncritical fanatic? You mean you can actually make allowances for overconfidence bias, instead of taking reckless gambles? You can listen to the content of what I'm saying instead of the applause lights?" Having a rationalist partner means never having to say "Oh, you wouldn't understand."
Also, on cultishness: I saw an ad the other day ...
World-destroying black hole caused by LHC. Autism through vaccination. Cancer from low intensity radio waves (i.e. a cell phone rather than a radar station). A meteorite hitting your house. A plane crashing into your house if you don't live in a landing vector of an airport. Terrorists capturing the plane you are on if you fly rarely.
It is perhaps the best-kept secret on Less Wrong that the New York City community has been meeting regularly for almost two years. For nearly a year we've been meeting weekly or more. The rest of this post is going to be a practical guide to the benefits of group rationality, but first I will do something that is still too rare on this blog: make it clear how strongly I feel about this. Before this community took off, I did not believe that life could be this much fun or that I could possibly achieve such a sustained level of happiness.
Being rational in an irrational world is incredibly lonely. Every interaction reveals that our thought processes differ widely from those around us, and I had accepted that such a divide would always exist. For the first time in my life I have dozens of people with whom I can act freely and revel in the joy of rationality without any social concern - hell, it's actively rewarded! Until the NYC Less Wrong community formed, I didn't realize that I was a forager lost without a tribe...
Rationalists are still human, and we still have basic human needs. lukeprog summarizes the literature on subjective well-being, and the only factors which correlate to any degree are genetics, health, work satisfaction and social life - which actually gets listed three separate times as social activity, relationship satisfaction and religiosity. Rationalists tend to be less socially adept on average, and this can make it difficult to obtain the full rewards of social interaction. However, once rationalists learn to socialize with each other, they also become increasingly social towards everyone more generally. This improves your life. A lot.
We are a group of friends to enjoy life alongside, while we try miracle fruit, dance ecstatically until sunrise, actively embarrass ourselves at karaoke, get lost in the woods, and jump off waterfalls. Poker, paintball, parties, go-karts, concerts, camping... I have a community where I can live in truth and be accepted as I am, where I can give and receive feedback and get help becoming stronger. I am immensely grateful to have all of these people in my life, and I look forward to every moment I spend with them. To love and be loved is an unparalleled experience in this world, once you actually try it.
So, you ask, how did all of this get started...?
Genesis, or a Brief History of Nearly Everything
The origin of the NYC chapter was the April 24th, 2009 meetup that Robin Hanson organized when he came to the city for a prediction markets conference. Approximately 15 people attended over the course of the night, and we all agreed that we had way too much fun together not to do this on a regular basis. I handed out my business cards to everyone there, told them to e-mail me, and I would create a mailing list. Thus Overcoming Bias NYC was born.
It was clear from the very beginning that Jasen Murray was the person most interested in seeing this happen, so he became the organizer of the group for the first year of its existence. At first the times and locations were impromptu, but in August Jasen made the brilliant move of precommitting to be at a specific time and place for a minimum of two hours twice per month. Because enough of us liked Jasen and wanted to hang out with him anyway, several people began showing up every time and a regular meetup was established. Going forward we tried a combination of social meetups, focused discussions and game nights. Jasen also attempted to shift coordination from the mailing list to the Meetup group, but Meetup is not a great mailing list and people were loathe to use multiple services. That now serves as our public face.
In April 2010, Jasen departed to run the Visiting Fellows program at SIAI, and I became the group's organizer. We immediately agreed on a number of changes: weekly meetups (with game nights every other week), focused discussions addressing specific problems instead of general theory, and a temporary taboo on discussion of AGI/FAI. We also moved the majority of our meetups from a public diner to a private residence, which avoided a lot of hassles with loud crowds, ordering of food, etc. These changes marked our transition to a social group that focused on practical life benefits. June brought two more key changes: we started holding strategy sessions on request to help members optimize their lives, and I started hugging people, which began a cascade of increasing physical contact. That summer brought an increased interest in skill sharing, a reduced game night frequency, and meetups focused around specific topics. That fall we began using the group more for discussions, sharing social events of mutual interest, and coordinating activities together outside of the weekly meetups.
Then, in October, things began to accelerate. I told everyone on the list to respond or be removed, to get an idea of numbers and to galvanize the core membership. Several members broke off old relationships and some of them entered new ones within the group. More women started attending; we had previously been almost all male. We began having more contact with the west coast rationalists, including visits by Jasen and Michael Vassar and an extended stay by Divia, which brought valuable new memes to our community. Self-reported levels of fun and happiness began to radically increase. Mailing list discussions turned towards asking for practical advice. The meetups took on a self-improvement focus, with weekly goal-setting and accountability. Andrew Rettek began a public lecture series presenting the Sequences. Demand for more-than-weekly meetups grew...
Lessons
NYC has pioneered creating rationalist communities. While we have largely proceeded via trial and error, the rest of you who are going to become organizers can learn from our experiments and avoid a lot of mistakes. The lessons largely fall under two categories: how to build a group, and what to do with a group once you have one. I hope that you find this advice helpful in your own efforts to establish rationalist communities.
Building a Community
Communities need heroes: Until we have a cadre of paid community organizers, LW meetups will have to run on hero power. Most members are going to be passively attending, a few will actively contribute ideas and activities on the mailing list, but someone needs to be willing to step up as a leader and begin organizing people. Do you want a community badly enough to build one yourself?
Commitment works: We started having regular meetings because Jasen committed to showing up at a specific time and place and staying for a minimum length of time, regardless of other attendance. Enough folks wanted to hang out that this resulted in successful meetups.
Schedule events first, get feedback later: Trying to ask everyone to state their preferences in order to accommodate them all rarely works and can result in prolonged indecision. Just schedule a time and place and topic; people who want to come but can't will speak up and tell you why. With enough iterations you can settle on something approximately utility maximizing.
We are a group of friends: This is the true secret of our success, we are not just a meetup group. We started off as a bunch of people who enjoyed talking about rationality enough that we kept doing it regularly until we became a part of each other's lives. You can tell because we greet each other with hugs instead of handshakes. That physical contact has a profound psychological impact. Furthermore, almost the entire growth of our group has come through friend-referral, not through increased Less Wrong readership. Rationality per se is not the core selling point of the group - people genuinely like hanging out with us, and they tell other people to come hang out with us too.
Gender ratio matters: It is no secret that rationality suffers from a paucity of women, which makes it difficult to start a group with any women at all. There is no easy answer here, but it is important to address this factor as early as possible. Simply put, if you're winning at life and having enough fun women will want to join you, and a balanced gender ratio encourages more people of both genders to attend. Work hard to find interested women, and be careful in the presence of newcomers when trying to sanely explicitly discuss hot-button gender topics. In case the argument for more women is not sufficiently clear, gender-balanced meetups are a lot more fun, and it provides a unique perspective on ideas and group dynamics.
The mailing list is for more than just meetups: While scheduling meetups is an obvious function of a group mailing list, it can be used for all manner of discussions and coordination between group members. Given our significant overlapping interests, one function of the list is for people to invite others to join them on their adventures, be that going to conferences, parties, sous-vide steak dinners, rock climbing, or whatever else people feel like doing. Another very important use is to ask the group for advice on a particular subject, like optimizing OKCupid profiles, learning programming languages, alleviating bad moods, and more! Last but not least, mailing lists make large group discussions on serious questions feasible.
Interact with outside rationalists as much as possible: Just as division of labor exists within the group, it also exists among groups. This allows a steady flow of new memes to try out, and an external evaluation of the current group memes. SIAI and the NYC community have been working on different projects and have different perspectives, and it has been extremely helpful to both groups to have more collaboration between them. NYC is also a major city, so we get a lot of visiting rationalists passing through, and people have traveled from neighboring states to attend our events. This provides constant perspective and growth.
Meetup topics
Group Rationality
Spend time with each other: The biggest benefit of having the community is having the community. Hold meetups often, and use the mailing list to arrange activities outside the meetups as well. Do the things you like doing... together. Get to know other people in the group, figure out who your closest friends are and hang out with them. This is incredibly fun, promotes well-being, and encourages the spread of knowledge. When everyone is feeling good, the positive mood contagion can be overwhelmingly powerful.
Epistemic privilege and meme-sharing: The most powerful aspect of a group of rationalists is that you have an entire class of people whose reasoning you trust. Division of labor arises naturally as each member has different interests, they all pursue a variety of skills and areas of expertise, which they can then bring back to the group. Even the lowest-level rationalists in the group can rapidly upgrade themselves by adopting winning heuristics from other group members. I cannot overstate the power of epistemic privilege. We have rapidly spread knowledge about metabolism, exercise, neuroscience, meditation, hypnosis, several systems of therapy... and don't forget the Dark Arts.
Ask the group for help: There is a reason we identify as aspiring rationalists, rather than just plain rationalists. Despite our best efforts we are not perfect Bayesians, but at least we know the importance of saying oops. One of the biggest advantages of a group of rationalists is that any of the individual members can ask the group for help when they are feeling indecisive or they think their logic is compromised. When everyone else in the group unanimously agrees with each other and disagrees with us, that's evidence strong enough not to ignore. For the record, the only thing that drives rationalists crazier than loneliness is being in a relationship.
Be honest with each other: Maybe this should go without saying, but it bears worth repeating. One of a rationalist's strengths is not identifying with our beliefs, which allows us to surrender our old attire, update on new evidence, and actually change our minds. It is difficult for others to identify errors in our data or reasoning if that entire process is a black box - and by symmetry, if others wish to improve as well, they need to be willing to hear us and we need to be willing to tell them unpleasant truths. Most rationalists I have encountered also tend not to be very judgmental, and this quality makes this kind of communication drastically easier because everyone feels safe. Make your community a place where everyone can give and receive feedback and share their best knowledge of the map without fear.
Learn to be social, and go forth into the world: To be frank, many of us are not very good at social interaction, which can definitely be painful, and, when socializing is an important part of our life or job, debilitating. Fortunately, rationalists have a major hack: we can start socializing with each other in a non-judgmental environment. Once some of the benefits of regular social interaction settle in, and people become happier and more comfortable in groups, it becomes increasingly easy to socialize with other people outside the group. There has been a very clear trend towards increased sociability and as a result good social outcomes.
Most progress is accomplished in small groups: There is strong consensus that group discussions rarely result in updating, even if they are fun. Conversations of 2 or 3 (maybe 4 at the most), seem to produce the most useful insights. This is why spending time together bilaterally is incredibly important to group development. When a handful of people are all interested in a particular topic and practice it together, they form a de facto working group which allows them to iterate rapidly and then teach it to the rest of the members.
Set goals and hold each other accountable: This has been a recent, but powerful, addition to the group. Humans are not automatically strategic, but we have each other to remind us of this fact. The vast majority of people don't even reach the first step of having explicit goals! Not only that, but being a social group allows us to leverage that social pressure on each other - it is legitimately challenging to stand in front of the group and admit that you have not achieved your goal for the week. These goals should either be focused on the most important step that would change your life, or radically push you outside your comfort zone.
The Road Ahead
The NYC community continues to change and grow, and every week brings something new. The problem of optimizing group rationality is far from solved, and I hope to share insights with Less Wrong as we continue to have them. Our current biggest challenge is that we are outgrowing our usual meetup location as there has been demand for more meetups on a wide variety of topics. Given that our biggest strengths are social in nature, we are beginning to hit fundamental limits on group size above which coordination begins to break down.
The solution we are currently implementing is creating multiple groups, each meeting weekly and focused on a different topic. Andrew Rettek is creating a group at Columbia University, focusing on outreach/education and specifically teaching rationality through cognitive biases. My own group is focusing on self-development, which involves goal-setting, skill-sharing, and creating tools to correct errors in reason and emotion - in short, instrumental rationality. Zvi Mowshowitz is running a third group sticking to the core meetups like discussions and game nights, and trying experimental formats as well. Members may attend any meetups they wish during the week, with the goal of decreasing total attendance at each one to keep numbers reasonable - and we will keep creating more groups if these ones get full.
Most importantly, however, we want to make everything we have done here and everything we have learned reliably reproducible. This post is one example of an attempt to codify what steps we have taken to get here from there as a community so that others can begin following our lead, and I fully intend to flesh out each of these in more exact detail. We have also stumbled on a number of useful memes and heuristics, all of which I seek to turn into explicit knowledge: step by step instructions that anyone could follow to achieve similar benefits. Given that much of this knowledge will likely contain implicit components, instructors of these skills should be able to earn profits teaching them to others. Making more money seems to be one of the biggest metrics on which rationalists do not yet perform exceptionally, but if we are truly creating value in the world we should learn how to capture it.
Call to Assemble
You have now heard my case for group rationality, and it rests upon the individual benefits it incurs: you will be drastically more happy, and you will level up a lot more quickly. Armed with this knowledge, what should you do?
First of all, if you live in an area which already has a critical mass of rationalists you should take these lessons and create a community of your own, so that you and everyone else can reap the rewards. It is up to you to be the hero - yes, you. One common piece of feedback we get from new members is that Less Wrong discussions are intimidating, and they don't feel qualified to even talk about these topics (much less contribute or become an organizer). They are invariably wrong.
If you find yourself having to move for any reason, then you should make every attempt you can to congregate in an area with more people. Note that in-person interaction requires minimal effective distance between people. There is a strong case to pick NYC: it is a major urban area with a lot of different job opportunities, the unusually good subway system shortens effective distance, and we are creating a model which can scale with additional rationalists. Two alternatives are suburban areas with good highways, or to move within walking distance of other rationalists. Taken to the limit you can share housing with other rationalists, as in the case of the Visiting Fellows program. As the NYC community grows we are naturally clustering around different parts of the city, and we hope to build an intentional community where many of us live together in shared housing.
You may have had a sense that more was possible, and if you did then you were correct: groups of rationalists have more fun and win at life, and it's time to scale up the awesome. Whether you decide to make your own home or come join ours, the NYC community will always welcome you with open arms.