I recently moved to Karlsruhe and found that it is quite a shame that there is no organized rationalist community in this city! In consequence, the goal of this post is to take a first step towards building a LessWrong meetup in Karlsruhe.

Felix Karg and I did a quick brainstorming to find out what we would like a LessWrong meetup in Karlsruhe to be like and how we could contribute to it.

The following gives a short summary of what we came up with.

Goals:

Provide platform for regular meetups, reading groups (the sequences, the codex, other rationalist reading material), discussions, workshops and other events
In general: locally connect rationalists and encourage interaction
Maybe also (in the long term): facilitate exchange with other local rationalist communities, organize larger events

Our contribution:

I would be willing to take an organizing role, including e.g. organizing a (up

to) (bi-)weekly reading and discussion group.

Next steps:

Find participants
Organize a first meeting
Establish means of communication and a regular interval for further gatherings

Problem:

Oops oh yeah the pandemic...

It is maybe not possible and most certainly not a good idea to meet indoors within the next few months. In contrast to that, outdoor meetings are probably less of a problem, but will often be limited by the weather and the limited sunlight of short winter days.

To that end we can:

wait (and postpone further action until the temperatures allow for more comfortable outdoor meetings or until the pandemic relaxes)
meet outside
meet online

So?

In order to find out how many people would be interested in participating in a local rationalist meetup in Karlsruhe, I suggest that we do an online meeting on 2020-11-14 at 14:00 on meet.jit.si/KarlsruheLW20201114. This will be an opportunity to discuss individual opinions on how to proceed short-term.

If enough people are interested I would be comfortable with having future meetings outside as long as the weather permits it. If however too few people are with me on this, I think that it is probably best to wait until spring (and maybe organize a few online gatherings).

PTheyssen

PTheyssen