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 ...

hallofame49

hallofame49