We're holding the first Vancouver meetup on Sunday, July 31st starting at 3pm at the Commune Cafe on Seymour Street. We'll definitely be there from 3pm-6pm, but it'll end when it ends.

I've recently moved to Vancouver from the San Francisco Bay Area, where I lived at the household that hosts the Tortuga/Mountain View meetup. The rationalist community in Silicon Valley is vibrant and growing, and I loved being part of it. As Cosmos wrote of the New York group:

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...

Activities of the rationalist community at Tortuga included meetups, hiking trips, guest speakers, transhumanist movies, skill-training sessions, parties and impromptu pillow fights. I want to find or build a similar community in Vancouver. We have a base of several people, and will be reaching out through Less Wrong and in other ways to find like-minded people.

I'm anticipating holding weekly meetups. The Commune Cafe in downtown Vancouver is a good place to start, but we have a great place in North Vancouver that we could use if that location works for everyone.

At this first meetup, we'll get to know each other, and talk about what we want to get out of holding meetups and forming a community, and figure out how to accomplish those things.

Feel free to bring friends, significant others, or anyone else who's interested in rationality.