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How to Run a Successful Less Wrong Meetup

by Kaj_Sotala
12th Jun 2012
2 min read
40

83

Meetups & Local Communities (topic)
Frontpage

83

How to Run a Successful Less Wrong Meetup
37ShannonFriedman
14FrankAdamek
1ShannonFriedman
5A1987dM
1Strange7
-5Clippy
-2Strange7
2wedrifid
-10Clippy
-1wedrifid
19A1987dM
4Grognor
-11Clippy
12wedrifid
-7metatroll
29[anonymous]
11maia
10Paul Crowley
4Kaj_Sotala
5Paul Crowley
3Kaj_Sotala
2Kaj_Sotala
1Paul Crowley
1wedrifid
1Kaj_Sotala
10blob
5Kaj_Sotala
4Alexander230
6Jolly
11Jolly
4MalcolmOcean
3anros
12Raemon
3Shmi
20Kaj_Sotala
3bramflakes
4lukeprog
1Michael Michalchik
2Kaj_Sotala
1Jackercrack
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[-]ShannonFriedman13y370

I have a blog I really want to post, but I just created my profile on LW and don't have any karma yet. Can you please up vote this comment so that I can post? I'm a long time community member, just new to the blog.

Warmly, Shannon

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[-]FrankAdamek13y140

Shannon really is a long-time and hugely contributive rationalist, hosting a ton of meetups in a great space and making a lot of other contributions as well. Thumbs up.

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[-][anonymous]13y10

Thanks Frank! And thanks everyone who up voted my comment! :)

[This comment is no longer endorsed by its author]Reply
[-]A1987dM13y50

Have you posted on the welcome thread?

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[-]Strange713y10

Interesting strategy.

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[+]Clippy13y-50
[+]metatroll13y-70
[-][anonymous]13y290

I'm really glad you took the time to make the design work well. Great design is sorely underestimated - this is one of the best-looking products to have come out of Less Wrong. Awesome job.

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[-]maia13y110

Just out of curiosity, have there been any efforts to test what effects meetups have on happiness or instrumental rationality?

Reply
[-]Paul Crowley13y100

aaaargh, PDF! Any chance of an ePub or Mobi version? I have looked into creating these things, I can create them for you from the sources if you like. Cheers!

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[-]Kaj_Sotala13y40

I could make the most recent Google Docs version public, but I'm not sure if there were any changes introduced in the conversion from Docs to PDF that I should update in the document first. I'll ask Luke.

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[-]Paul Crowley13y50

Thanks. As it happens my employers have products for converting Google Docs into high-quality PDFs and eBooks - I could use those!

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[-]Kaj_Sotala13y30

Alright, here's the link to the updated Google Docs version.

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[-]Kaj_Sotala13y20

Did you make the eBook version? Want to share it with us? :-)

(Luke prefers to have people looking at the PDF rather than the GDocs version, so he set it back to private - but we would like to have an eBook version available.)

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[-]Paul Crowley13y10

No not yet. Need a moment of calm at work!

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[-]wedrifid13y10

Which products, out of interest?

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[-][anonymous]13y10

Stan said that he would update the GDoc with the changes soon, I'll publish it when he's done that.

[This comment is no longer endorsed by its author]Reply
[-]blob13y100

Great document! Were there any major changes from the last version on google docs?

Some comments:

The "Add new meetup" button described in "Making the announcement" only appears if you have more than two points of karma. While most organizers probably meet that requirement, I thought I simply hadn't found the right place and had to ask someone. I'd prefer if the button showed, but was disabled and had a "need two karma for that" tooltip for people with <2 karma over adding the information to the document.

In the section on Liar's dice:

See Wikipedia for a number of variants, as well as detailed information about the bidding systems.

Unfortunately the descriptions of the various bidding systems were recently removed from Wikipedia. This is the last revision that has them.

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[-]Kaj_Sotala13y50

Thanks for your feedback!

Were there any major changes from the last version on google docs?

Probably some, but we didn't keep a changelog, so I don't remember what they were.

The "Add new meetup" button described in "Making the announcement" only appears if you have more than two points of karma. While most organizers probably meet that requirement, I thought I simply hadn't found the right place and had to ask someone. I'd prefer if the button showed, but was disabled and had a "need two karma for that" tooltip for people with <2 karma over adding the information to the document.

I guess all the people working on the guide had enough karma to be ignorant about that. :-) I'll add a mention of it. Your suggestion is good too, hopefully some site developer will implement it.

Unfortunately the descriptions of the various bidding systems were recently removed from Wikipedia. This is the last revision that has them.

Argh, that's the problem with referencing Wikipedia. I guess I'll change the link to point to the archived revision.

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[-]Alexander23011y40

This 2 karma restriction creates inconvenience when an organizer wants to delegate the posting about meetup to another person who have to create new account. If it's an anti-spam measure, maybe it can be done in better way, such as optional phone number sms confirmation that will remove karma restriction from announce posting.

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[-]Jolly13y60

Oops. That reminds me, I was supposed to send more pictures... O:-)

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[-]Jolly13y110

Ok, Photos from 2012 Rationality Minicamp, the 2011 and 2012 NYC meetups, and a random Cambridge meetup are here - Photos They should be up for at least a few months, at which point I'll probably pull them down to save me space.

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[-]MalcolmOcean12y40

This document is awesome.

Tiny bit of feedback on Fermi scoring. The Science Olympiad rules appear to get logarithmic rounding wrong.

Generally, fives can round either way, depending on if you think your answer is high or low.

When dealing with orders of magnitude, the centerpoint for rounding should be halfway between the two values, except in this case the value is the exponent, not the mantissa/coefficient. This means that halfway is sqrt(10) = 3.16

So in general, values of 3 or lower should be rounded down and values much higher than 3 (even 3.4) should be rounded up.

3.68 x 10^3 ~= 10^4

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[-]anros7y30

Just out of curiosity, have there been any efforts to test what effects meetups have on happiness or instrumental rationality?

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[-]Raemon7y120

I think the closest thing we have to this are various LessWrong, EA and SlatestarCodex surveys, which include questions like "do you attend meetups", as well as some questions aiming to tease out wellbeing and rationality stuff.

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[-]Shmi13y30

This seems like a generic meetup guide for people who only know each other online. Maybe it can be renamed "How to Run a Successful Online Forum Meetup" and circulated more widely (say, linked on reddit), possibly after being stripped of personally identifiable info.

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[-]Kaj_Sotala13y200

Or you could link to the current version, thus advertising Less Wrong at the same time as you help people in other communities create meetups.

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[-]bramflakes13y30

Is this on the wiki yet?

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[-]lukeprog13y40

Not yet; feel free to create a page for it!

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[-]Michael Michalchik3y10

I get the error, link permanently deleted when I try to follow that link. Is this just a random error or has it been permanently deleted? Does it exist somewhere else or has the document been superseded by another document?

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[-]Kaj_Sotala3y20

I just checked and it works for me. The Wayback Machine also has a copy.

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[-]Jackercrack11y10

Fantastic guide, a small note: the various status cues on page 28 is a dead link

Edit: Note to future readers: dead links can generally be traversed using the internet archive to find the cached site from when it was up.

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Always wanted to run a Less Wrong meetup, but been unsure of how? The How to Run a Successful Less Wrong Meetup booklet is here to help you!

The 33-page document draws from consultations with more than a dozen Less Wrong meetup group organizers. Stanislaw Boboryk created the document design. Luke provided direction, feedback, and initial research, and I did almost all the writing.

The booklet starts by providing some motivational suggestions on why you'd want to create a meetup in the first place, and then moves on to the subject of organizing your first one. Basics such as choosing a venue, making an announcement, and finding something to talk about once at the meetup, are all covered. This section also discusses pioneering meetups in foreign cities and restarting inactive meetup groups.

For those who have already established a meetup group, the booklet offers suggestions on things such as attracting new members, maintaining a pleasant atmosphere, and dealing with conflicts within the group. The "How to Build Your Team of Heroes" section explains the roles that are useful for a meetup group to fill, ranging from visionaries to organizers.

If you're unsure of what exactly to do at meetups, the guide describes many options, from different types of discussions to nearly 20 different games and exercises. All the talk and philosophizing in the world won't do much good if you don't actually do things, so the booklet also discusses long-term projects that you can undertake. Some people attend meetups to just have fun and to be social, and others to improve themselves and the world. The booklet has been written to be useful for both kinds of people.

In order to inspire you and let you see what others have done, the booklet also has brief case studies and examples from real meetup groups around the world. You can find these sprinkled throughout the guide.

This is just the first version of the guide. We will continue working on it. If you find mistakes, or think that something is unclear, or would like to see some part expanded, or if you've got good advice you think should be included... please let me know! You can contact me at kaj.sotala@intelligence.org.

A large number of people have helped in various ways, and I hope that I've remembered to mention most of them in the acknowledgements. If you've contributed to the document but don't see your name mentioned, please send me a message and I'll have that fixed!

The booklet has been illustrated with pictures from various meetup groups. Meetup organizers sent me the pictures for this use, and I explicitly asked them to make sure that everyone in the photos was fine with it. Regardless, if there's a picture that you find objectionable, please contact me and I'll have it replaced with something else.

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