Curated. Having been an organizer for ~7 years I endorse most of these specific ideas and the underlying generating vibe that outputs them.
(some of the ideas are somewhat oddly-specific for particular sub-types of rationalist subculture, i.e. sub-subculture, and not saying every idea here is great for every meetup, but the general vibe of "figure out what culture you want and make it, opinionatedly" is great)
I maybe want to flag:
I would rather meetups in a city exist ~indefinitely in mildly crappy form, than if they exist in ideal form but only for a bit, and then the city has no more rationality meetups after that.
I think I agree with how this is presented in this post (i.e. in this context you're mostly talking about being "logistically crappy", which I think meetups can easily survive, especially if it's done such that someone else could choose to step up and make them less crappy). But, I think sometimes meetups are culturally kinda-crappy (because there wasn't someone putting in the work to make them culturally great), and in those cases I think it is sometimes better for the meetup to die, such that there's a clear vacuum someone could step up to fill.
Do not accommodate people who don't do the readings
Historically, I've gone in the reverse direction of "mostly, don't assign readings, just allocate the first hour to doing the reading and then talk, to avoid giving people more executive-function-heavy-work" (and, let people who actually did do the readings show up an hour late).
But, I have been pretty pleasantly surprised with how assigning readings has gone for the Lighthaven reading group, and sounds like it's also working for you. I think historically I haven't actually had a meetup where "do the reading" was a regular action as opposed to an occasional one-of so it didn't make as much sense to develop explicit culture around it.
It does seem nice to have a relatively minor, achievable "high standard" to help enculturate the broader idea of "have standards."
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1As someone who runs a (university) rationality group, I am pretty unsure about this point. While we started off being more accommodating to those who haven’t (starting with someone basically summarizing the reading), I feel like--for a reason unbeknownst to me--the standard changed and now everyone does the readings by default. Not accommodating people, then, seems like something that pushes people in the right direction.
1As someone who has been to this reading group several times, my take is that the quality of discussion was good/detailed enough that having wrestled with the reading before hand was a prerequisite to participating in a non-trivial way. From my perspective, the expectation was closer to "read what you can and its not a big deal if you can't read anything" but I wanted to be able to follow every part of the discussion so I started doing the readings by default.
Super upvoted.
With that said, why is the optimal amount of woo not zero?
Also I think nonaccomodationist vegans have tended to be among the crazier people, so maybe you want enough vegetables for the accommodationists but also beef from moderately less tortured cows.
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3i find that in zero-woo spaces a different set of maladies creep into the culture, normalizing practices such as:
- people staying in horrible jobs and getting pikashocked by recurring burnout
- people staying in relationships that check all the boxes so surely the lack of spark is fine and this will certainly in no way lead to a divorce in <5 years' time
- people becoming extraordinarily jaded about romance, the future, geopolitics, and many other important things to a very distorted degree
- people being unwilling or unable to talk to anyone about problems currently going on in their life and eventually dropping away from the scene as their misery compounds
while you can theoretically "skill issue, add more rationality" to fix this, i find that it's generally easier and more pleasant to let in a little woo, and that greases the way out of these traps.
non-accomodationist vegans will made sufficiently mad by the very regular fancy cheese spread so i don't see too much upside from adding actual meat options as well.
1
Many "woo" things have nothing to do with holding false beliefs. Even CFAR does stuff like Focusing, which I'd consider pretty solidly woo.
The good kinds of woo are about learning to use your emotions / System 1. Those things are very useful, a discovery which I found surprising. In retrospect, it should've been pretty obvious that evolution gave us complex emotions for good reason.
For cerebral people with a very developed System 2, there's often a ton of low-hanging fruit in using their System 1, and woo can teach them to pick it. Applying a bit of System 1 can often solve your problems more effectively than "just use System 2 even harder!"
You can get a lot of use out of pretending to push emotions around your body in the form of "energy" without literally believing it, probably similar to how you can push a pseudo-prediction to your brain to get yourself out of bed. And in fact, I think meditation-style practices are a promising avenue for anti-akrasia.
I completely agree, except I thought "woo" meant things that were more supernaturalism-adjacent, or metaphysically-committed, or disruptive-to-mental-structures, or something, definitely not with Focusing or authentic relating as solid examples[1]. (And that ambiguity makes me uncomfortable with normatively-charged public conversations about "woo" that don't try to intensionally define it.)
(This is as much a response to the OP as to your comment, but I wanted to keep this topic under one top-level thread.)
- ^
in my idiolect, the name for the category that does include those is "hippie shit" (non-derogatory)
Yeah, I guess it is ambiguous. I agree people should be more careful about this.
For what it's worth, this is a bullet point in the description of the "woo stuff" meetup that Eliezer was responding to:
Rats are particularly drawn to certain woo practices (jhanas and meditation, circling and authentic relating, psychedelics) while rejecting others (astrology, reiki, palm reading). What principles do you think determine which practices get adopted? Can we characterize this selection process as rational, meta-rational, level three midwittery, or some other thing?
So if the meetup was about these "certain woo practices" and Eliezer doesn't think they're all bad, there's his answer.
Rats are particularly drawn to certain woo practices (jhanas and meditation, circling and authentic relating, psychedelics) while rejecting others (astrology, reiki, palm reading). What principles do you think determine which practices get adopted?
A quick approximate guess: It's about developing your "mental powers", which sounds attractive to the same people who are attracted by the idea of developing their mental power of rationality.
Meditation and circling are based on a promise that if you start thinking and/or talking differently, you will unlock some kind of mental superpowers. Psychedelics unlock supposedly mental superpowers by swallowing a pill. Wannabe rationalists are attracted to the idea of having mental superpowers.
Astrology is about studying stars; almost as boring as astronomy. Palm reading, again, the real power is out there, you can just fatalistically study it. I am not familiar with reiki, but it seems like doing something with energies in your body, which sounds similar to exercise; boring.
(A similar perspective: With meditation and circling the power comes from you. With astrology and palm reading the power is in the stars and the lines. With psychedelics, the power comes from outside, but it boosts your brain. With reiki, the power comes from you, but it stays in the parts of your body outside the brain, and those are lower-status than the brain.)
I think the problem with Focusing is that it's a thing that happens to work but I don't think there's any mainstream scientific theory that would have predicted that it works, and even any retrodictions are pretty hand-wavy. So one might reasonably think "this doesn't follow from science as we understand it -> woo", the same as e.g. homeopathy or various misapplications of quantum mechanics.
Homeopathy is (very strongly) antipredicted by science as we understand it, not just not-predicted.
Also, how many psychological techniques or informal theories are actively predicted to work by mainstream scientific theory? How much of folk psychology or social common sense is? (This isn't to say that there's no epistemic difference between eg Focusing and folk psychology, obviously one has much more unscientific validation, but that "this doesn't follow from science as we understand it" doesn't match usage or practice.)
(I care about this discussion but feel a little bad about having it near the top of the comments section of an unrelated post.)
Homeopathy is (very strongly) antipredicted by science as we understand it, not just not-predicted.
Yeah, you're right. Though I think I've also heard people reference the evidence against the effectiveness of introspection as a reason to be skeptical about Focusing. Now if you look at the studies in question in detail, they don't actually contradict it - the studies are testing the reliability of introspection that doesn't use Focusing - but that easily sounds like special pleading to someone who doesn't have a reason to think that there's anything worth looking at there.
It doesn't help that the kinds of benefits that Focusing gives, like getting a better understand of why you're upset with someone, are hard to test empirically. Gendlin's original study said that people who do something like Focusing are more likely to benefit from therapy, but that could be explained by something else than Focusing being epistemically accurate.
As a nonaccomodationist vegan (who hasn't heard that term before. It probably applies to me but there are plain readings of it which wouldn't), I think you're right that we do tend to be crazier. It's a fringe view, and people get there for a whole host of reasons, many of which come with "baggage" in some form or other. Many have trauma which impacts them deeply in a lot of ways, some healthy (intolerance of harm), some unhealthy (see all the negative side effects of trauma). Others are simply contrarians who like being edgy or fringe. Others are looking for some extreme with which to view the world where they're the hero/"good guy" and everyone else is evil. Those are the main crazy nonaccomodationist vegan archetypes I've seen and unpacked, but I'm sure there are others.
That doesn't make it ok to exploit animals though.
@dirk Anti-reacts aren't for disagreement, they're for "this is an inappropriate use of the react" (e.g. if someone writes "haha" on something that wasn't meant as a joke, or someone hits "typo" on something that is actually correctly spelled).
So please don't anti-react my "Plus One" react if you strongly disagree with it. You can just react to the claim with your epistemic state (as you have done with your disagree-react).
1
1>I'm not saying it's zero percent a shitpost, but the polarization that it induces is intentional.
As an attendee of Jenn's meetups, I remember being skeptical about attending rat meetups and comforted by the website's vibe. Therefore I can attest that this does have some effect. It is interesting to find out that this was intentional!
1
. The group rationality tag on LessWrong is kind of dead
fwiw, I think when I write the sort of stuff that feels like it'd be relevant here, I tend to call use other more specific tags, like:
organizational-culture-and-design
"group rationality" feels too vague to feel that useful, but, if you disagree, I think if you took it upon yourself to populate the tag with relevant stuff you would find some.
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?
mm. I'd prolly call that one-level more meta than prediction markets, and about the same-meta as the others but oriented around a different problem. (I agree the others are one-level-more-meta if you are specifically oriented around that goal).
Examples of things you can read:
I’m a bit confused. Many rationality/EA meetups focus on reading and “cause exploration” (animal welfare, niche social theories, etc.). But we’re in a time of a major European war, human rights getting weaker in many places, and rising authoritarianism.
How should meetups balance reading with urgent real-world action, such as defense against military aggression, helping refugees, combating disinformation, or policy work? Any examples where a meetup actually moved from talk to sustained action?
I don't think rationality meetups should consider it a success criteria to work on any of these things. I would personally consider it a mark against helping to bring rationality meetups about if the meetups became about this kind of activism.
I have organized ~100 meetups in Freiburg, Germany over the last 3.5 years and I think this is great advice that matches a lot of my experience. In particular the number one piece of advice I give to new organizers is: You are the most important person at the meetup, make it easy and comfortable for yourself.
Thing I learned from this post and which I will try some more is to boss people around, do readings outside the rationality canon and specifically saying "hey name, can you please try to reduce the amount of conversational space you are taking up?". Thank you for writing this!
Do not accommodate people who don't do the readings
If there's one thing I hate, it's seeing rationalist groups devolve into vibes based take machines. Rationality meetups should cultivate the more difficult skills required to think correct things about the world, including reading longform pieces of text critically when that is a helpful thing to do (which it often is).
A good solution I have found for this is to assign a reading but have a different reading (ideally a sub-section of the first one) that is short enough so it can be read in about 20 minutes. At the beginning of the meetup I ask who didn't do the reading (e.g. because they are new, did not have time) and then those people go sit in a corner and spend the first 20 minutes doing the reading instead of joining the discussion. The advantages are:
- It incentivized doing the reading upfront because who wants to be reading alone in a room full of cool people you could be talking to instead?
- Everyone still knows at least part of what they are talking about during the later discussion
I estimate that this leads to 85% of people doing the reading upfront with the remaining 15% mostly being newcomers (we average ~18 attendees, ~2 of which are new).
If you assign readings and someone shows up who has not done the reading, what happens then? Do you ask them to leave, ask them to listen quietly, or something else?
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.
2
1also, good post, that somehow instills in me the urge to get good at running meetups, though I don't have an obvious niche to do that in and am not sure I want to prioritize
This is probably just me but if I had to do some reading or I'd otherwise be somehow penalized, I would probably just skip the entire meetup. Also saying to people outright "speak 25% less" feels insulting or at least, without social grace.
Thanks for sharing lovely ideas. I've organized non-rationality meetups and similar social/intellectual gatherings. Much of what you write here is applicable to various extents to those events as well. I'm really glad you shared this.
and the people who are largely here for the transhumanism
I really can't see from the website why that would be the case. I would consider myself a transhumanist and it is a large part of the way I think about humanity, and at least from my perspective I don't see anything wrong with your website design.
Can you please explain that point more?
Some very good ideas here.
I was going to object to the provide only vegan/vegetarian snacks on the basis that some people care about their health, but carnivores can easily go 12 hours without food so it is not a big issue, other than perhaps that one should not pander to irrationality. Specifically that a strict vegan diet without supplements will kill you (B12 and other things). https://x.com/i/grok/share/MXii9Lw6HXf4i9ETVkRBug1cU
Screwtape, as the global ACX meetups czar, has to be reasonable and responsible in his advice giving for running meetups.
And the advice is great! It is unobjectionably great.
I am here to give you more objectionable advice, as another organizer who's run two weekend retreats and a cool hundred rationality meetups over the last two years. As the advice is objectionable (in that, I can see reasonable people disagreeing), please read with the appropriate amount of skepticism.
Don't do anything you find annoying
If any piece of advice on running "good" meetups makes you go "aurgh", just don't do those things. Supplying food, having meetups on a regular scheduled basis, doing more than just hosting board game nights, building organizational capacity, honestly who even cares. If you don't want to do those things, don't! It's completely fine to disappoint your dad. Screwtape is not even your real dad.
I've run several weekend-long megameetups now, and after the last one I realized that I really hate dealing with lodging. So I am just going to not do that going forwards and trust people to figure out sleeping space for themselves. Sure, this is less ideal. But you know what would be even less ideal than that? If in two years' time I throw in the towel because this is getting too stressful, and I stop hosting megameetups forever.
I genuinely think that the most important failure mode to avoid is burnout. And the non-fabricated options for meetups organizers are, often, host meetups that are non-ideal, or burn out. I would rather meetups in a city exist ~indefinitely in mildly crappy form, than if they exist in ideal form but only for a bit, and then the city has no more rationality meetups after that.
Anyways this hot take trumps all the other hot takes which is why it's first. If the rest of the takes here stress you out, just ignore them.
Boss people around
You are a benevolent dictator, act like it. Acting like a dictator can be uncomfortable, and feeling uncomfortable as one is laudable. But you have to do it anyways because the people yearn to be governed. If you are not a benevolent dictator, there is going to be a power vacuum, and because of social monkey dynamics, some random attendee is going to fill that power vacuum, and they're going to do a worse (they don't know where the bathrooms are and to call for regular break times so people are not just sitting for 3 hours straight) and less benevolent job (they don't know that they're supposed to be a benevolent dictator instead of just talking at everyone for 3 hours straight) than you.
As an organizer, the attendees see you as having an aura of competence and in-chargeness around you. You're just some guy, so this is kind of baffling. But you should take advantage of this in ways that ultimately benefit the group as a whole. More on this in the highly recommended The Art of Gathering by Priya Parker.[1]
Tell people to do things.
People around these parts like to help out more than they get the chance to. If you ever offered to help the host at a party but the host waved you away, you know what I'm talking about.
Further, many people actually become quite psychically uncomfortable if they feel like they have an increasing debt to you that they can't pay back (e.g. because you keep hosting good meetups and they keep attending them). So I truly mean this: asking people to do things for you is doing them a favour. Ask them to fetch the latecomer from the door. Ask them to help you clean up after each event. Ask them to guest host meetups on topics they are well versed in.
Tell people how to participate, and sometimes to participate less.
A script I like when breaking people into conversational groups[2]: "Try to pay attention to the amount of conversational space you're taking up. If you feel like you're talking a bit more than other people, try to give other people more space, and if you feel like you're talking a bit less, try to contribute a little more." This does seem to help a little!
But sometimes it does not help enough, and the conversation ends up being monopolized by a person or two anyways. This sucks and is boring for everyone else trapped in that conversation. But you, as the benevolent dictator, can bring out the big guns, because of your aura of in-chargeness.
For example, I will regularly say "hey name, can you please try to reduce the amount of conversational space you are taking up?" More often, I will use a precise number: "Hey, I would like you to talk around 50/65/80% less."
I don't break this one out in the wider world, because this sounds like an unhinged request to most people. But rationalists find this an acceptable thing for organizers to say, and so I will keep pressing that button and not getting punished for it.[3]
Sometimes, people will take "please talk 50% less" as "please shut up forever". If they stop speaking entirely after you make the request, you can invite them back into the conversational fold by asking them for their thoughts on the topic a little while later in the conversation. Then they get the idea.
I do the opposite thing too. If there is someone who is a little more reticent to speak, but has a thoughtful look on their face, or I notice them failing to break into the conversation a few times, I'll also throw them a line, and ask them about what they feel about the readings or the latest turn in the conversation. The idea isn't to get to perfect conversational parity, but to nudge the conversation maybe 30% more that way. This one is nice because if you do it enough, a few other people in the conversation will also pick up the idea that they should be looking out for other people who are interested in speaking, and helping you with gently prompting others to contribute. (This one's fine to do anywhere since it's very... legibly? pro-social, but you do need the magical organizer status force field to request that people talk less.)
Do not accommodate people who don't do the readings
If there's one thing I hate, it's seeing rationalist groups devolve into vibes based take machines. Rationality meetups should cultivate the more difficult skills required to think correct things about the world, including reading longform pieces of text critically when that is a helpful thing to do (which it often is). Organizers should assign readings often, and cultivate a culture where doing the readings is a default expectation. Do not mollycoddle or be understanding or say "oh that's fine" to people who have not done them. You can give new people a pass for misunderstanding the expectations the very first time they show up, and your regulars a pass if they had some sort of genuinely extenuating circumstance.
Especially in smaller meetups (say, under 15 average attendees), you really want to avoid the death spiral of a critical fraction of attendees not doing their readings, and thus the discussion accommodating their lack of context. This punishes the people who did do the readings and disincentivizes them from doing the readings in the future.[4]
As a side benefit, this also makes it so that each newcomer immediately feels the magic of the community. If a new person shows up to my meetups, I like starting out the meetup by asking people who have done the assigned readings to raise their hands. All the hands go up, as well as the new person's eyebrows, and this is like crack to me.
Make people read stuff outside the rationality canon at least sometimes
Especially if you've been running the meetups for a few years. Rationality must survive contact with the wider world, even the parts of it that are not related to AI safety. Examples of things you can read:
Do closed meetups at least sometimes
Especially for contentious topics, such as gender war or culture war discourse, I restrict the meetups to only regulars. Two good reasons for this:
There is another reason, which is that this is sort of like, a way of rewarding your regulars for being regulars? Some amount of reward is good for the culture, but there are trade-offs and better ways of doing that. So I am not sure that this is a "good" reason.
My specific system is that the discord server for my community has roles for "regulars" and "irregulars". People get the "irregular" role after they attend three meetups within a few months' time, and the "regular" role after they... well, become regulars. I restrict more contentious meetups to only people with those roles, explain what they are, and explain that everyone else will be turned away at the door.
Experiment with group rationality at least sometimes
Many heads are better than one, but rationality in the community seems to be a solo activity. The group rationality tag on LessWrong is kind of dead. It should be less dead, and we should be distributing knowledge work more. Think about how your group can do that!
One easy type of doing this is the "skillshare" - if any of your attendees has a skill that they can teach others within a block of a few hours, help them host a meetup on teaching everyone else that skill. Some skillshares we're done: singing, calligraphy, disk golf, drawing, crochet.
Other things you can do: distribute reading a book or a very long essay, distribute researching a topic, distribute writing it up.
Bias the culture towards the marginal rat(s) you want
My meetups website is somewhat notorious for looking like this:
I'm not saying it's zero percent a shitpost, but the polarization that it induces is intentional.
The mainline rationalists are going to check out your meetup no matter what your website looks like. And once they are there, they are going to be like "ah yes, this is a meetup for my people, very good," and stick around. (Okay, yeah, make sure you have that part sorted first.)
So one question you should ask is: who is the marginal attendee that you want to attract? And then you want to bias your material towards them[5]. Here are some categories that might exist on the margins of rationality communities in various locales:
As with all things except pokemon, you can't get them all and you must consider trade-offs. My website will turn off the most fussy members of the tribe and the people who are largely here for the transhumanism, but I think the first group would kind of kill the vibes at a meetup anyways and I don't think there's too many of the second around these parts so I'm comfortable with the trade.
My website will also repel older members of the community, and I am sad about this. But I live in a college town and the numbers just don't work out in their favour, especially since older members are more likely to be more central members of the tribe, and come check us out anyways.
Websites, of course, are not the end-all and be-all of culture. Some other things I do to steer the culture of my group:
There are other things that affect the meetup culture that I can't realistically change, such as the layout and design of my apartment's amenity room, or like, my own fundamental personality. You can only do so much.
You can choose to not care about any of this. The correct choice for most meetups organizers is to not spend precious organizing hours thinking about culture strategy, and just focus on running meetups they consider interesting and fun. But while you can choose to not think about the trade-offs, the trade-offs will persist nonetheless.
And remember, if any of this stresses you out, see take #1.
You can find a summary on the EA forums here, and this specific point is under the subheading "don't be a chill host".
I break people into different groups if a single group has more than eight people in it. At seven or eight people, it becomes difficult for many people to contribute to the group conversation. But sometimes groups of only 3 people fizzle out, and this seems like a worse failure mode, so I wait until the threshold of 8 to split.
The way that I think about this is something like: people who tend to monopolize the conversation know this about themselves, and will kick themselves about doing so after they get home and realize that that's what they did. If the request is given in a non-hostile and casual way, they often genuinely appreciate the reminder in the moment.
I hear this take might not apply to larger groups where there will be enough people in the mix who have done the readings that they can just discuss with each other.
You can also consider the opposite; which groups you want to disincentive from attendance. But this seems anti-social so I shan't say more about it.