Disclaimer 1: I take responsibility for all opinions expressed here and note that they do not necessarily reflect the views of the people I interviewed or of my various employers.

Disclaimer 2: In this post I sometimes make claims on behalf of LW2. I am under the impression that this is mostly okay, but I want to clarify that I don't work for LessWrong.

Introduction

Background

LessWrong meetups have been taking place for almost a decade, and CFAR has a long history of encouraging people to start their own groups. But despite their popularity and staying power in the rationalist community, no one has yet solved meetups beyond the object level - that is, I haven't seen anyone give explicit models of what meetup groups are supposed to accomplish, nor even systematically examine what they've accomplished in the past.

I became interested in this a year ago, when I started my own meetup group and found that I was basically completely directionless, having not had much of a goal beyond 'start a meetup group'. In the intervening months, I’ve become increasingly interested in the theoretical underpinnings of the whole endeavor we call 'meetups', so in an attempt to figure out what the heck is going on, I interviewed members and organizers of eight rationality meetup groups from around the world and collected anecdata from dozens more.

Goals

I embarked on this project with the goal of answering two overarching questions:

What do meetups look like when they go right? What does it take to build a ‘successful’ rationality community, and is there a generalizable way to ensure a community’s success?
Why do some existential risk-focused people care about meetups, and should they? Is there a way to measure or determine what is being created by meetups?

I feel that I've gone some of the way towards answering both of these questions, but that I'm definitely not all the way there yet. Though I think this write-up captures the most important parts of what I've learned, there is a lot of other potentially valuable information that I left out for the sake of brevity, so if you think any of my claims seem unsubstantiated, I encourage you to ask for further details.

I intend to turn this post into a mostly static reference document for organizers, but there are hundreds of perspectives that I was not able to capture here, particularly from people who have many years of experience with this i...

Meetup Theorizing

Meetup Theorizing