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.

It's one in the morning. I just ran the east coast rationalist megameetup. A late night spike of my least favourite thing to hear about a meetup I'm running means I'm not going to be able to sleep for a bit. One of my favourite organizers has recently published a list of opinionated meetup takes, saying I have to be reasonable and responsible. 

I have to be reasonable and responsible in my advice giving, eh?

I'm the czar. Which one of you proposes to make me?

(Epistemic status: Written at one in the morning, after having slept about twelve hours in the last seventy-two, and a spike of cortisol. The odds I regret posting this are higher than pretty much anything I've put on the internet associated with my name before.)

Run meetups at a time convenient to you, a place convenient to you, and on a subject you find interesting

For a while now Boston has had a regular meetup Wednesday evening. Why Wednesday? Well, because I'm the one who picked the night, and Wednesday worked best for my schedule. Does someone want the meetups on a different day? I'm open to suggestions, and basically anyone can announce a meetup on our discord. I picked a bar that's easy for me to get to and I bring board games I like playing.

I run a lot of weird ideas for meetups. Sure, some of that is me doing some Explore (in the sense of Explore/Exploit) but also some of that is I like designing weird games, and if I run 'em as meetups people will help playtest my weird games. "Sequences Reading Group" is a popular meetup format. I don't find it that fun myself, so when I'm organizing for myself I don't run 'em. 

Oh, and I used to run a bunch at a rationalist group house that was occupied by the cool people I met at a megameetup almost a decade ago and enjoyed spending time with so much that I moved cities to hang out more. They did have a more centrally located apartment than mine. Also, I got an excuse to hang out more. 

I have run two rationality meetups where zero people attended. One of them was to do a play reading of Rationalist Hamlet. Guess what meetup I plan to rerun this year? 

Attendee preferences are, as Jack Sparrow would say, more like guidelines.

Tell attendees to do the thing you want 'em to do

This year at ECRM I experimented with trying something wild and novel- an opening speech. I know, I know, I'm way out on the Explore side of the Explore/Exploit tradeoffs.

But when writing the speech, I asked myself what I wanted the megameetup to achieve, and the answer was that I wanted people to make friends and learn rationality. That wasn't a surprise, I asked myself that question literal years earlier when I ran the thing for the second or third time. (Why not the first? Look, I pride myself on seldom making a mistake a second time, not on seldom making them the first time.) I wanted people to make more friends and to learn more rationality.

So in the opening talk, I told people to go introduce themselves to someone new and ask their name, where they're from, and then a third question that I changed each time. I did this three times. Boom, it's not a lifelong friendship but it's a start.

Oh, and I also told them what the formula for Bayes Theorem was, and "ask the other person the formula for Bayes Theorem" was the third question the third time. 

Scott Alexander has some writing advice that goes something like "just say what you want to communicate to the reader, then write that down." Well, my meetup advice is something like "just say what you want your attendees to do, then tell them to do it." If I ever decide to run a jogging meetup I'll call it a jogging meetup, we will meet, and then I'll tell 'em to jog. 

You don't have to do anything tricky here.

Tell people who make organizing less fun for you to go away

With a few remaining shreds of reason and responsibility I will note that this one probably applies differently/less the bigger and more official your meetup gets. 

But man. Sometimes it is easy to get turned and twisted up on whether an abstract spirit of justice would agree with a ban decision, or whether asking them to leave after whatever particular annoying thing they did this time was in some way against the deep spirit of your community.

At the local level of one organizer and a dozen people in the organizer's apartment, I am actually just fine with "they make this way less fun" as a reason to tell someone not to come to your dinner parties.

What makes things less fun? Maybe they don't do the readings. Maybe you wanted a meetup with just the regulars you like a bunch. Maybe they're really really bad at evidentials, a part of grammar that isn't even in the language the meetup is run in. That's cool. They can get their own meetup.

Get someone else to pay for it

For one of my best friend's bachelor party, we rented an AirBnB in a nice house and bought a bunch of good food and brought a bunch of board games. It was a great time. Good conversation was had, I ate a bunch of pizza, and got to kick people's butt at Magic. Of course, bachelor parties can be expensive. 

But you know what I did this weekend? 

Worried and stressed about a bunch of oddballs somehow managing to burn down a hostel, or fly to the venue for Berkeley Solstice even though Berkeley Solstice isn't even on this weekend because people inexplicably think I'm the one running that too, or poison themselves on gray market peptides nobody told me about because they know I frown on rules violations as petty as jaywalking, that's what I did this weekend. 

But what I could have done instead was rent an AirBnB in a nice house and bought a bunch of good food and brought a bunch of board games, and then got everyone attending to pay for almost all^[1] of the AirBnB and food. And see if they'll bring the board games. That sounds great. 

And it's not just attendees! Sometimes companies will sponsor your writing retreat in exchange for saying their name a lot and probably some other stuff, you weren't using that immortal soul you didn't believe in anyway. Sometimes grant foundations or meetup czars funded by grants and working too many second jobs will pay for your pizza if you send them photographs of happy rationalists smiling at a camera. Options abound. You can just ask for things. Like money.

Optimize for what you want out of meetups, and what you want can be pretty weird

I want to practice an art of rationality. So I run a bunch of "lets practice an art of rationality" meetups. I want to talk with people who are at all calibrated and who have some better discourse norms, so I run meetups that make people practice calibration and good discourse.

I enjoy getting applause. Remnant of my time as a theatre kid I guess. So I help run Solstice and I give a little speech each year at Megameetup thanking people who do help with megameetup a bit, and someone says they also want to thank me and then over a hundred people applaud and I do a little bow, it's great, would recommend. I think my predecessor did not enjoy taking bows in front of audiences as much as I do, and spent much more of his organization time in a back room masterminding things.

I like talking to new people. I deliberately try to sit down and talk with the new attendees for a few minutes to find out how they're enjoying things, how they found the community, what's going well, what's bumming them out, what books they recommend. It's useful information for running better meetups and also it's an excuse to talk to lots of new people. I enjoy the big meetups more than the little ones, because the big ones draw more new people I haven't met before.

What do you want out of meetups? Have you thought for five minutes about how to get more of it?

I advise this even if what you want is absolutely unhinged. 

Jenn runs meetups about contemporary culture war topics sometimes. You could pay me to do that, but it would not be cheap. Jenn does this because she enjoys it, because despite her convincing professional mien Jenn is obviously a different species than I am, perhaps some kind of rare and endangered Canadian goose. 

Competitive cheese rolling meetups exist, a fact which baffles and delights me in equal measure. Duncan Sabien set things on fire to start his conference off. He clearly didn't have to do that. He looked like he was having fun, which makes sense, because fire is pretty an that fire was really pretty, so pretty I think it burned through a thick metal bowl.^[2] Some organizers run events where forty or so people have sex with their partner.

Tell your attendees what they're signing up for as best you can, execute on your vision with verve and dedication, and live your specific meetup focused dream.

To butcher a quote from The Tragedy of Prince Hamlet and the Philosopher's Stone; Or, A Will Most Incorrect To Heaven: 

Yet I did figure such caprice ill-suited to almighty czars.

For all who suffer unlook'd for weird meetups, unattended by the czar's chosen organizers,

to be then punish'd for the ill-ordering of the world. . .

1. ^{^}

   I'll pay for my share of it divided evenly

2. ^{^}

   Duncon was such a good example of an event built to someone's particular combination of tastes, and it permanently added "what would a conference designed selfishly for your tastes specifically?" and variations like that to my getting-to-know-you questions.

   More meetups should have fire.