I've been running meetups since 2019 in Kitchener-Waterloo. These were rationalist-adjacent from 2019-2021 (examples here) and then explicitly rationalist from 2022 onwards.

Here are some notes on some of the weekly meetups I ran April-June, 2025. 

My meetup posts are written to be mostly plug-and-play-able by other organizers who are interested in running meetups on similar topics. Below you'll find links to said meetup posts (which generally have an intro, required and supplemental readings, and discussion questions for sparking conversation—all free to take), and brief reflections on how they went.

Index

• Raemon's Baba Is You Exercise (Planmaking and surprise anticipation workshop)
• The Colours of Her Coat (AI art)
• The Train to Crazy Town (When to stop on the EA train)
• The Future of Housework (Reproductive labour discourse, 1920s vs 2020s)
• A Car Plant Manufacturing Tour (self-explanatory)
• Intellectual Tree Rings (thoughtful questions about personal intellectual journeys)
• Research Party: ¡Afuera! (Researching how's Milei's Argentina's doing)
• Facts in Five Trivia (WMG-enabled trivia)

Raemon's Baba Is You Exercise

This week we'll be trying out Raemon's Planmaking and Surprise-Anticipation workshop.

Very easy to run considering that someone else designed the meetup already, love when that happens.

Get people to bring laptops, supply paper and writing implements. People can double up on laptops since the exercise involves not that much actual game playing and a lot of squinting at the initial state of the levels.

As I write this, you don't need to have any copies of Baba is You to run this exercise; there's a cute palette-swapped version of the suggested levels available online at https://baba-is-wons.vercel.app/home.html. Baba is You is also available on itch.io in a non-DRMed format.

Brief reflections on how it went by me and some of the meetups attendees available in the comment section of the original post, here.

The Colours of Her Coat

Last week, Scott published The Colors Of Her Coat, a meditation on superstimulus and context collapse after a week where AI-generated Ghibli images were inescapable on social media (this was like Mishapocalypse for the ratsphere).

This week, we'll use his essay as a jumping-off point to compare current reactions to AI art to historical cycles of discourse around photography and music.

Very occasionally, KW Rationality manages to do a meetup on a contemporaneous blog post!

Sadly, this meetup fell into two traps, "ttrpg which is more fun to write than to play" (I might have went overboard with the readings in my enthusiasm), and "organizer knows too much about the topic and has become blind to how inaccessible it is" (people struggled a lot with the Ben Davis essay excerpt, in particular). Maybe those are actually the same trap?

The meetup was still a pretty good time, but the discussion was a tad more shallow than I'd have liked. I'd like to retry doing an AI Art Discourse meetup, but what would I do differently?

1. Since this meetup, I've taken up a subscription to Midjourney magazine, which is $4 a month including international shipping. Having lots of concrete examples of AI art is useful.
2. Still link The Colours of Her Coat, but contrast it to the ecosystem of explainers and resources for AI art - style references, docs for advanced features, writeups by people experimenting with it seriously.
3. Probably flesh out my own take on ai art and assign it?

Hmm but I feel like the thesis "AI art can be "real" art" is very obvious? How to make it actually interesting? I think probably what I actually want is a discussion on "how to do good AI art", plus give people the time and credits necessary to actually mess around with Midjourney or another AI art program. Should email midjourney messaging and see if they'd sponsor a session.

The Train to Crazy Town

This week, we're discussing the train to crazy town. Per Cotra, the original coiner of the phrase:

Ajeya Cotra: And so when the [longtermists] takes you to a very weird unintuitive place — and, furthermore, wants you to give up all of the other goals that on other ways of thinking about the world that aren’t philosophical seem like they’re worth pursuing — [the near-termists are] just like, stop… I sometimes think of it as a train going to crazy town, and the near-termist side is like, I’m going to get off the train before we get to the point where all we’re focusing on is existential risk because of the astronomical waste argument. And then the longtermist side stays on the train, and there may be further stops.

One of the EA meetups. One of those meetups where I think the exact mix of people who show up really matters, in terms of how seriously the group treats the central question ("when to get off the train?"). But I think the meetup works on multiple levels of seriousness, so it's fine.

The Future of Housework

Alexandra Kollontai predicted a century ago that the nature of domestic housework would shift drastically any moment now, pointing to materialist trends that have only increased over the course of the 20th and 21st centuries. Jane Psmith, writing from a rat-adj pronatalist angle in 2023, believes homemaking be more important than ever. Could there be a dialectical synthesis in the works?

Our May Day meetup! An excuse to get people to read soviet feminist writing. Fulfills request from past me to do a mandatory reading from pre-1960. This one went really well; a bunch of the regulars are partnered up and the partners apparently all peep all the meetup topics and choose to not come out each week... except they all made an exception for this one, so the meetup attendance was almost doubled from all the wags and habs. I think the lesson to take away is that if you want more diverse meetup attendees, you need to provide fairly diverse meetup topics soviet feminist readings! Yes.

A Car Plant Manufacturing Tour

This week, we'll be doing a guided tour of the Toyota car manufacturing plant in Cambridge, Ontario. The tour starts at 2:00pm, please arrive at the plant 15 minutes before. There will not be an evening meetup.

It's good to mix it up a bit sometimes and do stuff in the city. If you are considering doing a local car plant manufacturing tour, however, bring earplugs. The manufacturing floor was so incredibly loud :(

Fun fact: this was our most gender-unequal meetup; there were 5 women and only 1 guy who attended. Girls really really like heavy machinery, I guess?

Intellectual Tree Rings

You—like ogres, trees, and pearls—have layers. You began as a small collection of simple sensations and ideas. You grew callouses over time from the messy realities of the world. Maybe at some point you have shed a previous layer entirely, leaving it in the past like a dry old husk. Other times, you can look to your past and trace a clear causal narrative: You are now A, which couldn't have happened if you weren't B, which was only made possible because at some point in the early 2000s, you were/did/came across C.

This week is an exercise in self-narrative-exploration, making it the small identity exercise's evil twin. This meetup will be unusually structured (think the HPMOR book swap, or lightning talks), to make sure that everyone who wants to gets an opportunity to share.

A list of questions that we went around the circle and answered; a meetup so nice we did it twice. I really adored this meetup, and learned wonderful things about everyone who came. My group has some founder effects where people by default don't actually share that much about their personal lives and background lore, so this was a useful corrective. But I did in fact steal the meetup basically wholesale from Rational Ottawa, a group that does not have this problem, and they also found the meetup so nice they did it twice. So you don't need to be an unusually standoffish group for this to be a good meetup!

I'm generally not a fan of more structured meetups because I find them kind of stilted (I do light-touch moderation of discussions but it's mostly free-flowing), but it really worked well in this case. Perhaps it would also work well in some other cases, but I struggle to think of cases that go beyond "asking each other deep, personal questions".

Still, asking other humans other deep, personal questions is a good exercise to do every once in a while! We should do something like this again. Maybe the notorious 36 questions? (For extra spice: ask people to bring a person they want to become closer to for the meetup?)

Research Party: ¡Afuera!

On December 10th, 2023, Javier Milei took office as the president of Argentina, on a platform of massive spending cuts and deregulation (¡AFUERA!). Many celebrated his promises, as after a sovereign default in 2014 and a decade of crippling inflation -- reaching over 200% in 2023 -- Argentina’s economic outlook was dire.

Some people were more skeptical, worrying that austerity would only plunge Argentina’s already precarious working class into worse hardship. Others simply felt that his big promises were simply populist bluster that Milei would not be able to make good on.

Now that he’s been in power for over a year,  let's use our rationalist martial arts to assess all these questions for ourselves.

Co-hosted with a regular. I continue my attempts to work out the kinks of research parties; they're already very good but I think they can be better. I like them because they're basically the lowest hanging fruit of group rationality, and with effort we even end up with publications that seem good enough for posting to LW. But there's a lot of friction in how to parcel out the research into discrete chunks, how to share findings at the end, and how to ideally have a nicely formatted package - all within a single 3 hour meetup.

The obvious response here is "well maybe the research party meetups should be longer than 3 hours?" but the answer is no I don't want to do that. So I will continue to find ways to make these 3 hour research frenzies go better! Probably we can be using AI at the end to summarize all our research and output a nice document, for example.

Facts in Five Trivia

I didn't run this meetup but it's a very fun trivia format that doesn't punish wild guessing, which makes it the evil twin of various calibration games that are popular in this crowd. Or, more charitably, a good way of cultivating more babble.

We should do more facts in five! We should try distributing the work of making rounds (e.g. all the regulars show up with one round).

Okay, that's all for this round. I did have some overall reflections for my previous post on Q1, I'll have another round of that in my upcoming Q3 post.